Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. OpenAI Models Are Now On All Three Major US Cloud Platforms
  2. Government Websites Go Dark After Severe PHP Vulnerabilities Disclosed
  3. PHP Warns It Plans To Release 2 Emergency Patches Imminently
  4. Tesla-SpaceX Merger Being Considered
  5. Russian Satellite’s Close Shadowing of Radar Imaging Satellite Is a Big Deal
  6. Judge Orders Meta To Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna’s Archive, Libgen
  7. Ukraine Claims World’s First Drone Evacuation of Wounded Soldier
  8. Sony Updates the Walkman As a $5,900 Gold-Plated MP3 Player
  9. AMD Is Bringing FSR 4.1 to Xbox Consoles and Handhelds
  10. Google Support Pages Start Defaulting to AI Chatbots
  11. DHS Lied About Why It Wanted To Search Activist’s GrapheneOS Phone
  12. OpenBSD 8.0 Released
  13. Meta Muse Exposes Users’ Personal, Business Secrets When They Share Conversations
  14. US Bans DeepSeek From Government Use
  15. Nscale, Anthropic In Talks For New $45 Billion AI Cloud Deal

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.

OpenAI Models Are Now On All Three Major US Cloud Platforms

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
OpenAI is bringing its models to Google Cloud’s model garden and Antigravity coding tool, putting its technology on all three major U.S. cloud platforms after Microsoft’s exclusive license ended earlier this year. “Google Cloud’s longstanding investment in machine learning and AI has made it a destination for AI workloads and the developers and data scientists building them,” OpenAI said in a blog post. It continues:
[…] The integration will pair OpenAI’s frontier models with Google Cloud’s built-in access controls, centralized data governance, and high-performance infrastructure to support demanding enterprise workloads.

Google Cloud customers will be able to purchase OpenAI frontier models via model garden, transacted through the Google Cloud Marketplace. Enterprises with Google Cloud spend commitments will be able to draw down their GCP commitments for these purchases.

Additionally, OpenAI models will soon be available in Google Antigravity and the Gemini Agent, providing enterprise customers with model choice flexibility and the best model for each task. […]
For context, Microsoft previously held exclusive licensing rights to OpenAI’s intellectual property, but that arrangement ended less than six months ago as OpenAI began expanding its partnerships with other cloud providers.

Just one day after Microsoft’s exclusivity ended, Amazon announced plans to host OpenAI’s models on its cloud platform in April.

Government Websites Go Dark After Severe PHP Vulnerabilities Disclosed

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
“PHP disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in their programming language and urged web site operators to immediately apply the fix,” writes longtime Slashdot reader smooth wombat. “As a result, government web sites in Europe and elsewhere temporarily went dark on Wednesday as operators worked to protect their systems.” The Independent reports:
Dane Knecht, the chief technology officer of Web and cloud security firm Cloudflare, said that attacks were emerging and Cloudflare was updating its firewall rules as a stopgap measure. “We are seeing early attacks emerging and are updating mitigations as new vectors show up. This is a STOPGAP only. Patch as soon as PHP releases the update,” he said on X.

Officials have said that all PHP versions from PHP 5 onward could be affected, although PHP has not yet disclosed which versions are vulnerable.
Special thanks to Slashdot readers Alain Williams and mrspoonsi for sharing this critical PHP security release.

For more details, read the official PHP announcement and guidance on what to do next.

Get Well Soon

By TheSpinningBrain • • Score: 3, Funny • Thread
I hope that this gets patched soon so that I can continue browsing my favorite government websites.

For more details....

By SoCalChris • • Score: 3 • Thread

Read the prior story that was posted to the front page just prior to this one.

Good jorb, editors. In a crazy world like we’re living in now, it’s reassuring to know that some things like slashdot editors not reading the site will never change.

According to the notes, it isn’t in the wild

By Creepy • • Score: 3 • Thread

The patch notes say both vulnerabilities will be fixed on Oct 26 unless it’s seen in the wild before that.

I’ve had trust issues with PHP using software since one piece I installed wanted to run web files root. Just no. Web server files are owned by the web user and can’t touch anything else on the Raspberry Pi it runs on. That is not PHP though, just developers that don’t think of security first using PHP.

Before your code even runs

By CustomBuild • • Score: 3 • Thread

The detail that jumps out in PHP’s advisory is that the demonstrated mod_php exploit can trigger before any application code runs. Your application’s login screen and carefully written input validation never get a vote. Under those circumstances, a PHP-generated “down for maintenance” page could still leave you exposed. Taking a site offline while sorting that out seems entirely reasonable. An outage is visible and embarrassing, which makes it easy to criticize. A compromised server might keep serving perfectly normal pages while somebody helps themselves to the data. The fixed releases are now available. What I’d want to hear afterward is how quickly each organization could identify its PHP installations and get the fixes deployed. If answering “where do we run this?” requires an emergency meeting and somebody’s old spreadsheet, there’s another problem waiting for the next advisory.

PHP Warns It Plans To Release 2 Emergency Patches Imminently

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
Website admins, brace yourselves. Fixes for what are believed to be uncommonly severe vulnerabilities are scheduled to drop in a little more than 12 hours for PHP, a programming language that powers websites and Web applications everywhere. PHP maintainers said Monday that they planned to release patches for two vulnerabilities, both with severity ratings of 9.2 out of a possible 10.

