Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Anthropic Announces Claude Subscribers Must Now Pay Extra to Use OpenClaw
  2. No, AMD Is Not Buying Intel
  3. Amazon Must Negotiate With First Warehouse Workers Union, US Labor Board Rules
  4. The Document Foundation Removes Dozens of Collabora Developers
  5. ‘Cognitive Surrender’ Leads AI Users To Abandon Logical Thinking, Research Finds
  6. Colorado’s New Speed Camera System Makes Waze Nearly Useless
  7. Artemis II Astronauts Pass 100,000 Miles From Earth On Voyage To the Moon
  8. ‘AI’ Is Coming For Your Online Gaming Servers Next
  9. Iran Strikes Leave Amazon Availability Zones ‘Hard Down’ In Bahrain and Dubai
  10. Microsoft To Invest $10 Billion In Japan For AI, Cyber Defense Expansion
  11. Netflix Must Refund Customers For Years of Price Hikes, Italian Court Rules
  12. Fan Fiction Website AO3 Exits Beta After 17 Years
  13. Tech Companies Are Trying To Neuter Colorado’s Landmark Right-to-Repair Law
  14. College Student, Cat Meme Helped Crack Massive Botnet Case
  15. Penalties Stack Up As AI Spreads Through the Legal System

Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents them on a single page for easy reading.

Anthropic Announces Claude Subscribers Must Now Pay Extra to Use OpenClaw

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Anthropic’s making a big and sudden change — and connecting its Claude AI to third-party agentic tools "is about to get a lot more expensive,” writes the Verge:
Beginning April 4th at 3PM ET, users will “no longer be able to use your Claude subscription limits for third-party harnesses including OpenClaw,” according to an email sent to users on Friday evening. Instead, if users want to use OpenClaw with Claude, they’ll have to use a “pay-as-you-go option” that will be billed separate from their Claude subscription.
Anthropic’s announcement added these extra usage bundles are “now available at a discount.” Users can also try Anthropic’s API, notes VentureBeat, “which charges for every token of usage rather than allowing for open-ended usage up to certain limits, as the Pro and Max plans have allowed so far. "
The technical reality, according to Anthropic, is that its first-party tools like Claude Code, its AI vibe coding harness, and Claude Cowork, its business app interfacing and control tool, are built to maximize “prompt cache hit rates” — reusing previously processed text to save on compute. Third-party harnesses like OpenClaw often bypass these efficiencies… [Claude Code creator Boris Cherny explained on X that “I did put up a few PRs to improve prompt cache hit rate for OpenClaw in particular, which should help for folks using it with Claude via API/overages.”] Growth marketer Aakash Gupta observed on X that the “all-you-can-eat buffet just closed,” noting that a single OpenClaw agent running for one day could burn $1,000 to $5,000 in API costs. “Anthropic was eating that difference on every user who routed through a third-party harness,” Gupta wrote. “That’s the pace of a company watching its margin evaporate in real time.”

However, Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw who was recently hired by OpenAI, took a more skeptical view of the “capacity” argument.“Funny how timings match up,” Steinberger posted on X. “First they copy some popular features into their closed harness, then they lock out open source.” Indeed, Anthropic recently added some of the same capabilities that helped OpenClaw catch-on — such as the ability to message agents through external services like Discord and Telegram — to Claude Code…

User @ashen_one, founder of Telaga Charity, voiced a concern likely shared by other small-scale builders: “If I switch both [OpenClaw instances] to an API key or the extra usage you’re recommending here, it’s going to be far too expensive to make it worth using. I’ll probably have to switch over to a different model at this point.”

“I know it sucks,” Cherny replied. “Fundamentally engineering is about tradeoffs, and one of the things we do to serve a lot of customers is optimize the way subscriptions work to serve as many people as possible with the best mode…” OpenAI appears to be positioning itself as a more “harness-friendly” alternative, potentially using this moment as a customer acquisition channel for disgruntled Claude power users.

By restricting subscription limits to their own “closed harness,” Anthropic is asserting control over the UI/UX layer. This allows them to collect telemetry and manage rate limits more granularly, but it risks alienating the power-user community that built the “agentic” ecosystem in the first place. Anthropic’s decision is a cold calculation of margins versus growth. As Cherny noted, “Capacity is a resource we manage thoughtfully.” In the 2026 AI landscape, the era of subsidized, unlimited compute for third-party automation is over. For the average user on Claude.ai, the experience remains unchanged; for the power users running autonomous offices, the bell has tolled.

I already cancelled my subscription

By Hadlock • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

I cancelled my subscription overnight, and I’m using the free credits they gave me to wrap up some things and transition away. I am not going to be locked into someone’s walled garden again.

Let the enshitification begin

By ukoda • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Looks like they think they have passed the point where they need more customers and are now going to start the process of milking them for what they can get. Let the enshitification begin.

No, AMD Is Not Buying Intel

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“The April 1st timing should have been your first clue,” writes Gadget Review. TechSpot’s false story was just an April Fool’s prank — although Gadget Review thinks it’s still funny how “something about this particular piece of satire felt uncomfortably plausible.”
Maybe it’s because AMD stock sits around $196 while Intel hovers near $41, or perhaps it’s the poetic justice of the underdog finally eating the giant. The semiconductor world has witnessed stranger reversals, but none quite this dramatic. Your gaming rig’s CPU battle represents decades of corporate warfare, legal grudges, and technological leapfrogging that makes Game of Thrones look like a friendly board game.

