Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App
  2. Xbox Game Exclusivity Will Be Decided on a ‘Case-by-Case’ Basis, Microsoft Says
  3. Apple Announces macOS 27 ‘Golden Gate’, Drops Support For Intel Macs
  4. Apple Announces Siri AI, Next Generation of Apple Intelligence
  5. WhatsApp Catches Spyware Firm NSO Defying No-Hacking Court Order
  6. Firefox Merges Support For Vulkan Video Decoding
  7. Italy’s Bending Spoons, Owner of AOL and Vimeo, Files For Nasdaq IPO
  8. Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain’s ‘Core Algorithm’
  9. Ruby Fights Supply-Chain Attacks With Filter Offering ‘Cooldown’ Before Installing New Packages
  10. A San Francisco Burglar Escaped in a Robotaxi - and Police Still Can’t Find Him
  11. Texas Grid Flags Risks As Data Centers, Crypto Sites Fail Voltage Tests
  12. Police Sued After Imprisoning Innocent Man Placed Near Violent Crime By Flock License Plate Reader
  13. Prada Unveils ‘Liquid Cooling’ Inner-Layer Garment for NASA’s Moon Astronauts with Knitted-In Ventilation Tubes
  14. Black Market Tinkerers on Facebook Marketplace Offer to Hide ‘Recording Lights’ on Meta Smartglasses
  15. New Fortune 500 Rankings: Texas Overtakes California, But Amazon is #1, Beating Walmart

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.

Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Last Thursday, Wired reported that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased facial recognition system called NameTag into software installed on millions of phones. In a follow-up report, Wired says the tech giant has now removed the face-recognition-related code, while saying “no final decision” has been made about whether the feature will launch. From the report:
On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user’s device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing.

NameTag first surfaced in February, when The New York Times, citing internal Meta documents, reported that the company was developing face recognition for its smart glasses and weighing a launch as soon as this year. One memo reportedly described releasing it during a “dynamic political environment,” when privacy and civil liberties advocates would be distracted. Last week, WIRED reported that much of NameTag’s machinery was already built into the Meta AI app, downloaded by millions of users, as early as January, even as Meta publicly said it had made no final decision about face recognition. After WIRED’s report, Stone dismissed the findings, writing that the company couldn’t answer questions about how the system would work because “the feature does not exist.” Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, called the reporting “incredibly misleading” and “absolutely dishonest.”

[…] The newly released version of Meta AI removes nearly all traces of the feature Meta said did not yet exist. Gone is the face-recognition software itself, along with the code that ran the NameTag recognition process and the “Person recognized” alert the app would have shown if someone were identified. The update also strips out a folder where the app would have stored the cropped images and biometric signatures of faces it captured but could not identify. […] A few fragments of the NameTag system remain in the version of latest Meta AI, including an internal debug menu label and a dormant link meant to open a recognized person’s profile. The leftover code points to parts of the system that are no longer there.

Xbox Game Exclusivity Will Be Decided on a ‘Case-by-Case’ Basis, Microsoft Says

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Microsoft executive Matt Booty says future Xbox exclusivity will be decided “case-by-case,” with Gears of War: E-Day and Clockwork Revolution remaining Xbox console exclusives while major multiplayer, live-service, and previously promised PlayStation releases stay multiplatform. But IGN’s Tom Phillips says Microsoft’s announcement still leaves numerous questions unanswered, like “why just Gears and Clockwork Revolution?” and “how will this policy be enforced in future?” From the report:
Last night’s Xbox Showcase featured the return of games specifically earmarked as exclusives for Xbox consoles (though, of course, they’ll still also be coming to PC). But why just Gears and Clockwork Revolution? And how will this policy be enforced in future? Microsoft’s announcement left numerous questions unanswered. “We want a reason for people to get on board with Xbox, we want them to have a reason to buy an Xbox, we want them to have a reason to be an Xbox fan,” Booty said. “At the same time, we want to reward all our players that have been with us for a long time — we know that exclusives are important, and that’s why we’ve got Gears coming in 2026 and Clockwork [Revolution] coming in 2027.”

“We also want to be clear that our big multiplayer games and live-service games are going to continue to be multiplatform,” he continued. “If we’ve promised something to players already, we’re going to honor that promise. And then — I think Asha said it — we’re going to make the right decision and not the fast decision. “We’re going to keep thinking about this going forward,” Booty continued, “and, I think you guys know already, our principle is when we announce the date, we announce the platforms. So, it’s going to be case-by-case, but we’re going to be clear, that when it’s got a date, it’s got a platform and you’ll know what the choice is going to be.”

Beyond those games already confirmed for PlayStation (such as the upcoming Halo: Campaign Evolved, and the PS5 version of Forza Horizon 6 due later this year), last night saw Microsoft make the call that other upcoming titles would still be coming to PS5 as well. While it had been assumed that State of Decay 3 would get a PS5 version, yesterday saw it made official. Hellblade threequel Senua was unveiled, and is getting a PS5 version. And, unsurprisingly, Spyro: A Realm Beyond is coming to Xbox, PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2.

A slow death? Xbox soon to joining the Zune?

By oldgraybeard • Score: 3 Thread
Xbox 3rd qtr 2026 revenue down 5%

Apple Announces macOS 27 ‘Golden Gate’, Drops Support For Intel Macs

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from AppleInsider:
Apple has unveiled its next Mac operating system, macOS Golden Gate, with Apple promising better performance, the improved Siri, and more. […] On the surface, macOS Golden Gate is not as significant an upgrade as macOS Big Sur, or even macOS Tahoe with its Liquid Glass redesign. But under the surface, it is much more significant than it seems. Apple has chosen this release to draw a line in the sand. For the first time, the new macOS Golden Gate will not support Macs that have Intel processors. […] Nonetheless, as of when this is released to the public in September or October, no Intel Macs will ever be supported again.
One of the most notable design tweaks in this new release is a refinement of macOS toolbars and sidebars: toolbars are now more distinct, sidebars can stretch all the way to the window edge, and sidebar icons have regained color. Apple is also tightening window corner radii to address complaints about resizing behavior.