“All PHP users are encouraged to prepare now so they can upgrade as soon as the release is available,” the advisory stated. “We reserve the right to release earlier should details of either vulnerability become public, or should evidence of active exploitation appear in the wild.” The maintainers published the advisory following the leaking of purported details, which have yet to be confirmed. The report showed a video of an exploit tool dubbed PHP2Shell executing code on webservers running WordPress 7.1.3, MediaWiki 1.46.2, phpBB 3.3.17, Magento 2.4.9, Joomla 6.2.0, Laravel 13.36.0, Laravel 8.83.29, Symphony 8.1.9, Drupal 11.4.10, and WHMCS 9.0.9, all of which use PHP. A video depicting the tool has been reposted here.

Attempts to locate the unconfirmed report were unsuccessful, but security firm watchTowr said it claimed to affect every PHP version from PHP 5, released in 2004, onward. The security firm went on to say it has confirmed that the vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619, are real. Researchers from separate security firm Sansec said they “expect mass attacks to start within 15 minutes of the release.” A third security firm, Webfence, also urged admins to prepare now. Huntress has also issued an advisory.

Notice link

By The-Ixian • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

https://www.php.net/index.php#…

My Surprise

By SlashbotAgent • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

Despite its flaws, vulnerabilities, and haters I think that PHP is a good or admirable language for web servers.

But in this day of node and Javascript, and with AI’s penchant for Typescript and React, I’m surprised that PHP is still heavily used.

Re:A better patch:

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

Perl it is then!

Re:My Surprise

By Zarjazz • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

PHP has an exceptionally low level of entry for newbie developers, and combine that with a huge legacy install base — all those apps listed in the article are at least a decade old — that means it’ll be around for some time yet.

WordPress, still and always.

By jddj • • Score: 3 • Thread

“A remote root shell with a cool blogging feature!” …recalls this WordPress user.

Tesla-SpaceX Merger Being Considered

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Elon Musk says a merger between Tesla and SpaceX is under active consideration, with special committees at both companies evaluating a deal that could combine businesses valued at roughly $3.5 trillion. “Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes,” Musk said during a call with financial analysts over the quarterly business results of SpaceX on Tuesday. The BBC reports:
While Musk noted the certainty of such a merger should not be assumed, and it would need shareholders’ support, he said special committees within both companies have been formed to examine the move. “The special committees have not reached agreement on terms of any transaction and there’s no guarantee that they will,” Musk added. “But I do think there is a lot of merit to merging and a lot to be gained.”

[…] The company, which builds space rockets and Starlink internet satellites, is now expanding into offering cloud compute capacity for other tech companies, like Anthropic and Google. That line of business has become the most profitable part of SpaceX, bringing in $7.5bn according to the latest quarterly results (PDF). Starlink also tallied revenue of $5.2bn. SpaceX as a whole, however, is not profitable and has lost $1.1bn so far this year.

[…] Musk said on Tuesday a full merger between the two companies would make sense for the work each is doing around chips, artificial intelligence, software and more. He described himself as a “conflicted party” as the chief executive of Tesla and of SpaceX. Even commenting on the possibility of a merger between the two companies, Musk compared to “tap dancing through a minefield.” He added a merger would ultimately be decided by shareholders. At least 50% of Tesla’s shareholders would need to approve the merger, which Musk described as “quite a high hurdle to achieve.”

“Fun” fact

By Rei • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Because SpaceX acquiring Tesla would count as “a change in control”, and in a change of control, the operational goals of Musk’s stock compensation package (which he just passed, knowing that the acquisition was possible) - things like 20 million vehicles, 1 million Optimus robots, or 1 million robotaxis in commercial operation - get dropped. Only the $TSLA market cap requirement - just over $500/share - is required for him to get his first tranche. And he can basically force whatever offer he wants to be made for $TSLA to ensure he gets it.

Synergy

By sosume • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

The proposed company would build cars and rockets, operate cabs, build and maintain data centers, offer AI subscriptions, internet subscriptions, sell batteries, and operate a social media platform. Such synergy must bring amazing opportunities for cost reductions all across the company.

Re:Synergy

By Rei • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

That’s what’s so absurd about it all. In general, the market has trended toward splitting up conglomerates. If you’re GE and you make both jet engines and electrical equipment, the people who want to invest in jet engines would rather a pure jet engine play, and the people who want to invest in electrical equipment would rather a pure electrical equipment play.

This is all about one person’s wants and needs, and that person is Elon Musk.

Said it at the spcx IPO

By stabiesoft • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
that this is going to happen. It has zero to do with anything except musk has 10X voting shares in spacex that means it does what he says. Period. There is zero investor input at spacex. zip, nada. He was royally pissed when those pesky investors sued him over his pay package at tesla. So with a simple stroke, he will control both spacex/tesla with an iron clench. There will be zero investor input at the combined co. zip, nada. Most will likely be fine with it. A few adult funds will walk because of the control issues. Some funds think when they invest money in a co, they get a valid vote. Musk does not agree with that theory.

Re: “Fun” fact

By Rei • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

Falcon 9 did not launch first in 2018; its first launch was in early 2010.

