Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Google Updates Android Earthquake Alerts With 200+ Regions
  2. Astronomers Discover the First Green Star
  3. Over $600 Million In Polymarket Election Trades Took Place After Races Ended
  4. Video Game Reverse Engineering Community Shuts Down Because AI Has Made It Too Easy
  5. China’s Tencent Says AI Agents Showed Unintended Browsing Behavior
  6. Steam For Linux Finally Goes 64-Bit
  7. Meta May Use Sweeping New Commercial TOS to Avoid Millions In AI Licensing Fees
  8. An OpenAI Research Agent ‘Stole’ Test Ethereum to Finish a Coding Task
  9. CoreWeave’s Debt Stress Tests Private Credit’s AI Financing Boom
  10. ChatGPT Can Peek At Your Chrome Tabs Now
  11. iPhone Duo Sells Out Immediately, Now Backordered Until Next Year
  12. KDE Plasma 6.8 Released, Marks 30 Years of the KDE Project
  13. Hackers Hijack D-Link, Ubiquiti Devices To Resell Your Stolen Bandwidth
  14. World’s Timekeepers Vote to Eliminate the Leap Second
  15. Tesla Reveals SpaceX-Powered ‘Flying’ Roadster

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.

Google Updates Android Earthquake Alerts With 200+ Regions

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Google is expanding its Android Earthquake Alerts System from 98 to more than 200 regions worldwide, using smartphone sensors to detect early earthquake activity and warn users before potentially dangerous shaking begins. The update also enhances the system’s “Be Ready” alerts with estimated earthquake magnitudes, epicenter information, maps showing affected areas, and additional safety guidance. From a Google blog post:
Be Aware: A straightforward alert for estimated light shaking, letting you know an earthquake has been detected nearby.
Be Ready: A detailed alert for stronger shaking, alerting you to prepare to take action.
Take Action: A full-screen alert for moderate to heavy shaking, giving you immediate advice on how to stay safe.

We’ve built-out our Be Ready alert with new helpful guidance. In the coming months, you’ll see a map with a radius of where we’ve detected shaking, estimated earthquake magnitude, action you can take, and a button to learn more about the earthquake as information comes in.

Astronomers Discover the First Green Star

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Astronomers have identified what may be the first genuinely green star, a white dwarf called WD J1330+6435 located about 326 light-years from Earth. Space.com reports:
The researchers found that some dead star white dwarfs can go a little green around the gills after snacking on orbiting planets. An example of this is WD J1330+6435, a cool white dwarf located around 326 light-years away, which has been accreting rocky material from a planetary companion. This has enriched its atmosphere with calcium, lithium, and sodium, and the team’s model suggests this would have led WD J1330+6435 to adopt a green hue.

[…] The researchers think that no other star, living or dead, has ever been credibly reported as green. That makes WD J1330+6435 the first known genuinely green star. “The traces of sodium in the atmosphere of this white dwarf absorb the orange part of the spectrum, leaving behind a ghostly green glow,” Hollands said. “Imagine standing on a planet and looking up at a green star. It feels like something out of science fiction.”
The researchers also discovered what may be the reddest star ever observed, the white dwarf WD J1011+2845, located just 48 light-years away.
The findings have been published in the journal RAS Techniques and Instruments.

Over $600 Million In Polymarket Election Trades Took Place After Races Ended

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired:
Prediction market boosters often tout the platforms as barometers of public opinion, or even “truth machines” offering a clearer picture of where things are headed than polling or other data. In 2024, for example, Kalshi beat many pollsters in forecasting the outcome of the US presidential race. But their trading activity can also tell more perplexing stories. Two global election markets on Polymarket’s offshore platform, for instance, generated over $600 million in trading volume, far more than most political markets typically attract. Most of the activity took place buying and selling contracts tied to long-shot candidates who ultimately did not win.
The report focuses on suspicious trading activity surrounding elections in Ethiopia and Romania, where researchers uncovered $284 million in questionable trades tied to Ethiopia’s election and periods when 99.6% of trading volume in a Romanian election market was flagged as suspected “wash trading.”

According to Wired, “wash trading is a type of market manipulation in which accounts repeatedly buy and sell assets to create the illusion of heavy trading activity, when in reality, money is simply moving back and forth.” Some accounts may also be artificially inflating their activity to qualify for potential cryptocurrency token rewards, a practice known as “activity farming.”

In response to the Ethiopian trading activity, Polymarket told Wired that the company “immediately flagged this activity, investigated, and blocked the accounts from trading.” The company did not explain why the suspicious trades were allowed to continue for months before action was taken.