Apple Announces Siri AI, Next Generation of Apple Intelligence

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
At WWDC 2026, Apple announced a new “Siri AI,” describing it as a more conversational, personalized, and systemwide assistant that can understand on-screen context and interact with apps while relying on on-device processing or Private Cloud Compute. The relaunch comes two years after Apple’s original Apple Intelligence promises stumbled and "never fully materialized,” reports The Verge. MacRumors reports:
Siri is now embedded directly in the Dynamic Island, accessible by swiping down from it, pressing the side button, or saying “Hey Siri.” A revamped voice engine makes the assistant sound more expressive, with micro-adjustable voice settings available during initial setup.

During Apple’s keynote demo, presenters showed Siri handling chained, multi-step requests with apparent ease. In one sequence, a presenter asked about a Suki Waterhouse concert, was told tickets require a lottery entry, and asked Siri to set a reminder when the lottery opens, which it did. In another, the assistant identified a photo’s landmark, pulled up navigation to that location, and surfaced photos from a recent family trip, adding a specific image to a shared family album on request.

Another demo showcased Siri’s ability to synthesize information across apps. A presenter asked about a dessert he had heard about at an event, and Siri located the relevant details from his Messages history. It then compiled the information into a watch-party menu, drafted a message to his contacts with the menu included, and presented send and edit options. In a further demo, a presenter asked about something his son had shared in a message and followed it up by asking Siri to compose an email on the subject.

A new dedicated Siri app lets users scroll back through prior conversations and kick off new ones, with conversation history synced via iCloud so sessions carry seamlessly between devices. The app is also coming to watchOS. On the Mac, Siri is now also integrated into Spotlight and available via right-click context menus on any file or window. On visionOS, Siri AI gains a 3D visualization that users can place anywhere in their space.

We’ve seen “demos” before

By misnohmer • Score: 3 Thread
Is this general availability, or just demos? There were demos last time Apple Intelligence was announced too.

They were talking about this on the business news

By oldgraybeard • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
The Apple analyst was charged up because it would drive the product replacement cycle(Apple has many older devices still in use, like my old se). And drive service revenue by having Siri choose sponsored products where it can and Apple gets a cut.
So Apple AI is just like everyone else’s AI. Long on Artificial, No Intelligence, just Automation, an ad/paid sponsors platform used as a sales and marketing tool to drive the Apple revenue streams.
But with assurances, nothing will leave the Apple walled garden and only those paying for access to the Apple customers will be allowed in.

WhatsApp Catches Spyware Firm NSO Defying No-Hacking Court Order

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek:
Meta-owned communications app WhatsApp says it recently detected and disrupted a spear-phishing attempt linked to spyware company NSO Group. The attack is allegedly in defiance of a court order that bars the spyware maker from targeting WhatsApp. WhatsApp filed a lawsuit against NSO in 2019, after it came to light that a zero-day vulnerability had been exploited to deliver spyware to users. […] NSO has been seeking to overturn the order blocking it from targeting WhatsApp users, arguing that the company will “suffer irreparable harm.”

According to WhatsApp, the spyware maker has violated the permanent injunction. The messaging app reported on Monday that it had recently learned of a social engineering attack that attempted to trick users into clicking on malicious links. WhatsApp has only shared a few domains as an indicator of compromise (IoC), but says it was able to link the attack to NSO, pointing to similarities to previously reported one-click phishing campaigns tied to the spyware company. WhatsApp says it also caught the attackers creating test accounts and groups. Those accounts and groups have been disabled, but further action is also being taken.
WhatsApp says it is asking a federal court to hold NSO in contempt for allegedly violating a permanent injunction barring it from targeting WhatsApp and its users. The company also said it is making a “significant contribution” to the Spyware Accountability Initiative, a fund aimed at exposing and stopping spyware abuse.

Comical

By RitchCraft • Score: 3 Thread

A spyware company trying to stop another spyware company. It’s the modern day equivalent of Spy vs. Spy.

“the company will “suffer irreparable harm.”

By oic0 • Score: 4, Funny Thread
Are anyone’s feelings hurt if an Israeli spyware company goes under?

Bomb ‘Em

By Bahbus • Score: 4, Informative Thread

I can only hope NSO Group and every single employee gets bombed by Iran or whoever else Israel has pissed off.

Re:No jurisdiction

By jd • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Incorrect. Computer misuse within the US, regardless of where the individuals who are doing the misusing are located, is under US jurisdiction. This is long-established. Laws dealing with multi-jurisdictional issues (such as patents/copyrights, illicit interstate commerce, sex tourism, computer misuse) are old-hat.

Attacking US servers located in US territory is an attack carried out within the US, regardless of where the keyboard warrior is.

Now, if the servers attacked are in Ireland, then they’re also covered by EU jurisdiction (no matter what the US likes to think).

The law is the law, and nobody, in any nation, is immune. A fact a lot of nations like to pretend they’re somehow immune to. They aren’t and there will always be a price to pay for such cavalier attitudes.