Picture this: In 1975, AMD reverse-engineered Intel’s 8080 processor, creating the Am9080 clone. The audacity was breathtaking — AMD spent 50 cents per chip to manufacture something they sold for $700. That’s a 1,400% markup on borrowed technology, making today’s GPU prices look reasonable. This relationship evolved from copying to partnership to bitter rivalry. The companies signed second-sourcing deals in the late 1970s, with AMD becoming Intel’s official backup supplier. Then came the lawsuits. AMD sued Intel for antitrust violations in 2005, eventually settling for $1.25 billion in 2009. That settlement money helped fund the Ryzen revolution that’s currently eating Intel’s lunch. The historical irony runs deeper than your typical tech rivalry. AMD literally started as Intel’s shadow, creating chips by studying Intel’s designs under microscopes. Today, Intel engineers probably study AMD’s Zen architecture the same way…

This April Fool’s joke works because it captures something true about power shifts in technology.
The site TipRanks notes that both companies saw their stock price rise Wednesday, though that might not be related to the false article. “Positive analyst coverage from Wells Fargo could be acting as a catalyst for AMD stock today. Intel also announced plans to buy back its 49% equity interest in a joint venture with Apollo Global Management APO.”

Amazon Must Negotiate With First Warehouse Workers Union, US Labor Board Rules

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Amazon “must negotiate with a labor union representing some 5,000 workers at a company warehouse on Staten Island,” reports Reuters, citing a ruling Wednesday from America’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

The union formed in 2022, according to the article, and “has been seeking to negotiate with Amazon over pay, working conditions and other matters.”
The NLRB said in its ruling that Amazon “has engaged in unfair labor practices” by refusing to bargain with the labor group or to recognize its legitimacy… Amazon said on Thursday it disagreed with the NLRB’s ruling. “Representatives of the NLRB improperly influenced this election,” the company said in a statement, suggesting it planned to appeal. “We’re confident an unbiased court will overturn the original certification, and we look forward to the opportunity for our team to fairly voice their opinions.” An appeal would likely preclude Amazon from having to comply with the NLRB’s order while it makes its way through the courts…

Related to the Staten Island case, Amazon has argued that the NLRB itself is unconstitutional and sued to block the agency from ruling on it. The matter is still pending.
After forming independently, that union “has since aligned with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters,” the article points out. The Teamsters represent 1.3 million American workers, according to a statement they issued this week, which also includes this quote from the president of Amazon Labor Union-e Local 1. “We are making history at Amazon, and we are doing it through undiluted worker power…”

Their statement adds that the ruling “came only one day after the union announced another historic victory that upheld Amazon Teamsters’ right to strike.”

This will accelerate…

By MpVpRb • Score: 3 Thread

…the adoption of robots

The Document Foundation Removes Dozens of Collabora Developers

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Long-time GNOME/OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice contributor Michael Meeks is now general manager of Collabora Productivity. And earlier this month he complained when LibreOffice decided to bring back its LibreOffice Online project, as reported by Neowin, which had been inactive since 2022. After the original project went dormant — to which Collabora was a major contributor — they forked the code and created their own product, Collabora Online.

But this week Meeks blogged about even more changes, writing that the Document Foundation (the nonprofit behind LibreOffice) “has decided to eject from membership all Collabora staff and partners. That includes over thirty people who have contributed faithfully to LibreOffice for many years.” Meeks argues the ejections were “based on unproven legal concerns and guilt by association.”
This includes seven of the top ten core committers of all time (excluding release engineers) currently working for Collabora Productivity. The move is the culmination of TDF losing a large number of founders from membership over the last few years with: Thorsten Behrens, Jan ‘Kendy’ Holesovsky, Rene Engelhard, Caolan McNamara, Michael Meeks, Cor Nouws and Italo Vignoli no longer members. Of the remaining active founders, three of the last four are paid TDF staff (of whom none are programming on the core code).
The blog It’s FOSS calls it “LibreOffice Drama.” They’ve confirmed the removals happened, also noting recently adopted Community Bylaws requiring members to step down if they’re affiliated with a company in an active legal dispute with the Foundation. But The Documentation Foundation “also makes clear that a membership revocation is not a ban from contributing, with the project remaining open to anyone, and expects Collabora to keep contributing ‘when the time comes.’"

Collabora’s Meeks adds in his blog post that there’s “bold and ongoing plans to create an entirely new, cut-down, differentiated Collabora Office for users that is smoother, more user friendly, and less feature dense than our Classic product (which will continue to be supported for years for our partners).
This gives a chance to innovate faster in a separate place on a smaller, more focused code-base with fewer build configurations, much less legacy, no Java, no database, web-based toolkit and more. We are excited to get executing on that.

To make this process easier, and to put to bed complaints about having our distro branches in TDF gerrit [for code review], and to move to self-hosted FOSS tooling we are launching our own gerrit to host our existing branch of core… We will continue to make contributions to LibreOffice where that makes sense (if we are welcome to), but it clearly no longer makes much sense to continue investing heavily in building what remains of TDF’s community and product for them — while being excluded from its governance. In this regard, we seem to be back where we were fifteen years ago.

Big egos

By gweihir • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Do not make for good engineering. FOSS is no different.

‘Cognitive Surrender’ Leads AI Users To Abandon Logical Thinking, Research Finds

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
When it comes to large language model-powered tools, there are generally two broad categories of users. On one side are those who treat AI as a powerful but sometimes faulty service that needs careful human oversight and review to detect reasoning or factual flaws in responses. On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine. Recent research goes a long way to forming a new psychological framework for that second group, which regularly engages in “cognitive surrender” to AI’s seemingly authoritative answers. That research also provides some experimental examination of when and why people are willing to outsource their critical thinking to AI, and how factors like time pressure and external incentives can affect that decision.

