Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Singapore Says US Not Helpful On Investigation Into Suspected Spy’s Company
  2. Microsoft Outlook Goes Down Nationwide [UPDATE]
  3. Google Pushes Privacy Angle As Gemini-Powered Smartglasses Debut
  4. Iconic First Image of Black Hole Holds Up To Scrutiny
  5. Critical Apache HTTP/2 Flaw Could Let Unauthenticated Attackers Execute Code Remotely
  6. Jensen Huang Resigns As Nvidia CEO
  7. Tim Peters, Python User #2 and Prolific Contributor, Dies At 74
  8. Power Grids On 5 Continents Pulse Every 60s. Scientists Think They Know Why
  9. Sunken SS United States Set To Become World’s Largest Artificial Reef
  10. United Airlines Bans AI Agents From Booking Flights On Behalf of Travelers
  11. Jensen Huang Said to Have Had Relationship With Nvidia Executive Who Reports to Him
  12. Nvidia and Jensen Huang Face Shareholder Lawsuit Alleging Investors Were Misled About Spy Affair
  13. New York Forces T-Mobile to End Data Caps On Low-Income Plans
  14. Ukraine Strikes Cause Permanent Data Loss at Russia’s Yandex Cloud
  15. Court Says Trump Can’t Use Leaks To Justify Spying On Journalists’ LinkedIn DMs

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.

Singapore Says US Not Helpful On Investigation Into Suspected Spy’s Company

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Singapore says U.S. authorities provided limited assistance in its investigation of Megaspeed, the company run by Alice Huang, the Chinese businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence suspects is a Chinese spy and whose relationship with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has drawn scrutiny. According to Singapore, authorities held Alice Huang’s passport from June 2025 until February while investigating “potential false declarations,” but ultimately released her with a “stern warning” and barred her from re-entering the country. The New York Times reports:
The statement raises new questions about the response of the Trump administration to the case and why the U.S. government did not more forcefully intervene. According to the timeline in the statement, Singaporean authorities had been holding Ms. Huang’s passport well after President Trump was briefed last fall about her relationship with Nvidia’s chief executive and the belief that she was a Chinese intelligence asset. The New York Times has reported that Taiwan began monitoring Ms. Huang in 2024 at the guidance of the U.S. government.

In its statement, Singapore said that it had sought information from an American server maker and close Nvidia business partner, Supermicro, but that the company had provided “limited cooperation.” Supermicro, a firm that packages Nvidia’s A.I. chips onto servers that can be used in data centers, has been at the center of a number of chip smuggling investigations across the globe. Supermicro was a supplier to Megaspeed, a company incorporated in Singapore and run by Ms. Huang, according to two people with knowledge of the matter.

Singapore said in the statement its authorities raised Supermicro’s “limited cooperation” with the U.S. Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation in July 2025 and “requested their assistance in securing the company’s cooperation.” “Despite these repeated requests, Singapore has to date received limited information or assistance in respect of the company,” the statement said.

Microsoft Outlook Goes Down Nationwide [UPDATE]

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Microsoft is suffering a major Microsoft 365 outage that’s disrupting Outlook, Teams, Copilot and SharePoint for users across the Americas, with more than 129,000 problem reports logged on Downdetector shortly after the disruption began. Microsoft blames the connectivity problems on an unexpectedly large number of unavailable servers that overloaded the remaining infrastructure. The company says it’s redistributing traffic and restarting affected systems. From a report:
Microsoft was not providing an estimated time by which it expects service to return. Both individual Outlook users and those on enterprise accounts experienced problems logging in to the service. The outage also affected other Microsoft services, including Microsoft Teams, the Copilot 365 AI service and SharePoint Online. “Users may be unable to connect to multiple Microsoft 365 services,” the company said on its Service Health Status page.
UPDATE 11/12/26, 19:50 UTC: From Microsoft 365 Status: “We’re testing a configuration change to address a problem that’s causing servers to fail automated health checks and become unavailable. In parallel, we’ve initiated a restart of all affected servers and are monitoring health as they return to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as http://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.”

UPDATE 11/12/26, 20:19 UTC: From Microsoft 365 Status: “We’ve not identified any recent change correlated with the start of impact; however, our investigation indicates the failed health checks may originate from a specific component that’s responsible for processing server health. We’ve taken steps to prevent additional servers from being impacted while we work to return the affected servers to service. More info under EX1550543 and MO1550821 in the Microsoft 365 admin center, as well as http://status.cloud.microsoft if the admin center is not available to you.

UPDATE 11/12/26, 20:29 UTC: “According to https://downdetector.com/, much of the major services are down,” writes Slashdot reader xocmot2. “AWS, Microsoft, Meta, on and on. Clearly not a Microsoft thing.”

Developing…

Just checked …

By PPH • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

… my LibreOffice. Still up.

This is an inevitable/predictable consequence

By Arrogant-Bastard • • Score: 3 • Thread
It’s also not the first time one of the big players has had a catastrophic outage; has anyone else noticed that both the frequency and severity of these are increasing? For example (and there are many more): Google Cloud says a ‘power event’ caused today’s outage, Salesforce staggers back to feet after global outage, AWS CloudFront outage serves errors instead of websites, Microsoft Exchange Online outage causes email delays, failures, IBM Cloud evaporates as datacenter loses power, Microsoft confirms Teams is down and messages are delayed.