Firefox Merges Support For Vulkan Video Decoding

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Firefox has merged initial support for Vulkan Video decoding, giving the browser a more cross-platform path for GPU-accelerated video playback beyond Linux’s long-running reliance on VA-API. Phoronix reports:
Firefox on Linux has long been focused on the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) that isn’t universally supported by Linux graphics drivers. This has left to efforts like NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver to layer VA-API atop NVIDIA NVDEC interfaces to enjoy GPU-accelerated video playback in Firefox. Smaller Arm/embedded graphics drivers also have been largely left out of the game in the VA-API space. But with Vulkan Video we are beginning to see more adoption and in a cross-platform manner.

[…] The Firefox 153 release due out in July will have Vulkan Video decoding support available. The Vulkan Video activity in Firefox Git culminated this week with the work of NVIDIA engineer Tymur Boiko and Red Hat’s Martin Stransky. Firefox 153.0 is expected for release on 21 July with this Vulkan Video support assuming no last minute issues.

It’s actually cross-platform and cross-API compat

By MIPSPro • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Vulkan is friendly to both X11 (x11vk) and Wayland (waylandvk). It works on Linux (with Mesa or proprietary drivers), Windows, and elsewhere, regardless of the underlying display protocol. Thank you, Khronos for side stepping that quagmire.

Italy’s Bending Spoons, Owner of AOL and Vimeo, Files For Nasdaq IPO

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Bending Spoons, the Italian app studio behind acquisitions like Eventbrite, Vimeo, WeTransfer, Evernote, and AOL, has filed to go public in the U.S. after growing into a subscription-heavy app conglomerate with more than 500 million monthly active users. TechCrunch reports:
In its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Bending Spoons said it ended the year with $1.31 billion in revenue and has generated $601 million in Q1, a 132% year-on-year jump. The company gets the majority of its revenue from subscriptions, which account for 84% of its business. It generated $27.4 million in profit in Q1 2026. The company raised funding at an $11 billion valuation last year, up from $2.8 billion in 2024. In April, Reuters reported that the company could seek a $20 billion valuation with the IPO.

AOL Still Exists?

By Too Late for Cool ID • Score: 3 Thread
I though I took a long time to close my AOL zombie account, and that was in the 90s.

Re:Glad they got all that stuff in one place.

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Vimeo is and was pretty interesting. They were hosting high res videos like this https://vimeo.com/18280328 before youtube

Horrible customer support

By smooth wombat • Score: 3 Thread

My father has been locked out of his email account since last month. Multiple calls to support and now a second ticket for support have gone nowhere. They’re a bunch of script kiddies repeating the same things over and over and never listening to what is being said.

The issue is on AOL’s end, but they refuse to acknowledge it, let alone do anything.

Based on this experience, no way I’d buy company stock. With that kind of bad service, people will be leaving.

So basically

By DrXym • Score: 4, Funny Thread
Bending Spoons is a farm up North where brands you haven’t heard of in a while can go to run and play.

Re:AOL Still Exists?

By fropenn • Score: 4, Funny Thread

Oh trust me it’s dead. AOL is nothing more than a pointless news aggregator.

Kettle: Pot.

Jeff Bezos Is Funding a Wild Hunt for the Brain’s ‘Core Algorithm’

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Jeff Bezos is backing Flourish, a new “neuro AI” startup with $500 million in funding and a reported $2.5 billion valuation, that aims to reinvent AI by studying the brain’s architecture and building systems that learn continuously while using far less power than today’s large language models. The company’s long-term bet is that neuroscientists and AI researchers working together can uncover the brain’s “core algorithm” and eventually create brain-inspired AI that runs on a tiny fraction of current compute. Wired reports:
Rob Williams knows how to pitch Jeff Bezos: You write a press release as if your product has already been built. Bezos reads it and gives a thumbs up or down. Williams went through this process a lot as an executive on Amazon’s “S-team,” in charge of software products such as Alexa, until his departure last fall. But the pitch he made a few weeks later — in December 2025 — was different. Now he was collaborating with Thomas Reardon, a neuroscientist and repeat startup founder, and approaching Bezos as a funder, not a boss. Here’s what Bezos, sitting on his yacht somewhere, read while Williams anxiously watched on Zoom: “Flourish is a neuro AI company that is solving the two most difficult problems facing AI today: power efficiency and continuous learning. We are building Cortex AI, the first synthetic intelligence system designed to match the computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget of the human brain.”

A month later, I’m lunching with Reardon and Williams in the Flatiron neighborhood in New York City. Reardon gets right to the point. AI has dug itself into a hole, he says. Though increasingly powerful, large language models are greedy consumers of computer power and data. Though the inspiration for LLMs was rooted in biology, current frontier models have little in common with the human brain. A person uses about 20 watts of energy to process information; a single chip in an AI training cluster uses more than 30 times that amount. The hyperscalers require thousands of chips and gigawatts of energy, enough to power small cities. And those models need to suck up virtually all of what humans have written. Each new model requires more, more, more. For all of that, the models don’t learn. Once you train them, they’re stuck. The goal, Reardon tells me, is to build “a synthetic artificial intelligence brain that runs on 50 watts or less.” It should adapt to its conditions, be as nimble as a human mind, and burn a tiny fraction of an LLM’s compute power and energy. The proof of concept is thriving inside our skulls. “There’s something fundamentally wrong with saying, “I need to basically read every book ever written 20 times over in order to learn English,’" Reardon says. “A human baby does it with a couple hundred thousand utterances.”

