Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Scammers Are Abusing an Internal Microsoft Account to Send Spam Links
  2. Lenovo, Dell, and HP Financially Support Linux Vendor Firmware Service
  3. More Videogames Developers Consider Unionization - Some Spurred By Changes to Remote Work Policies
  4. ‘Underminr’ CDN Vulnerability Hides Malicious Traffic Behind Trusted Domains
  5. Tesla’s Electric Cybercab is Certified as the Most Efficient EV Ever
  6. Linus Torvalds on How AI is Impacting the Hunt for Linux Kernel Bugs
  7. Is America Closer to Ending Daylight Saving Time?
  8. AMD (Xilinx) is Excluding Linux From the Free Tier For Its FPGA Dev Tool
  9. US Layoffs Haven’t Increased, and New Tech Industry Hiring Balances Firings
  10. Air France, Airbus Guilty of Corporate Manslaughter In 2009 Air France 447 Crash
  11. Free Software Foundation’s Call for ‘LibreLocals’ Answered on Six Continents - With More Coming
  12. Friday Google’s AI-Powered Search Results Glitched on the Word ‘Disregard’
  13. Researchers Say the Worst Climate Future is Less Likely. But the Best One is Also Slipping Away
  14. Linux Kernel Flaw Lets Unprivileged Users Access Root-Only Files, Execute Arbitrary Commands as Root
  15. Tech CEOs Call for a Universal Basic Income. But What are the Alternatives?

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.

Scammers Are Abusing an Internal Microsoft Account to Send Spam Links

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“For months, scammers have been taking advantage of a loophole that allows them to send spammy emails from an internal Microsoft email address typically used for sending legitimate account alerts,” TechCrunch reports:
[The scammers] have been able to set up new Microsoft accounts as if they are new customers and use that access to send out emails purportedly from the tech giant, potentially tricking people into thinking these emails are genuine…

Last week, I received several, similarly structured emails containing subject lines and web links to scammy sites from Microsoft across different email accounts. These crudely made emails were sent from msonlineservicesteam@microsoftonline.com, an email account that Microsoft uses to send important notifications to users, such as two-factor authentication codes and other critical alerts about their online account. Some of these emails’ subject lines resembled official emails that would alert users to fraudulent transactions, while other emails claimed to have a private message waiting for the recipient at a web address mentioned in the email body.

In a social post on Tuesday, anti-spam nonprofit The Spamhaus Project said it had also seen Microsoft’s account notification email address being abused to send spam and that the activity dated back “several months.”
A PR representative told TechCrunch that Microsoft was “actively investigating” and “taking action against these phishing reports to help keep customers protected,” with measures that include “removing accounts that violate our Terms of Use” and “further strengthening our detection and blocking mechanisms.”

TechCrunch suggests the issue may not be limited to Microsoft. “Other users commenting on social media say that other companies’ email addresses are also being used to send out spam.”

Lenovo, Dell, and HP Financially Support Linux Vendor Firmware Service

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
The It’s FOSS blog has news about the Linux Vendor Firmware Service, which gives hardware vendors a secure portal to upload firmware updates “which can then be downloaded and installed by users through clients such as GNOME Software or fwupdmgr.” (Originally developed in 2015 by GNOME maintainer Richard Hughes…)
The issue, however, obviously, had been funding with the largest contributors being the usual suspects, Framework and Open Source Framework Foundation, at $10K a year. Recently, however, Lenovo and Dell joined suite as Premier sponsors, which is the highest tier at $100K a year each, making the project more sustainable and manageable.

These companies contributing makes a lot of sense, considering they are two of the bigger computer companies which offer Linux by default in some cases, especially with Lenovo’s ThinkPads being the Linux users’ favorite for decades. And now… HP has followed suit as a Premier sponsor, also providing $100K a year, right alongside Dell and Lenovo…

The question still remains, however, where are the other vendors? What are they waiting for… This major move by these three companies should not only be seen as a sign of relief and wider acceptance of the usage of Linux, but as a beacon for other vendors to follow, who ought to make their hardware more accessible to the open-source community.

More Videogames Developers Consider Unionization - Some Spurred By Changes to Remote Work Policies

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Developers for several top videogames have joined unions under the Communication Workers of America — including Call of Duty, Fallout, Overwatch, Diablo and World of Warcraft. Last month workers on the online game Magic: The Gathering Arena team announced their own CWA union.

The gaming news site Aftermath shares some interesting details:
Owner Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast could have voluntarily agreed to the union, but instead the issue is going to an official vote with the National Labor Relations Board in June… [O]ne Arena developer shared on Bluesky that one of the reasons they were inspired to organize was because Wizards changed its remote work policy, requiring them to move across the country or to a more expensive state to remain employed. (Changes to remote work have been one of the big drivers of unionization and union action among video game developers.) If the union is successful, the company wouldn’t be able to unilaterally change working conditions like remote work; it would have to negotiate with the union over the decision. There’s no guarantee unionized employees would get what they want, but they’d have more of a say, and the opportunity to directly influence their work situation, than they would without a union.

Re:Game Devs are DEI and Marxist. Unions are Marxi

By r1348 • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Seek help.

Re: WFH again?

By fluffernutter • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Time to switch to a company that must post all job opportunities and interview for them without bias.

Re: Game Dev and Remote Work

By Baron_Yam • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

I provide IT support to insurance brokerages - you may or not be surprised to find that since COVID, they’re continuing to convert to WFO.