Overall, across 1,372 participants and over 9,500 individual trials, the researchers found subjects were willing to accept faulty AI reasoning a whopping 73.2 percent of the time, while only overruling it 19.7 percent of the time. The researchers say this “demonstrate[s] that people readily incorporate AI-generated outputs into their decision-making processes, often with minimal friction or skepticism.” In general, “fluent, confident outputs [are treated] as epistemically authoritative, lowering the threshold for scrutiny and attenuating the meta-cognitive signals that would ordinarily route a response to deliberation,” they write. These kinds of effects weren’t uniform across all test subjects, though. Those who scored highly on separate measures of so-called fluid IQ were less likely to rely on the AI for help and were more likely to overrule a faulty AI when it was consulted. Those predisposed to see AI as authoritative in a survey, on the other hand, were much more likely to be led astray by faulty AI-provided answers.

Despite the results, though, the researchers point out that “cognitive surrender is not inherently irrational.” While relying on an LLM that’s wrong half the time (as in these experiments) has obvious downsides, a “statistically superior system” could plausibly give better-than-human results in domains such as “probabilistic settings, risk assessment, or extensive data,” the researchers suggest. “As reliance increases, performance tracks AI quality,” the researchers write, “rising when accurate and falling when faulty, illustrating the promises of superintelligence and exposing a structural vulnerability of cognitive surrender.” In other words, letting an AI do your reasoning means your reasoning is only ever going to be as good as that AI system. As always, let the prompter beware.

Oh Brave New World with such people in it

By Ender_Wiggin • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

“On the other side are those who routinely outsource their critical thinking to what they see as an all-knowing machine”

I’ve run into these people, they’re the worst. It was bad enough dealing with people whose mindset was ‘If I cant find it on google then it doesn’t exist,’ and it seems these people have moved into AI and gotten dumber but think they’re even smarter.

Another word for stupidity.

By gurps_npc • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I think what is really going on is that is not ‘fluid IQ’, but regular, normal “IQ”.

That is, stupid people either do not realize the AI is wrong, or more likely, they are so used to being corrected by more intelligent people that they just assume the AI must be smarter than they are and do not challenge it.

I can also see a small number of submissive/shy/apathetic people just accepting the wrong information and thinking it is not worth fixing.

This kind of thing gets me so mad that I would never just accept that.

Normal

By nospam007 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

50% of us have an IQ of under 100.

Critical Thinking

By Tomahawk • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
is something that just isn’t taught properly, if at all, in schools. We see the lack of it everywhere. So it’s understandable that many are offloading this to something else because they just don’t know how to do it themselves. Laziness is also a factor, yes. But inability, I feel, is the biggest factor here.

Re:New religion

By dvice • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

“Thinking about God increases acceptance of artificial intelligence in decision-making”
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a…

Colorado’s New Speed Camera System Makes Waze Nearly Useless

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Colorado is rolling out an average-speed camera system that tracks vehicles across multiple points instead of catching them at a single camera, making it much harder for drivers to dodge tickets with apps like Waze and Radarbot. Motor1 reports:
The state’s new automated vehicle identification systems (AVIS) use several cameras to calculate your average speed between them, and if it is 10 miles per hour or more over the limit, you get a ticket. No longer will you be able to slow down as you approach a camera and speed back up after passing it, not that you should be speeding on public roads in the first place.

Colorado began deploying this new camera system after legislators changed the law in 2023, allowing AVIS for law enforcement use. The systems, installed on various roads and highways throughout the state, first began issuing warnings, but police began issuing tickets late last year.

The most recent section of road to fall under surveillance is a stretch of I-25 north of Denver, which brought the state’s growing panopticon to our attention. It began issuing tickets on April 2. The Colorado Department of Transportation installed the cameras along a construction zone. The fine is $75 and zero points for exceeding the speed limit, and the police issue it to the vehicle’s owner, regardless of who is driving.

A very late implementation

By Teun • Score: 5, Informative Thread
In The Netherlands we call it ‘trajectcontrole’ (average speed control) and it has been around since the early 2000’s.

Re:…not that you should be speeding on public ro

By euid0 • Score: 5, Informative Thread
FTFY “Speed limits are set to reduce speeding. To improve public safety.” https://www.sciencedirect.com/… “Effectiveness of 30 km/h speed limit – A literature review”

How interesting

By Dagmar d’Surreal • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

What an interesting way to roll out a dragnet surveillance network.

Re:Maybe stick to the speed limit?

By kenh • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

A few years back where I lived they installed speed cameras. Municipality contracted speed camera installation to private firm, which calibrated them to ridiculous speed limit +2. Then the municipality started lowering speed limits. According to official statistics, by the end of the program about 40% of population got a speeding ticket in a given year. This resulted in political pressure to shut the program down. Thing is, before, during, and after there was no measurable effect on accidents. It didn’t even work as a safety measure.

The purpose of the speed cameras was always revenue generation - it was never about safety.

The city hired someone to install cameras and give the city money. Over time the city wanted more money, so they kept changing speed limits. If they wanted to prevent speeding, the city would have increased interdiction, rather than installing a passive revenue-generating camera system.

Why would anyone think getting a bill in the mail two weeks after you went speeding down a neighborhood street would increase safety?

Re:UK has them, Waze still useful

By fewnorms • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Same here in the Netherlands. Waze works just fine here with those average speed enforcement zones (as they’re called in Waze lingo). I think it even takes those sections into consideration when plotting routes based on “fastest”. Quite useful information to have.

Artemis II Astronauts Pass 100,000 Miles From Earth On Voyage To the Moon

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The Artemis II crew has passed 100,000 miles from Earth and is now on a “free-return” path around the moon after a successful “translunar” injection burn. “Ladies and gentlemen, I am so, so excited to be able to tell you that for the first time since 1972 during Apollo 17, human beings have left Earth orbit,” NASA’s Dr Lori Glaze told a news conference. The Guardian reports:
The astronauts — the Americans Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover and Christina Koch, and a Canadian, Jeremy Hansen — spent their first day in space performing checks on the spacecraft, which had never carried humans before. Later they had time to speak to US TV networks. “I’ve got to tell you, there is nothing normal about this,” Wiseman told ABC News from the cramped interior of the capsule. “Sending four humans 250,000 miles away is a herculean effort, and we are now just realising the gravity of that.”