All of these companies — and others — have gutted the budgets and personnel that “keep the lights on” — that do the routine work that keeps everything running. The money has been shifted into AI, the people have either been shifted as well or simply laid off. The remaining skeleton crews are largely composed of junior people who not only lack the required knowledge, but the kind of judgment and expertise that only comes with running things for 10, 15, 20 years. They might (or might not be) smart, diligent, and hard-working — but they’re in over their heads. And thus we see what we see here.

All of us who’ve been running things on this network for a very long time have seen this movie, multiple times. It always ends the same way. So my advice to those of you who are relying in any way, directly or indirectly, on Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Oracle, etc., is: make a plan. Now. Because you don’t want any part of where this is going.

Let me add one more thing. It’s unknown whether the AI bubble will burst or not. Perhaps the NVidia/Huang affair (literally) is the first sign of that, perhaps it’s not. But: if it bursts, and there’s a non-zero probability of that happening, then that will exacerbate this — and those companies will need to cut costs and boost revenue. Two ways to do that are cutting operational budgets/staff even further and increasing prices. We’ve seen this movie too. Heck, I’ve been in this movie, and it was an awful experience that dragged on until we finally managed to extricate ourselves from the wreckage.

So do yourself a favor: make a plan.

I don’t trust the downdetector reports

By dskoll • • Score: 3 • Thread

I seriously doubt so many other services are also down. I think it’s more likely a bad actor is falsifying reports to downdetector.

Time to decrement the version number

By Jeremi • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

It’s now more accurately known as Microsoft 364.

Google Pushes Privacy Angle As Gemini-Powered Smartglasses Debut

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Google is launching its first Gemini-powered smart glasses, with Samsung supplying the computing hardware. Given their built-in 12-megapixel camera, Google is emphasizing privacy protections, including a tamper-resistant recording light, automatic face redaction, and restrictions on real-time facial recognition and livestreaming. The company also promises not to use captured photos or videos for AI training or targeted advertising. Ars Technica reports:
Google says the frames all weigh about 41 grams, which is not terrible but is definitely near the top for glasses generally. They will, naturally, weigh much more when you account for lenses. That will also determine the final pricing. So far, we only have the starting prices for these devices, including non-prescription lenses.

The setup here is similar to the Ray-Ban Meta glasses we’ve seen for a few years. There are no screens in the lenses, but you can interact with the AI system via voice or by activating the integrated camera. The experience should be similar to using Gemini Live on your phone, but it will be a lot easier to fire up the AI. You can say “Hey Gemini” or tap a touch-sensitive area of the frame to start interacting with the robot.

Since this is the same chatbot that operates across the Google ecosystem, it has access to your data and preferences. You can ask questions and get personalized answers, have Google Maps guide you by voice, or just talk with the AI to kill time. The glasses use custom open-ear speakers to limit distractions for those around you. Google notes the directional microphones should not pick up speech from other people, either.

Adding the camera feed is where things get interesting. When the AI can see what you see, it has the potential to do more work on your behalf. Google suggests asking Gemini for recommendations when looking at a bookshelf or glancing at an event poster to have the AI add it to your calendar. The glasses will also support Gemini Guided Vision, which provides conversational audio descriptions for people who are visually impaired.
The new frames are available for preorder today starting at $395.

Nope

By RitchCraft • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

Nope, nope, nope. Don’t care what measures are in place, glassholes are not allowed. Meta and Google have proven to be evil. Their guardrails mean nothing.

Pushing the Privacy Angle?

By crunchy_one • • Score: 3 • Thread
The only way that I can imagine Alphabet pushing the privacy angle is right off the ledge.

Spy Glasses from an Advertising Company

By BrendaEM • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
Would ever would anyone trust Google?

“Promises”

By gurps_npc • • Score: 3 • Thread

“promises not to use captured photos or videos for AI training or targeted advertising”

Google’s promise is as valuable as their commitment to ‘not be evil’. On a scale of 1-10, that is a -4

Moreover, note it only promises for those two things. 10 years ago they would not have mentioned AI training cause it wasn’t a thing yet. I wonder what is not a thing yet today but will be in 10 years.

Promise not to use our video for ANYTHING, anything less is not a promise at all.

Iconic First Image of Black Hole Holds Up To Scrutiny

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation:
On April 10 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) Collaboration revealed the first picture of a black hole. The object is at the centre of a galaxy known as M87, about 55 million light-years away. The iconic ring structure instantly became one of the most recognized scientific images of the modern era. It showed a black hole “shadow” outlined by light from swirling hot gas — just as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. The result supported the long-standing idea that the centers of galaxies house supermassive black holes. However, scientists have since had some disagreements on whether the details and structure of the ring in the original publication were accurate. Our new research, published today in Nature, used new techniques to investigate the original datasets. Not only do our results validate the original work, but they also provide a fresh perspective on the ring structure. Our independent results enhance confidence in one of the most significant modern scientific results. And we bring the image of a black hole millions of light-years away back into focus.

[…] When compared directly to images from the EHT collaboration, our result is consistent in diameter and overall orientation. Naturally, there are some differences in the fine details of ring width and surface brightness along the circumference, but the overall structure matches. This provides a fresh perspective on the iconic black hole ring while also resolving previous discrepancies. To prove this success didn’t depend solely on advanced machine learning, we also developed a complementary imaging method based on traditional statistical techniques. This entirely different method also validated our structure using the new closure invariant data we produced. Overall, our work delivers a strong independent validation of the supermassive black hole structure at the centre of galaxy M87. And it could do more in the future. Our technique could also be useful in other situations where data from multiple sensors are combined to map unknown structures — such as medical imaging or mapping earthquakes.