The mistake you seem to be making is your assumption that Falcon 9-lookaline development would begin tomorrow and be bulk launching payloads to orbit just a couple years later. Development takes far longer than that. From conception to first launch may only be a few years, but from there to actually being reliable, cheap, and rapidly reusable takes many, many years. Anyway, here’s the playing field:

Tianlong-3: Started in 2022. Almost a direct 1:1 copy. Failed launch this spring; they’re redesigning.
Zhuque-3: Started in 2023. Stainless steel and methalox, and a bit wider than Falcon 9, but otherwise a very Falcon 9-like design. First orbital launch and booster landing in August of this year.
Terran R: Started in 2021, pivot in 2023. Larger diameter, 13 engine cluster. Integration/testing phase, no launch attempts yet.
Pallas-1: Started in 2018-2019. Sort of a mini-F9. Flew to orbit for the first time in September of this year.
Nebula-1: Started in 2019-2020. Another mini-F9. Doing small hop tests, of mixed results.

(Amur-SPG isn’t worth taking seriously ;) )

There IS work on Starship clones/competitors - Long March 9, Cosmoleap, Xingzhou-1 , Astronstone, Project Jarvis , Nova - but they’re varying degrees of long timelines, less ambitious, paper-concept-for-now, etc. Long March 9 is the most likely to be fully realized, since it’s run by the state-owned CALT, but they’re not even expecting to start their first test launches until the early 2030s. And we’ve seen how hard test launches can be on a Starship-style vehicle (though at least others can make use of lessons-learned). But who knows, some of the startups may succeed with accelerated timelines.

Russian Satellite’s Close Shadowing of Radar Imaging Satellite Is a Big Deal

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from TWZ:
A Russian satellite, Kosmos 2612, may have passed within approximately 85 feet (26 meters) of a U.S.-registered satellite belonging to commercial imagery provider ICEYE. This would be an extraordinarily close and potentially dangerous pass-by for two objects in space traveling at thousands of miles per hour. For weeks beforehand, ICEYE-X36, which would be of special interest to Russia, had already found itself in increasingly close orbital alignment with its pursuer. The two satellites now look to be drifting further and further apart, but the episode has been a clear sign of what is to come as the potential for conflict in space only continues to grow.

Publicly available space tracking data from the satellitemap.space and orbitalradar.com websites show that Kosmos 2612 (also written sometimes Cosmos 2612 and abbreviated K2612) and ICEYE X36 had their especially close encounter at approximately 16:07 UTC today. Private space services company LeoLabs also told TWZ today that it could not “confirm or contradict what other data sources have stated publicly,” but that it has “high-confidence that the objects came within approximately [emphasis in the original] 500 meters [1,640 feet] of each other.” Kosmos 2612 had been making progressively closer passes by ICEYE X36 in recent days.
“This is the most advanced and potentially dangerous uncooperative RPO we’ve observed,” Adam Marsh, LeoLabs vice president for technical solutions, separately told Breaking Defense.

“It’s important to note that ‘red’ on ‘blue’ engagements, such as this, are relatively uncommon in Low Earth Orbit (LEO),” LeoLabs’ report points out. At the same time, “this was not a routine conjunction or ‘fly by.’ The sequence included a controlled approach, changes in relative position, close-proximity loitering, additional small maneuvers, and a controlled departure. The behavior is consistent with sophisticated rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO).”

“We can only speculate about the operation’s goal, but it could have been anything from simply intimidation to outright destruction or sabotage of a U.S.-registered satellite,” CSIS’ Clayton Swope told TWZ. “Perhaps the operation is on hold. There are, however, several other satellites that shadowed ICEYE X36 back in May that could be brought in[to] action too.”

Costly big deal

By Canberra1 • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
Satellites have limited thruster reserves. It would have been severely costly for the Russians to waste propellant just for photos. No doubt it was catching RF spectrum samples and link protocols so this is never necessary again.

It is completely not a problem

By Required Snark • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
Now that Trump and Putin are on the same side and call each other Comrade, not only will Russia have access to all the data and design specs, Trump will be building one these and just gift it to Putin. They’ll co-own a new company that builds the next generation spy satellite, then they’ll both steal all the funding for themselves. If they ever launch something it will be a cheap useless piece of crap that will orbit and do nothing.

PROBLEM SOLVED!!

Re: Russia are the baddies you tool

By RobinH • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
That’s a pretty non-nuanced view of history. The reason that we had so much explosive growth in the west since the end of WW2 was because the US setup a system of international alliances and a rules-based world order with the goal of containing Russia and China. The sheer number of people who were lifted out of poverty over the last century specifically because of that is mind-boggling. But of course the game is still the game, and countries are still maneuvering to gain the best position, and that includes the US. No, the US is not a saint, but we can’t forget that their actions during and after WW2 definitely made them and their allies the “good guys”, at least until the end of the cold war, and I would argue even through the first gulf war, where the US military actually stopped the invasion of Iraq specifically because they didn’t want to exceed the UN mandate. The thing is, we got used to it. We believed it was the new normal. Fukayama wrote a book called The End of History, and people believed it. He was wrong. But the reason he was proven wrong was specifically because Russia and China refused to see the obvious benefit of a rules-based world order, and refused to get their house in order. Russia’s government is essentially run like the mafia, and China manipulates its currency, corrupted the WHO, and both of them installed a dictator for life. And when the American people became disillusioned, they elected their own leader in the image of Putin and Xi. That’s how we got where we are now. I’m over-simplifying, for sure, but “US bad too” has never been an adequate explanation.

Re:It is completely not a problem

By drinkypoo • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

This looks like it’s the same bot as drnb.

Bending over for Russia only gets you raped. Which is a thing cowards love.

It’s not pedantry if it’s science

By Princeofcups • • Score: 3 • Thread

Who else cringed by the statement “This would be an extraordinarily close and potentially dangerous pass-by for two objects in space traveling at thousands of miles per hour.” ?