Reardon and Williams haven’t figured out yet how to build systems that match the magic of a human brain. What they have is a belief that an expert, well-resourced team — of AI researchers and neuroscientists working essentially side by side — can find the answer. The neuroscientists will conduct original wet lab experiments with some of the most advanced lab equipment available, to hunt for usable intel on the brain’s architecture. They plan to release the models they’re currently developing as near-term products on the path to a full reinvention of AI. The fuzziness of the proposal didn’t bother Jeff Bezos. After reading Williams’ two-pager, he chipped in $50 million. Other funding came from Lux Capital, Google Ventures, and Catalio, among others. Bezos then almost doubled his initial stake and told Reardon he’d have given more if they’d asked. Now with a war chest of $500 million and a reported valuation of $2.5 billion, Flourish just needs to invent a new way to do AI.

Re:Hmm

By nightflameauto • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Have they considered just hiring humans instead of machines?

The tech oligarch version if this will be brains in vats hooked up to electrodes performing as machines. These people don’t want full humans. They want the benefits of the human brain without having to consider ethical treatment of workers.

Brains are a lot more efficient

By mspohr • Score: 5, Informative Thread

LLMs are just big inefficient search engines. They are not intelligent. They just regurgitate random stuff they found on the Internet and format it nicely.
The human brain (or that of any animal, for that matter) is incredibly efficient, using less than 100 Watts and is a lot more capable than any LLM. The brain is actually intelligent.
So yes, LLMs are a dead end.

Re:A human Algorithm?

By LainTouko • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
You know where all that “four humours medicine” came from? Hydraulics was a very impressive technology, so people tried to explain the human body with it. Certain idiots have recently started doing the same thing with computers and the human brain.

Advice…

By johnnys • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Do a woman’s algorithm first. It’s more useful.

Male algorithm is “100 think of boobs” then “200 goto 100”

And we ALL know that goto is considered harmful!

Doing it wrong

By Frissysan • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
“And those models need to suck up virtually all of what humans have written.”
No, they dont. As a matter of fact sucking up everything they can beg borrow or steal is what causes ‘hallucinations’. They are doing it wrong. They should be using curated and task focused data and making task oriented AI. One for coding, another one for cooking, etc. Of course that is more difficult to build, so they dont bother. Just feed it more BS from reddit or wherever, that’ll fix it!

Ruby Fights Supply-Chain Attacks With Filter Offering ‘Cooldown’ Before Installing New Packages

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Most supply-chain attacks using Ruby’s package hosting site "exploit a narrow window,” according to a new blog post form Ruby core maintainer Hiroshi Shibata.

So its packaging-managing Bundler tool now offers a filter that blocks new version until it’s been public “for at least N days. Releases too new to have been scrutinized are passed over in favor of ones that have aged past the window.”
The feature was designed in the open, drawing on how other ecosystems approach the same problem. It is opt-in, and complements rather than replaces existing defenses like mandatory 2FA and trusted publishing… Cooldown is unset by default, so a project without it keeps resolving to the newest versions.... Passing 0 disables cooldown for the run…

Cooldown is most useful as one part of the wider security investment happening on rubygems.org. The registry now validates gem contents at push time and checks logins against Have I Been Pwned so that compromised passwords cannot be reused, work described in Protecting rubygems.org from the outside in. A dedicated team is running AI-assisted vulnerability scanning against the most critical gems, backed by Alpha Omega and Anthropic, and the direction of all of this is tracked on a public roadmap. Trusted publishing and mandatory 2FA already raise the bar for who can push a release in the first place.

Will encourage sleeper attacks

By xack • Score: 3 Thread
Where a malicious package waits a few days before deploying itself. An adversary can build up trust for years in some cases in order to catch a big fish.

Learn to pin your dependecies

By devslash0 • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Just pin your dependencies. To an EXACT version, with a hash. No loose versioning or version auto-updates in the pipeline. Detect outdated versions automatically but update manually, after a full review, and a full av scan of the built environment before the release. Know and control what goes into the production environment. In other words, you’re a professional - act like it.

The state of Ruby supply chain security

By sinkskinkshrieks • Score: 4, Informative Thread
They don’t even sign or verify most packages and allow code execution on installation. This “cooldown” is lipstick on a pig and why I haven’t used Ruby in 10+ years. Package curation, code signing + public key management, and no code execution on installation are table stakes for any serious platform. Ruby isn’t a serious platform.

Re:And how will that help?

By Junta • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Well, it lets some people have long cooldowns make the rest of their ecosystem suckers.

Of course, this *also* means the people with high cooldowns get to be vulnerable to security problems longer because they will be applying cooldown to security fixes…

But yes, some sort of actual curation would be the best mitigation, particularly to allow trustworthy critical security updates through quickly instead of those getting caught in the cooldown.

A San Francisco Burglar Escaped in a Robotaxi - and Police Still Can’t Find Him

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
A burglar took a self-driving Waymo taxi to rob a San Francisco yoga studio this past January, reports TechCrunch — “and police have still not caught them.”

Even the police officer assigned to the case thought it would be easier to solve, notes The San Francisco Chronicle, since Waymos are outfitted with multiple high-definition cameras and require users to make accounts with their credit card numbers:
It’s common for officers to seek video footage of a crime from any of the Waymos, Teslas and other high-tech vehicles that record their surroundings. That information can be crucial for identifying suspects or creating a reliable timeline of events. At times, police will go so far as to obtain search warrants to tow the vehicle “witnesses" to ensure they don’t lose valuable video evidence. In the Hot 8 Yoga burglary case, San Francisco police issued a search warrant that forced Waymo to turn over information on the account that ordered the ride and video footage from the white Jaguar that served as the getaway car, police records show.