Critical Apache HTTP/2 Flaw Could Let Unauthenticated Attackers Execute Code Remotely

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
A critical flaw in Apache HTTP Server’s HTTP/2 module could allow unauthenticated attackers to remotely execute code and potentially take control of affected server processes. Tracked as CVE-2026-119618, the vulnerability affects Apache HTTP Server 2.4.55 through 2.4.70 when HTTP/2 is enabled and is fixed in version 2.4.71. The Hacker News reports:
The vendor’s assessment, published yesterday, also says “public research has demonstrated a reliable exploit” against a server in its default configuration with mod_http2 enabled. It does not name or link that research. Security company Wiz said later that day that no exploit was available and that no exploitation in the wild had been reported.

HTTP/2 runs only where the Protocols directive turns it on, as the module documentation explains. The directive uses h2 for HTTP/2 over TLS and h2c for HTTP/2 over plain TCP. It can be set for the whole server or for a single virtual host, so admins should check the server-wide setting and every virtual host.

Standalone builds of the module, released on GitHub as mod_h2, are affected from version 2.0.8 through 2.0.42. Admins who run the Apache HTTP Server project’s own releases should move to version 2.4.71, the fixed release named in its security advisory. That release also fixes a crash in mod_md, rated important, and a one-byte overwrite of stack memory in mod_vhost_alias, rated low.

Jensen Huang Resigns As Nvidia CEO

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Jensen Huang has stepped down as CEO of Nvidia after 33 years leading the company, with CFO Colette Kress taking over as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent replacement.

“The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company’s operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption,” said board chair Harvey Jones in a release announcing the news.

The abrupt departure follows revelations about Huang’s affairs, including one with a woman U.S. intelligence reportedly believes was a Chinese spy. CNBC reports:
Huang, 63, apologized on Sunday for being “unfaithful to my wife,” though he provided no details about the affair with businesswoman Alice Huang, who has worked for a Chinese company and Nvidia customer called Megaspeed. Late Wednesday, The New York Times reported that the Nvidia CEO also had a separate affair, this one with Kimberly Powell, vice president of health care at the chipmaker. Later that afternoon The Times and other outlets reported that Nvidia’s board met to discuss the company’s future.

Jensen Huang denied allegations that he had compromised national security or Nvidia secrets after reports of the Alice Huang affair. The news sparked concerns that Nvidia knew companies based in Singapore and Malaysia had been evading U.S. export controls in accessing its technology. The board said on Tuesday that it had hired Wachtell Lipton to investigate the intelligence allegations.

Game over

By CommunityMember • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
He might (given the boards historical deference to him) survived the honey trap (it is an age old espionage technique), but not the revelation that he was shagging a direct report which violated the companies policies. It was game over. The only remaining issue was how his lawyers and the boards lawyers would negotiate the terms of the exit.

Re:Pyzondar

By OrangeTide • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

He gets to keep his $150B, or at least half of it. I’m sure he is allowed to do as he pleases now that he doesn’t have a company to manage. I found him to be a “hands on” manager when I worked there, but I didn’t realize he was far more hands on with some of his staff. Irritating that I had to do training sessions on export controls and sexual harassment every year when he had been violating company policy, ethics, and potentially the law all this time.

No shortage of RAM for him…

By Flownez • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread
I’ll show myself out.

Re:Pyzondar

By rsilvergun • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread
We do not spill the blood of Kings

Re:Game over

By CubicleZombie • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

But for some run of the mill consensual affairs it all seems weirdly puritanical and unnecessary to me.

It’s not a moral question, it’s liability. Shagging an underling can be interpreted as sexual harassment and end in a very expensive lawsuit. Very poor judgement.

Tim Peters, Python User #2 and Prolific Contributor, Dies At 74

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Tim Peters, one of Python’s earliest and most influential contributors, died on July 15 at age 74. Known as Python’s second real user, Peters created the Zen of Python and Timsort sorting algorithm while contributing to numerous core components. He also served as a Python Software Foundation director from 2001 to 2014. Adafruit remembers Peters in a blog post:
He’s best known for the Zen of Python, PEP 20, still printed by typing import this. In 2002, he gave Python Timsort, the sorting algorithm he designed for lists, later adopted by Java and Android. He also polished the cyclic garbage collector and the pymalloc allocator, worked on the dict implementation, the float object, the math module and Karatsuba multiplication in longobject, and wrote the first version of doctest, plus difflib, pickletools and tabnanny.

He was a director of the Python Software Foundation from 2001 to 2014. Before Python, he wrote compilers at Cray Research and speech-to-text software at Dragon Systems. The thread is full of recollections from core developers about his patient, detailed answers on the mailing lists, signed with his trademark .
Python creator Guido van Rossum also paid tribute to Peters in a post on discuss.python.org, writing: “It’s hard to overestimate Tim’s influence on Python. He’s probably best known for writing the Zen of Python (PEP 20), but to me he was a mentor and language co-designer long before that…”

Further discussions can be found on Hacker News and Reddit.

I see that Slashdot

By rossdee • • Score: 3 • Thread

Still has up to date news…

Imported in 1952

By Viol8 • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Yielded in 2026. RIP.

Re:I see that Slashdot

By greytree • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread
He had to be deprecated for 3 months before he could be officially removed.

His remains …

By PPH • • Score: 3 • Thread

… will be cremated. And his ashes distributed throughout all the unused whitespace.

