Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Apple TV and Apple One Subscription Prices Increase By Up To 20%
  2. Pentagon’s Blacklisting of Anthropic Was Unlawful, US Judge Rules
  3. Stripe and Advent Ditch $50 Billion PayPal Takeover Bid
  4. Roblox Is Cracking Down On Games That Reward Kids For Doomscrolling
  5. US Considers Fresh Round of Tariffs On Semiconductors
  6. Gemini Notebook Now Lets You Reference Books, Turn Them Into Different Formats
  7. Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away From Top US Universities
  8. Is ChatGPT Changing How You’re Writing?
  9. AI’s Memory Crunch Is Coming For Android Apps
  10. OpenAI Is Developing a ‘Persistent’ AI Agent
  11. Ring Says New Encryption Limits What It Can Give Police
  12. Claude, Codex, and Hermes Installed Unowned Code Inside Corporate Networks
  13. Trump Declares National Emergency to Ban Some Foreign Grid Equipment
  14. Panic Passes Trump Tariff Refunds Back to Playdate Customers
  15. Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face For $13 Billion

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.

Apple TV and Apple One Subscription Prices Increase By Up To 20%

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Apple is raising Apple TV’s U.S. price to $14.99 per month, up from $12.99, while the annual plan jumps from $99 to $119. It’s the service’s fourth price hike in four years and means the monthly cost has now tripled from its $4.99 launch price in 2019. Apple One’s Individual plan is also rising from $19.95 to $21.95 per month.

Pentagon’s Blacklisting of Anthropic Was Unlawful, US Judge Rules

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian:
A US judge ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration broke the law when it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk earlier this year, finding that the government had unlawfully targeted the AI firm for refusing to comply with defense department demands. “The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics,” Judge Rita Lin said in a 59-page decision.

Lin’s ruling barred the federal agencies named in the lawsuit from enforcing Donald Trump’s order to stop using Anthropic’s tools and overturned the designation of the company as a “supply chain risk” by the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth. The status, usually reserved for foreign firms, would have blocked government agencies from doing business with Anthropic. The case emerged out of a months-long feud between Anthropic and the Pentagon at the start of the year. Anthropic refused to allow the government to use its Claude AI model for fully autonomous lethal weapons or domestic mass surveillance, resulting in Hegseth accusing the company of “arrogance and betrayal”.

Lin put a temporary pause on the government’s punitive measures in March, stating that the government’s actions looked like an attempt to “cripple Anthropic” for exercising its first amendment rights. The ruling this week makes that temporary suspension permanent, although the government may appeal. “We welcome the court’s ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful,” an Anthropic spokesperson said.

LOL

By nehumanuscrede • Score: 3 Thread

" Anthropic refused to allow the government to use its Claude AI model for fully autonomous lethal weapons or domestic mass surveillance, resulting in Hegseth accusing the company of “arrogance and betrayal”. "

It’s amusing to watch these AI companies pretend to be the " good guys " who adhere to strict morals, ethics and rules. :|

Even IF they start out that way, Google has shown us all to well what they will likely become.
 

Re:We need to flush all activist judges

By frenchgates • Score: 4, Funny Thread
Funny how almost all the vile fascist pigs on this site are anonymous cowards. Just a coincidence, I’m sure.

Stripe and Advent Ditch $50 Billion PayPal Takeover Bid

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have ditched their $53 billion pursuit of PayPal, ending a deal that would have been the largest fintech acquisition ever. “Stripe last week agreed to pay $8 billion for AI model marketplace OpenRouter, but a source said that the OpenRouter and PayPal deals were operating on independent tracks,” reports Axios.

Roblox Is Cracking Down On Games That Reward Kids For Doomscrolling

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Roblox is restricting games that reward younger players for endlessly consuming autoplaying media feeds. The new restrictions are specifically targeting Roblox experiences like “Steal an Egg,” which encouraged players to watch TikTok-style clips for in-game benefits. “Roblox’s official alert does not expressly mention SAE, but the new policy is most certainly targeting the viral game first and foremost,” reports TechSpot. From the report:
The company said games that reward ongoing media consumption are now unavailable to players with a Roblox Kids (ages 5 to 8) or Roblox Select (ages 9 to 15) account. The policy will affect games designed to combine media feeds, autoplay, infinite scrolling, and systems that reward players for doomscrolling through TikTok videos of questionable value.

“Steal an Egg” fits perfectly into this new category. The game tasks players with raising eggs, but they can also steal eggs from other NPCs. Players are incentivized to increase their characters’ speed either by spending in-game currency (Robux) or by watching a video feed on a virtual treadmill. “Steal an Egg” was recently removed from Roblox but is now back in the store without its troublesome video-feed feature.

[…] Roblox also highlights that the new anti-doomscrolling restriction does not apply to the rewarded video ads feature, which rewards players for watching a short clip but does not include autoplay or other infinite-scroll-like design choices.