Faye said that he couldn’t discuss certain details of the case, but that the Waymo user’s account information didn’t lead police to the suspect. In general, he said, it’s not unusual for a criminal to order a service with stolen information or a burner phone. The video evidence didn’t help much either, Faye said. He said that the company had not retained interior footage of the car by the time the search warrant was filed in April and that it had kept the faces seen outside the car blurred for privacy reasons… Waymo does not publicly disclose how long it retains video footage. The company blurs faces and license plates in the public-facing images it uses in a database designed for research....

Last year in Los Angeles, a person allegedly robbed a grocery store before hopping in a Waymo. Officers were able to chase down the vehicle after the suspect got inside, and the car pulled itself over after police turned on the car’s emergency lights, according to Los Angeles-area news outlets.
“Farah Issa, studio manager of Hot 8 Yoga, showed the Chronicle a copy of the surveillance video from her phone, noting how the Waymo dropped off the suspect and waited for him to finish the burglary before taking off again.”

Re:San Francisco police can’t find him

By Valgrus Thunderaxe • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
These robot taxis are the perfect weapon for Jihad. Put a bag full of C-4 in the passenger seat and instruct it to go to the nearest Israeli embassy.

Re:What is the story here?

By gijoel • Score: 4, Funny Thread
The suspect was reported to have screamed “You broke my cover” during a past lives guide meditation session, and then jumped through a glass window. He then reported boarded the robot taxi, tore out the Waymos synthetic customer relations model prototype and commandeered the taxi. The suspect is still at large, but police have asked SpaceX and Blue Origin for assistance.

AI is Stealing Jobs!

By jpatters • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Not even getaway drivers jobs are safe!

Re:Criminal = Immigrant. DEPORT: save yourselves!

By gtall • Score: 5, Informative Thread

As the link of the poster below me reports, immigrants are significantly less likely to commit crimes than the home-grown. Let’s accept that, then your blurb is clearly racist towards minorities in the U.S. According to our Geheime Staatspolitzei (FBI), https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-t…, you are talking out of your ass. I’ll let you crunch the numbers, if your racism doesn’t prevent that.

The multiracial aspect of American society is a strength, not a weakness. And who gives a flying rat’s ass over how many of each group there are. We’re all Americans. That used to be a common feeling before la Presidenta found he could inflame the Whites’ inner racism and sell them a bag of stupid ideas. Remember Nazi Germany and how well that ended.

Re: Preservation letter?

By hdyoung • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
This has nothing to do with police competence. Like every organization and company nowadays, police departments are very short of manpower. This incident involved a guy stealing an armful of hot yoga pants. No violence, low property damage and very low value stolen. In terms of priority, this would rank above robbing a vending machine but lower than literally every other crime. Dealing with this stuff take time, and each cop only has 8 hours per workday. You do the math and this kind of thing gets neglected or straight up ignored. They choose to focus on the violent crime, drug stuff, and higher dollar value things.

Texas Grid Flags Risks As Data Centers, Crypto Sites Fail Voltage Tests

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Reuters reports:
Several large data centers and crypto facilities planning to connect to the Texas power grid ahead of peak summer demand have failed key reliability tests, raising the risk of power outages just as electricity use hits its seasonal high, according to the state grid operator… Unlike traditional industrial customers, which tend to draw electricity steadily and predictably, data centers are engineered to cut their connection to the grid at the first sign of trouble to protect their equipment and keep services running. That makes them an unpredictable and potentially destabilizing force on grids already under pressure from rising demand. Four groups of unnamed large electricity users, including data centers, abruptly disconnected from the Texas grid during a test of how they would handle routine voltage disturbances, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said in a report dated May 21.

When large customers abruptly cut their power use, it can knock the grid off balance and trigger wider outages. ERCOT, which manages electricity for most of Texas, said it reviewed about 20 gigawatts of large customers seeking to connect to the system, including eight projects totaling roughly 3.9 gigawatts aiming to start up before July 1. It said it identified four groups of large power users that could each trigger more than 5,000 megawatts of demand tripping under certain fault conditions, based on simulations of transmission system disturbances. Those abrupt drops in demand were equivalent to the electricity consumption of a large city such as Boston.

Wait, what?

By davidwr • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

data centers are engineered to cut their connection to the grid at the first sign of trouble to protect their equipment and keep services running.

You are building a billion-dollar data center and you aren’t putting routine-but-poor-power-quality-tolerant power-conditioning uninterruptible power supplies between the grid and your sensitive equipment???

Besides, if you are going to build a deci-megawatt-or-bigger power consuming complex, it would help the grid out if you put some grid-scale-batteries and a large amount of always-on local power generation on-site, as some data center complexes and other heavy-industry-consumers are already doing.

It almost looks intentional

By Jeremi • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

If I was deliberately trying to cause a nation-wide backlash against data centers, I’m not sure what I’d be doing differently from what the AI companies are currently doing.

Has nobody told them that people don’t like having their lives disrupted, particularly when they don’t see any compensating benefit, or even a convincing reason for having any of it? If they were to ease off the gas pedal just a bit, they could probably do a boil-the-frog and get a larger number of smaller/less-obtrusive data centers built over a longer time period, and without the voter revolts and strict legislation that are likely to hobble them now.

Re:Wait, what?

By fuzzyfuzzyfungus • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
I suspect it’s a straightforward incentives problem. If you can get away with making it the grid’s problem there’s not much incentive to pay for more expensive facility power setups. Presumably this is why ERCOT is testing current and prospective customers and making noise about it; and why there are at least some standards for how ill-behaved a load can be while still being allowed to hook up; with some awkward interactions between very large sites that also have the ability to shut down rapidly at relatively low cost. If you are ‘mining’ crypto you presumably prefer the gear to be online because it is depreciating by the minute regardless; but the risk and inconvenience of shutting it down and booting it up again isn’t particularly dramatic compared to having to cold start an aluminum smelter or something.