Power Grids On 5 Continents Pulse Every 60s. Scientists Think They Know Why

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
“ScienceAlert is reporting that researchers may have finally determined why, for many years, power grids around the world have been pulsing every 60 seconds,” writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. The likely culprit? Uninterruptible power supplies running routine battery checks. From the report:
Every minute, some uninterruptible power supplies perform routine battery checks, creating small but measurable surges in electricity demand. And it’s like clockwork. “Even benign control routines can become systemically relevant when many devices act coherently,” writes a team led by physicist Dirk Witthaut of the University of Cologne, Germany, in a paper published in Nature Energy. “Unintended synchronization can generate recurrent and potentially amplified oscillatory behavior in large-scale cyber-physical energy systems.”

To figure it out, Witthaut and his colleagues analyzed high-resolution electricity measurements from buildings at the Forschungszentrum Julich research campus in Germany. [… they found that] the 60-second pattern appeared in four buildings, all of which contained uninterruptible power supplies. None of the buildings they measured without these systems showed the same pattern. Following the electrical signals more closely, the researchers detected tiny bursts of current from the batteries at precisely one-minute intervals. They were able to trace the resulting fluctuations through one building’s electrical system, all the way to the connection with the public high-voltage grid.

The manufacturer subsequently confirmed the culprit’s identity — routine battery self-tests, conducted automatically by the systems’ management software. But why would equipment in different buildings, let alone different countries, be doing this at the same time? The answer appears to lie in the clocks. Digital devices can synchronize their internal clocks using external time signals, meaning that independently operating systems can end up performing their scheduled tasks together. Individually, these small checks are insignificant. But when enough devices act in synchrony, their combined electricity demand can produce a measurable effect across an entire power grid.

Re:Smdh

By fahrbot-bot • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

The straightforward solution is for the UPS manufacturers to jitter the test time and it becomes a total non-issue.

From TFA:

Fortunately, the solution may be relatively straightforward, at least for big batteries and backup systems. Rather than having thousands of devices perform the same task at the same moment, manufacturers could introduce small variations into their software schedules, preventing the minutely pile-up.

Indeed, they have already contacted the manufacturer of one of the systems they identified, and the company issued a software update that relaxed the strict periodicity of its system checks.

Coherence

By pz • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

When I was working for a startup in the early 2000s, we had our own servers. We were growing, so were adding servers at a pretty good clip. After one particular expansion, all of a sudden, Saturday night at 3 am, we blew breaker. No one had a good explanation, but the sysadmins were not happy about needing to go to the office in the middle of the night to fix things up.

A week later, the same thing happened. I suggested that it was the RAID check kickoff that might be doing it. And, indeed, it was. A couple of dozen servers all seeking their drives at once was too much for the circuits they were on. Staggering the startup time fixed it.

Coherence can be good, like when you’re rowing crew, or bad, like when you have dozens of drives all drawing max power. Or, from the summary, gazoober UPS systems doing a battery check.

Blast from the past

By dsgrntlxmply • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
In the 70s I wrote embedded asm code for networked terminals. There were around 400 terminals. They checked with a central system every night at midnight for software updates, and at some other interval for clock sync. Unfortunately, there was not much relative drift in the terminal clocks, so the central system began having overload failures at midnight. We ended up putting a request time spreading factor into the terminal’s update request code.

Re: Coherence

By topham • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Maximum amperage draw for 1/10th of a second is not usually taken into account, breakers don’t usually blow that fast because of a current spike. (Those numbers are usually not on the specification sheet either.)

The maximum load is calculated over a period of time, not a very short period of time. It is in this fuzzy gap that issues like this arrive.

Lessons from the physical world - 1831 bridge fail

By mccalli • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
This is eerily similar to the marching soldiers’ bridge collapse - Broughton Bridge in 1831, often misattributed to Napoleon but happened after his reign.

Lessons weren’t learned 180 years later either, for the Milllennium Suspension Bridge, which I happened to work next to at the time and watched the construction and failure unfold. People tend to walk in sync. When things happen in sync, a resonant pattern emerges. It’s true for people crossing bridges. It’s true for people synchronising machines to exact clocks and nice rounded-off times as well.

Sunken SS United States Set To Become World’s Largest Artificial Reef

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PBS:
The historic ocean liner SS United States will be intentionally sunk Wednesday off the coast of the Florida panhandle. Live coverage of the sinking of the SS United States is expected to start at 1 p.m. EST, with the sinking expected at 2 p.m. EST. Watch live in the video player above. In its heyday, the SS United States crushed the trans-Atlantic speed record, which it still holds. The luxury ocean liner took only three days to cross from New York to Europe on its maiden voyage in 1952. Carrying presidents and Hollywood stars, the nearly 1,000-foot vessel was a technical marvel of its time. However, the rise of air travel and high operating costs sunk its economic viability, and the ship was pulled from service in 1969. The ocean liner sat at Philadelphia’s Pier 82 for nearly 30 years.

After a contentious back and forth with a pier landlord over rent and docking fees, Okaloosa County in Florida eventually stepped in to purchase the ship and bring it to the Gulf of Mexico to become the world’s largest artificial reef. The multi-million dollar project is also aimed at creating an economic development opportunity as a major diving attraction. “It was our goal to make sure that she wasn’t lost forever,” said David Lawrence, a member of the board for the SS United States Conservancy, the group that sold the vessel to the Florida county.