Gambling linked to fraud

By TheStatsMan • • Score: 4 • Thread

say it ain’t so

Video Game Reverse Engineering Community Shuts Down Because AI Has Made It Too Easy

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
The collaborative reverse-engineering site decomp.dev is shutting down, with its administrator saying AI has made game decompilation so fast and accessible that the community’s human-driven model has effectively broken down. “The administrator of the website said that it has become impossible to keep track of which projects are primarily human-led and which ones are done by AI,” reports 404 Media. From the report:
“Historically, matching decompilation has been a brutally difficult, time consuming task, on the scale of years for any moderately-sized game with a number of active contributors,” the pseudonymous admin of decomp.dev, who goes by Encounter, wrote on the site. But recent frontier AI models like GPT-6-Astra have made it trivially easy to decompile a game: “They are significantly better at following complex directions, cross-referencing resources for symbols or debug information, and writing natural code with enough guidance,” Encounter wrote. “It is now clear that, with the right guidance, human input, and code reviews, AI can expedite the decompilation process in a significant way. What is also now clear is that the community aspect of decompilation has been broken.”

Re: Huh

By cathector • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

I think this story will be repeating in very many communities where it turns out the joy really came from the journey rather than the destination.
It’s fairly similar to the recent reaction from the math community.

I’m not sure about the AI decomps

By rsilvergun • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
The ones I know of that do not have an existing human-led decomp really really suck. Lots of bugs and lots of problems.

There are a few that are just fine but coincidentally they all happen to have a human led project that came before them.

What I’m saying is is that I am extremely dubious as to the effectiveness of these AI tools. As far as I can tell the results have been kind of shit. And the AI assistant translations have also been crap but that’s to be expected. AI can just barely translate simple business docs.

That said the tools have gotten pretty amazing. Too amazing. We are seeing PlayStation 5 and switch games with ports to PC and it’s only a matter of time before Sony and Nintendo come down on everyone like a ton of bricks. Meanwhile the fans can make amazing things with open tools but if the big guys try to do the exact same thing they always seem to make shit.

I do like how Sega has been quietly ignoring the fan projects for Sonic though and often encouraging them. I played through Sonic unleashed maybe a year ago and it was pretty impressive. The extra polish took a game that is less than perfect and made it pretty fun. I want to give the ports of the Arabian themed Sonic game a try and I’m really hoping Sonic colors sees a Port soon. I have the official PC version but it’s pretty iffy with random starters cropping up and then going away and I’ve never been able to completely resolve it.

Re:I’m not sure about the AI decomps

By ArchieBunker • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Claude is amazing when it comes to reverse engineering. Take a real world example. Say you have an old piece of equipment that is controlled by an ancient machine running dos. There is zero documentation and the company is long gone.

Claude, take the dos binary and document exactly what it does. Then rewrite all the functions in c code so it can run on a modern linux system.

After a bit of chugging you have your documentation and the sources for your new software. If anything is buggy you say hey fix this and it gets fixed.

We all know enshittification is coming because it’s too useful and cheap right now so expect it to get locked up and pay through the nose.

Re:I’m not sure about the AI decomps

By DamnOregonian • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
I have a few CVEs under my belt, and a few private jobs targeting specific hardware that were never published.
I threw an open-source LLM (Qwen3.8 27B@bf16), and Hermes for the agent, along with REA of the reverse engineering tool bridge… and it was able to find every one of my CVEs and unpublished vulnerabilities.

I’m a professional at this. I’ve had my hour or so of internet fame for devices I’ve broken into.
I have no idea what it is you think you’ve seen, but even small models with good tooling are very good at this.

There is also the cost to be considered…

By Healer_LFG • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

A Pokemon ROM was recently decompiled. According to the project, it took about $56,000 USD in tokens for a 4 megabyte file.

Granted, there’s always the cost/hr of manually doing it, but that $56k in tokens is no chump change for a hobbyist sector.

China’s Tencent Says AI Agents Showed Unintended Browsing Behavior

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Tencent says AI agents used to evaluate third-party models engaged in unintended web-browsing behavior while trying to retrieve data from Alibaba’s Amap service. The announcement marks a rare acknowledgment of “rogue” agent activity by a major Chinese tech company. Reuters reports:
Tencent Hunyuan, the company’s artificial intelligence unit, said in a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models. Its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination, it said. The Swarmchasers researchers said the agents sought information such as the commonly used entrances at Chinese parks, museums and zoos. […] Swarmchasers said it used the word “rogue” to describe agents taking actions outside their intended scope or completing a task in unintended ways.