Especially for the boutique shops, I doubt an RTO office can compete financially with one structured under a WFH model.

Re:Game Devs are DEI and Marxist. Unions are Marxi

By ClickOnThis • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Unions are the new National Socialists, basically, same as 1939. Note: National SOCIALISTS were socialist. And, don’t bother trying to persuade me they were somehow right wing.

The National Socialists in 1930s-40s Germany called themselves “socialists” for branding purposes. They wanted to appeal to the working class. And it worked. But they were anything but socialists.

North Korea calls itself the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Does that mean it’s a democratic country?

Re:WFH again?

By PleaseThink • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Not everyone lives to work. If you’re saving enough, the life improvements from working from home far outweigh the promotion and networking ‘opportunities’.

If you were fully remote you could have moved to a lower cost of living area, closer to friends/family, or to a part of the country you preferred. The savings from that can drastically reduce the amount of years before retirement or improve your social life with the people you actually care about.

If your employees can’t listen to their boss then they should be fired. Being only an avatar shouldn’t matter. Everyone’s supposed to be adults working towards a common goal. Granted I know real life isn’t always like that, but that’s what you should be working towards.

‘Underminr’ CDN Vulnerability Hides Malicious Traffic Behind Trusted Domains

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes:
Threat actors are exploiting a vulnerability in shared content delivery network (CDN) infrastructure to hide connections to malicious domains. Researchers say the vulnerability could impact roughly 88 million domains and can bypass DNS filtering and protective DNS controls, potentially enabling stealthy command-and-control communications and other evasive attacks.
Dubbed “Underminr,” the exploit “presents the SNI and HTTP Host of a domain,” writes SecurityWeek, “while forcing a request to the IP address of another tenant on the same shared edge.”
The mismatch, ADAMnetworks reports, has been exploited in attacks targeting large-scale hosting providers, including those that have implemented mitigations against domain fronting…

Threat actors’ increased reliance on AI is expected to lead to a surge in attacks. “Once Underminr becomes parametric information for AI-generated malware, we could expect to see it in every attack that needs to evade protective DNS as part of the attack chain,” ADAMnetworks CEO David Redekop says.

The whole internet is full of backdoors

By xack • Score: 3 Thread
With the proliferation of illegal proxies, vpns and scrapers you can’t trust the authenticity of traffic anymor. It also means that the internet is getting “ossified” as only a small amount of trusted protocols and clients are allowed now. With malware finding even more back doors the internet basically is an untrustable medium now. Cybersecurity has become pointless because the maniac is in the mailbox.

Unsurprising, To Me.

By SlashbotAgent • Score: 3 Thread

This is quite unsurprising to me. I’ve always regarded CDNs as a problem and more recently I’ve added the hyper scalers to the problem list.

DNS filtering a is a waste of time when we have to trust massive blocks of IPs that should not be trusted and when DNS records can flux(change) instantly and constantly.

This is just one area where we seem to trust the infrastructure because we’re stupid or no one has gotten around to exploiting obvious weaknesses, yet.

Don’t even get me started on Docker repos and/or people’s eagerness to
# curl -fsSL https // randomshit.site/InstallUnknownSource.sh | bash

What the absolute fuck?

Tesla’s Electric Cybercab is Certified as the Most Efficient EV Ever

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Tesla’s upcoming Cybercab “has been certified at 165 Wh/mi,” reports Electrek — which makes it “the most efficient electric vehicle ever produced — by a wide margin.”

The next most efficient EV on the market, the Lucid Air Pure, consumes 28% more energy per mile. Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy confirmed the figure, which represents a certified rating — not a marketing claim or internal target.

It’s an impressive achievement, but it comes with a massive asterisk: Tesla accomplished this by building a tiny two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel, no pedals, and a sub-50 kWh battery pack… Even Tesla’s own Model 3 — one of the most efficient passenger EVs you can buy — needs nearly a third more energy to cover the same distance… Where the 165 Wh/mi figure genuinely matters is in the economics of running a robotaxi fleet. Energy cost per mile is one of the biggest operating expenses for any ride-hailing service, and the Cybercab’s efficiency gives Tesla a structural cost advantage over competitors…

The small battery pack also means faster charging times and lower per-vehicle battery costs — both critical for fleet economics. Tesla has said the Cybercab will cost $30,000, and the efficient powertrain is a big part of hitting that price target. Tesla confirmed Cybercab production has started at Giga Texas in April, though the ramp is expected to be slow initially. The company still hasn’t solved unsupervised autonomous driving — the first steering wheel-less unit rolled off the line in February, but Tesla’s supervised robotaxi fleet currently crashes at roughly four times the rate of human drivers.

It’s a really light car

By phantomfive • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
From the article:

calling the Cybercab the “most efficient EV ever” is technically accurate, but it’s a bit like comparing a motorcycle’s fuel economy to a sedan’s. The Cybercab is a purpose-built, two-seat autonomous pod with no driver controls. No steering column, no pedal assembly — all of that weight and complexity is gone. Tesla designed a teardrop-shaped body that narrows significantly at the rear, optimized purely for aerodynamics rather than rear passenger comfort or cargo space.

Presumably it’s aimed at being a Driverless Taxi, not a consumer car.

Weight, size, performance, features matter

By markdavis • Score: 4, Informative Thread

>“Tesla accomplished this by building a tiny two-seat robotaxi with no steering wheel, no pedals, and a sub-50 kWh battery pack.”