Like the ship’s unconventional life, it will also have an unconventional sinking. Federal environmental and explosives rules prevent the county from using explosives. Instead, tanks inside the ship have been removed and large holes were cut into the decks. Once the valves are opened, water will flood the hull, sinking the ship. Resting at 180 feet below the surface of the water, the SS United States will join more than 500 artificial reefs in Okaloosa County, which the county relies on to support the underwater ecosystem.

Re: Capsized?

By drnb • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

It was my understanding that the main economic reason to pay for the sinking was to attract divers. Not as many will be interested in a ship upside down or on its side.

Speaking as a diver, no. A wreck on its side is more interesting. Something is going to be buried in the sand. If upright that’s propellers and rudders. If on its side what gets buried is pretty much a mirror image of what is facing upwards. So you get a complete viewing on its side.

Re:Capsized?

By CaptQuark • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Looks like the sinking did not go as planned, and the ship will settle on its side. Probably would have been easier to control if they would have been allowed to use explosives.

Not really. What you saw was the ship taking on water and listing to the side. That has very little influence on how the ship will sink and settle to the bottom.

If you want to see an example of how thinks sink, drop a quarter into a glass bowl and watch it tumble to the bottom. It slides sideways, sometimes tumbles, and sometimes travels sideways a fair distance from where you dropped it into the water.

The main factors that determine how the ship settles on the bottom are the keel shape and the flatness of the bottom. Most of the wrecks sunk in that area are purposely put in vast sandy “deserts” where there are no other rocks or items to attract coral or fish, hence the advantage of putting artificial structures to create a place for fish to congregate and predators to feed.

I’ve made dives on the Duane/Bibb and Eagle in Florida’s Keys and the fish population is wondrous to see. You can see some pictures and descriptions of the sunken ships in the keys here on Quartz and other sites.

Re:Capsized?

By kriston • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

The insulation was removed decades ago. It’s an empty hulk that had been scraped down to the steel.

Um, Gulf of what PBS?

By fahrbot-bot • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

Okaloosa County in Florida eventually stepped in to purchase the ship and bring it to the Gulf of Mexico …

Good for you, now let’s re-check your federal funding and access to the White House Press Pool … /s

The end of a long, and for me, sad vigil…

By golem100 • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

I was five when my family travelled on the SS United States from New York to Germany.
I have a whole variety of “Flash Memories”—little blinks of the past: putting on the life vest with my father during the lifeboat drill; watching a Disney film with him in the theater, “Tiko and the Shark”(…it took me years of searching with various phrases to find this movie—I started to look for it when I turned 36, age my Father died); my mother buying Hershey’s chocolate bars at the gift shop, breaking them up by pounding on them and stirring them into warm milk, because I wanted chocolate milk and they did not have any onboard!

My Father died two years later.

For 30 years I watched her age and rust as I drove past her on I-95 heading into Philly.

I am an American citizen who had his 1st view of the Statue of Liberty from the deck of a North Atlantic ocean liner.

I visited her once at the pier. It was in mid January, bitter cold, icy. The Security guard waved me past when he saw my SLR with its 420mm lens. I have an A3 print of one of my exposures on my office wall. The paint curling off of the rusting metal. I remember my Father and I think of the lives: mine, my daughter, my brother, he did not get to see…

United Airlines Bans AI Agents From Booking Flights On Behalf of Travelers

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
United Airlines is banning unauthorized third-party AI agents from booking flights, checking in passengers or making account changes on travelers’ behalf. CBS News reports:
To make an airline booking, an AI agent requires access to a customer’s personal information, including credentials like payment information. United has a problem with that, saying that “sharing account credentials with personal, third-party, AI assistants can expose sensitive information, and actions taken by these tools may result in unintended purchases, account changes, or use of MileagePlus miles.”

The carrier also said that using an AI agent to, for example, check in for a flight could violate federal regulations, including rules requiring travelers to verify in person that their luggage does not contain banned substances. “As a result, United is taking steps to restrict access — directly within our digital platforms and indirectly via travel agencies and aggregators — to prohibit use by unauthorized, third-party personal AI agents or assistants,” said the airline, which is updating its booking and ticketing policies to reflect the new rule.
“United is saying they don’t want to add yet another, and potentially even more powerful, intermediary than they already face in terms of Google search, price-comparison metasearch sites and online travel agencies,” said Henry Harteveldt, an aviation analyst at Atmosphere Research Group. “Flight searches cost airlines money, and undoubtedly United wants to avoid the expense associated with the surge of AI bot flight searches.”

Horseshit.

By Gravis Zero • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

The reason they are doing this is because AI cuts through all their bullshit that is designed to fool humans. Naturally, they have no problem with you using their AI which undoubtedly is instructed to lead people to accept worse options.

AI is stupid but United Airlines is a bunch of hypocrites that is bursting at the seams with malice.

Using AI agents should be an opt-in, not forced

By drnb • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

that is precisely an industry that is ripe for automation with AI.

On the search side, yes. With respect to automatically filling in the fields for booking the flight, OK if you opt-in and are responsible for errors. However having an AI make the final decision and payment is something new and different. That’s where the airline may have the right to say no, we do not opt-in for agent based booking and purchase, we require a human to review the transaction and approve it.

Re:AI will decide winners, this is a dumb move

By karmawarrior • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

What utter bollocks. This is the type of industry that AI has no role in whatsoever. Why the fuck would you put something designed to emulate a “human” in instead of a conventional, easy to understand, algorithm that just juggles prices and flight times?