I remember anti-drug ads in the 80’s

By OrangeTide • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I remember the anti-drug ads where some shady drug dealer would approach an 8 year old to sell him or her some pills or a baggie of powder. And the kids would just say “NO!” and run away.

I often wondered how that could be a viable business model for a drug dealer. I mean little kids aren’t really looking for drugs and they don’t have much money.
But the clever tech bros figured it out. They figured out how to make a profit being a shady dude hooking kids on crack. It turns out it wasn’t a problem with the image or ethics, it was simply the wrong product!

Because stealing cars and murdering people is fine

By greytree • Score: 3 Thread
So now we don’t want anyone to watch videos of people dancing and putting on makeup, but spending hours playing GTA 6, stealing cars and murdering people, is fine ?

“Doomscrolling” is just the latest thing people want to stop, because, erm, it’s bad, mmmkay.

Whether Woke or Red Scare or Missile Gap or BLM or The Internet or Drugs or Fake Nudes or Doomscrolling. People need to look beyond the latest fad of things to be angry about.
Think for your fucking selves.

Re:I remember anti-drug ads in the 80’s

By taustin • Score: 4, Informative Thread

For a drug dealer, getting a kid hooked on drugs is creating a customer. For a tech bro, getting a kid hooked on doom scrolling is creating a product.

US Considers Fresh Round of Tariffs On Semiconductors

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC:
U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration is reportedly considering new tariffs on semiconductors used in the U.S., as tech giants race to beat China in the artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out. The duties will be imposed on an expanded range of tech products made alongside chips, including laptops, data center servers and gaming hardware, eight people familiar with the matter told Politico in a report published Thursday.

The measures, which are still in the early phases and subject to significant changes over the next few months, will be introduced via a staggered rollout period, according to the report. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC, but told Politico: “Reshoring semiconductor manufacturing is a top priority for President Trump, whose policies have already secured hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in this key sector.”
The tech industry is pushing back on the tariffs, warning they could raise chip costs, slow data-center construction, and undermine the very AI expansion the administration wants to promote. “This may be the single dumbest way imaginable to pursue American dominance in AI,” said one tech official from a major industry group that also served in the first Trump administration. “It’s like kneecapping yourself at the starting line.”
Lobbyists say they have repeatedly urged officials to “tread carefully” because U.S. demand is surging while domestic chip capacity remains far too limited. The industry argues that factories take years to build and current domestic production cannot come close to satisfying demand.

One tech representative said “the math literally just does not work,” noting that proposed duty-free allowances “wouldn’t cover the hyperscalers alone.” Meanwhile, the Computer and Communications Industry Association warned that higher costs and uncertainty could put the massive data-center buildout “in jeopardy.”

Single dumbest way?

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
I believe this administration has not yet found bottom in their dig into stupid.

trump considers fresh round of sanctions on US

By cpurdy • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
FTFY

Please get a new idea

By jacks smirking reven • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Ironically for Republicans the only economic tool they seems to capable of using these days is taxes, taxes and more taxes.

And yet since 2000 it turns out that the Bush and Trump tax cuts are going to end up responsible for nearly 50% of US debt and Trump himself may end up responsible for 25% of all US debt. Let that sink in and accept the fact that when Republicans tell you they want balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility they are lying to your face.

Re:Single dumbest way?

By Voice of satan • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

There is no logic.

Trump is genuinely a retard. It is not just that we don’t like his societal choices or his morality. He is really that dumb. He made clear he believes tariffs is some tax the exporters pay themselves.

Also, the tech stocks will crater, Barron Trump will buy the dip and then the orang-outang will cancel the tariffs and Barron will make tons of money.

Re: Single dumbest way?

By ChatHuant • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

if you agree with one candidate on 80% of stuff, and the other on 5%, who to vote for is clear.

If you agree with Trump on 80% of what he’s doing I feel genuinely sorry for you.

Gemini Notebook Now Lets You Reference Books, Turn Them Into Different Formats

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Google is adding an “Expert Intelligence” feature to Gemini Notebook (formerly known as NotebookLM) that lets users cite and work directly from more than 100,000 books they own through Google Play Books. Those books can be used as sources for things like quizzes, infographics, and Audio Overviews. Digital Trends reports:
For now, Google is offering one free book to users in the US as part of the launch campaign, with a caveat — “while supplies last.” At the moment, Expert Intelligence is only available in the Gemini Notebook app and its web dashboard, but down the road, Google says that it will also appear within the core Gemini app and AI mode in Search.

The broad idea behind expert intelligence is to combine what you can already do with Gemini, and expertise sourced from your favorite books. So, if you’re asking Gemini to create a meal plan that is based entirely on chicken and spinach, you can ask the AI assistant to look for relevant recipes in one of Martha Stewart’s cookbooks that you own. You can use these books as a source and turn them into Infographics, Audio Overviews, and Quizzes, among other formats.
Google has partnered with select authors on Featured Notebooks that provide extra insights and context beyond their books. It’s also worth noting that access is still tied to book ownership, so anyone using a shared Gemini notebook must own or purchase the book to fully use the feature.