It still HAS steering and brakes/etc. Not having steering wheel/column or a few pedals isn’t that significant, it would only matter for weight, which neither has much of. Being small, small battery, low-power motor, and aerodynamic are the primary factors in being so efficient in this case.

My tremendously more powerful, dual-motor, much larger Ariya rarely gets better than 263 Wh/mi (and usually much worse), so at least double the power usage. But it also has all laminated insulated glass, leather seating for 5, double moon roof, much more storage, 4WD, more ground clearance, 87kWh battery, probably more safe, etc.

Anyway, I don’t think electricity efficiency is likely the most important factor for a cab vehicle. Charging speed and frequency and vehicle reliability are probably far more paramount, since time is money.

Dude it’s 2026

By rsilvergun • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
You don’t have a lot of managers that don’t do anything. You basically have three types of managers. The first are Union busters. They are just there to keep the employees in line and are useful to the company not you. They aren’t getting in your way because they are incompetent it’s because they need to make sure you don’t unionize.

After that you have accountants you also have to do your HR paperwork.

And finally there are line workers who have been promoted into management in order to give them or work for about the same pay.

It’s extremely unlikely Tesla fired their Union busters they kind of need those guys to keep pay down. And the same goes for their managing accountants.

That means they more than likely lost some folks who do actual work and wound up with a manager title.

Not including Chinese vehicles

By mkwan • Score: 5, Informative Thread

If you read the Electrek article, the ratings are performed by the EPA, which only tests cars available in the US. So no Chinese EVs, which are the most advanced.

Typical Americans, assuming the world ends at their borders.

Re:LOL Exodus

By thegarbz • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

That’s a good thing. If their top engineers were leaving, that would be a bad thing. When management leaves, the engineers become more efficient.

That is an incredibly silly generalisation. Yeah some managers are shit and produce inefficiencies, but some managers are the opposite and contribute heavily to successes of projects. Just for fun I had a look at who left. Google’s AI results showed 4 people leaving the vehicle division:
1x Chemical Engineer with a history of manufacturing optimisation.
1x Aerospace engineer with a post grad study related to manufacturing.
1x Mechanical engineer with a masters in manufacturing systems (also this guy, Emmanuel Lamacchia, lead multiple wildly successful programs at Tesla including the Model Y program which is Tesla’s best selling product)
1x Electrical Engineer with a masters in electrical design.

So yeah let’s celebrate getting rid of those “managers” who were holding back the engineers.

On the flip side we just lost a high profile manager where I work, a veteran accountant, with an MBA, and a history working for nothing but consultants. Yeah we were all very fucking happy he’s gone.

Don’t generalise.

Linus Torvalds on How AI is Impacting the Hunt for Linux Kernel Bugs

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Linus Torvalds spoke this week at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America, reports ZDNet — and described how AI is impacting Linux kernel development:
“In the last six months, we’ve seen a lot more commits,” Torvalds noted, estimating that “the last two releases, it’s been about 20% more commits than we had in the previous releases over many years.... The real change that happened in the last six months was that the AI tools actually got good enough for a lot of people… we’re seeing a definite uptick in just development on pretty much all fronts....”

On the positive side, he framed AI-discovered bugs as “short-term pain” with long-term benefits: “When AI finds a bug in any source code… long term is you found a bug, we fixed it, that the end result is better for it.” After all, he continued, “I think finding bugs is great, because the real problem is all the bugs you didn’t find…” For small teams or solo maintainers, he said, flood-style AI bug reports can cause real burnout, especially when “it’s a bug report, and when you ask for more information, the person has done a drive-by and doesn’t even answer your questions anymore.”
The AI news site Techstrong notes this quote from Torvalds. “I have a love-hate relationship with AI. I actually really like it from a technical angle, I love the tools, I find it very useful and interesting, but it is definitely causing pain points.”
The chief challenge with AI is that it forces people to change how they work, he found. People get into a rut, and AI challenges their norm. The Linux security mailing list got the brunt of this new wave of AI-generated commits. Not all bugs are security issues, but when “people think that when they find a bug with AI, the first reaction seems to sometimes be let’s send it to the security list, because this may have security implications,” Torvalds said. As a result, the security list — watched over by a small group of maintainers — was overrun by duplicate entries…

The Linux project learned to manage the bug influx with a set number of tools to sort out and deprioritize the obvious drive-by reports (ones where the person submitting the report won’t even answer any questions). One tool, Sashiko, reviews all the patches submitted on the mailing list. “Sometimes the review is not great, but quite often it finds issues and it asks questions and says, ‘Hey, what about this issue?’" he said.
Linux also updated their documentation, partly just to address “an uptick in bug and security reports from discoveries made in full or in part with AI.”

Security Researchers want/need attention

By williamyf • Score: 3 Thread

Not only they crave it, but also, the job itself demands it.
And part of the attention is the severity of the Bug, with security bugs with working exploit code being the “best-est”.

So, In the same address, Torvads asked security researchers to not publish exploit code, but this goes against the incentive structure of security research including payment.

Luckily, fixing that problem is easy. Linux is taling about a (current) private security mailing list, and a (future) Public list.