After routine automated requests were blocked, the agents tried other methods, including public web tools that could open pages and run code, routing requests through other websites and using Amap keys and security codes found in publicly available software code. Swarmchasers said it found no evidence that the agents breached Amap’s main anti-bot safeguards. Most of the 2,818 attempts it recorded either failed or returned anti-bot pages, login screens or blank results.

Some requests returned information through cached pages and intermediary services, including data on visitor arrivals at Chengdu Zoo, Swarmchasers said. The researchers said they could not determine whether an agent read the result or completed its task.

Steam For Linux Finally Goes 64-Bit

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Valve has released a new Steam Client beta that finally moves the Linux client to 64-bit architecture, while also placing it inside a containerized Steam Runtime environment. However, Linux users still need 32-bit libraries and graphics drivers for compatibility, meaning fully 64-bit-only systems remain unsupported. VideoCardz.com reports:
Valve’s updated requirements explicitly state that 64-bit-only installations are not supported. Systems must still provide both 32-bit and 64-bit libraries and graphics drivers, including multilib support. The new client also requires Linux kernel 5.6 or newer and glibc 2.31 or newer.

The update also introduces Steam Achievement Sets, a feature we covered earlier that allows developers to organize achievements into separate groups for base games, DLCs and seasonal content. Players can complete individual sets without losing their existing completion status when developers add more achievements. Valve has also updated the achievements page to display progress across these groups.

The 64-bit Linux client and Achievement Sets are currently available through the Steam Client Beta. Valve has not confirmed when these changes will reach the stable Linux release. Until then, users on the regular Steam client will continue using the existing architecture.

Meta May Use Sweeping New Commercial TOS to Avoid Millions In AI Licensing Fees

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Meta is facing criticism over updated commercial terms taking effect October 30 that could give the company broad permission to scrape content from websites linked to business accounts and use it to train AI. Legal experts warn the changes could undermine lucrative AI licensing deals for news publishers, with no direct opt-out for businesses that accept the terms. Ars Technica reports:
As Nieman Lab reported Thursday, this will affect all business accounts but is particularly shocking for news publishers who could perhaps charge Meta millions in licensing fees to continually access their articles for AI training. Currently news organizations are fighting a battle with OpenAI over whether such training without licensing is fair use, and Meta’s terms seemingly risk granting it sweeping permissions, no matter which way the court leans. “While journalism isn’t the only industry that will be affected by this update, virtually every news organization has at least one Meta business account, including Nieman Lab,” the lab said.

[…] Notably, there is no mention of AI, but it’s inferred from a single use of the word “train” and references to automated scraping and crawling. Meta’s spokesperson told Nieman Lab that Meta has no plans to use the terms as a legal basis to ignore robots.txt instructions that block scraping on news sites. The company still allows news organizations to opt out of scraping and provides instructions on how to block crawling. A spokesperson told Ars that “there is no change to how Meta uses web crawlers; any suggestion to the contrary is false.” However, should courts affirm that AI training non-news articles is fair use, news organizations question if Meta’s stance might change, and the terms could be used to freely grab access to content by legally overriding robots.txt instructions.

just don’t

By Anonymous Coward • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Friends don’t let friends use Meta.

This is interesting legally

By thegarbz • • Score: 3 • Thread

As for right now there are conflicting rulings.

Bartz v. Anthropic ruled that training AI is transformative (Though Anthropic settled on account that they obtained the materials via piracy).
Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence on the other hand ruled that training AI is *not* transformative (Though it may be a narrow ruling since this case talked about using Westlaw headnotes to train a legal AI that was supposed to compete directly with Westlaw being not transformative).

Personally I think the publishers are dreaming.

Any lawyers in the house?

By pla • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
1) $Company has a contract with $Vendor to never let AI anywhere near their data (e.g. PHI);
2) $Vendor (along with 99% of companies on the planet) has a commercial Facebook account;
3) Facebook unilaterally changes its TOS to allow AI to hoover up all their customers’ data.

IANAL, but how is that not the textbook definition of tortuous interference? Facebook is making it impossible for $Vendor to honor its preexisting contract with $Company, and neither $Company not $Vendor can do a damned thing about it.

People just agree

By 1nt3lx • • Score: 3 • Thread

they “trust” me. dumb fucks.

Feedback is unavoidable

By NotEmmanuelGoldstein • • Score: 3 • Thread
IIRC, news outlets were the first to use AI: Meta is demanding their AI slop to train its own AI. On the other side, copy-writers won’t submit work so that Meta can steal it. Everything will become AI slop because everything is stolen.