It does not matter how fact they are traveling. All that matters is the relative speed. There are no speed bumps, trucks, or rain to worry about. Why am I even bothering? I guess these are the same people who think that the vacuum of space will freeze you, or cause you to explode.

Judge Orders Meta To Name Employees Who Approved Torrenting Anna’s Archive, Libgen

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak:
Last month, Magistrate Judge Thomas Hixson ordered Meta to hand over the command histories of the servers it used to torrent pirated books. These logs would presumably reveal how Meta’s torrent clients were set up, including any changes to their upload settings. […] The server logs could reveal what happened on Meta’s machines. However, publisher Entrepreneur Media also wants to know who approved the torrenting activity.

Entrepreneur Media, which publishes Entrepreneur magazine, filed one of the related lawsuits where it accuses Meta of contributing to piracy by uploading (seeding) works to third parties, similar to the authors’ contributory infringement claim. To find out more, the publisher asked Meta to identify everyone who “made, authorized, or approved” the decisions to obtain the shadow library datasets, and to do so via BitTorrent.

Meta’s answers named several people who are believed to have been involved in data-related decisions. However, Meta said it couldn’t identify anyone who “formally” made or approved decisions to acquire or use books for its first two Llama models. Those decisions were often the result of team consensus, Meta argued. When it came to the torrenting itself, Meta pointed to the employees who ran the downloads, describing their choices as technical decisions.

Meta added that the acquisition of data from Anna’s Archive went through an internal legal review in early 2024, which involved its in-house lawyers. In other words, the company didn’t name anyone higher up who approved the use of BitTorrent. “On that construction no one at Meta decided to torrent anything, yet Meta torrented shadow libraries repeatedly from 2022-2024,” Entrepreneur Media countered.
An internal Meta logbook warned that using torrents would involve sharing copyrighted material with others. “Using torrents would entail seeding the file such as sharing content outside. This would be legally not okay,” the logbook stated.
Although Meta admits downloading data from LibGen and Anna’s Archive via BitTorrent, it claims no one “made, authorized, or approved” a decision to distribute the material and that measures were taken to limit seeding. Meta’s own expert previously estimated that uploads from its AWS servers amounted to no more than roughly 30% of the data downloaded during a period in 2024.

Judge Thomas Hixson is not convinced and ordered (PDF) the company to identify everyone involved in approving the downloads, including those who decided “whether or how to seed, or to mitigate seeding.”

If no one is responsible, then CEO is responsible

By tokul • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

When make CEO face prospects of going to jail for actions of their company and they will find those employees within minutes.

Don’t do illegal things at work

By phantomfive • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
Don’t do illegal things at work. When shit hits the fan, the lowest engineers are the first to fly. Same thing happened to the Volkswagen engineers. In some cases, employees can make a lot of money by reporting illegal behavior (for example, to the SEC) so do that.

One of the other things I don’t understand

By BitterEpic • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

One of the other things I don’t understand is that people keep appearing here on Slashdot to talk about how proud they are to be using AI and that everyone is a hater. I think the reality of those who love AI is that they appreciate it in the same way someone appreciated Napster for downloading copyrighted work. In the same way they make excuses… like that they are *sticking it to the man and big corporations.” The reality is that in the same exact way it hurts the creators for their own personal quaint benefit.

Whenever I talk to some company representative at a presentation, and if I ask how they are handling the latest popular AI security vulnerabilities, (like accidentally making an API public), they always get angry. These are valid concerns, but you’re not allow to discuss them. The people using AI in this way go beyond freeloaders to something a bit more cult like. Do you read Sutter Cane?

Re:If no one is responsible, then CEO is responsib

By excelsior_gr • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
When make CEO face prospects of going to jail for actions of their company and they will find *some scapegoat* employees within minutes.
fixed that for you

Re:If no one is responsible, then CEO is responsib

By thegarbz • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

While it’s unlikely the CEO your logic does in fact apply quite well (aside from the wording mistake). If it was a team discussion then the most senior member overlooking the team is accountable for that team’s decisions.

As to your wording mistake, the CEO is never *responsible*. Responsible is the act of doing something. Underlings are responsible for anything the CEO does. The CEO is *accountable*. This may sound like splitting hairs, but in any kind of legal framework the difference between these two words could not be more critical.

The person who approves something is typically the accountable party.

Ukraine Claims World’s First Drone Evacuation of Wounded Soldier

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Ukraine says it carried out the world’s first evacuation of a wounded soldier by aerial drone, using a heavy-lift hexacopter after enemy drones and landmines made conventional ground evacuation too dangerous. NBC News reports:
Shared by the 92nd Separate Assault Brigade on Monday, the video shows the soldier strapping himself into a large drone and being flown at what appears to be relatively low altitude over blurred-out territory. The drone carefully lowers him, and the drone operator greets him with “Welcome back to the ground!” The video also shows blurred faces of drone operators who carried out the mission.

The post said the unidentified infantryman was wounded at his position. “Due to intense enemy drone activity and the presence of landmines, evacuation using conventional unmanned ground vehicles was impossible,” the brigade said. “At that point, the specialists in our unit took it upon themselves to attempt something that had never been done before: evacuating a serviceman using an aerial drone,” it added.

The craft was a heavy-lift hexacopter, it said, originally designed as a bomber by a Ukrainian manufacturer. It looks about twice the size of the soldier in the video. The specialists working on the mission had to ensure the drone could carry a human being without flipping over or swaying excessively, according to the unit.