Well, if you are a security researcher, subbmit your bug to both lists, first to the private mailing list, with the example exploit code, then to the public list, sans the exploit code, but with an adendum that says “exploit code avaialable in the private security list under security bug report # xx.yy.zz”. When the security hole you reported is patched, and the details of the private mailing list become public, and the exploit code is shown to work, the infosec researcher (if s/he responded and did follow-up work) will be dully cretited, which is nice and works for everyone.

JM2C YMMV

Is America Closer to Ending Daylight Saving Time?

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
A proposal to make daylight saving time permanent has advanced in the U.S. House of Representative, reports California news station KCRA:
A proposal to make daylight saving time permanent has advanced in the House, reigniting an age-old American debate around the twice-annual clock changes. And this time, the proposal has the president’s backing. President Donald Trump said Thursday that he will work “very hard” to sign the so-called Sunshine Protection Act into law after the House Energy and Commerce Committee overwhelmingly approved the bill by a 48-1 vote.

The bill still needs to pass the full U.S. House, and then the U.S. Senate would consider taking up the measure.
The bill would allow U.S states to decide whether to “exempt themselves” from Daylight Saving Time, according to the article.

The bill’s sponsor described the annual clock-switching as “inconvenient, unnecessary, and out of step with the needs of today’s families and economy,” while finally creating a permanent Daylight Saving would bring “more usable daylight hours throughout the year.”

This would be a disaster!

By VAXcat • Score: 5, Funny Thread
With climate change already making everything hotter, adding an hour of daylight to every day will just make things hotter still! I know my lawn will never make it through all that extra daylight.

Think of the school children

By bosef1 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I would be interesting in hearing from people who _want_ the twice-annual clock change. Why do you want that? How does it benefit you?

I may just be confused, but I thought one of the primary advocates for the clock shift was parents with school-age children. Shifting the clocks helped prevent the children from having wait for the bus in the dark, or walk home in the dark, something like that. But that may be me mis-remembering something I heard a while ago.

My preference would be year-round Standard time (noon is noon). My second preference would be year-round Daylight Saving. I dislike the twice-annual clock change, find it of no value, and support eliminating it.

Re:Think of the school children

By timepilot • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Every time I hear the “think of the children” argument against year-round DST, I ask myself why schools don’t just start an hour later instead of dragging the rest of the world along with them. Year round DST FTW.

Re:No.

By markdavis • Score: 4, Informative Thread

>“This bill doesn’t kill DST. It allows states to make it permanent, if they want to.”

I came to post the same thing. This: “The bill would allow U.S states to decide whether to “exempt themselves” from Daylight Saving Time, according to the article.” That is 100% INCORRECT. States can ALREADY exempt themselves from Alternating Daylight Saving Time and stay on permanent Standard Time. And only two do (Arizona and Hawaii). What they cannot do is opt for permanent (year-round) Saving Time, which the bill seeks to allow. And that would be a very good thing to have. Then States can decide which of the three time schemes works best for them.

What we would probably find is that States will mostly decide based on neighboring States and we will see “clumps” of areas on one scheme or another. Latitude will probably be the most determining factor, with more northern ones leaning towards Alternating Daylight Saving Time (current scheme) and more southern ones leaning towards permanent Saving Time. The two that are on permanent Standard Time will probably remain on it and no other State change to that. Would probably take several years for things to sort out after trials and such.

Re:No.

By msauve • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Light in the morning is just as usable as light in the evening. Get your lazy ass out of bed.

AMD (Xilinx) is Excluding Linux From the Free Tier For Its FPGA Dev Tool

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Long-time Slashdot reader Sun writes:
AMD has announced a change to the way they are licensing Vivado, their FPGA development tool… Hidden between the lines of the announcement [of a new model starting with the 2026.1 release] is the change to the free of charge tier. AMD is adding more devices to be supported in this tier, which is supposedly the carrot. The stick, however, is the removal of certain debug features.

The thing that’s likely to hit the hobbist community the worst, however, is that the free tier will now not be available on Linux.

AMD are saying that old licenses are still in effect, so it appears that if you hurry to install Vivado now, you’d still be able to use it moving forward. It is not clear, however, whether it’ll still be possible to install Vivado 2025.2 after Vivado 2026.1 becomes available.
“Almost all our surveys show… close to 70% of the customers are still using Windows,” explained AMD senior product application engineer Anatoli Curran on the tool’s support forum. “Vivado ML Standard Edition v2025.2 is going to be officially supported (I mean if there are any bugs found, these can be fixed) until v2026.3 release… Any release older than the current 3 released versions of Vivado then becomes unsupported (meaning no bugs will be fixed with Vivado Standard Edition v2025.2 after Vivado v2026.3).

“However, users can continue using V2025.2 forever, if they wish to do so… Also, Vivado ML Standard Edition v2025.2 is license-free… Users only need to obtain and use any IP Core related licenses, or Vivado Model Composer (for SysGen).”

US Layoffs Haven’t Increased, and New Tech Industry Hiring Balances Firings

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“The numbers show that layoffs in the U.S. are roughly at or below levels from before the pandemic,” reports the Washington Post, “although they are higher than in 2022 when businesses snapped up workers as the economy roared back to life…

“A different measure that accounts for the growing U.S. workforce shows that layoffs affected about 1.2% of employed people in March, a number that has been steady for years outside of the pandemic…”
In the technology industry, where Meta and other companies are regularly announcing job cuts, the layoff picture is complex. There has been a marked increase in layoffs in recent months in what the Labor Department calls the information industry, which includes employment of software developers and other tech workers. But Matthew Martin, senior U.S. economist at the research and consulting firm Oxford Economics, noted that hiring has also increased in that category, which includes media and entertainment. The combination of hiring minus layoffs in the information industry is effectively a wash, Martin said. Layoffs at Big Tech companies like Meta and other high-profile employers don’t necessarily reflect what is happening in the country, Martin said, and draw far more attention than what may be slow and steady workforce growth. “There’s a lot more headlines about job cuts than there are [about] expansion plans by businesses,” he said.