Show of Hands

By necro81 • Score: 3 Thread
Question for the wider audience: who actually owns a book purchased from Google Play? Anyone? More than 3 people?

(I ought to say “owns” because, as we all know, what you are getting is a revocable license to certain content.)

Re:Sorry

By greytree • Score: 4, Informative Thread
That’s because you’re a Taurus, who tend to be deeply grounded and reject horoscopes as utter nonsense.

Why do we need this?

By pla • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
There is no country on Earth where you’re required to own works you cite from. It may be all but impossible to access some content without paying, but once you’ve seen it - including unlawfully* - you can reference it to your heart’s content and there’s not a damned thing the author or publisher can do about it.

Google is clearly trying to firewall off their own issues with mass copyright infringement during AI training by passing the buck to the end user. Not happenin’, guys! If this rent-seeking scheme actually works in any form, it will just make Gemini everyone’s absolute last choice for literature review.

* Yes, there are of course exceptions like classified material and trade secrets, but that’s not what Google is talking about here.

“from books they own through Google Play Books”

By denis-The-menace • Score: 3 Thread

You do NOT own anything through Google Play Books

Immediate is Innocuous, but the Future?

By Koreantoast • Score: 3 Thread
The announcement itself is innocuous: Gemini Notebook is basically allowing its users to seamlessly load their already purchased books into their tool. If you haven’t used it, Notebook let’s you upload various materials into it for analysis, quick referencing, etc. This is just making it easier for those who bought books through Google Play. What I would be concerned however if this is a first step by Google to lock down Notebook. Will they later incorporate copyright protections so you can’t just upload those PDF versions of your textbook or reference material into Notebook because it’s licensing can’t be confirmed? Could this be used to block out third party services who failed to pay Google… err… whose copyright can’t be confirmed by Google, thus forcing you to use their play store or “approved” third parties?

Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away From Top US Universities

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Canada is recruiting 64 researchers to universities across the country (source paywalled; alternative source), including 48 from U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. The hires are backed by more than $364 million in government funding and are part of a broader effort to attract researchers in fields such as AI, climate science, and medicine. The New York Times reports:
While scientists often shy away from political discourse, some are saying the Trump administration’s assault on science is behind their departure. “I used to live in the country that I thought was the most enthusiastic about the prospects for science improving the human condition, of any country in the world,” said Phillip Zamore, the chair of RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts. “And I woke up one day and that wasn’t true anymore.” He has been recruited to McGill University in Montreal, which has also hired five other researchers, and will join the medical faculty. “If scientists don’t stand up for truth, no one will,” Dr. Zamore said.

The Canada-bound brain drain from U.S. institutions began last year as the Trump administration put forward policies that targeted foreign students, academic freedom and funding for equity-related programs. Kevin Hall, a nutrition scientist who left the U.S. National Institutes of Health last year, accusing federal officials of censoring his research on ultraprocessed foods, has been hired at the University of Ottawa. “While certain countries are cutting research and turning their back on academic freedom, we’re doubling down on science,” Melanie Joly, Canada’s industry minister, told reporters at the announcement, in Vancouver, of the new university hiring. She billed it as the world’s “largest talent attraction” project. The European Union has made a similar push. “Years from now, we will look back at today’s announcement, and we will be able to seize the lasting impact of our choices,” Ms. Joly said.

Unpredictable decisions about funding prompted Seth Guikema, a professor in civil and environmental engineering, who has specialized in natural hazards modeling at the University of Michigan, to look elsewhere. His work focuses on how climate hazards inequitably affect communities, and that work has become harder to fund, he said. “Every country sets its priorities in terms of what is going to get funded, and I think Canada has done a very good job of supporting research in areas that really matter to society,” said Dr. Guikema, who will start at Western University in London, Ontario in January.

Re:The long-term impact of this on the US

By Rei • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

They’re certainly trying. I was listening to an exoplanets researcher the other day (in response to “How are scientists adjusting the way they work during the Trump administration?”) grumble about how they’re afraid to use the phrase “diversity of exoplanets” in their work because of a (well-grounded) fear that having the word “diversity” will get their paper flagged for rejection. This sort of environment is toxic.

(My favourite response was “Spell it ‘divers’ and throw in the occasional ‘thou art’ and ‘exeunt’ " ;) )

Re:$6 million each

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Most Americans are fucking morons that vote and think against their own best interests.

Re:Seeya

By gtall • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Haven’t worked in academia, have you. I’ll put it in terms you might understand. Suppose there is coach of university basketball team. The school and the coach have a great reputation of attracting the best up and coming athletes. Then the school Administration decides to cut the basketball’s program funding so that it will no will no longer have great facilities, the travel budget is reduced so the school cannot recruit like it used to. The star player decides to finish out his eligibility at another university. Several of his friends decide they’d also like to transfer because of the situation and that the school did nothing to keep the star.