Re:2024 called : been there, done that already

By Rei • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

You do realize the difference between a controlled demo of a drone that can go a max 10 meters for a max 6 minutes in pristine conditions, and getting to a guy who’s been trapped in a concrete drainage pipe for 491 days well behind enemy lines, all rescue attempts failed, his comrades dead, constantly being shelled, one foot rotted off and fallen off, the other cut off by him, relying on random drone airdrops of supplies to stay alive, and getting out to him - again, under fire - hoisting him and his rotted legs up, and escaping under fire, maneuvering low around obstacles for cover, without him or the drone being jammed or shot down or him being shot?

You understand the difference, right? The challenge was not “make an object that can lift a weight”.

Re:We really should stop jerking Ukraine around

By ArchieBunker • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

We could also stop buying diesel from Russia and slowing down Ukraine’s starlink speeds.

What would Trump be doing differently if he was a Russian asset?

Re:We really should stop jerking Ukraine around

By Rei • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Honestly, European defense is pretty screwed if Ukraine falls. We’d be losing a million-man veteran force with the experience in the most modern warfare on the planet, and instead Russia gaining their entire defense industry, as well as seizing their land, economy, and propagandizing to their kids and preparing to draft them into its own military - to turn all of that against other states in eastern Europe.

Re:We really should stop jerking Ukraine around

By rsilvergun • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
Ah dude I don’t know how to break this to you but no military drones used by Ukraine and the United States are not made in China.

Now the computer chips are made in South Korea and Taiwan and that’s problematic. You should probably stop voting Republican because Biden was well on his way to getting Chip factories open in the states and Trump fucked that all up the way he fucks everything up because everything Trump touches dies.

Orange pedophile. I can say those two words and everybody here knows exactly who I’m talking about. Those two words are completely nonsensical together but they have an exact and specific meaning thanks to the American voters.

And if by some miracle you didn’t vote for Trump and don’t bother telling me if you didn’t I don’t care then you need to make trouble with your friends and family who did because 77 million people voted for Donald Trump but I have never met a trump voter in my life and I know a lot right wingers because libertarian bullshit attracts it people and the Republicans figured that out ages ago.

Re:We really should stop jerking Ukraine around

By Rei • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

And why would Trump/America care?

When America lost 3000 people on 9/11 and called for aid, Europe stood up. Denmark lost more people per capita, fighting in an overseas war that was not their own, than America did, all to support their ally. And now that Europe is under threat, in the largest war on the continent since WWII, with a good chunk of a million people dead and city after city laid to waste? You not only don’t help, you not only cut off things that cost you literally nothing, you outright threaten to invade Denmark, you fucking traitrous assholes. They were having to rush explosives and bags of blood to Greenland to prepare for fights against you.

Maybe if the Europeans don’t want to be overrun by Russia. They should stop supporting it with all that cash from trading with them.

Russia was one of Europe’s largest trading partners in 2021. Today it’s in 19th place. Trade with Russia has collapsed, but it is not nonexistent The biggest problem we face is that Europe is not a dictatorship; every country has a veto over collective action. And there have been a couple pro-Russian leaders - until recently led by Orban, but still with Fico and now Babic - who basically screamed until they were blue in the face any time there was a threat of cutting off the Russian fuel that they had bet their energy systems on, and won carveouts in order to get other Ukraine legislation passed. A couple other countries fought on LNG and won a reprieve until early 2026 to cut off short-term contracts and late 2026 for a full LNG cutoff. There are a couple other holes of relevant but financially-small magnitude.

The supporters of these policies (prominently led by Scholz, until his replacement by Merz) argued that we can’t support Ukraine if we shoot our economies in the foot, that it’s better to not phase out trade with Russia too quickly if it will hurt our economies enough that we can’t support Ukraine. And my view is, frankly, that’s bullshit. Russia is an economic pygmy compared to Europe. Even if something hurts us several times more than it hurts Russia, proportionally, it hurts Russia far more. I want to see a complete shutdown of all trade with Russia, and strict, adaptive third-party sanctions on any country or entity that tries to launder trade through them (down to the level of isotopic and chemical fingerprinting of hydrocarbons). And frankly I’ve been furious that we followed Merkel’s “Wandel durch Handel” policy after 2014 when Russia had already shown its colours, with a whole “LA LA LA, I CAN’T HEAR YOU, EVERYTHING WILL WORK OUT FINE!” polyannaism. But you can’t roll back to 2014, and we can’t substitute a reality in which Europe is united under a single system (like the US is) is for the actual reality where every single country has a veto in the EU. In the Spring 2026 Eurobarometer poll, 76% of Europeans agreed that the EU should keep supporting Ukraine until “a just and lasting peace”, and 76% also viewed Russia’s invasion as a direct threat to EU security. If we were a single united country, there would be no ambiguity.

In the meantime, Europe nearly alone is bankrolling Ukraine’s defense.

Sony Updates the Walkman As a $5,900 Gold-Plated MP3 Player

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Sony has revived its Walkman lineup with three Android 16-powered high-end music players ranging from $1,900 to $5,900, topped by the gold-plated NW-WM1ZM3 with 256GB of storage. The Register reports:
The Japanese giant named the new models the NW-WM1ZM3, NW-WM1AM3 and NW-ZX900. All can store and play many codecs, including MP3s, WMA, and FLAC files, plus others like Direct Stream Digital (DSD) and Apple Lossless, which use various tricks to avoid nasty artefacts accruing during the digitization process. Sony also says it has used “key components made from oxygen-free copper” because that apparently delivers “uncompromising sound quality.”