You slop-gobblers are so obsessed with your complement-toy that you’ve forgotten traditional processing is not merely more efficient and faster, but actually more accurate, when you have a straightforward logical query to make.

Idiots

By gurps_npc • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

How stupid do you have to be to give financial permissions to devices known to hallucinate.

Congratulations you have bought $30,000 worth of shares in the Brooklyn Bridge.

Make booking easier then

By DrXym • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
I don’t fly much with US carriers but I fly a lot with Ryanair and the booking / checkin process is an obstacle course of dark patterns. Patterns that hide the cheapest option and use scary warnings and confusing layouts to upsell to things people may not want or need. It’s intentionally not simple, it’s excruciating.

So I’d certainly be interested in using an AI driven browser like Perplexity to wade through this garbage, to find the cheapest tickets for my criteria and get me to the booking screen. I would not trust it with my personal details or complete the final purchase but if it saved me time to finding a flight and getting me to that final screen then I’d be all for it.

So here’s a whacky idea for airlines. If the thought that people might use an AI to find best value flights for their needs, then bring it in-house. Allow people to set up an account, and choose to see a streamlined search and ticket purchasing flow. A flow that truthfully finds the best flights that match their criteria and lets them quickly book with their choices prefilled. They can still edit them at the end, e.g. to add bags or whatnot. But knows, perhaps if booking was not an ordeal people might actually like using that airline especially if there is a choice to use another.

Jensen Huang Said to Have Had Relationship With Nvidia Executive Who Reports to Him

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is facing scrutiny over an affair with an alleged Chinese spy. Now, The New York Times reports that Mr. Huang also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company’s vice president of health care and a direct report, raising questions about conflicts of interest and compliance with the company’s policies governing personal relationships. From the report:
The relationship, which has not been previously reported, was with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care, said the people, who spoke under the condition of anonymity to describe sensitive information. Under Nvidia’s code of conduct, employees are told to “avoid situations where our actions create conflict” including “personal relationships,” and the company states that it “promptly investigates reports of misconduct.” Many corporations have policies against managers having relationships with subordinates.

Mr. Huang, 63, and Ms. Powell, 48, were captured on video being affectionate at a San Jose, Calif., hotel during a Nvidia conference in March, according to two of the people who worked at the company. The New York Times has not seen the video. Both Mr. Huang and Ms. Powell are married to other people. […] One bystander captured the interaction on their phone, three people briefed on the incident said. Mr. Huang’s security witnessed the bystander with their phone and sequestered them, the people said. They made the person an offer to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Further reading: Nvidia and Jensen Huang Face Shareholder Lawsuit Alleging Investors Were Misled About Spy Affair

If true....

By CommunityMember • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
If the report is true (and it is just a report, but the NYTimes says it was corroborated by five people) that usually means that the executive will soon be “spending more time with their family”.

Re:If true....

By russotto • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Huang’s not a peon who can be fired by HR; he can only be fired by the board, and only in accordance with his contract, which is no doubt quite favorable to him.

Executives sleeping with Chinese spies is news. Them sleeping with the help is pretty much Tuesday.

Re:If true....

By SoftwareArtist • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

This is the most damning part:

Mr. Huang’s security witnessed the bystander with their phone and sequestered them, the people said. They made the person an offer to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

It proves the company knew about it and tried to cover it up. This isn’t just a story about two people having an affair. A publicly traded company tried to deceive the public (meaning investors) about something that was clearly material to their stock price. Expect the lawsuits to start within days.

Re:Raises questions for sure

By MachineShedFred • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

The simpler explanation along the same lines: there was an active investigation going on at the United States Department of Commerce into this, and that investigation was yanked over to DoJ where nothing happened.

Who’s to say that someone at Commerce had enough of that shit, and after the election results saw who is going to be holding committee gavels in January and got a big case of the fuck-its and leaked investigation details, including memos from Marco Rubio about it, to the New York Times?

That’s “why now” and it’s far more believable than some other “deep state” horseshit. A concerned citizen, being fed up with shit being swept under the rug about actual lawbreaking, deciding to overturn the game board. Not like it’s the first time.

Re:If true....

By thegarbz • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Executives sleeping with Chinese spies is news. Them sleeping with the help is pretty much Tuesday.

Yes and on Wednesday most Executives sleeping with the help get fired by the board. Intel, bp, Nestle, McDonalds, and NBC just to name the first few to show up in a google search have all lost CEOs this past decade alone due to relationships with subordinates. Most CEO contracts offer precisely zero defence against conflict of interest violations.

Most companies have insanely strict rules about this and hold top management to them far more critically than lower level employees as the impact of a potential conflict of interest and the legal ramifications get worse the higher up the chain you get. The Chinese spy on the other hand is unfortunate but defensible given that it wasn’t an internal undisclosed company relationship and very much a case of being professionally played by an external nation state actor.

Nvidia and Jensen Huang Face Shareholder Lawsuit Alleging Investors Were Misled About Spy Affair

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Charlotte Web shares a report from the Associated Press:
A shareholder has sued Nvidia and its CEO, Jensen Huang, accusing them of deceiving investors in their responses to media reports about Huang’s affair with a purported Chinese spy that threatens national security. […] The news reports said that the Commerce Department was investigating Alice Huang’s company, Singapore-based Megaspeed, on suspicions that it was helping to sidestep U.S. export restrictions blocking Nvidia chips from being sold to China. But Nvidia said then that its compliance team checked and determined that Megaspeed wasn’t doing anything illegal.