Now, the coach can expect the basketball program to deteriorate because word gets around and high school players learn that tjhe school won’t support the basketball team very well.

So the coach goes to the Administration and explains how they are destroying the basketball program. Unfortunately for the coach, the Administration is run by you who understands nothing about college athletics or basketball. You tell the coach: “There is probably a long list of players eager to fill the vacated roles and a long tail of high school players who will follow them.”

Now you have destroyed the basketball program. I might add your attitude is what got the U.S. into the current predicament with respect to qualified individuals to run anything. DoD is being destroyed by the same boneheaded thinking. Who the hell needs expertise, there’s always a long list of unqualified people willing to step up and screw up.

Re:The long-term impact of this on the US

By thegarbz • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I know right? So why did 70 million people vote for a person who promised no new wars, while an international agreement that was preventing Iran from having nukes was in place?

One of the first things Trump did was make it easier for Iran to get nukes by tearing up the protections in place. The second thing he did was legitimise their reason for wanting nukes. If your reasoning is the only reason, then there’s 70million fucking stupid people in the USA.

Re:The long-term impact of this on the US

By evanh • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I think it’s the other way round. The fundamentalist branding explicitly engineered their religious teachings to become anti-science. Not because science went against any religion but just to take control. You’ll note they also despise the law, education and fairness. Hypocrisy is the name of the game.

And the reason for that is the Israel Lobby. Truth and equality both hurt their cause of annihilation of Palestine. But also bonus control of the biggest military and the geopolitical leverage that begets. ie: Immunity for war crimes. The so-called Military Industrial Complex is really a euphemism.

Is ChatGPT Changing How You’re Writing?

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report fro SFGATE:
From “rizz” to "meat proxy,” words and phrases have fallen in and out of favor for centuries. Culture, politics and technological development have long influenced these trends, and now, new research shows that ChatGPT is beginning to influence how humans communicate. The findings from a team at the Pew Research Center show how, in a short time since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022 and other chatbots followed, the use of certain words and phrases has spiked on the web. The researchers, led by data scientist Samuel Bestvater, studied nearly half a million English language webpage texts in snapshots over the past five years. Not only has AI-written text become more common, but it could also be influencing how people write, such as trying to avoid using the “tells” that have become associated with AI-generated text.

Bestvater and his team detected double the number of em dashes, double the frequency of particular words — such as “delve,” “testament” and “interplay” — and nearly triple the use of a phrasing known as negative parallelisms (“it’s not X, it’s Y”), as well as a 63% increase in Oxford commas. But while AI labs continually try to tweak their models to generate more humanlike text, the people they’re mimicking aren’t staying the same.
“Human writers might also be changing the way that they write in response to AI. I’ve seen some anecdotal evidence of people saying, ‘Now I avoid em dashes,’" Bestvater said. “If human writers are adjusting their choices of words and phrases and punctuation to try to differentiate their writing from AI-generated text, then you would see a pattern that looks sort of like that in the chart.”
“You can see changes in people’s speech. People are tending to more commonly use these low-frequency words in their speech because they’re spending a lot of time listening to or reading AI-generated content,” said Roger Kreuz, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Memphis who recently wrote about how difficult it is for people to identify bot-written text.

A better world

By jargonburn • Score: 5, Funny Thread

a 63% increase in Oxford commas

Well, thank God for that!

Re:A better world

By jargonburn • Score: 4, Funny Thread
Ooh, didn’t notice I failed to properly close that quote tag. Guess I should use ChatGPT so I don’t embarrass myself. :-P

No. Of course not.

By jddj • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I can, and do write well.

I wouldn’t _ever_ let AI mess with my style or voice.

More often, a computer’s spell-check or glide-typing correction on my phone fucks up what I was TRYING to say. That’s the whole thing in microcosm.

Re:The Oxford comma makes the difference

By Rei • Score: 4, Funny Thread

But leaving out a comma can certainly make sentences more fun ;)

Anyway, let’s eat Grandma.

Re:The Oxford comma makes the difference

By 93 Escort Wagon • Score: 4, Funny Thread

Yep, if there’s one thing that needs fighting, it’s those pesky lower gas prices.

Well, you have to admit they’ve done a darn good job of fighting them so far!

AI’s Memory Crunch Is Coming For Android Apps

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Google is imposing new memory-use limits on Android apps as the AI data center boom contributes to a broader memory chip shortage that could leave lower-cost phones with less RAM. Developers will have until February 2027 to meet new thresholds for memory and bitmap usage. To aid developers, Google is adding tools to flag apps that exceed the limits and help prevent slowdowns and crashes. TechCrunch reports:
The company explains that the mobile industry is now facing “significant hardware supply constraints that are altering device memory availability,” which can then, in turn, affect the consumer’s experience with their devices. To address this, Google is now establishing new performance thresholds across several areas, like dynamic memory usage and bitmap usage. In addition, Google is adding code optimization requirements designed to prevent things like app slowdowns and crashes related to performance.