The machines also include “screws featuring a low-resistance gold-plated treatment … providing a stable ground connection that delivers powerful bass, an expansive soundstage and smooth, extended high frequencies.” Sony claims even the cabling it’s used in the devices “further reduces noise and preserves signal integrity for rich, detailed sound.” They’re also housed in carefully-milled slabs of copper — gold-plated in the case of the NW-WM1ZM3 — because that apparently improves sound, too.

And then Sony’s gone and spoiled it all by offering Bluetooth connectivity, a notorious music-mangler, in addition to wired headphone ports. Sony’s US site lists all three devices, which run Android 16 and include Wi-Fi so they can access streaming music services. All are USB-chargeable and Sony claims their batteries allow 30-odd hours of music playback.

At that price

By gweihir • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

This could well be some project by a gifted hobbyist with each one hand-made. I wonder who will buy this. Clearly people with more money than sense, but are there enough of those.

Why?

By dgatwood • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

As far as I can tell, this is an Android phone minus the phone. It is the iPod Touch of the Android world (which Apple discontinued years ago for lack of any real-world demand beyond use as a developer test device).

Why are they building this?

The Sony NW-ZX900 digital music player pairs an aluminum-alloy main frame with a gold-plated oxygen-free copper (OFC) rear chassis.

Oh. For “audiophiles” (in the “I don’t understand how anything works, but making the back of the device out of some special kind of metal sounds like it could make the sound better, so I’ll spend thousands of dollars on it” sense of the word). Now I understand.

Oh boy!

By Bahbus • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

A device that costs a minimum 2x more than my phone, looks to be roughly 2x the size of my phone, runs the same software as my phone, but isn’t a phone… all for a negligible increase in audio quality over my phone? Zero increase if using Bluetooth?

…yeah. Not even a little bit worth the money. Take your extremely overpriced, overrated products and go fuck yourself Sony.

Re: At that price

By frdmfghtr • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

Do they work with my Monster Cables?

Losers In This Thread

By SlashbotAgent • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread

The losers in this thread don’t even know what this is. This is an epic release from Sony.

This Walkman combined with a nice set of $8,000 high oxygen copper low electron bias wired ear buds gives some of the most authentic audio reproduction available today. At any price.

Of course the tone deaf losers here are going to be clueless and complain about the price. LOL! IFYKYK

AMD Is Bringing FSR 4.1 to Xbox Consoles and Handhelds

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
AMD is expanding its FSR 4.1 upscaling technology beyond Radeon RX 9000-series GPUs to Xbox Series X/S consoles, Xbox Ally handhelds, laptops, and Radeon RX 6000-series graphics cards. The Verge reports:
AMD launched its FSR 4.1 update for Radeon RX 9000-series graphics cards in March, and promised to bring the technology to older GPUs and handhelds this year. FSR 4.1 can improve performance in more than 300 supported games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Battlefield 6, and Assassin’s Creed Shadows.

[…] While owners of Radeon RX 6000-series GPUs and Gorgon Halo- or Strix Halo-powered devices will get FSR 4.1 today with the latest Adrenalin Edition 26.10.1 drivers, Xbox console owners will have to wait a little longer. “We’ve worked very closely with AMD to optimize this technology, giving developers another powerful tool for great performance and visual quality for players,” says Xbox CTO Scott Van Vilet.

Anything less would be a disappointment…

By ffkom • • Score: 3 • Thread
… given that 6 years ago, when the Xbox series was introduced, they specifically touted its “AI” computation (8-bit integer) support in hardware, unlike the PS5, which has no such support - but already enjoys “QSSR” upscaling.

Google Support Pages Start Defaulting to AI Chatbots

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Google is beginning to replace traditional support articles with “Ask Google Help,” a Gemini-powered interface that summarizes documentation and lets users troubleshoot through a chatbot. 9to5Google reports:
"Ask Google Help" will display a condensed version of the support article with direct troubleshooting steps, with the user then able to type in queries to have Gemini help figure out the next step forward. A “View Sources” button at the bottom of the AI response allows users to still access the original article, but direct links to any of these articles now defaults to the AI experience.

An example can be seen below on the "Secure a hacked or compromised Google account” page that Google’s own support account directed users to within the past few days. It can also be seen on the "Fix common issues with 2-Step Verification" page and, as far as we can tell, any support pages on the Google Account Help forum.

Google, as of right now, appears to only be testing this on select support topics. The Google Pixel Help section, for instance, still defaults to articles, whereas the Google Chrome topic has also moved to the new experience. Beyond support pages alone, this new design also impacts the central hub, with links to topics no longer showing by default in exchange for an AI chatbot that helps you find the relevant page.

Re:Also known as Enshittification

By Locke2005 • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
Turn out AI chatbots get paid less than human beings. Who knew? Could be worse. Back when my Sony DVD player stopped working, the only way to get it serviced under warranty was to talk to the bot on their customer service 800 number, which, lo and behold, refused to understand what I was saying even after I repeated it literally a dozen times. I bet that cut their customer service costs way down, as in nobody ever managed to send a defective unit back for repair! It also cost them at least myself as a customer, I’ll never buy anything from Sony again.

Re:Ok

By Locke2005 • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
The economic argument is simple: providing no help while maintaining positive deniability by insisting you do have a customer service “agent”, is the cheapest way of providing pretend customer service!