Orion will travel about 4,000 miles (6,400km) beyond the moon before turning back, providing unprecedented and illuminated views of the lunar far side. If all proceeds smoothly, the astronauts will set a record by venturing farther from Earth than any human before — more than 250,000 miles. The mission is part of a longer-term plan to repeatedly return to the moon, with the aim of establishing a permanent base that will offer a platform for further exploration.
After the final engine burn, NASA said Wiseman took two “spectacular” images of Earth.
The first photo, called Hello, World, “shows the vast expanse of blue that is the Atlantic Ocean, framed by a thin glow of the atmosphere as the Earth eclipses the Sun and green auroras at either pole,” reports the BBC. Another photo shows the view of Earth from inside the Orion spacecraft.

What illuminates the far side of the moon?

By taleman • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

providing unprecedented and illuminated views of the lunar far side.

What illuminates the far side of the moon? It is full moon now, so the far side is the dark side.

Re:Why does it take 4 days?

By OrangAsm • Score: 5, Funny Thread
Currently: it’s 2721 mph. It has slowed down continuously since the burn, due to the tug of the flat earth being instantiated as round during the mission.

Re:Thanks for the Hi-res images, NASA

By quonset • Score: 4, Informative Thread

There’s always someone to bitch over something so trivially insignificant.

Re:Why does it take 4 days?

By martin-boundary • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
obligatory gravity well explainer

diversity

By groobly • Score: 4, Funny Thread

Based on the diversity identity of the crew reflecting that of the US, we can infer that:

1. 25% of the US is female.
2. 25% of the US is black.
3. 67% of the US is white
and
4. 25% of the US is Canadian.

‘AI’ Is Coming For Your Online Gaming Servers Next

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
“Consumer PC parts aren’t the only things being gobbled up by the ‘AI’ industry,” writes PCWorld’s Michael Crider. “A Starcraft-inspired strategy game is shutting down its multiplayer servers because the hosting company got bought out for ‘AI.’" The game will still be playable offline for now, but the shutdown highlights the ripple effects of the AI boom on the gaming industry. Amid the ongoing hardware shortages, AI companies are basically gobbling up as much infrastructure as they can to repurpose it for AI workloads. From the report:
The game in question is Stormgate, a crowdfunded revival of the real-time strategy genre that has languished in the last decade or so. The developer Frost Giant Studios told its players on Discord (spotted by PC Gamer) that it would be unable to continue multiplayer access past the end of this month. The “game server orchestration partner” was bought by an AI company — the developer’s words, not mine — which means that the multiplayer aspects of the game will have a “planned outage.”

The devs say the game will be patched for offline play, presumably including its single-player campaign mode and co-op modes, but “online modes will not be available at that point.” They’re hoping to bring back online play in a later update, but that’ll depend on “finding a partner to support ongoing operations.” That sounds like old-fashioned player-hosted games with lobbies aren’t in the cards, at least not yet.

Frost Giant’s server provider is Hathora, which was bought by a company called Fireworks AI last month. Fireworks describes its offerings as “open-source AI models at blazing speed, optimized for your use case, scaled globally with the Fireworks Inference Cloud.” So, yeah, Hathora’s infrastructure will likely be used for yet more generative “AI.” And according to GamesBeat, it’s planning to shut down the game service aspect of its company completely. That means Stormgate probably isn’t going to be the last game affected. Hathora also provides online services for Splitgate 2, among others. I’m contacting Hathora for comment and will update this story if I receive a response.

DirectIP

By Hentes • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Games used to allow you to host a server on your own computer. Let’s start demanding modern games do the same.

When will anyone else say “enough already”

By mnemotronic • Score: 3 Thread
I’m ready to drive a wooden stake into the heart of these AI companies. They’re consuming everything and delivering great promises. What good is the ultimate AI if the AI companies swallow all the resources on their way to the top. Or bottom. The only thing the human have left are stone knives & bears kins.

Re:You have no IP address. Your neighborhood does.

By Racemaniac • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Well, it will obviously be an issue for some people in third world banana republics like the USA where you can be stuck with a monopoly by a corrupt ISP

But for most people though it won’t be an issue, i’d also love for the industry to go more into the self hosted route again (though it’s probably wishful thinking.... self hosting is too hard for the common person ^^'.....)

Why not move to Hetzner or other baremetal?

By Un-Thesis • Score: 3 Thread

Why do they not just migrate to another ISP???

Peer to Peer

By EnsilZah • Score: 3 Thread

If I remember correctly, Blizzard games like Starcraft originally did the actual multiplayer game state synchronization as direct communication between the players, Battle.Net just did the matchmaking and chat which is pretty low bandwidth.
Maybe they can rewrite their netcode to be more like that.

Iran Strikes Leave Amazon Availability Zones ‘Hard Down’ In Bahrain and Dubai

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Iranian strikes have reportedly knocked out key AWS availability zones in Bahrain and Dubai, leaving parts of both regions effectively offline for an extended period and forcing Amazon to urge teams and customers to shift workloads elsewhere. “These two regions continue to be impaired, and services should not expect to be operating with normal levels of redundancy and resiliency,” an internal Amazon communication memo reads. “We are actively working to free and reserve as much capacity as possible in the region for customers, and services should be scaled to the minimal footprint required to support customer migration.” Big Technology reports:
With the war now nearing its sixth week, Iran has made Amazon infrastructure in the Gulf an economic target and is now eyeing its peers. Amazon’s Bahrain facilities have been hit multiple times, including a Wednesday strike that caused a fire. And its facilities in the UAE also sustained multiple hits. The IRGC is threatening multiple other U.S. tech giants, including Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

Amazons infrastructure in Bahrain and Dubai each have three ‘availability zones’ or clusters of compute. Both Bahrain and Dubai have a zones that are “hard down” and and “impaired but functioning,” per the internal communication. “We do not have a timeline for when DXB and BAH will return to normal operations,” the internal post said.