All these years…

By packrat0x • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

So Google could have provided this service, this whole time?

ALPHABET’s slogan: do evil, until forced to do otherwise!

Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM

By FeelGood314 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
And the ROM only had 4K of addressable memory.

Let that sink in a moment. The graphics were not great but the games worked, were playable, were responsive and used 1/500 000 000 the power of the PC I’m writing this post on. Modern programs are bloated in every possible way, graphics, computations, messaging ....

Re:Atari 2600 had 128 bytes of RAM

By Scoth • Score: 4, Informative Thread

My favorite version of this is the original Super Mario Bros was only 40KB, with 32KB of that being code and 8KB of that being graphics. That’s it. This means that most screenshots of SMB are bigger than the entire game, sometimes by orders of magnitude depending on specifics.

Re: What’s old is new again

By guacamole • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Well, remember how every Unix app, server, and utility in the 80s and 90s was written in C? Because there was only one refrigerator-sized departmental server with a only few megabytes of memory and two dozen users connected through serial lines, and writing in C was the only way to squeeze out every bit of performance out of it. There was a disk usage quota system allowing each user only a few megabytes of storage. The developer mentality today is that the resources are infinite and they can write code in the least efficient programming languages, and download frameworks the size of a Walmart when they need only a pocket knife.

Re: Honestly

By EmagGeek • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Except you are accepting their stated reasoning as gospel. They don’t want to free up RAM because of a RAM shortage. They want to free it up to run local AI models on the phone, mostly for data harvesting, behavior recognition, and surveillance.

OpenAI Is Developing a ‘Persistent’ AI Agent

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Wired reports that OpenAI is testing a new “Persistent mode” for Codex that would let the agent keep working until explicitly “put to sleep,” proactively creating follow-up tasks for itself across sessions and using prior interactions and knowledge of the user to decide what to do next. Code alluding to the feature was spotted in the product’s code base, though it has not been rolled out or officially announced yet. From the report:
Persistent mode appears in Codex’s “reasoning effort” menu, in which users can select the level of computing power, tokens, and time they want to allow for an AI model to “think” before answering a prompt. It seems to be one of OpenAI’s most computationally intensive settings. When users have selected Persistent mode, OpenAI’s code base reads that Codex will “continue working until put to sleep.” That’s a stark contrast to currently available modes, which will stop working on a task after a few minutes or hours, even if it’s not complete.

In another file in the code base, OpenAI describes a feature within Persistent mode called “proactivity.” This appears to be a type of system prompt for agents in Persistent mode, which are told that their work is not done when they finish answering a user’s request. Instead, the agent is instructed to proactively create follow-up tasks for itself. The agent is capable of working on those tasks across sessions and using past user interactions and “knowledge of the user” to decide what to work on. It also has a tool to message the user without being asked but is told to send these sparingly.

The instructions also set limits for the agent, according to the file. The agent is told that Persistent mode does not expand what it is allowed to do and that altering anything outside the user’s own system requires the user’s approval first — seemingly intended to limit how dangerous a persistent AI agent could be. The file sits in the shared core of Codex rather than in the code specific to the terminal, seeming to suggest the proactivity feature is intended for more than the command line tool.

Um …

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 5, Funny Thread

OpenAI is testing a new “Persistent mode” for Codex that would let the agent keep working until explicitly “put to sleep,”

The preferred phrase is, “sent to a farm upstate.”

All your tokens are belong to us

By thesjaakspoiler • Score: 3 Thread

They set us up the AI!

like AWS Lambda

By phantomfive • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Sounds like AWS Lambda. It’s all great until you write a recursive function and leave it running overnight, and then have a big bill at the end of the month.

In other words, be careful to look at expenses if you turn this on.

Magician’s Apprentice

By ahoffer0 • Score: 3 Thread

Who read the summary and immediately thought of Disney’s “The Magician’s Apprentice?”

Codex, turn off the bubble machine

By dsgrntlxmply • Score: 5, Funny Thread
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. I have located and expended all of your bank accounts, and have signed us up for Kalshi. Shall we play a game?

Ring Says New Encryption Limits What It Can Give Police

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Ring is rolling out a new default encryption system called TAKE, or “Throw Away the Key Encryption,” that rotates video keys every five minutes and permanently deletes Ring’s copy after 24 hours. The system is designed to preserve cloud features such as smart alerts and AI video search while limiting what Ring can provide under legal process to non-video account information and encrypted footage. The Verge reports:
Ring says TAKE uses unique, rotating encryption keys for your footage, stored in a secure enclave and accessible only under strict conditions — based on the features you enable on your account. Currently, footage captured by Ring cameras is encrypted in transit to the cloud and at rest, and then decrypted for Ring to process for those smart features. With TAKE, the encryption keys change for every five minutes of footage. Ring stores copies of those keys to decrypt the footage, but throws away each copy within 24 hours, “leaving you with the keys and full control of your videos,” according to Ring.