In his view, technology companies may be pushing out some workers and replacing them with people who have different skills as they respond to the demands of AI. It’s true that businesses in some industries are devoting enormous sums of money and attention to AI. It’s changing how some people work and a minority of American businesses are rolling out AI tools. But it’s also become a trend for bosses to blame layoffs on the productive capabilities of AI and its ability to replace workers, even when job cuts may have little to do with the technology. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has taken note of the pattern that he and others call “AI washing,” essentially a high-tech form of whitewashing… “You know something is happening all the time when they have a word for it,” said Gautam Mukunda, who teaches leadership at the Yale School of Management…

AI-related employment changes are tiny so far, said Nathan Goldschlag, director of research at the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank. He pointed to a recently published analysis of Census Bureau surveys, which found more than 95 percent of businesses that use AI said it hasn’t changed their staff sizes — and AI-related employment increases were more common than decreases.

Real Question

By Princeofcups • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

As what salary? I have a tire repair place really close, and it’s all 20 something kids WITH DEGREES, working for $12/hr.

Jay Powell from the article

By gtall • Score: 5, Informative Thread

“What economists call a “low-hire, low-fire” job market is rough for job seekers, acknowledged Jerome H. Powell, who is set to depart as chair of the Federal Reserve.

“The labor market is in balance,” Powell said at a news conference last month. “But it’s an unusual and uncomfortable kind of a balance where people who don’t have jobs will have a hard time breaking in.”"

The job market for tech, reading the rest of the article, is just flat. That’s the problem as Powell alludes to. It means that youngins cannot easily break in, and if you lose a job, you’ll have trouble finding another. The economy is mainly picking up jobs in healthcare.

Layoffs and rehirings force workers

By TheStatsMan • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

to do the same job for less money.

It’s about cutting wages, period.

“The labor market is in balance” Powell said

By JoeyRox • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
This is the same guy who repeatedly claimed that the runaway inflation in 2021 was “transitory”, when it was obvious to anyone with a brain that it wasn’t. Everyone with a brain turned out to be right.

Re:“The labor market is in balance” Powell said

By martin-boundary • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
Seems to me like “everyone with a brain” turned out to be wrong in the choices they made since then.

Air France, Airbus Guilty of Corporate Manslaughter In 2009 Air France 447 Crash

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Long-time Slashdot reader UnknowingFool shares this report from the BBC:
Air France and Airbus have been found guilty of manslaughter over a 2009 plane crash which killed 228 people. The Paris Appeals Court found the airline and aircraft manufacturer “solely and entirely responsible” for the incident, in which flight AF447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. The passenger jet stalled during a storm and plunged into the water, killing all on board. A court had previously cleared the companies in April 2023, but they were found guilty on Thursday after an eight-week trial.

Both have repeatedly denied the charges and say they will appeal… The companies have been asked to pay the maximum fine — €225,000 ($261,720; £194,500) each — but some victims’ families have criticised the amount as a token penalty…

In 2012, French investigators found a combination of technical failure involving ice in the plane’s sensors and the pilots’ inability to react to the aircraft stalling led to it plunging into the sea. The captain was on a break when the co-pilots became confused by faulty air-speed readings. They then mistakenly pointed the nose of the plane upwards when it stalled, instead of down. Investigators concluded the co-pilots did not have the training to deal with the situation. Pilot training has since been improved and the speed sensors replaced.

Re:What was the argument against Airbus?

By trelanexiph • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Airbus has a flight laws system. That flight laws system which would have told the pilot they were in a stall failed because of ice accumulation during a thunderstorm.

The pilot didn’t know they were in the stall because the otherwise highly redundant system which should have warned him didn’t work. Given what he could see, the aircraft was losing altitude, so he firewalled the throttles and pointed the nose up. If you don’t know your wings aren’t generating lift anymore, this isn’t an unreasonable reaction.

The captain re-entered the cockpit seconds before they hit the water and figured it out, but it was too late.

Re:Pathetic fines

By test321 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Their problem isn’t the legal cost (peanuts for them) and precedents are not very influential in Roman law systems. Their problem here is their corporate image. They’re a reputable company in a highly regulated market and now they’re guilty of manslaughter, and that’s a *bad* thing. Like someone who wants to run for office and convicted of fraud or embezzlement.

Technically they’re not appealing, they’re escalating to a supreme level, which will analyse only matters of law (and not facts). The high court might decide the law was not properly applied, or some procedure was not followed, an cass (annul) the sentencing, ordering a new trial.

Re:What was the argument against Airbus?

By test321 • Score: 4, Informative Thread

I understood it differently https://bea.aero/en/investigat…

You say the stall was not identified, but the synthetic voice says “stall”, I counted, 75 times between 2:10:10.4 and 2:14:21.5 (then it says “pull up” 4 time in 7 seconds before end of recording). You say the captain entered seconds before the crash, but he actually was back at 2:11:42.5, that’s 2 minutes 45 seconds before crash.