Re:Please sir

By dskoll • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Of course, I do not want the Islamic Regime to win this war.

But Iran will beat the USA. Not because the US military is bad. It isn’t; it’s the best in the world.

The problem is that the USA will lose because its political leadership is completely incompetent. It had no idea how Iran would react. It thought this would be Venezuela II. Even though any armchair general could have predicted that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz to cause economic pain, Trump seems to have been caught by surprise.

The US political leadership has no plan, no clear goals, no strategy, and no clue who they are dealing with. They are going to put their own soldiers’ lives at risk and are going to totally botch this shitshow.

The real winners in this are Russia and China. A weakened USA is just what they want, and it’s just what they are going to get.

Re: Please sir

By dskoll • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Iran is “vulnerable” and “weak”? Really? It just took out a $750M E-3 Sentry AWACS using missiles and drones that probably cost it a total of a couple of million bucks. It downed an F-15E and an A-10. It damaged a Black Hawk helicopter.

The stakes for the Islamic Republic regime are existential. If it survives, it wins. And in the entire history of warfare, the number of regime changes achieved via air attacks alone is precisely: ZERO.

That means boots on the ground. In a country of 90 million that can probably rustle up 1 million troops to defend itself. You really think the USA is going to go there?

The end result will be the survival of the Iranian regime, which over the next 5-10 years will rebuild its missile and drone capabilities and probably double down on building nukes. And it will never trust the USA again, having been attacked while in the middle of negotiations.

Meanwhile, the USA has a significantly depleted Patriot arsenal and other weapons and is going to suffer enormous economic shocks. And Russia’s loving the increased oil prices (except thankfully, Ukraine is hitting its ability to export oil, but still… it will end up benefiting Russia.)

Re: Please sir

By dskoll • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Again: I do not want Iran to win. But it will win, because you (and the current American government) completely miss the point.

Iran wins by having its regime survive. And the survival of that regime is not in doubt. At least, not unless the USA invades with ground troops and is willing to take thousands to tens of thousands of casualties.

Do you really want that to happen? Do you think the American public wants it to happen?

Also, please provide citations for “regular Iranians” taking over police stations. The Iranian regime has shown it’s willing to act with the utmost brutality, and 50M unarmed civilians cannot win against 1M armed troops.

Re:Please sir

By dskoll • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The USA is getting weaker in the following ways:

1. It’s pissed off most of its allies who will be much less likely to help them out in future. We all helped out after 9/11 and in Afghanistan. That ain’t happening in future with the attitude from the Trump regime.

2. The USA is sabotaging its own economy, first with ridiculous sanctions and second by blowing up the world economy with this war.

3. The USA may have an impressive industrial base, but dig deeper… pretty much every supply chain in the USA has some dependence on China or some other country, and alienating those countries is not a good strategy.

4. The weakening of democracy in the USA and its contempt for the international order is emboldening countries like China and Russia. They feel much less constrained by a weakened and disengaged USA. As for oil, the USA is allowing Iranian tankers through! So China will get its oil anyway, because Trump is afraid to block it and make oil prices spike even higher.

Re: Please sir

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

You’re so close to getting it. Look in the mirror motherfucker.

Microsoft To Invest $10 Billion In Japan For AI, Cyber Defense Expansion

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Microsoft plans to invest $10 billion in Japan from 2026 to 2029 to expand AI infrastructure, boost local cloud capacity, train 1 million engineers and developers, and deepen cybersecurity cooperation with the Japanese government. Reuters reports:
The investment includes the training of 1 million engineers and developers by 2030, Microsoft said, which was unveiled during a visit to Tokyo by Vice Chair and President Brad Smith. In a statement, the company said the plan aligns with Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s goal to boost growth through advanced, strategic technologies while safeguarding national security.

Microsoft will work with domestic firms including SoftBank and Sakura Internet to expand Japan-based AI computing capacity, allowing Ecompanies and government agencies to keep sensitive data within the country while accessing Microsoft Azure services, it said. It will also deepen cooperation with Japanese authorities on sharing intelligence related to cyber threats and crime prevention.

1m cybersecurity engineers

By david.emery • Score: 5, Funny Thread

All trained to secure Microsoft products. Hopefully that’s enough…

Train people???

By gweihir • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

And there I was under the impression that AI makes them all obsolete…

Re:Train people???

By martin-boundary • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

10B/1M = 10,000 per “engineer” (*). I don’t know about you, but I don’t get out of bed for that kind of value. Moreover, it’s Microsoft money, meaning it’s probably just vouchers for time on the cloud, as if that’s real money.

(*) it’s actually less, the budget is likely going to pay for advertising and events etc.

No way.

By bobm • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

No way they are going to hire 1M meat sacks. They have ~250k currently and that includes sales, etc. So I wonder where they pulled this number from and why Japan?

Data and AI soverignty

By will4 • Score: 3 Thread

Speculation: Microsoft will be ‘investing’ in major countries around the world to have a local to the country cloud and AI compute.

It will allow Microsoft to sell to the government and corporations when the country passes the eventual law requiring data storage, personal data, government cloud and AI models to reside within the country for economic and security reasons.

Second speculation: Microsoft and other world’s largest consumer of CPUs, memory chips, GPUs, computer motherboards, networking chips, etc. will have supply chain shortages crippling their business in 2 years if the AI use/consumption keeps growing.