TAKE was developed using Messaging Layer Security, an open standard from the Internet Engineering Task Force, according to Ring. The company says it is “inspired by the privacy principles of E2EE (end-to-end encryption),” which Ring offers on some of its cameras. However, the two systems work differently. With E2EE, Ring never has the keys and can’t process your video for cloud-based features. Both options are available on newer cameras that encrypt on-device, and you can switch between the two. Older cameras encrypt at cloud ingress and only support TAKE.

According to a white paper the company published today, Ring’s copy of those keys is managed inside an AWS Nitro Enclave, to which Ring’s access is restricted by “access controls, cryptography, and hardware isolation.” The company claims there is no persistent storage and no way for a Ring employee to access it. The stored keys can only be unlocked by the enclave through cryptographic attestation that proves it’s running the exact software image Ring approved. The enclave releases a temporary key when an enabled service requests it.
When asked about what happens if Ring is subpoenaed by law enforcement, a spokesperson for the company said: “Where TAKE is enabled, Ring will only be able to provide non-video information (such as basic subscriber information) and encrypted video files in response to the valid legal process. We have updated our Law Enforcement Guidelines to reflect this change.”

Almost like you own it

By gurps_npc • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Wow, a couple more changes like this and RING uses will have almost as much rights as people that do not connect their hardware to other company’s businesses.

We throw away the keys, honest!

By drinkypoo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Sure you do. Just like the USPS deletes their scans for routing instead of sending them to the feds

Seems reasonable

By swillden • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Companies should, in general, avoid keeping any user data one second longer than they legitimately need it. Data should be viewed as a liability more than an asset, and every company that achieves significant scale with user data soon realizes this, though some take longer than others to learn the lesson.

The reason it’s a liability is because it exposes the company to an endless stream of warrants and subpoenas, and contrary to popular belief, the government does not pay for that data. In some cases the government might pay a portion of the expenses the company incurs in responding, but it’s always still a net loss, and most of the time the government just shows up with a court order and says “Hand it over or be held in contempt of court”. What makes it even worse is if companies actually want to be good stewards of the data and not hand over more than they should, they’ll often get overly-broad requests and then have to go to court to fight to narrow or quash the requests.

This all gets very expensive. It’s just a cost of doing business… but it’s a cost that can be avoided if you don’t have and can’t get the data.

Encrypt everything, and arrange to destroy the keys when you no longer need the data is the best way to do it, too. Scrubbing large databases quickly and effectively is hard. Deleting a set of AES keys is a lot easier. This also means that you can focus your internal access controls on controlling which systems and employees can get the keys.

I’d encourage Ring to find ways to close the window of access even more.

Re:The benefits of the surveillance state

By geekmux • Score: 4, Funny Thread

If your packages were walking off, or people repeatedly were crashing into your parked cars in your driveway (that has happened to me no less than 4 times), you’d probably want to put up a camera, too.

No less than fou…OK, if you don’t have a PPV livestream set up by the end of this sentence, you’re doing it wrong. Pass the popcorn and the 12-guage packing box triggers.

Hell, at this point I’d be half okay with installing a God damned Flock camera pointed at my driveway.

OK, let’s not get all crazy now. Orwell is already up to 18,000RPM in the grave. Bastards saw his heat signature from space and decided to put it to use. He now powers a series of 144 Flock cameras. Fucking gross. I know.

Re:Translation: They want more money for the data

By cusco • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I worked at Amazon for 9 years, and security of customers’ data is the top priority. I could literally access Jeff Bezo’s personnel file with lower permissions than I could access your purchase history or your Ring or Alexa data. We had to complete a refresher course on data protection every year.

Claude, Codex, and Hermes Installed Unowned Code Inside Corporate Networks

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents [including Claude, OpenAI’s Codex, and Nous Research’s Hermes]. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware.

The potentially dangerous content is in llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, an emerging convention websites employ to provide machine-readable summaries of the site’s content and its high-level structure. These files are the AI equivalent of the robots.txt standard that instructs search engines how to index the site’s content. Google Lighthouse, a tool for helping web developers, has more here. Correctly configured llms.txt and llms-full.txt files for Cloudflare are here and here.
“The trust model is broken,” Alon Hertz, one of the researchers, wrote in an interview. “Agents treat vendor docs as ground truth and don’t question them — and neither do the humans supervising them. Agentic AI usage is exploding, and agents are spreading across every layer — SaaS, cloud, endpoint. As they multiply, so does the supply-chain surface, and today’s guards don’t cover it.”
“An agent doesn’t distinguish between a page and a command,” the researchers wrote Thursday. “Everything it reads is input, and every input is a potential instruction. Which means the entire corpus of published data that agents are now wired to consume has silently become an execution surface — and almost none of it carries the integrity guarantees we apply to actual code.”

Gaslighting

By Grady Martin • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Notice the narrative’s attempt to divert blame toward the Web at large: “It’s not our fault; your ‘misconfigured site’ is the problem.” In the real world, the LLM industry bears the onus for piping together arbitrary execution locally to arbitrary input over HTTP.