But, according to the complaint, the statements were misleading because they were made when Jensen Huang was having an affair with Alice Huang, who is “suspected of seeking to help smuggle Nvidia products into China.” It accuses Nvidia and Huang of failing to disclose the affair and issuing false statements about Nvidia’s relationship with Megaspeed, which posed a “material risk” to Nvidia’s reputation and business prospects.

[…] “As a result of Defendants’ wrongful acts and omissions, and the precipitous decline in the market value of the Company’s securities, Plaintiff and other Class members have suffered significant losses and damages,” the complaint said. Had investors known the truth, they wouldn’t have purchased Nvidia’s shares “at the artificially inflated prices that they did, or at all,” the complaint said.
“Fun fact: Nvidia donated $25 million to Trump’s White House ballroom fund,” notes Slashdot reader Charlotte Web.

UPDATE: The New York Times reports that Huang also also had an extramarital relationship with Kimberly Powell, the company’s vice president of health care and a direct report.

But, the Video Cards…

By groebke • • Score: 3 • Thread

Here is to seeing pricing and scarcity both dropping…

LOL, I know, I made myself laugh.

Investors: We love this manipulative, lying shit!

By locater16 • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread
*Manipulative lying shit does something bad for the investors. Investors “wait, not like that!”

New York Forces T-Mobile to End Data Caps On Low-Income Plans

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
New York has forced T-Mobile to remove a 50GB monthly data cap from its $15 low-income broadband plan after regulators found customers who exceeded the limit had their speeds cut by more than 97%, to just 650 Kbps. “Additionally, the [Office of the Attorney General (OAG)] found T-Mobile restricted [New York’s Affordable Broadband Act (ABA)] plans to areas with 5G coverage, despite offering standard-rate 25 Mbps plans in 4G areas, and intentionally coded its website to hide affordable plans from search engines,” reports RochestFirst. From the report:
Under the terms of the settlement, T-Mobile must:

- Eliminate data caps on its ABA plans and deliver guaranteed 25 Mbps download speeds.
- Expand ABA plan availability to all geographic areas where it offers fixed-wireless home internet service.
- Make its ABA webpage indexed and easily discoverable via standard web searches.

Seems like a good way to…

By Crudely_Indecent • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

cause the carrier to raise their prices to cover the cost of unlimited high speed data for budget users.

Re:Seems like a good way to…

By Rujiel • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
Holy illusion of scarcity, batman!

Re:Seems like a good way to…

By bill_mcgonigle • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

They could have set the QoS tag to the lowest level for capped welfare accounts but it sounds like they just wanted to be dicks about it.

Had they behaved decently it’s unlikely NY would have taken notice. Maybe other providers will take notice?

I dunno, patronize a better company if you can find one. Higher prices will likely nudge customers to switch even if they don’t know the cause.

Data caps are the worst.

By outsider007 • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

Imagine being too poor to jerk off.

Ukraine Strikes Cause Permanent Data Loss at Russia’s Yandex Cloud

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Russia’s Yandex says 2.84% of customer data has been permanently lost following Ukrainian strikes on data centers in the country. “According to the company, recovery is impossible because of critical damage to equipment and the lack of backup copies on the platform,” reports UNITED24 Media. From the report:
Yandex clarified that customers who had previously enabled the platform’s backup tools did not experience any data loss, as their information remained fully preserved. The incident has prompted the company to revise its approach to data protection and disaster recovery, particularly the default settings for cloud infrastructure. Under the updated policy, automatic backups will be enabled by default whenever customers create new virtual machines on Yandex Cloud. Users will retain the option to disable the feature manually through the management console. In addition to changing its backup policy, Yandex Cloud announced the launch of a new availability zone, designated ru-central1-f. The new availability zone operates from a separate location, improving the resilience and reliability of the services.
The report says Ukrainian drones targeted three Yandex data centers in Russia over four days, beginning October 8 with a strike on a facility in the Ryazan region that houses two of the company’s three supercomputers. A second attack hit Yandex’s largest data center in the Kaluga region on October 9, followed by a third strike on October 11 targeting a facility in the Vladimir region that houses the company’s remaining supercomputer.

Not terrible, which is too bad

By abulafia • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
I expected this to be worse.

DR scenarios that we rehearse do not (yet?) include drone attacks; at a bare minimum we’d need to physically relocate backup machines, which would also require adding rather large pipes we could dedicate to backup traffic. After that we’d probably need think about redundancy - drones can attack multiple sites at once. And after that, we’d need to think about multiregion setups for resiliency against flying bombs, not just overworked engineers.

That all starts getting expensive very quickly; I doubt Yandex did any of that. So maybe they just got lucky, or maybe they were clever, hard to tell.

Too bad it weren’t worse. But drones are cheap and Ukraine is very competent and getting more so, so there’s hope for a round II.

Re: Not terrible, which is too bad

By newcastlejon • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
There are only two ways that Putin will leave The Kremlin: in a coffin or a body bag. Either way it will be feet first.

In god we trust, backups we check

By Wolfling1 • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
No backups. That’s the second oldest IT mistake in the book.

Send them offsite daily. Not just to the building next door… outside the nuclear blast radius.

Check them weekly. Even better… restore them onto the DR infrastructure as soon as they’ve been taken.

I mean… really? Its 2026 and people are still using the ‘we had no backups’ as an excuse?

Re: Not terrible, which is too bad

By Rei • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

Map of agricultural production changes in the nuclear winter following a minor nuclear exchange, posted for no particular reason.