Netflix Must Refund Customers For Years of Price Hikes, Italian Court Rules

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A Rome court ruled that several Netflix price hikes in Italy were unlawful because the company’s contracts didn’t adequately explain or justify future pricing changes. As a result, Netflix has been ordered to issue refunds that could total roughly 500 euros for some long-term subscribers. Ars Technica reports:
The lawsuit was brought by Italian consumer advocacy group Movimento Consumatori, which alleged that the price hikes violate the Consumer Code, Italian legislation that aims to protect consumer rights. The Consumer Code says it’s unlawful for a “professional to unilaterally modify the clauses of the contract, or the characteristics of the product or service to be provided, without a justified reason indicated in the contract itself,” according to a Google-provided translation.

The court’s April 1 ruling determined that Netflix’s contracts were required to explain in advance why prices or other terms might change in the future. Because the price hikes were found to be imposed without providing customers with valid justifications, the court ruled that the new prices are invalid and ordered Netflix to refund affected subscribers. This comes despite Netflix reportedly providing a 30-day advance notice of the higher fees and allowing customers to cancel their subscriptions to avoid price hikes.

The court gave Netflix 90 days to inform millions of current and former customers via email, mail, its website, and Italian newspapers of their right to refunds or else face a penalty of 700 euros per day, Italian newspaper Il Sole 24 Ore reported today. Per Italian law, price increases that Netflix has issued or will issue beyond April 2025 are legal. At that time, Netflix adjusted its terms to state that contract terms could one day change due to technological, security, or regulatory needs, to clarify clauses, or to provide changes to the service, Il Sole 24 Ore reported.

Pause on Hike

By Luthair • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
I’ve always wondered how willing companies would be to hike prices if subscriptions would automatically pause on a price increase, and the consumer would need to approve the new price for the subscription to continue.

Re:See Americans?

By sarren1901 • Score: 4, Informative Thread

It’s netflix, a totally optional entertainment service that you can cancel any time you want. This is Italy just fleecing an America tech company because they can.

Re:“To keep up with inflation”?

By test321 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

This is just Italy fleecing the tech company because it can.

No it’s not. It’s not “Italy” (as a country, as a government) that brought the case. It’s a consumer union and the lawyers they paid; not “Italy”.

What it is, it’s a megacorp not competently reading the law of the country they operate in. It was just as simple as writing “to keep up with inflation”. They just had to write that to be in the clear. Just like one has to say “yes I do” when getting married, otherwise it might not be valid.

This is really standard stuff. I’m not in Italy, but I have seen reports in other news of, say, a decision of a district to change the name of a street to be cancelled by a Court because the district forgot they have to justify the reason for the name change (which is just as simple as to write “to honour the name of a local citizen”); and a criminal sentencing cancelled by a higher court because the lower judge forgot to justify something. This sort of mess up happens, it’s fair game for someone to bring the case to Court and win.

Re: See Americans?

By sg_oneill • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The thing with most countries that aren’t america is you cant just unilaterally change a contract even with “30 days notice”, you need to get the customer to actively consent, click a button that says “I acknowledge this nonsense” or whatever. Netflix was fined for breaking Italian law, in Italy.

Netflix are absolutely NOT in the right, and that should not be controversial to anyone

Re:What now?

By bsolar • Score: 5, Informative Thread

But to my knowledge, they are month to month, meaning the contract is for the month, and by agreement a new contract is created each month

No, it’s not: it’s a subscription contract that lasts until one of the parties terminates it. This means the contract lasts effectively indefinitely but can be terminated or in some aspects modified during its course without having to agree to a full new contract agreement, which the consumer would have to actively accept every time.

The issue is that for these contracts the law does allow for modifications without requiring a full new contract agreement every time, but the clauses in the contract need to be specific about what can be changed and why and cannot give the provider too much unilateral power. The clause Netflix was using from 2017 to April 2025 were instead very generic, giving Netflix basically unlimited power to unilaterally change the price without justification.

In the Italian system clauses like these, which give a party significant unilateral power over the other party, are called “vessatorie” (vexatious) and are void unless individually accepted and signed by the other party on top of the contract containing them. In case of online contracts this might require a separate digital signature for each individual clause.

Note that a proper digital signature would otherwise not be required for an online contract not containing these type of clauses, which can be accepted by a consumer by simply clicking on a consent box. This means having these clauses makes an online contract much more problematic to accept.

Since the clauses Netflix was using to increase prices were found to be “vexatious” and were not accepted with individual signature, they were found to be void. Since they were void, Netflix could not use them as basis to increase the prices. After April 2025 Netflix introduced clauses that were considered not vexatious and Netflix can increase prices based on them.

Fan Fiction Website AO3 Exits Beta After 17 Years

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Archive of Our Own (AO3) is officially dropping its “beta” label after 17 years. The Organization for Transformative Works, the nonprofit behind the fanfiction site, said the site will keep evolving with new improvements even though it’s no longer technically in beta.

“As the AO3 software has been stable for a long time, the change is mostly cosmetic and does not indicate that everything is finalized or perfectly working,” the organizations says. “Exiting beta doesn’t mean we’ll stop continuing to improve AO3 — our volunteer coders and community contributors will still be working to add to and improve AO3 every day.”

Some of the features it’s introduced over the years include a tag system, offline fanworks downloads, privacy settings that let creators restrict access to their work, and new modes for multi-chapter works. As it stands, the site says it has more than 10 million registered users and 17 million fanworks.

What??

By GeekWithAKnife • Score: 3 Thread
They’ve gone back to Alpha?!

Proper internet

By NaiveBayes • Score: 3 Thread
There’s something comforting about AO3, a website build by a community for the community. It’s like the classic internet.

Tech Companies Are Trying To Neuter Colorado’s Landmark Right-to-Repair Law

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired:
Today at a hearing of the Colorado Senate Business, Labor, and Technology committee, lawmakers voted unanimously to move Colorado state bill SB26-090 — titled Exempt Critical Infrastructure from Right to Repair — out of committee and into the state senate and house for a vote. The bill modifies Colorado’s Consumer Right to Repair Digital Electronic Equipment act, which was passed in 2024 and went into effect in January 2026. While the protections secured by that act are wide, the new SB26-090 bill aims to “exempt information technology equipment that is intended for use in critical infrastructure from Colorado’s consumer right to repair laws.”