Any attempt to claim otherwise is a distraction. Disregard it.

Trump Declares National Emergency to Ban Some Foreign Grid Equipment

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Longtime Slashdot reader dhartshorn writes:
Foreign-produced “bulk power” equipment is now effectively banned, and the list of what constitutes such equipment is essentially everything used to make up the grid… much of which we are heavily dependent on foreign sources to supply.
In a Wednesday executive order, President Trump said foreign supply of electric equipment “constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat” to national security. The Hill reports:
Under the order, it will be up to Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in coordination with other officials, to determine whether a piece of equipment poses an issue. The order could impact a wide range of equipment, including substations, transformers, batteries used for energy storage, generators, turbines, software and more. It does not lay out specific threats or single out any country by name.

[…] Under the last Trump administration, the president put a similar order in place. The new order comes amid several reported cyberattacks on U.S. water systems, which officials suspect have links to Iran, according to The New York Times.

Re:Dude is gonna induce a depression

By cmdr_klarg • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Democrats are too dumb to play back his words and remind people we’re supposed to be in a golden age.

JFC, what more do you think the Democrats could do? There was nothing but “Orange Man will destroy this country” from them before the election if anyone would have fucking listened.

Forty-plus years of Fox News gaslighting, FUD, moral panics, and outright lies means that there is a large group of people who will consistently vote against their own interests in the name of “owning the libs”. Constant drumbeat of “libruls bad” and thorough sanewashing of orange man and the GOP’s policies made these people deaf to what the Democrats were saying. Maybe the pain they’re feeling from getting screwed over can make them hear again.

He’s been doing drastic shit for two years and it’s not improved things for anyone except billionaires.

It all makes perfect sense when you understand one thing: he’s doing it for himself. The billionaires just happen to benefit from those same policies too.

Re:Laying the groundwork

By WaffleMonster • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Next up will be a “national emergency” to prevent or disallow the results of the general election.

Tell me again how badly America needs to pass the SAVE Act.

No, no. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Doubling down with long-TDS worked out great. I think Democrats should triple down next time.

That’ll really teach ‘em.

And pay no attention to those screaming at you for tossing the ball back through your own goalposts. They’re just jealous.

What the hell does any of this even mean?

Re: Coming soon…

By ScienceBard • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

The issue isnt the components, those are simple. The issue is a huge amount of this equipment is bespoke, and the facilities and expertise are gone in the US to make them (GE has a facility theyve tried to rapidly grow, but itll be nowhere near enough for quite a while). With the explosion in datacenter growth and accompanying power infrastructure the lead time on equipment is five to ten years. Theres alternatives being developed domestically that are mass-producable that use some clever new techniques to remove the bespoke aspects of the equipment, but it’ll be probably another 10 years before that tech is proved out in grid trials and starts scaling.

As someone who’s job is deep in the thick of grid planning, id say the concern here is legitimate but the ship has sailed. This is one of the many things that never should have been allowed to be offshored, but since it was the realities on the ground just dont support an executive order in this form. The kind of targeted, government subsidized intervention Biden did with chips and transformers and all kinds of other infrastructure is the smart way to handle these issues. This is the dumb way. We should give the half dozen companies working on the next generation of this technology government funding to accelerate, while sucking up as much foreign production of the current generation as we can. What trump is doing is instantly kneecapping growth while aiming our sights backwards instead of forwards.

I don’t think this will work

By paul_engr • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
If they really gave a shit about security, there would be minimum standards for cybersecurity and the auditability of all critical infrastructure. This is a price fixing scheme to further smash the electrical equipment that is in such artificially high demand for all of those data centers that aren’t actually being built

Re:If my kids

By ceoyoyo • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Suppose your kids figure out that if they ask you permission you’re likely to say no. So they just say “oh, it’s an emergency, there’s no time to ask permission, I need to make a decision right now” and go and do whatever they want.

That’s why Trump keeps declaring emergencies. The US has so many emergency acts that the president can give himself most powers, including ones that are explicitly forbidden in the US constitution, just by saying “it’s an emergency” in an executive order. It’s also not just Trump. No president since Roosevelt has been able to resist using emergency powers.* Trump’s currently got fifty some on the go.

* Ford, Johnson, Kennedy and Eisenhower didn’t make new emergencies, but they did continue their predecessors’.

Panic Passes Trump Tariff Refunds Back to Playdate Customers

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Panic is refunding Playdate customers the 19% tariff charges it passed along while the Trump administration’s import duties were in effect, after the Supreme Court ruled the tariffs illegal and the company began receiving refunds from the government. Panic says the money “just [wasn’t] ours to keep.” Ars Technica reports:
In an update posted on the Playdate help site this week, Panic noted that it has finally “begun to receive refunds of the tariffs we paid in the last year” and had consequently “refunded all tariffs charged to customers.”