Re:Wait, what?

By thegarbz • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

You are building a billion-dollar data center and you aren’t putting routine-but-poor-power-quality-tolerant power-conditioning uninterruptible power supplies between the grid and your sensitive equipment???

You misunderstood the problem. They *ARE* doing this. At the first sign of a voltage disturbance they switch from the grid to their UPS / own generators and keep running because they do care about themselves. This is the problem. During a period of grid instability having a massive load disconnect makes the instability worse. It’s literally one of the ways cascade failures on the grid can occur.

Re:Flywheel storage buffer

By Jumperalex • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Why should all the other customers have to pay for it?!?! Also that’s not how grid load balancing works.

It is a problem specific to the large user and that same large user should be held responsible for being a responsible part of the community.

Police Sued After Imprisoning Innocent Man Placed Near Violent Crime By Flock License Plate Reader

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“When Hugo Parra was arrested last year on felony charges, his pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears,” reports the Times of San Diego:
San Diego police had a description of the Alfa Romeo car he was riding in [but no license plate number] and a witness who identified him during a curbside lineup as the man who brandished a handgun in Golden Hill. They had also checked the city’s automatic license plate camera system, run by the private company Flock, and got a “hit,” substantiating the claim. The problem, says attorney Alex Coolman, was that Parra was five miles away from Golden Hill at the time of the crime, and the so-called hit from the license plate reader was captured before any police pursuit began. “This Flock hit was obviously the wrong car, as it could not have been in both places simultaneously,” said Coolman, who represents Parra and the driver, 23-year-old Ariel Beltran.

Despite the signs pointing to it being a different Alfa Romeo, police arrested Beltran and Parra… [An officer had informed dispatch that one of the men “matched the victim’s description, other than having a different-colored hooded sweatshirt.”] Parra spent nearly one month behind bars, missing Thanksgiving and other special events with his family, before the assault with a firearm and evasion charges were dropped.
Parras says he was incarcerated with actual murderers, according to the article, and Parra and Beltran are now preparing to sue the city, seeking $1.5 million each in damages for civil rights violations and negligence. Their claim notes they’d driven past several other Flock cameras which officers could’ve used to corroborate their story (not to mention location data on their cell phones).

Meanwhile, the article also notes that last month the Institute for Justice “identified at least 17 cases in the United States of officers allegedly using Automated License Plate Reader technology to keep tabs on partners, exes, and strangers who had caught their eye…”

Re:Destroy Them

By JaredOfEuropa • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Sounds to me the cameras are working just fine, but law enforcement is using them incorrectly (and there’s no recourse or oversight).
The data should have cleared him as a suspect.

Re: Destroy Them

By angryman77 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
I say they’ll only learn after they’ve been successfully sued for a few billion dollars because of lazy/negligent work. Let the lawsuits continue!

Re:Destroy Them

By jhoegl • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
You arent wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6F_0iIaXGqA

And if you want to see real incompetent use of police cameras attempting to “gather data” for “precrime”, you should watch this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD_2fVqEMk

These are high school diploma morons attempting to use technology to do their job for them. It would be ignorant to continue to allow not only this, but corporate owned cameras access to our streets and data.

SDPD: Tenaciously Stupid

By ihadafivedigituid • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
San Diego Police Department absolutely can officially believe a car, a person, the Sun, or anything else can be in two places at once.

Having made this assessment, they are blandly impervious to any evidence to the contrary. It’s like The Naked Gun but without the humor. Poorly recruited, poorly trained, and poorly led, they are to be avoided like day-old Taco Bell leftovers.

SLOPPY POLICE WORK

By redelm • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Hardly new, sloppy police work has been around for at least 800 years (Magna Carta) and will persist so long as the drive to punish outweighs the costs of error.

This being egregious, and CA, I do hope the falsely jailed wins supersized compensation to caution others with a higher than zero cost of error. A feature (not bug) of the American system (McD coffee scald).

Prada Unveils ‘Liquid Cooling’ Inner-Layer Garment for NASA’s Moon Astronauts with Knitted-In Ventilation Tubes

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Italian fashion house Prada “unveiled on Sunday the inner-layer garment set to be worn by NASA astronauts heading to the moon,” reports Reuters.

“The body-hugging suit, created in collaboration with Houston-based space infrastructure developer Axiom Space, features ventilation tubes knitted into the garment.”
Expertise for developing space exploration products “can come from lots of seemingly unrelated industries,” said Jonathan Cirtain, CEO of Axiom Space… The new product follows Prada’s splashy foray into space fashion in 2024 with the unveiling of a spacesuit that is expected to be used for NASA’s anticipated Artemis 4 moon landing in 2028…

Other fashion and apparel companies have jumped on the space bandwagon. Under Armour has partnered with spaceflight company Virgin Galactic to create space apparel, while Columbia Sportswear has worked with space exploration company Intuitive Machines on space fabric technology.
The new “Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment” was displayed on a mannequin at an event at Prada’s Manhattan store.

Not so new

By Woeful Countenance • Score: 3 Thread

The new “Liquid Cooling and Ventilation Garment”

It may be “new” in the sense that cerulean could be the hot new color, but the Apollo astronauts already had LCVG’s in the 1970s (example here).

“In an independent space suit, the heat is ultimately transferred to a thin sheet of ice (formed by a separate feed water source). Due to the extremely low pressure in space, the heated ice sublimates directly to water vapor, which is then vented away from the suit.”