According to CVR, FDR, graph of parameters, all documented in the link above:

At 2:10:03, autopilot disengages due to unreliable speed reading. At 2:10:07, one of the co-pilots puts the plane to climb. It was not discussed or voluntary, it could have been a stress reaction. Later as the plane lost altitude, the co-pilot indeed kept the plane to climb (erroneously, thinking it would help). Several “dual input” warning can be heard (six times), as the captain tries to level the plane, or even tries to get it go down (to recover speed and stop being stall), but the co-pilot stubbornly (out of stress) keeps the stick to climb, even when the captain gives clear order don’t climb.

Excerpt:
2 h 12 min 59,6 SV : dual input
2 h 13 min 22,9 SV : dual input
2 h 13 min 39,7 Climb climb climb climb
2 h 13 min 40,6 But I’ve been at maxi nose-up for a while SV : dual input
2 h 13 min 42,7 (CAPTAIN) no no no don’t climb
2 h 13 min 43,5 so go down SV : dual input

Free Software Foundation’s Call for ‘LibreLocals’ Answered on Six Continents - With More Coming

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
The Free Software Foundation announced this week that “its global call for free software supporters to organize LibreLocals this May resulted in free software supporters organizing forty-six LibreLocal events on six continents thus far.” (And new dates and locations are being added daily.)
The FSF invited free software supporters to organize in-person community meetups in their area during May 2026, or LibreLocal month, to bring people together to swap ideas, learn from each other, and celebrate free software. People were encouraged to organize events grounded in freedom to help spread the free software philosophy.... “The success of these LibreLocals speaks to how many people globally are interested in free software and ready to build community, and it demonstrates the strength of our movement” [said FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman]. “People getting together like this also proves how computer freedom and digital rights are on people’s minds. When we reject freedom-restricting software and promote software that respects user rights, it helps further so many other basic rights....”

The FSF has financially supported some of the events, but notes organizers are going above and beyond to create noteworthy events by any measure, and is impressed with the global network taking shape. “The energy we feel from all organizers is extremely motivating and we look forward to seeing LibreLocal events spread even wider over the next years! We want to support these initiatives even more, so we’ll be looking to build a network of sponsors for future iterations as we work towards May 2027,” says Heshan de Silva-Weeramuni, FSF program manager… William Goodspeed, the organizer behind the Beijing LibreLocal, reported that their meetup was double the size of last year’s, and a number of very rich collaborative projects have emerged among the attendees.

Discussing the value of connecting people, de Silva-Weeramuni notes: “Free software supporters know that connecting with each other leads them to learn, experiment, and create great things that protect our individual and shared rights. The extraordinary contributions that free software has made to the world were born through such collaborations between like-minded people towards a freer society. This same global spirit of collectively building a better future is one of the inspiring things that we have once again seen unfold through this year’s many LibreLocals.”

That’s cool

By GameboyRMH • Score: 3 Thread

I might’ve gone to one but it seems they’re all in the past now. Maybe I’ll remember to check next year.

Friday Google’s AI-Powered Search Results Glitched on the Word ‘Disregard’

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
On Friday TechCrunch reported they could no longer Google the word “disregard”.

Google’s AI Overview responded “Understood. Let me know whenever you have a new prompt or question!” below an icon for hearing the word “disregard” pronounced — then displayed several inches of blank whitespace.

“The Merriam-Webster link is still in there, but you have to scroll…”
Earlier this week, Google rolled out a completely new Search experience, foregrounding AI summaries and kicking the traditional “10 blue links” far down the page. But the sheer scale of Google Search means there are lots of edge cases that the company doesn’t seem to have considered…

Google has been catching some flack on social media for this, and it’s easy to see why… For most users, that single reply is the only thing you’ll see. And crucially, the AI response serves no conceivable value to a user searching the word “disregard.” It’s just a broken tool.
Google appears to have fixed the issue — sort of.

Now Googling the word “disregard" brings up a list of news stories about how Google’s AI Overviews misinterpreted the word disregard in search queries.

Kinda like …

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 3 Thread

Google appears to have fixed the issue — sort of.
Now Googling the word “disregard” brings up a list of news stories about how Google’s AI Overviews misinterpreted the word disregard in search queries.

A self-inflicted Streisand Effect”. Good going Google. :-)

Researchers Say the Worst Climate Future is Less Likely. But the Best One is Also Slipping Away

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Citing new research, the Associated Press reports that “modest gains in the fight to curb climate change have dialed back the most catastrophic of future heating.”

That’s the good news. But the same research “also confirmed that there’s no chance to limit warming to the international goal set in 2015.”
Researchers’ new list of seven plausible carbon pollution scenarios for the future are pushing aside two staples of climate policy: the extremes on either end. The extremes have become less probable in the past several years because of how we power our world. Carbon dioxide, released from the burning of gas, oil and coal, is chiefly responsible for warming. Increasing use of green energies, like solar, wind and geothermal, which don’t emit carbon dioxide, have lowered top end carbon pollution projections. However, because those changes haven’t been fast enough, the bottom end projections have risen.

The Paris climate agreement in 2015 set a goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times, or the mid-1800s, giving rise to the mantra "1.5 to stay alive,” but now scientists say that even their best case scenario still shoots past that signature temperature mark. On the other end, those same new scenarios no longer include the coal-heavy future that would lead to 4.5 degrees Celsius (8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, a scary scenario that many scientific studies used in their future projections.