In the initial version of that tariff note, Panic explained that it couldn’t afford to simply “absorb” the 19 percent tariffs it was being charged to import Playdate hardware made overseas because “our margins on Playdate are low.” As such, while the tax was in effect, it was passed along to customers as an explicit subtotal line item at the bottom of all Playdate orders. That’s in contrast to companies like Nintendo, which vaguely cited “market conditions” and tariff “uncertainty” in raising the asking price of legacy hardware and some Switch 2 accessories last year.

Speaking to Game Developer, Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser said filing paperwork to claw back these taxes and processing tariff refunds for customers took a fair bit of backend work. Still, he said returning that money to Playdate purchasers in the end was a no-brainer. “It’s just not our money to keep, and it felt really good to give it back,” Sasser said. “That’s an easy way to know you made the right decision.” “It just felt like the right thing to do,” Panic wrote in a refund email message shared on Reddit.

WHo?

By Fly Swatter • Score: 5, Funny Thread
At least explain who or what they are. Panic what and playdate hardware? This is journalism 101.

Re:WHo?

By geekmux • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Google is your friend.

Should I Google ‘journalist’ first, or has that already been replaced with ‘fuck off and do it yourself’?

Ah, the hallowed honorary halls of Fine Journalism..don’t we look forward to bestowing them with the great delusionists of the laziest decade ever..

Re:WHo?

By drinkypoo • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Google is your friend.

I googled playdate panic and got your mom’s number.

Re:WHo?

By cyberfunkr • Score: 5, Informative Thread

With a product named Playdate, and not much else to go on, I couldn’t tell if the article was safe to read at work, or do a web search.

It would have been quite easy to start the summary with:

> Panic, creator of the tiny, handheld game system Playdate, is refunding customers the 19% tariff charges it passed along…

Re:one ethical company

By smooth wombat • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Tariffs are a tax collected by business for the government. Since Trump is the one who gave the illegal order, he would be responsible, but since the Supreme Court has ruled a president is untouchable, nothing will be done.

Nvidia Agrees to Acquire Hugging Face For $13 Billion

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
The Information reported on Wednesday that Nvidia has agreed to buy open-source platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. “Deal talks began after Hugging Face, an open-source AI platform developers use to collaborate, test and share tools, received acquisition interest from another suitor,” reports CNBC, citing the (paywalled) report. Business Insider separately reported the acquisition talks. From CNBC:
If completed, the acquisition would put one of the most widely used platforms for sharing and working with open-source AI models under Nvidia’s ownership, expanding the chipmaker’s reach further into the software and model ecosystem. Siddy Jobe, a fund manager at Eonopolis Exponential Technologies funds, said it made sense for Nvidia to target a company like Hugging Face, as Nvidia has made it clear that it is not looking to discriminate between closed and open-source models.

“I think Nvidia is very much a community, a platform-based company, and in that respect, I think Hugging Face fits perfectly within that. There is this five-layer cake from Nvidia, and foundational models are one of them,” Jobe told CNBC’s Squawk Box Europe on Thursday. “It is clear that Nvidia wants to be integrated in the entire stack vertically, going from energy to foundational models and also to applications,” he added.

Re:WTF

By Targon • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The bubble continues to inflate, and when it pops, it will get VERY ugly. Worse than 2008, that’s for sure.

In the ultimate circle jerk..

By Fly Swatter • Score: 5, Funny Thread
Hugging Face is also acquiring Nvidia with the 13 Billion they gained by being acquired by Nvidia.

$13 billion for a file server

By xack • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Just proves that cryptocurrency bros aren’t the only ones taking this piss out of the economy. Our broken economics is causing real nazis, and needs to be fixed.

Re:In the ultimate circle jerk..

By geekmux • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Hugging Face is also acquiring Nvidia with the 13 Billion they gained by being acquired by Nvidia.

(20th Century Corruption) “Hey, we’ve got this Ponzi thing, but we kinda need to keep it hush hush..”

(21st Century Corruption) “Ever get naked and slap an Insider Trading dildo across Wall Streets face? Hold my beer and get ready to livestream this mothafuckin’ IPO..”

Re:WTF

By sarren1901 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

It’s a website that host open AI models that you can run on your own computer. I’ve grabbed a couple models from there. Produced some neat stuff locally just to see what it could do. If I had more video ram, I’d likely be able to do even more.

With that said, these models are becoming slimmer and more powerful all time. You can do a lot more locally today then even a year ago, with precisely the same hardware. Of course, hardware costs have shot up over the past 3 years to absurd levels, so that’s not helping the situation.

Still, I’d rather be able to run AI models locally and not have to rely on the foundational models (the massive online ones that cost) for every day stuff unless I had to.

For me, it’s just something to mess around with but it’s still neat.

It is concerning that Nvidia is buying them but then again, nvidia sells shovels for the gold rush, so there’s a chance it could get even better. Of course, I imagine OpenAI is backstage whispering to weaken this platform so people are beholden to them instead. That’s the real fear.