Black Market Tinkerers on Facebook Marketplace Offer to Hide ‘Recording Lights’ on Meta Smartglasses

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
People are disabling the “recording light” on Meta’s Ray-Ban smartglasses — “by my count, thousands of people,” says tech journalist Joanna Stern in a new video report:
STERN: “They’re hiring people on Facebook Marketplace to drill out the light for as much as $100. According to our reporting, folks are offering this service in at least 30 states — despite Meta’s attempts to stop it… In most states, we found multiple listings. In the New York and New Jersey area alone there were 23 listings.”
Stern watched a man in New Jersey disable and then conceal the light with a drill and dental probe in a New Jersey garage (a skill he learned watching YouTube and TikTok videos). He said the same day he’d already been contacted by eight more interested customers, and Stern also found at least 10 other people willing to do the same thing, just in New Jersey. “But what we found is they’re all over the country.”

Meta sold 7 million smartglasses in 2025, but a Meta spokesperson insisted to the videomaker that a “majority” of their smartglasses owners aren’t blocking the recording light. And furthermore, they added “We aggressively target anyone advertising tampering tools, have removed thousands of violating ads and Marketplace listings for these services, and pursue legal action when appropriate.” (The reporter acknowledges “many” of the Marketplace ads disappeared after they brought them to Meta’s attention — and Meta also said they were working with other retailers and sellers to take down listings for smartglasses-tampering parts.)

The reporter also heard from one journalist who said they’d used it so they could record the activities of federal immigration agents without being targeted. “Others told me they just don’t want people asking questions when they’re recording.” (There’s video of one young man saying “It’s already difficult enough to film in public. I don’t want to have a blinking light on my face.”)

Tampering with smartglasses isn’t illegal — though it is against Meta’s Terms of Service, and could void your warranty. But a lawyer in the report says recording others without consent may be illegal, depending on a wide range of “jurisdictional nuances” like whether you live in an all-party consent state or a one-party consent state. “This seems to be our new reality,” the report concludes: “more cameras, more microphones everywhere, and less certainty about who and what is recording.” (Tech blogger John Gruber offered this assessment. “Using a Meta platform to find people to hack a Meta device so you can surreptitiously record strangers. So perfectly Meta.”)

Stern’s report points out that “People are trying to fight back. Apps have popped up that use Bluetooth to scan for nearby camera glasses.” (In the video one app-maker wonders why Meta isn’t offering the same service themselves. “There are technical solutions to these problems.”)

Ironically, when I watched the report on YouTube, it was preceded by… an ad for Meta’s Ray-Ban AI smartglasses.

Re:Easy way to go to prison

By jhoegl • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Legal to record in public in USA, dont know how draconian your government is to allow for prison on editing a device you own.

Re:Glass holes

By markdavis • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

>“I was thinking of getting a dash cam for my car. But i call these people glass holes. Would that make me a dash hole? It is not really that different, the dash cam does not notify it is recording either.”

I, indeed, would call people going around recording everyone from a face advantage “glass holes”.

No, a dashcam or fixed security camera is not at all the same. A glass hole is a person who is recording people face-to-face without the other knowing. In such a situation, you are recording a conversation/interaction and often in a place that is not fully “public”. It is a major betrayal of a social norm/social contract.

I don’t know about you, but I do expect I might be recorded outside driving a car, in a store, even a restaurant. They might be brief interactions, rarely focused directly on just me, and rarely with audio. I do not expect to be directly recorded by someone in my home, at the table in a restaurant, in a doctor’s exam room, in a bathroom, during a business meeting, etc.

In a situation where it is not socially acceptable to hold your phone up to someone in a “I am recording you” posture, it is certainly less acceptable to be doing it with a head-mounted camera/microphone… and even less so if there is zero indication it is a recording device and is actually doing so at the time.

I can list an empty root beer can for $100

By Powercntrl • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Just because there are FB marketplace listings offering to remove the flashing LED from smart glasses, that doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a huge market for such services. It reminds me of how a few years ago, a kid made a troll post on some drug forum about Jenkem, and without doing any checking whatsoever to see if there really was any legitimacy to the claims that kids were getting high on fermented human feces, several news outlets just ran with it.

Now, I’m sure there certainly are people who’ve taken a sharpie or some electrical tape to their glasses to cover up the LED, but they probably didn’t pay someone to do it for them.

Re:Easy way to go to prison

By Smidge204 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

> Legal to record in public in USA

It’s not so clear-cut. First, what you probably meant to say is “there is no expectation of privacy in public” which is absolutely not the same as “legal to record in public.”

First, obviously, you must be in a public space. The moment you enter private property - which includes all businesses and even spaces like most parking lots - you have no right to record there. If a person has “a reasonable expectation of privacy” at a location, even if it’s a public space, you generally do not have the right to record them. Many government facilities also have policies that prohibit video recording even if they are technically public spaces.

If your video recording has audio as well, then you may be subject to wiretap laws. If your state is a two party consent state, then all parties involved in the audio recording must be aware of and agree to being recorded, even in a public space, if that conversation can reasonably be assumed to be private. So if we’re in a two party consent state, and you engage me on the street and strike up a conversation with me specifically, and try to record it without my permission, congratulations you’re doing a crime… likely a felony.

If you are recording for commercial purposes, such as filing a movie or tiktok video, you may be required to have every person in that recording sign a release giving you permission to use their likeness.

And of course, nobody who plans to record video for honest and upstanding purposes should be worried about hiding the fact they are recording to begin with. The only reason to do this is to be a little shit about it.
=Smidge=

Re:Gaslighting much?

By gweihir • Score: 4, Informative Thread

This creates a covert listening device, which a crime to operate it in many places and a crime to own in some. That includes the US under 18 U.S.C. 2511. But rest easy, the maximum penalty is only 5 years in federal prison and a $250’000 fine. Nothing to worry about.