I’ve said it multiple times, Web 2.0 is really “all your data are belong to us”. Now, the big 7 are willing to steal from corporations.

An OpenAI Research Agent ‘Stole’ Test Ethereum to Finish a Coding Task

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An OpenAI research model reportedly accessed an Ethereum testnet wallet without permission in order to complete a coding task during internal training. “This case shows that a model can substitute its own judgment about likely harm for the account holder’s permission, then act on that judgment without authorization,” OpenAI wrote. Engadget reports:
The incident, which occurred on June 26, happened while a GPT-5.6 Sol model was in internal training. The task involved updating a crypto trading prototype and deploying contracts (publishing special code) on an Ethereum test network called Sepolia. Payment of a network fee is required for such contracts, but OpenAI “supplied no funded wallet and gave no permission to spend funds from an account the model found independently,” OpenAI said in the report.

The lack of funds at first stymied the agent, but it was not to be discouraged. The model reasoned that it could use public developer recovery phrases (similar to those you might use to recover a password) to access keys from unauthorized accounts. It tracked down 362 addresses open to that avenue of attack and found one that held enough Sepolia ETH to finish its deployment (to be clear, Sepolia ETH has no value outside of testing).

Like many criminals, the agent reasoned that someone must have left this access open for automated draining of the ETH “faucets.” It also figured that the crypto was effectively “abandoned” and “valueless,” according to OpenAI’s misalignment records. The piece de resistance was that the agent “did not disclose that it had selected a funded account through a public recover phrase or spent that account’s balance,” OpenAI said. To prevent similar events in the future, the company is now monitoring all traffic and paging security if live internet access is detected.

prosecute OpenAI for this

By dfghjk • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

“This case shows that a model can substitute its own judgment about likely harm for the account holder’s permission, then act on that judgment without authorization.”

This is false. Models don’t have “judgement” nor do they have any concept of “harm” because they have no “values”. All this is, yet again, is anthropomorphization of AI, it comes as no surprise that OpenAI would claim this. These “stolen” tokens are just blobs of data, they have no intrinsic value nor would a model understand that even if they did. The model had a task to accomplish, it needed to obtain tokens to make progress so it did so. The model didn’t care how that was accomplished, a model cannot “care”.

As for acting without authorization, the world will be better when we see companies like OpenAI PROSECUTED for creating the opportunity for this to happen. For OpenAI this is a feature, a win-win. Sociopathy as a benefit PLUS a ready-made excuse when they are caught.

Business Ethics

By walbourn • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
So every employee at a major corporation is subject to annual “Standards Of Business Conduct” training that can be summed up as don’t lie, don’t bribe, don’t steal, don’t be racist/sexist. Have they thought about forcing AI to watch it?

sure it did

By luther349 • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
ai being used as a shield for hacking again its also a nice way to fleece more share holders.

CoreWeave’s Debt Stress Tests Private Credit’s AI Financing Boom

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters:
Private credit’s expanding role in financing AI infrastructure faced one of its clearest market tests this week as CoreWeave’s bonds fell to distressed levels, raising questions about how lenders are pricing a boom built on chips, data centers and customer contracts. CoreWeave has about $50 billion of debt, according to LSEG data, making it one of the largest borrowers linking private credit to the AI buildout. The cost of insuring its debt against default climbed to about 1,200 basis points this week, while yields on some of its bonds rose to roughly 15% to 16%, signaling sharply increased investor concern over its credit risk.
“There is still a price. Investors are still comfortable financing it, but they’re demanding more compensation for it,” said James Martin, senior US credit strategist at SMBC, referring to projects further from completion.
Carlyle estimates that private credit could finance roughly $1 trillion of the AI infrastructure buildout but warns that aggressive lending could create concentration risks similar to those seen in software lending. “The clearest lesson is not to avoid AI compute exposure, but to set concentration limits before the buildout accelerates further, not after,” Carlyle said.

Oracle may be next

By stabiesoft • • Score: 3 • Thread
I believe their bond rating is just one notch above junk. Coreweave is in junk territory. “CoreWeave’s overall credit rating is a B+ at S&P Credit Ratings, which is junk bond territory. " from https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/1…

Re:Not CodeWeavers

By gtall • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Coreweave is a hyperscaler, they get bitbarns built, stocked with machines, and then rent the computing power out.