The bill is supported by tech manufacturers like Cisco and IBM, according to lobbying disclosures. These are companies that have vested interests in manufacturing things like routers, server equipment, and computers and stand to profit if they can control who fixes their products and the tools, components, and software used to make those upgrades and repairs. They also cite cybersecurity concerns, saying that giving people access to the tools and systems they would need to repair a device could also enable bad actors to use those methods for nefarious means. (This is a common argument manufacturers make when opposing right-to-repair laws.)

[…] During the hearing, more than a dozen repair advocates spoke from organizations like Pirg, the Repair Association, and iFixit opposing the bill. YouTuber and repair advocate Louis Rossmann was there. The main problem, repair advocates say, is that the bill deliberately uses vague language to make the case for controlling who can fix their products. […] The Colorado Labor and Technology committee advanced the bill, but it still needs to go through votes on the Colorado Senate and House floors before going into effect. Those votes may take place as early as next week. Regardless of how the bill goes in the state, it’s likely that manufacturers will continue their push to alter or undo repair legislation in other states across the country.
“The ‘information technology’ and ‘critical infrastructure’ thing is as cynical as you can possibly be about it,” says Nathan Proctor, the leader of Pirg’s US right-to-repair campaign. “It sounds scary to lawmakers, but it just means the internet.”
The current wording of the bill “leaves it up to the manufacturers to determine which items they will need to provide repair tools and parts to owners and independent repairers and which ones they don’t,” says Danny Katz, executive director CoPIRG, the Colorado branch of the consumer advocate group Pirg. “This is a bad policy and would be a big step back for Coloradans’ repair rights.”

iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said in the hearing: “There’s a general principle in cybersecurity that obscurity is not security,” iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens said in the hearing. “The money that’s behind the scenes, that’s what’s driving the bill.”

Re: You will own nothing and you will like it

By Registered Coward v2 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The legislators will, flat on their back , taking it and enjoying it.

I would love to be in that hearing

By darkain • Score: 5, Funny Thread

“So, you think critical infrastructure shouldn’t be repaired!?”

And watch the bullshit lame ass excuses the fuckwit companies come up with.

(yes, I know its so they can sell you service contracts and parts and labor n what not, but i want to see them attempt to justify it)

I support right to repair

By hdyoung • Score: 3, Interesting Thread
but not for the reasons that are popular here.

In America, it’s my god-given constitutional right to be a booger-eating moron.

So, if Jim Bob the farmer wants to defeat three levels of safety interlocks so he can reach shoulder-deep into his corn thresher and try to fix something that has absolutely no qualifications to deal with, that’s his business and nobody should be able to tell him otherwise. And, when the machine unexpectedly starts running, pulls Farmer Bob in and quickly converts him to a tidy pile of corncob sized Farmer-Bob-Nuggets, he has absolutely nobody to blame but himself. Especially not the tractor company.

If someone wants to pop the top off their $2800 Iphone 18 Max Pro Ultra and mess with the innards, that’s all good. But when they inadvertently crack a dozen solder joints and turn their shiny piece of high technology into a glass paperweight, Apple is not at fault.

I am perfectly fine with complete right-to-repair, as long as the original manufacturer has zero liability.

Downmod in 3,2,1

Re:I would love to be in that hearing

By larryjoe • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

“So, you think critical infrastructure shouldn’t be repaired!?”

They know that critical infrastructure *must* be repaired, and want exclusivity over those repairs so that they can profit unreasonably.

So, let the companies retain their monopoly over repair and then regulate that repair business as a monopoly, with government oversight, regulation, and approval of all prices and offerings. If a free market doesn’t exist, then there is no free market to be enabled by a laissez-faire government approach.

College Student, Cat Meme Helped Crack Massive Botnet Case

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The Wall Street Journal shares the "wild behind-the-scenes story" of how the world’s largest and most destructive botnet was uncovered and taken down, writes Slashdot reader sturgeon. “At times, the network known as Kimwolf included more than a million compromised home Android devices and digital photo frames — enough DDoS firepower to disrupt internet traffic across the U.S. and beyond.” From the report:
Sitting in his dorm room at the Rochester Institute of Technology, Benjamin Brundage was closing in on a mystery that had even seasoned internet investigators baffled. A cat meme helped him crack the case. A growing network of hacked devices was launching the biggest cyberattacks ever seen on the internet. It had become the most powerful cyberweapon ever assembled, large enough to knock a state or even a small country offline. Investigators didn’t know exactly who had built it — or how. Brundage had been following the attacks, too — and, in between classes, was conducting his own investigation. In September, the college senior started messaging online with an anonymous user who seemed to have insider knowledge.

As they chatted on Discord, a platform favored by videogamers, Brundage was eager to get more information, but he didn’t want to come off as too serious and shut down the conversation. So every now and then he’d send a funny GIF to lighten the mood. Brundage was fluent in the memes, jokes and technical jargon popular with young gamers and hackers who are extremely online. “It was a bit of just asking over and over again and then like being a bit unserious,” said Brundage. At one point, he asked for some technical details. He followed up with the cat meme: a six-second clip that showed a hand adjusting a necktie on a fluffy gray cat. Brundage didn’t expect it to work, but he got the information. “It took me by surprise,” he said.

Eventually the leaker hinted there was a new vulnerability on the internet. Brundage, who is 22, would learn it threatened tens of millions of consumers and as much as a quarter of the world’s corporations. As he unraveled the mystery, he impressed veteran researchers with his findings — including federal law enforcement, which took action against the network two weeks ago. Chad Seaman, a researcher at Akamai, joked at one point that the internet could go down if Brundage spent too much time on his exams.