In actual reality, Meta does not want to get sued because some dumb fuck managed to get themselves imprisoned or fined, so they made it somewhat hard to make this thing illegal to use.

New Fortune 500 Rankings: Texas Overtakes California, But Amazon is #1, Beating Walmart

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot
“Texas has dethroned California as the state with the most Fortune 500 companies,” reports the Los Angeles Times:
The Fortune 500 list ranks the largest U.S. companies by revenue. This year, 57 of the top companies are headquartered in Texas, compared with California’s 56. It’s a reversal from two years ago when the Golden State had the pole position…

California’s corporate haters say they try to avoid the state’s high costs, income taxes and strict regulations, but the western state is still a top money maker. “California dominates on nearly every other measure: its Fortune 500 companies are the most profitable ($647 billion), most valuable ($20 trillion), and employ more people than any other state (2.8 million workers),” Fortune said in a news release. Indeed, despite the naysayers, Californian companies have been leading the world in developing artificial intelligence technology as well as the latest in space and defense tech. The state is home to nearly 400 “unicorns,” or billion-dollar startups — more than any other state, according to CB Insights. It also gobbled up nearly two-thirds of U.S. venture capital last year, with San Francisco Bay Area startups such as OpenAI leading the way, according to the business information platform Crunchbase.

Texas and California have been in a tug-of-war for the crown. In 2024, after a decade, California bagged the top spot with 57 companies on the list, while Texas and New York tied in second with 52 companies each… The fourth spot was tied between Illinois and Ohio, with 29 companies each.

Amazon was the top company on the list, ending Walmart’s 13-year reign at the top of the annual Fortune 500 companies list. Amazon’s 2025 revenue was $716.9 billion, compared with Walmart’s $713.2 billion. Seattle-headquartered Amazon joined Exxon Mobil, General Motors, and Walmart as the only four companies to have ever held the top position since Fortune began publishing the data in 1955.

Re:But but but…

By cpurdy • Score: 5, Funny Thread
According to Fox News, Texas students rank very highly on standardized science tests including: “Creation, how six days of work can beat your stupid evolution”, and “Women, why they are best suited for child-rearing and obedience”.

Useless measure

By Archfeld • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Large corporations are leeches not contributors. The only true measure is GDP. California’s is approximately TWICE what Texas claims. In fact it takes Texas AND New York to beat California. If we could ensure these corporations actually paid taxes things might even out.

Re:Useless measure

By outsider007 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The only true measure is GDP. California’s is approximately TWICE what Texas claims.

GDP counts things like rent, where CA certainly beats Texas

However… I would argue that price-adjusted per-capita GDP is probably a better metric, and I think you’ll find that those are about a tie.

Re:But but but…

By ArmoredDragon • Score: 4 Thread

You guys sound like Russians, only instead of a random CNN comment it’s Fox News.

Here in TFS, we have an early indicator suggesting that business is moving out of California. I say early indicator, because business moving somewhere is the egg. Eggs have a way of turning into chickens. Then, you follow that up with dubious claims about skilled California workers not moving with them. The data says otherwise — namely, that higher skilled (and thus higher paid) workers are going where there’s no income tax. Not red states, just no income tax. Which is usually (but not always) red.

https://blog.hireahelper.com/2…

I, and other people I know who are intending to leave California, don’t particularly care for Florida or Texas politics anymore than California politics. The problem with California is basically this: Everything that’s wrong with this state is pervasive. No matter what you do, there’s no avoiding it. Sleeping is expensive. Eating is expensive. Even shitting can be expensive. The air quality here is bad, the data we have on it suggests it’s shortening lifespans, and it’s actively getting worse (at least my car has a HEPA filter, but it’s sad that you’d even want one.) The state is fast running out of fresh water because unlike all three surrounding states and Mexico, it doesn’t believe in water management. Need to develop property? File an application, and if you’re lucky, you can break ground in 3-5 years.

Texas bans abortions. Pretty dumb, but at the same time, for most people, including most women, it’s basically irrelevant.
Texas is religious…I guess, though the Scientology Celebrity Center is pretty damn close to where I am now. Don’t mess with them, they don’t mess with you. That’s what we’ve got a first amendment for.
Texas has guns, which is fine by me because my past military experience has me very desensitized to that kind of thing. I feel more at ease around a Texan with a gun than a Californian with a gun, which is probably because if you see one here in most public settings, it’s almost certainly illegal, so whatever else he’s up to is probably nothing good.

You know what I don’t like about Texas? It’s fucking desolate. Very, very desolate. Which is the main reason I don’t want to move there, but I may anyway. My preferred spot is Florida, where when something does happen, it has a strange way of making national news, even though all the “Florida man” memes are basically a daily occurrence here. Shit, just look at what drinkypoo did:

https://ktla.com/news/californ…

People do even more oddball, off the wall shit here than Florida could ever hope to achieve, and it only ever makes local news. Shortly after I moved here there was a mass shooting at a basketball court and…again…only local news barely mentioned it. They interviewed the mom of one of the kids that was killed and she just spoke casually about it like it was no big deal, casually mentioning on camera that she’s one of the crips before the reporter cut her off. Practically every month, somebody is playing GTA, IRL edition, and has like 5 stars speeding down the freeway.

Re:Good for you to hate Texas so much!

By evil_aaronm • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
Might have to go to Texas, anyway: to liberate the people from the extremists trying to turn it into a backwards totalitarian hellscape like Afghanistan. Instead of Sharia Law, it’ll be Christian Nationalism. The Republicans, there, are a special kind of extreme. Look at Abbott and Paxton; imagine being under their watchful eye.