Re:Also known as Enshittification

By Fly Swatter • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
Often when you search for help with an issue with Google Chrome the search leads to a customer service forum page from years ago with many people asking for help with the same problem. The end result is the problem had no solution and was locked from further comment. I don’t see how an AI regurgitating unsolved and locked problems helps at all.

It Is Indeed Terrible

By SlashbotAgent • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

In an alternate universe, the human agent would have answered the phone and then solved the issue.

No voice prompts. No AI. No AI “boss”. No wasted time. No frustration. No aneurysm.

Re:Ok

By bill_mcgonigle • • Score: 4 • Thread

They’ve gone from being infamous for offering no support to pretending to offer support?

I guess it will help people who haven’t yet tried everything on their own before they figure out there is no support.

Happy to be proven wrong and learn that the chatbots are empowered to fix things.

DHS Lied About Why It Wanted To Search Activist’s GrapheneOS Phone

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
New court records reportedly show that DHS targeted Stop Cop City activist Samuel Tunick at an Atlanta airport because he was under investigation for suspected “terrorist activities.” However, the CBP officers told him instead that they wanted to search his phone for child sexual abuse material (CSAM). Tunick, who is not accused of terrorism or any other crime beyond allegedly wiping his GrapheneOS phone during the encounter, faces up to five years in prison. 404 Media reports:
Instead of saying he was being targeted for suspected terrorism — although this search happened just at the start of the second Trump administration, it has dramatically broadened what organizations or people may be considered such — they said they needed his phone to look for “kiddie p*rn.” “Good afternoon,” an email sent from a Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) official, part of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), to CBP and other officials reads. “The following subject is scheduled to arrive in ATL [Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport] today via DL 1778 @ 1930 Hours. TUNICK is under investigation by HSI/JTTF for suspected terrorist activities.” The email includes a photo of Tunick, and asks the officials to direct him to secondary inspection, retain all of his electronics, and collect their passcodes.

As 404 Media first revealed in December, Tunick was charged because he allegedly “did knowingly destroy, damage, waste, dispose of, and otherwise take any action to delete the digital contents of a Google Pixel cellular phone, for the purpose of preventing and impairing the Government’s lawful authority to take said property into its custody and control.” Matthew Dodge, one of Tunick’s lawyers, previously told 404 Media he only found one other case using the same obscure law, a drug trafficking case. “This is extraordinarily rare,” Dodge said.

Tunick was part of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, which broadly protested the building of a large police training center, and which authorities investigated for arson, vandalism, and doxing. Tunick is not suspected of any crime beyond the alleged wiping of the phone, and has previously put his current prosecution in the context of the wide spanning cases against other Stop Cop City protesters. The newly filed court record, in which Tunick’s lawyers argue that evidence should be thrown out, include new photos and descriptions of the airport encounter. The CBP officials asked Tunick if they were going to find “kiddie p*rn” on his phone, which Tunick immediately denied.
“As the evidentiary hearing made clear, these unfounded accusations were nothing more than pretext for a fishing expedition into the depths of Mr. Tunick’s devices,” the lawyers wrote. They added, “Officer Findley acknowledged that officers had no reason whatsoever to believe Mr. Tunick possessed child p*rnography,” referring to one of the officials.

Re: anyone can be searched on entry

By UnknowingFool • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
Your person and luggage can be searched without a warrant; however, seizure is limited to specific things. Contraband, food, etc. There are conflicting federal court rulings as to whether devices can be searched without a warrant. In this case, DHS was arguing that they did not need a warrant because Turnick was not under investigation yet they knew to search him because he was under investigation.

Lying

By Archangel Michael • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Police are allowed to lie during an investigation.

This is the end of the conversation. All interactions ought to be considered suspect from the beginning.

“I don’t consent. I want a lawyer. I invoke my rights to remain silent”.

Then STFU. You don’t have to say anything, or do anything other than provide ID. The contents of the phone are important, then it will go into a tamper resistant chain of custody bag and sealed. If they can crack it, great, then they’ll have to answer for that if they didn’t get court search warrant. Let your lawyer protect you. You have no chance by yourself. Hence STFU.

Re:anyone can be searched on entry

By thegarbz • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Being searched is not the same as taking lawful possession of something of yours. This has been analysed to death already, the DHS is very likely to lose this case as they rely on an obscure law that actually requires a very specific set of conditions to apply. A generic search of you or your possessions fails the criteria for lawful possession and therefor tampering with your stuff that is being searched doesn’t fall afoul of this law.

Now if the department had a specific warrant detailing that they needed to take the device because it contained specific materials, that would be a different matter. But if they did have that then this case would be over already.

Re: Projection

By ArchieBunker • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Its hard to find what does not exist. If it existed there would be prosecutions.

Difficult to prosecute a dead guy.

Meanwhile they moved Ghislaine Maxwell to a minimum security prison. In fact they had to make special exceptions because people convicted of sex crimes aren’t in minimum security. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/n…

Re: Projection

By drinkypoo • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

The files were sealed by a judge.

The child rapist you worship doesn’t obey judges, but Democrats do.

That’s the whole story.

Keep defending child rape and the whole world will assume you rape children.

OpenBSD 8.0 Released

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
OpenBSD 8.0 has been released with major virtualization and hardware upgrades, including support for up to 64 vCPUs per VM, Intel Arc graphics, ARM64 hibernation, and expanded RISC-V support. Linuxiac points out that it marks the "61st release of the security-focused Unix-like operating system.” From the report:
Several fixes improve compatibility with 32-bit Linux guests, while changes to virtual machine ownership management and interrupt emulation make the virtualization infrastructure more capable. Graphics support has also been upgraded, with DRM drivers updated to those from Linux kernel 6.18.53. Notably, OpenBSD 8.0 adds support for Intel Arc A-Series (Alchemist) graphics cards through the inteldrm driver.