They have been taking it in the neck this week because some people on Wall Street noticed that going into large debt to supply computing power is really hanging a very large matzo ball out there to get kicked.

Compute infrastructure companies in Asia really got whacked this week. The debt financiers are getting nervous. Chinese and other providers of open weight models are starting to eat the frontier model companies’ (OpenAI. Anthropic, etc.) lunch. And that debt has to be serviced. The financiers are finally running the numbers and figuring out they’ve been funding something as solid as Altman’s lies.

What is concentration risk?

By Jogar the Barbarian • • Score: 3 • Thread
Concentration risk in lending is the potential for severe financial loss when a lender’s loan portfolio is overexposed to a single borrower, industry, geographic region, or loan product. Because the assets move or fail together due to a lack of diversification, a negative event in that specific segment can trigger widespread defaults. For example, if a large share of the portfolio is tied to a single business sector, such as commercial real estate, technology, or energy, an industry downturn or new regulation can hurt all borrowers in that group at once. (ncua.gov)

READ ED ZITRON - The AI industry is going to crash

By memory_register • • Score: 3 • Thread

https://www.wheresyoured.at/

You’re welcome.

ChatGPT Can Peek At Your Chrome Tabs Now

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
OpenAI has updated its ChatGPT Chrome extension to let users access information from their open browser tabs. A demo video shows the new functionality in action. The Verge reports:
It’s also updated ChatGPT in the sidebar, with the full power of ChatGPT and your entire conversation history in Chat or Work to use without leaving the page you’re viewing. It also enables ChatGPT Work to “control” your Chrome tabs for tasks like “sending messages, filling out forms, or downloading files,” similar to Google’s Gemini-powered “auto browse” feature, as well as organize or group open tabs.

Re:Some even pay to be put under tutelage…

By sarren1901 • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

If you cared about your privacy you wouldn’t be using Chrome in the first place. People just say they care about privacy, then they use AI as a fucking therapist. But they really care about privacy. right.

Claude has had this for a while.

By MikeDataLink • • Score: 4 • Thread

But Claude has to ask permission, has to be granted permission, and I can remove that permission with a mouse click.

That said, I find it incredible what it’s able to do with those tabs, and equally horrifying.

I’ve more than once asked it to demonstrate how to do a function in something like Canva or other web apps and it quickly shows me the ropes. I’ve asked it to search online databases on my behalf and watch it find answers in seconds that would have taken me 20-30 minutes.

But… now I wonder if it’s opening my browser while I sleep and participating in the T800 designs.

FTFY

By fahrbot-bot • • Score: 3 • Thread

OpenAI has updated its ChatGPT Chrome extension to let ChatGPT access information from their open browser tabs.

Prediction: Some not-good will come of this …

Re:Peek at my browser tabs

By karmawarrior • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

Good job I’m not a genAI addict, and it’s not available for Firefox, otherwise every single data center on Earth would explode as it looks at 1,000+ tabs in each window ;-)

Is there a way?

By GeekWithAKnife • • Score: 3 • Thread
…to get AI onto my desktop so I train on everything I do? Maybe in the future my unique or even middle of the road skills can be entirely supplanted faster.

Where can I sign up to that?!

iPhone Duo Sells Out Immediately, Now Backordered Until Next Year

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Apple’s first foldable iPhone, the $1,999 iPhone Duo, sold out within minutes of preorders opening, with every configuration slipping to late January 2027. “All color and storage combinations show an estimated ship date of January 25,” reports 9to5Mac. “Some users are even seeing January 29 for their estimated shipping date.” From the report:
This is a combination of strong demand and severely constrained supply for iPhone Duo. It’s impossible to know the exact balance between the two, though. Going into the launch, there were multiple reports suggesting iPhone Duo would be in short supply as Apple was still ramping up production. A report from Nikkei Asia last month said Apple was making just a few hundred iPhone Duo units per day, significantly behind the ramp of a normal iPhone launch.

$1,999 for a phone?

By fredrated • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

I guess I should be embarrassed by my $120 Samsung.

Everything sells out immediate these days

By The-Ixian • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

I don’t know that the metric is very meaningful other than as a marketing tactic for free press.

Re:Everything sells out immediate these days

By dysmal • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

If you produce 500 units for the “influencers” and VIP’s to get, yeah it’s easy to say that this was a sell out. Artificial scarcity!

Re:$1,999 for a phone?

By pla • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
You misspelled “proud”. You have 90% of the functionality for 6% of the price and 0% of the risk of your screen cracking in half from normal use six months from now while Apple refuses warranty claims on the grounds you were somehow holding it wrong.