HappyCat

By A10Mechanic • Score: 5, Funny Thread
I can haz botnet? [ok, we got that out of the way, on to serious discussions]

Brundage runs a botnet monitoring company

By the_skywise • Score: 3 Thread

Huh… so the kid who’s the CEO of his own botnet monitoring company (with prices starting at US 7k/month) looking for threats “stops” one of the most virulent botnet attacks in recent history?

“Benjamin Brundage is founder of Synthient, a startup that tracks proxy services and was the first to document Kimwolf’s unique spreading techniques. Brundage said the Kimwolf operator(s) have been trying to build a command and control network that can’t easily be taken down by security companies and network operators that are working together to combat the spread of the botnet.” …

“Meanwhile, Brundage said the good news is Kimwolf’s overlords appear to have quite recently alienated some of their more competent developers and operators, leading to a rookie mistake this past week that caused the botnet’s overall numbers to drop by more than 600,000 infected systems.
“It seems like they’re just testing stuff, like running experiments in production,” he said. “But the botnet’s numbers are dropping significantly now, and they don’t seem to know what they’re doing.”

How… convenient…

Someone was good at social engineering

By misnohmer • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The gist of the story is that a young student was good at extracting information from young hackers using social engineering. It yielded better results that law enforcement agencies.

Re:Someone was good at social engineering

By PPH • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Humor works.

Unless your subject is autistic. Then they just don’t get it and they mod you down .....

Krebs Article

By Himmy32 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The Krebs on Security article is much heavier on the tech details and not locked behind a paywall.

…Kimwolf botnet operators were tunneling back through IPIDEA’s proxy network and into the local networks of systems running IPIDEA’s proxy software. The attackers dropped the malware payload by directing infected systems to visit a specific Internet address…

So the better summary is there was a botnet that was able to connect to local networks through people who installed vulnerable residential proxy apps. Then would look for devices with open Android debugging ports and add those to the botnet. Kid with side business tracking residential proxies asks botnet operator about bots on networks with residential proxies. Botnet operator brags. Vulnerability gets closed and botnet gets dismantled. Reporting about cat memes for human interest story.

Penalties Stack Up As AI Spreads Through the Legal System

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
Tony Isaac shares a report from NPR:
When it comes to using AI, it seems some lawyers just can’t help themselves. Last year saw a rapid increase in court sanctions against attorneys for filing briefs containing errors generated by artificial intelligence tools. The most prominent case was that of the lawyers for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, who were fined $3,000 each for filing briefs containing fictitious, AI-generated citations. But as a cautionary tale, it doesn’t seem to have had much effect. The numbers started taking off last year, and the rate is still increasing. He counts a total of more than 1,200 to date, of which about 800 are from U.S. courts.
“I am surprised that people are still doing this when it’s been in the news,” says Carla Wale, associate dean of information & technology and director of the law library at the University of Washington School of Law. “Whatever the generative AI tool gives you — as in, ‘Look at these cases’ — you, under the rules of professional conduct, you have to read those cases. You have to read the cases to make sure what you are citing is accurate.”
“I think that lawyers who understand how to effectively and ethically use generative AI replace lawyers who don’t,” she says. “That’s what I think the future is.”

Did they fire their paralegals?

By gurps_npc • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Because that would explain why they still have issues.

I can easily see a lawyer order their paralegals to fact check their reports, but when they get AI they fire their paralegals and just think the AI can handle those duties.

Ethics

By eriks • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

“I think that lawyers who understand how to effectively and ethically use generative AI replace lawyers who don’t,”

There are three kinds of people in the world:

1. Those who strive to behave ethically.
2. Those who don’t give a damn about ethics at all and make no bones about it.
3. Those who pretend to behave ethically.

People who want to “do the right thing” aren’t a problem. They sometimes make mistakes, but try to correct them. I think this is most people, like more than 80%.

People who don’t give a damn aren’t really a problem either, since in a world populated by mostly good people, they’ll ultimately be shamed and marginalized or end up in jail.

People who can successfully project the illusion of behaving ethically when they have no intention in doing so are a HUGE problem. While there aren’t a lot of them, they’re highly concentrated in positions of power and hold most of the world’s wealth.

Maybe in the field of law, you can sort of cancel out the pretenders over time, since everything is (ostensibly) reviewed, so maybe “AI” will help the unabashedly unethical lawyers to self-destruct, but everywhere else, the problem remains, and “AI” is mostly going to make them worse.

Re:It’s easy to understand how this is happening

By UnknowingFool • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Only if one were to really scrutinize the work would one discover how terrible it is, but why bother doing all that extra evaluation…wasn’t AI supposed to save you time?

Unfortunately for lawyers, they are in a field where their opposition checks their work. From what I understand the most difficult part is finding the relevant case or law. If a lawyer cites [court case] or [law], the opposition can quickly check it. It is almost an NP problem.

Re:It’s easy to understand how this is happening

By MobyDisk • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

which can turn hours of work into minutes, saving them a lot of time and work

1. Raw work: 8 hours
2. Work with unchecked AI: 8 minutes
3. Work with check AI: 16 minutes

I don’t get why people choose option 2 over option 3.

Lawyers are some of the most overworked people on the planet.

They stocker making $15/hour needs to work extra hours to survive. Why does the lawyer making $500/hour overwork?

Re:It’s easy to understand how this is happening

By alvinrod • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Anyone charging hundreds of dollars per hour for their work had better damned well be doing it. Not only should they be sanctioned by the courts, but they should face criminal fraud charges. If the courts want to put a stop to this they had better get serious now and stop handing out slaps on the wrist. Multiply the sanctions by an order of magnitude and give opposing counsel a 30% finder’s fee to encourage additional vigilance and it’ll quickly stop.