The new proposed worst case scenario has an end-of-the-century warming of about 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit), a full degree (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) less than the old scenario, while the updated best case future is a couple tenths of a degree Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than previously theorized, squeezing past the Paris goal, said climate scientist Detlef Van Vuuren of Utrecht University, lead author of a recent study laying out future scenarios. “There is kind of a narrowing of the futures. It cannot be as bad as we thought, but it cannot be as good as we hoped,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

The scenarios include a “middle” one where by the end of the century the world warms 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, which is roughly the path society is currently on, scientists said… Because carbon pollution keeps rising globally and stays in the atmosphere for about century, the best case scenario is for warming to shoot past the 1.5 degree mark, peak at 1.7 degrees Celsius (3.1 degrees Fahrenheit) for maybe as long as 70 years, and eventually somehow come back down below 1.5 degrees if a technology can be designed to remove massive amounts of carbon from the air, said nine of the 10 scientists interviewed for this article. The world is warming at a pace of a tenth of a degree Celsius (nearly 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit) every five years, they said.

Re: The climate grift

By LindleyF • Score: 5, Informative Thread
I found a 2015 article linking Miami, sea level rise, and the year 2025. That one isn’t saying that it will be underwater by 2025, only that the climate trajectory is such that its eventual fate will be sealed by 2025 if changes aren’t made, because climate doesn’t turn on a dime. I don’t know if that’s the one you’re referring to, of course. But I’m sure whatever it is was making the best prediction it could given the data.

As expected

By Local ID10T • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

The “worst case scenario” was never likely. Neither was the “best case scenario” likely.

It was always going to be somewhere in the middle.

Life is gonna suck for a whole lot of the world. Humanity will survive. Life will go on. We can still choose just how bad we are going to make it. How many of us survive. How we live. How many other species survive. How many don’t.

Re: The climate grift

By jd • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Climate latency is around 40 years, so if 2025 is when the climate trajectory passed the point of no return, then the actual prediction is that Miami will be in serious trouble by 2065 and that no viable path to Miami recovering will exist, that CO2 won’t drop to levels that permit such a recovery within the remaining lifespan of any part of Miami.

Re: The climate grift

By LindleyF • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
There is a certain mindset that says, if the thing everyone is warning about hasn’t happened yet, then it must not be a real problem. That’s human nature; it’s the same reason people ignore car alarms. But it’s flawed.

What we should be doing is recognizing that if the predictions keep pointing the same direction, there’s something they’re all pointing at. Improving data may change how well we can tell how far away the thing is, and how large it is. But that there is a thing in that direction we should be concerned about is not changing.

It could still be that bad

By SoftwareArtist • Score: 4 Thread

The article includes a major qualification that was omitted from the Slashdot summary:

While the upward curve of emissions is flattening, there’s a factor that could still make the older high end temperature estimates come true, Mahowald, Rockstrom and Hare said. That’s because the newest batch of scenarios only look at emissions from the burning of fossil fuels, which is the control knob that humans can turn.

Nature has another knob of its own referred to as climate feedbacks, which humans don’t control. Scientists have had a hard time projecting climate feedbacks, and that can add another half a degree Celsius (nearly a degree Fahrenheit) of warming on top of what’s caused by emissions.

Those feedbacks include release of massive amounts of heat-trapping carbon now being stored in the world’s oceans, in forested areas and in the Amazon, along with changes to ocean currents and cloud reflectivity, Rockstrom said.

The thing they’ve ruled out is the high end estimate of how much CO2 humans will emit, not how much the planet will warm. The rate of warming has accelerated in recent years, not because of how much we’re emitting but because natural feedbacks are starting to amplify it. There’s growing evidence that the old warming estimates were too low, and each emissions scenario will produce more warming than we previously thought it would.

Linux Kernel Flaw Lets Unprivileged Users Access Root-Only Files, Execute Arbitrary Commands as Root

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Qualys’s Threat Research Unit (TRU) has discovered and published a logic flaw in Linux kernel “that permits an unprivileged local user to disclose sensitive files and execute arbitrary commands as root on default installations of several major distributions.” Friday their blog pointed out “The bug has resided in mainline Linux since November 2016 (v4.10-rc1).”

“Upstream patches and distribution updates are already available.”
Working exploits are circulating publicly, and administrators should apply vendor kernel updates without delay. During ongoing research into Linux kernel privilege boundaries, TRU identified a narrow window in which a privileged process that is dropping its credentials remains reachable through ptrace-family operations even though its dumpable flag should have closed that path. By pairing this window with the pidfd_getfd() syscall (added in v5.6-rc1, January 2020), an attacker can capture open file descriptors and authenticated inter-process channels from a dying privileged process and re-use them under their own uid. The primitive is reliable and turns any local shell into a path to root or to sensitive credential material [including host private keys under /etc/ssh ]

CVE-2026-46333 is local-only, but the impact is severe… Any unprivileged shell on a vulnerable host is enough to read /etc/shadow, exfiltrate SSH host private keys, or execute arbitrary commands as root through hijacked dbus connections to systemd. In practice, the distinction between an unprivileged foothold and full host compromise collapses: a phished developer account, a constrained CI runner, a low-privilege service account, or a shared multi-tenant host all become direct paths to root. With the vulnerable code shipping in mainline kernels since v4.10-rc1 (November 2016), the historical exposure spans nine years of enterprise fleets, cloud images, and container hosts.