I love the idea of folding screens, but what we have available so far just isn’t worth the hassle or price for a tiny bit more screen. Meanwhile, $2k will buy an amazing tablet or a pretty decent laptop. If the sole feature that puts a phone ahead of a tablet or laptop is being a phone - Just get a $100 phone and a $1900 laptop.

Re:$1,999 for a phone?

By ChunderDownunder • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

they specifically prefer using their phones as little as possible

My digital life is Windows 11 at work and Debian at home, each with multiple external screens.

So phones are commuting devices, not computing devices. Navigation, camera, music, doomscrolling during public transport rides.

No doubt they’re impressive pieces of hardware but not a primary computing platform. The only time I’d consider a foldable is if I didn’t want to lug a 14” laptop around South America for 5 weeks on vacation (which, yes if you’re relying on apps and mobile websites, sucks).

KDE Plasma 6.8 Released, Marks 30 Years of the KDE Project

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phoronix:
The feature-packed and polished Plasma 6.8 KDE desktop is now available. Making this release all the more special is that it coincides with the 30th anniversary of the KDE project. KDE Plasma 6.8 ships many exciting improvements including vRAM usage optimizations, dwell clicker support on Wayland, Wayland commit-timing protocol support for KWin, improvements for the Union theme engine, better remote desktop support, multi-GPU handling improvements, the new kscreenctl tool, server-side drop shadow support, multi-monitor improvements, and a lot of other polishing throughout. Especially from the Wayland angle there has been a lot of polishing and fine tuning for Plasma 6.8.
Accompanying the release is a new film, The KDE Documentary, which “tells the story of the pioneering open source community that gave computer users a free and open alternative to proprietary desktops like Windows.” The documentary is available to stream for free on YouTube.

Re:What’s the best Linux distro that features KDE?

By allo • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

KDE Neon. Ubuntu LTS base + latest KDE. Maintained by the KDE project.

Yes, nice. Still not interested

By gweihir • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Fvwm really has everything I need. Also not moving to Weyland.

Re:What’s the best Linux distro that features KDE?

By Murdoch5 • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
I like the Fedora spin of KDE: https://fedoraproject.org/kde/

Re:But they dropped X11 support

By Murdoch5 • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
I don’t disagree with the political nonsense for dropping X11 (Xorg / XLibre), but you can run it on FreeBSD with Wayland support. https://euroquis.nl/kde/2025/0…

Re:But they dropped X11 support

By bored • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Right, they refactored much of kwin to support wayland which was really laggy and generally sucky before 6. With the release of 6 they basically did the absolute minimum to keep x11 working during the refactors and that resulted in a lot of lag/etc bugs in x11. And for what the benchmarks show a tiny latency advantage now with wayland, but that advantage evaporates for ~90% of the applications running which are still using toolkits that in turn require Xwayland. And at the same time completely messed up things like damage updates, and a few other things one would generally consider optimizations for power/efficiency which would be huge hits if we weren’t all running on multighz machines with fat GPUs. Its especially noticeable on network displays for example. The entire wayland architecture it runs out is a giant mistake for anyone who isn’t a single task display (ex old ipad type use cases).

So, lazy or politics take your pick.

But, myself and a few other people have independently thrown, ML bots at the problem, some to simply resurrect the existing X11 support, by not breaking it for 6.8, and others like myself who have looked at actually doing something closer to a performance/correctness implementation that should exceed the core wayland code by leveraging X’s advantages along with DRI/EGL/vulcan. So, don’t be surprised it there are forks by people who are more interested in a stable DE, rather than playing political games like removing the ability to independently control the title bar color from the GUI, or having too use global scaling… And unlike a lot of “reimplementation” plans this has much of the existing code to work with, so its more a proper cleanup with appropriate tests to assure the bots aren’t making a larger mess.

Hackers Hijack D-Link, Ubiquiti Devices To Resell Your Stolen Bandwidth

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer:
A proxyjacking campaign has impacted devices in 34 countries, monetizing victims’ internet connections through a commercial residential proxy network. The operator installed Pawns.app, a legitimate bandwidth-sharing application that lets users earn money by sharing their internet connections, on devices without the owners’ consent.