(For a full-scale exchange…)

Also, for no particular reason, a map of Russia’s population distribution, alongside a reminder of Russia’s nuclear missile failure rate, particularly booster failures. And that nuclear warheads have been commonly lost disturbingly often even during peacetime, with at least seven weapons from four incidents lost in flight landing in a way that left them fully intact and easily reparable, just from the US alone. And that Ukraine is rich in nuclear engineers, including still some retirees who worked in the Soviet nuclear weapons programme.

There’s also this myth that “if you just use a nuclear weapon, you automatically win the war”. Nuclear weapons are immensely effective terror weapons, but their effectiveness on the front is a lot weaker than most people think. People on frontlines tend to be in trenches, bunkers, basements, armoured vehicles, etc, and can be surprisingly close to a tactical nuclear blast while still surviving. They’re effective against hard points but struggle against a broad, diffuse front (aka, today’s front, which is a sparsely populated, deep, amorphous zone, thanks to drones). Amortizing Russia’s estimated budget for tactical nuclear weapons comes up with ~$15-25M per weapon (not counting the delivery system), so they’re hardly a dime a dozen either.

IF, via terror bombing or threats of terror bombing, you can convince your enemy to surrender, then congratulations, you have won (enjoy your nuclear waste heap and restive population who wants nothing more than to kill you). If they do not, however, their only goal remaining will be to focus 100% on using their extensive nuclear waste supplies rich in plutonium, their extensive long-range strike weapon supplies, and their extensive metallurgical experience, to render your major cities to ash in the same way that you did theirs.

(I also just assume herein that Ukraine doesn’t actually have a secret nuclear weapons programme already, which is certainly an assumption).

Perhaps it is the 2.84% that Putin wants to be los

By drnb • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

Russia’s Yandex says 2.84% of customer data has been permanently lost

Perhaps it is ‘conveniently’ the 2.84% that Putin wants to be lost? Sorry Mr Prosecutor, the files you have requested were destroyed in a Ukrainian air raid.

Court Says Trump Can’t Use Leaks To Justify Spying On Journalists’ LinkedIn DMs

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
The Trump administration’s fight to stop suspected leaks of top-secret military information on LinkedIn can’t sweep in “a vast number of confidential sources” of random journalists “who have no conceivable relationship” to the Department of Justice’s investigation, an appeals court ruled (PDF) Tuesday. The order came after the DOJ asked LinkedIn to turn over 18 months of communications from targeted journalists who collectively published more than 1,000 articles on many different topics over that time period. The request was not limited to journalists involved in a controversial report from a news outlet that Trump said exposed confidential military information in a foreign country. (The outlet is not being named to protect national security secrets.) Instead, the DOJ cast a wide net, requesting extensive LinkedIn data on journalists who had any possible link to the journalists around the time the report was drafted.

The majority of journalists have LinkedIn accounts and publish their contact information to encourage sources to connect on the platform, LinkedIn argued. So allowing that government overreach went beyond harming targeted journalists and threatened to undermine a critical platform where journalists frequently connect with confidential sources, judges ruled. Even more concerning, the Trump administration secured a secrecy order barring LinkedIn from telling anyone about the sweeping request for a year. That left journalists unaware for far too long that their First Amendment rights had been compromised, judges ruled.
“A request by the government to scoop up reporters’ records wholesale and ascertain the identity of their sources would tip the balance against informed discourse in a manner inimical to democratic health,” Wilkinson wrote. He criticized the lower court for approving the request simply because the records were technically feasible to collect, emphasizing that “serious security and speech claims are in tension in this case. There is space under law for both.”
While declining to quash the order entirely, Wilkinson also directed the lower court to reconsider a limited exception to the government’s secrecy order that would allow LinkedIn to notify an attorney representing the news outlet under investigation.

Bruce D. Brown, President of The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), celebrated the ruling, saying: “This ruling is a big deal and will quickly become one of the leading opinions in the area — one we will be quoting from it for a long time. The court recognized that confidential sources are the ‘lifeblood’ of investigative reporting and that dragnet demands from technology companies to reveal those sources violate the law.”

The outlet is not being named

By pla • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

The outlet is not being named to protect national security secrets

Can we please not do that shit?

It was almost certainly Dave Philipps and Matthew Cole’s 20250905 NYT article about a failed 2019 attempt by SEAL Team 6 to bug Best Leader when they unwisely chose to blow a random fishing vessel out of the water. Unsurprisingly, that wasn’t a great way to stay hidden during what was supposed to be the most covert of ops.

The calls

By ArchieBunker • • Score: 3 • Thread

are coming from inside the house. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Re:what’s to stop him?

By Geoffrey.landis • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Probably nothing, the same thing that stopped Obama from secretly seizing two months’ worth of telephone records covering 20 phones lines at the Associated Press.

Slight difference here, what the Obama administration subpoenaed was call records: what number called, and how long the call lasted, which does not include the content of the conversation . What is to be seized here was the actual messages. It was widely criticized at the time.

— also, 18 months is a much larger window to search than two months. It’s hard to see that asking for 18 months worth of records is a search for one identified leak.

Re:what’s to stop him?

By atrimtab • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

if he orders it, someone will do it

Well, he might be immune… depending on what the order is… but anyone who follows illegal orders is not!

Hegseth appears to be about to learn all about this…

Why not just use the NSA backdoor :o

By Mirnotoriety • • Score: 3 • Thread
The secret of room 641A