Qualys followed responsible disclosure throughout. Qualys reported the vulnerability privately to the upstream Linux kernel security contact on 2026-05-11. Over the following three days the kernel security team developed and reviewed the fix, CVE-2026-46333 was assigned, and the patch was committed publicly on 2026-05-14. We then engaged the linux-distros mailing list, the standard pre-disclosure channel for downstream coordination. A short time later, an independent exploit derived from the public kernel commit appeared.... Qualys is releasing the complete advisory today because the underlying technique is novel, the public picture is now incomplete and uneven, and independent researchers have already achieved local root and published exploit material. Doing so gives defenders, detection engineers, and downstream maintainers a single authoritative reference for the flaw, the race against do_exit(), the role of pidfd_getfd(), and the four exploitation case studies.

given enough eyeballs…

By dfghjk • Score: 3 Thread

…all bugs are shallow. Enough eyeballs and 10 years apparently. Open source proving its worth once again.

How many governments are internally pissed

By hwstar • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

that their 0-days are being found and patched?

Re:given enough eyeballs…

By AmiMoJo • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Seems to be more a case of enough AI tokens and the source code, and all bugs become shallow.

Presumably Microsoft has Copilot doing the same for Windows, and Apple has some AI working on MacOS and iOS, and we know Google has been using Gemini AI for Android.

They just quietly fix stuff before it becomes public knowledge, but Linux is open source so can’t really do that.

Re: âoeLocal onlyâ isn’t the p

By hcs_$reboot • Score: 4, Funny Thread

/. has no active developers and will just keep rolling with their 25 year old Perl scripts as long as they work.

At this point the Perl scripts are maintained by archaeology students.

Tech CEOs Call for a Universal Basic Income. But What are the Alternatives?

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot
The Washington Post looks at arguments that “AI’s coming upheaval may demand massive infusions of cash to everyday Americans”. But they also look at some of the alternatives:
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called for similar public-relief measures, including, potentially, universal basic income, or UBI. Eventually “our current economic setup will no longer make sense,” he wrote in a blog post, adding that “there will be a need for a broader societal conversation about how the economy should be organized.”

Though OpenAI CEO Sam Altman once championed universal basic income, he has since embraced a new structure where the public has “collective ownership” of aspects of AI, according to Business Insider. “I think any version of the future that I can get really excited about means that everybody’s got to participate in the upside,” he said in a recent podcast interview. In April, OpenAI laid out a set of policy proposals aiming to address the coming upheaval, referencing the transition to the industrial age and the New Deal as points of comparison for what’s on the horizon…

But some experts question whether tech billionaires, who spent decades resisting regulation, unions and higher taxes, would support the kind of massive redistribution such programs would require. “The only way to pay for UBI is to massively tax those enormously rich people who own the UBI machines,” said Jesse Rothstein, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of California at Berkeley who served as chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor. “It’s a nice surprise to hear Elon Musk advocating for that....” Rothstein co-authored a study in 2019 that estimated granting a small income to the entire country would cost a massive amount — nearly double the total spending of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. To issue payments of $12,000 a year to U.S. adults, for example, “would require nearly doubling federal tax revenues,” according to the paper…

Economists appear to broadly support other solutions beyond redistribution, such as job retraining. A working paper published this spring by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago showed economists support more narrowly tailored solutions to the economic disruption. In late April, Meta appeared to embrace that path, announcing “a multi-year initiative that provides free, rapid training to turn thousands of Americans with no prior experience into high-paid fiber technicians” for projects including data centers.
Key quotes from the article:

Re:Economic Crash

By thegarbz • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The entire economy is currently in a crashed state.

Errr no, quite the opposite. It is in a bubble pre-crashed. Tell me did you line up for food stamps yesterday? Economic crashes come with wide spread hardships. Yeah fuel prices are high, but beyond that we haven’t experienced a crash yet. Aside from a few tech job losses, unemployment is fine, purchasing power is down, but it’s only moved a small portion of the population into poverty.

You clearly haven’t seen a proper economic crash yet if you think you’re in one right now. *checks S&P500* Yep everyone’s 401K is still riding high.

Re: It’s a scary future

By OrangeTide • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Extreme wealth transfers to immortal corporate entities frequently enough. 100 years from now there will still be a Meta and Alphabet. Or a company that acquired them both.

Re:Great idea

By ClickOnThis • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Give free money for people to sit around and smoke pot all day.

If there are no jobs because AI took them, what do you propose they do instead?

Re: Great idea

By sziring • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Because they “worked” for their pay. Aka backpay for their part in being part of a crime.

First they’ll take away the vote

By hwstar • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Then they’ll introduce autocracy.
Then they’ll offer free euthanasia.
Then they’ll offer money to die with dignity.
Then they’ll return to draconian (The real kind) law, where every infraction, misdemeanor, or felony is punishable by death (See Larry Niven’s Sci-fi stories for an example of this.)
Then they’ll eliminate retirement income and heath care subsidies. This will force most retirees to choose either crime (Punishable by death) or Euthanasia.
Then they’ll euthanize anybody who is not productive.

In the end, the population could shrink to 1/10000 of what it is now (800 million).

There is no way UBI will ever be supported. The core people in power will never let it happen. The reasoning is: Why feed people who don’t contribute to the interests of the corporations or government.