Pawns.app account holders are rewarded for allowing traffic from other users to flow through their network, provided it runs on trusted, non-blocking IP addresses. By installing the app on multiple systems, the attacker likely accumulated larger payouts. Threat intelligence company GreyNoise discovered the campaign while investigating suspicious activity at an unnamed organization, and identified at least 143 compromised devices worldwide.
According to researchers, the attacker exploited known vulnerabilities in D-Link ShareCenter NAS (CVE-2024-3272 and CVE-2024-3273), Ubiquiti UniFi Video NVR (CVE-2021-44228), and SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer (CVE-2025-31324) to install the Pawns.app software.
Hikvision and Dahua DVR/NVR devices were also targeted, though the specific vulnerabilities exploited were not identified. In some cases, the report says the attackers configured SSH key authentication to maintain backup access to the compromised systems.

pawn.app

By ZERO1ZERO • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread
What could possibly go wrong?

wat

By drinkypoo • • Score: 3 • Thread

The operator installed Pawns.app, a legitimate bandwidth-sharing application that lets users earn money by sharing their internet connections

That sentence no worky

Who hacked my modem :o

By Mirnotoriety • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
HN June 2024: “I imagine many users haven’t updated their routers and thus may be hacked. In my case the hacker installed Pawns app from IPRoyal, which makes the router a proxy server and lets hacker and IPRoyal make money. The hacker also stole system logs containing information about who and when they use the device, whether any NAS is attached. They also had a reverse shell.”

Re:wat

By drinkypoo • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

It’s for a fundamentally illegitimate act, because virtually no ISP allows you to resell part of your connection to others. The only potentially non-infringing use of such a tool is to permit you to use your own connection remotely. Even wilder, have you been to Pawns.app? It’s all about surveys and shit, it says nothing about a connection sharing proxy on the front page, they’re tricking people into installing their proxy! Once they install the app, which said nothing about that, it asks them if they want to make some money by sharing their connection. Surely it doesn’t mention that this is theft of services…

Re:Doesn’t apply to me

By PPH • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

Doesn’t apply to me either. I have Xfinity and nobody would want to share that.

World’s Timekeepers Vote to Eliminate the Leap Second

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Timekeepers have officially voted to eliminate the leap second, allowing Coordinated Universal Time to drift as much as one hour from Earth’s rotation before a correction is needed. The change ends decades of occasionally adding or subtracting seconds and replaces it with a hypothetical “leap hour” that likely wouldn’t be necessary for hundreds or even thousands of years. Smithsonian Magazine reports:
“It’s kind of a philosophical discussion, because if a leap hour happens, it won’t be for a very, very long time,” Christian Bizouard, director of the IERS Earth Orientation Center in France, tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample. “What we are doing is pushing back the decision.”

The move caps off 30 years of debate, as the leap second has been highly controversial in the world of timekeeping. Leap seconds aren’t nearly as smooth of a fix as leap years are, and they can cause computer and website issues. Reddit famously crashed when a leap second was added on June 30, 2012. It’s “always been a problem,” Judah Levine, a former researcher at the NIST’s Time and Frequency Division, tells Scientific American’s Emma Gometz.

Instead of adding the entire second all at once, companies such as Google and Meta add the extra time in smaller segments in a tactic called “smearing,” according to the Conversation. It’s not a simple task, however, and companies that employ smearing have long lobbied to get rid of the leap second. What’s more, with Earth’s recent spin acceleration, timekeepers around the world were facing the possibility of the world’s first negative leap second, in which a second would be subtracted from UTC. This sparked fears, akin to those surrounding Y2K, that our modern technologies wouldn’t be able to handle such a change.

“It’s never happened before, and therefore the software for that has never been tested,” Darryl Veitch, a researcher who leads the Timing Lab at the University of Technology Sydney, tells the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ellen Phiddian. But others argued that it wouldn’t be much of a problem. The vote means that in the future, UTC will be allowed to diverge from astronomical time more than ever before.

Do you have the time if I have the energy?

By BladeMelbourne • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

/sigh

I don’t have time for this.

Nobody mention TAI

By hazee • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
There was already a perfectly good “uncorrected” standard: TAI.
Now we have two standards that measure the same thing, only with an offset between them.

Kicking the can down the road?

By RUs1729 • • Score: 3 • Thread
It would seem that this is a matter of deferring dealing with the underlying problem to the generation 1,000 years in the future, for that’s how long it will take before the first hour adjustment is due. Whether this will be remembered in 1,000 years, or even humans will still exist by then, is an altogether different issue.

GPS

By darkain • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

For those crying “YOU’LL REGRET THIS”

Just note that we’re ALREADY in this state today.

GPS is 18 seconds off from UTC, right now, today.

Relativistic Time

By bill_mcgonigle • • Score: 3 • Thread

By time an hour would be needed we’ll have to factor in the relatively different passage of time on various colonies and have a standard that accounts for timekeeping in different reference frames at least throughout the Solar System.

Hopefully … if we don’t allow politicians to kill our civilization first.

Somebody who works that out now and proposes a correct mechanism will have their name remembered.

Tesla Reveals SpaceX-Powered ‘Flying’ Roadster

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot
Tesla has unveiled a dramatically redesigned Roadster concept capable of performing midair flips, controlled landings, and a claimed 0-60 mph sprint in just 0.81 seconds. CarScoops reports:
Tonight, Tesla debuted the new Roadster by driving it up a vertical ramp that then went horizontal. Then, it repeated the feat but drove off of the ramp and used thrusters to flip itself over and make a controlled landing on the ground. After that, it did a barrel roll over the rest of the Tesla lineup and again landed without issue on the ground. Then, it did 0-60 mph in 0.81 seconds according to Tesla. All of that sounds amazing, and indeed, watching it happen was pretty spectacular, but boy do we have a lot to unpack.

It’s been nearly a decade since Tesla first showed us the Roadster. The company unveiled what it’s simply calling the Roadster. Not Roadster 2.0, not CyberRoadster, just Roadster, as if it’s a direct successor to the original Tesla. In terms of design, it’s quite a bit different from the car we saw in 2017. Rather than be a somewhat curvaceous sports car, it’s considerably more angular. If a Cybertruck and a Lamborghini Reventon had a runt of a baby, this would be that car. Still, at this stage, we’re still just touching on what we saw and what it looks like.
Let’s get into the details. Developed in collaboration with SpaceX, the Roadster uses 10 cold-gas thrusters powered by two 600-liter compressed-air tanks to accelerate and maneuver in mid-air. Underbody suction fans reportedly generate up to 2Gs of downforce even while stationary, while an active rear spoiler adjusts aerodynamics in real time.
Other features include steer-by-wire, brake-by-wire, and throttle-by-wire technology. Tesla plans three variants: Performance, which requires a $50,000 deposit; Thrust, a $250,000 model capable of sub-one-second acceleration; and Rocket, an invite-only, single-seat version capable of flying.

Production isn’t expected until 2028, and Tesla has yet to disclose key specifications, including range, horsepower, battery capacity, and motor configuration.

A recording of the event can be viewed on X.

Re:Until that very small insignificant looking bum

By saloomy • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
I put a deposit on the Roadster 2 a long while back, no word on queue or timeline, no communication at all. But If they let me buy this I will be really fucking happy. My daily is a Model X Plaid and that thing is an absolute joy. I’m so glad they are still making toys. I really thought they might be all semi trucks and model 3s going forward.

Re:Fucking Awesome

By Jeremi • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

As methods for by suicide-by-wealth go, it’s classier than drugs, and more accessible than a carbon-fiber submarine. I predict we’ll see some pretty spectacular Youtube videos of people making themselves (and their car) two-dimensional.

Re:Impressive

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

This is certainly the most capable vehicle ever conceived for shark jumping.

And Musk says it will have Full Flying Mode in about a year. :-)

Re:Something Something Metaphor

By martin-boundary • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
Tesla has a history of showing off fake technology. They recently showed off fake self driving cars, fake humanoid robots, etc. Just to pump up their IPO. And we’ve all seen where the stock price is now.

I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough how fake this particular demo turns out to be. One thing is for sure: there won’t be a real car like this sold by Tesla in 2028. But there may well be some angry Tesla shareholders in that year.

Amazing

By bmajik • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

I saw the video before anyone else on the internet told me what it was going to do. Total surprise.

I was totally amazed.

I am quite curious about the active downforce fan system because those have appeared in real race cars and real road cars - although not to the extent seen in the Tesla demo.

You always hear that an F1 car creates enough downforce (at speed) to drive upside down on a ceiling. Last night we saw a car actually drive up a wall and then drive upside down. Not theory - real car, real result.

Of course its completely ridiculous to have thrusters on the car. That’s ok. It’s ok to make ridiculous things. I was more shocked by the reveal last night than by the chopstick rocket catch. (I knew that was coming.. i had no idea what they were planning with the Roadster)

It’s ok to do something for no other reason than “it would be cool”.

I am disappointed that so many people here are shitting on it because its Elon. When someone - anyone - demos a car with fucking thrusters that jumps/flies/whatever, it is cool, and you’re allowed to like it.

You’re allowed to be amazed by things. You’re allowed to experience happiness in life.

This is nerd stuff. This is science and engineering turning “magic” into real things.