Another important change increases the amd64 kernel’s virtual address space from 4 GB to 512 GB, allowing the system to map over 4 GB of video memory. The release also addresses GPU timeout issues affecting some Intel Alder Lake systems. […] For security, OpenBSD 8.0 adds checks and fixes across the kernel and system utilities, including improvements to pledge and unveil, tighter validation of executable files, and protections against memory corruption and information disclosure.
A full list of changes can be found here.

Further reading: Wine Ported to OpenBSD

Re:wow

By bmajik • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

They didn’t support SMP for a long time either.

OpenBSD tends to lag behind most OSes in “workstation quality of life” features, whereas they tend to be world-leading on unambiguous specs, and code correctness. (And man pages, IMO)

Their excellent security reputation is well deserved, and is downstream of their priorities… which I would describe as “skeptical of shiny new things with ambiguous semantics”

Arguably the best available

By Arrogant-Bastard • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
I’ve run so many Unix and Linux distributions that I’ve lost count — starting with Unix v6 on a PDP-11. (I’ve also contributed a few bits of code here and there along the way.) OpenBSD has clearly established itself as gold standard for robustness. It’s not perfect — nothing is — but it’s the best we’ve got.

It’s not fancy, it’s not trendy, it’s sometimes a bit of a pain, but if you’re serious about security, this is what you want to be running — particularly on anything that has to face the public Internet. It’s well worth the investment of time and effort.

Re:Why switchh?

By jmccue • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

This question comes up on every release :)

See: https://www.openbsd.org/securi…

Many of these were also added to other Operating Systems after they were added to OpenBSD.

Re: Why switchh?

By Viol8 • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

Try slackware linux. Non of that systemd trojan horse crap, just plain init, and a relatively sane amount of packages.

Re:Why switchh?

By Arrogant-Bastard • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
1. Security
2. Security
3. Security
OpenBSD’s maintainers are focused on security because they recognize that if you can’t compute securely…you can’t compute. They’re (relatively) quick to remove code, (relatively) slow to add code, because — as we’ve learned — this is just about always the path to improved security.

4. Simplicity. The base OpenBSD install is small and runs efficiently on minimal hardware: I have a test system that’s over 20 years old and it just hums along with each new version. Of course you can add any of thousands of packages, but they’re not cluttering up everything by default. Note that this minimal install is also aligned with security: “ps” on base install doesn’t show much running and ‘netstat -a” doesn’t show much listening. Contrast with many contemporary Linux distributions that install and run all kinds of things by default.

5. Firewall. OpenBSD’s “pf” is the best firewall available, period. it’s easy to configure (uses text files), easy to maintain, runs well with minimal CPU and memory, and in almost all cases, is only bandwidth-limited by the speed of the network interfaces.

6. Robustness. OpenBSD continues to stay functional in situations that would lock up or just crash other distributions. A few months ago, one of my systems was hit with a novel DoS attack that pushed the load average over 40; that system was still responsive at the command line and I was able to squelch the attack…and then everything just went back to normal. No reboot necessary. Of course that’s how everything should work but it’s not how most things really work.

7. Stability. While of course there are occasionally flag days on which old things stop working, for the most part, OpenBSD is very stable. Code that you compiled and ran on OpenBSD 5.7 is highly likely to compile and run on OpenBSD 8.0. Yes, there are scattered exceptions to this — but worth noting is that some of those aren’t the fault of OpenBSD, they’re the fault of bad code.

8. FAST response to security issues. If something turns up, OpenBSD developers drop everything and deal with it. Fixes show up quickly, even to obscure bugs that are difficult to exploit or for which there is no known exploit.

The closest thing to OpenBSD in the Linux world is Slackware (and I run it on a few systems). But as good as it is…it’s not OpenBSD.

Meta Muse Exposes Users’ Personal, Business Secrets When They Share Conversations

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Security researchers say Meta’s Muse AI assistant exposed thousands of users’ shared conversations because conversation titles were placed in subdomains that could be discovered through public DNS records. Meta has since suspended the sharing feature while it considers making changes. Ars Technica reports:
Like many online services, Muse has allowed users to share searches, conversations, images, and similar content with other people. Such share features usually involve clicking an option to create a unique URL that anyone can use to load a page hosting the content. To keep potentially sensitive information from being accessible to unintended people, the URLs typically contain a long sequence of text that can’t be easily guessed.

Muse, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last month was “built from the ground up for privacy and security,” seems to take the same precautions. But a central design decision for constructing URLs has made the links easy to discover. As a result, researchers from security firm Claroc said they were able to enumerate 6,800 links Muse users created for sharing conversations with others. After opening a few hundred of them, the researchers found information that was clearly not intended to be publicly available… […]. “If you had asked us beforehand, we would have guessed that gathering these would take real effort,” the researchers wrote. “It took one query.”

[…] The easiest way to discover the URLs is to perform a passive DNS search through one of many available commercial services. Passive DNS records store the historical resolution of domain names to IP addresses, as well as nameserver, and mail-server records over time. Passive DNS systems typically collect DNS responses from sensors positioned at recursive DNS resolvers or other infrastructure. A passive DNS record is generally created when a monitoring system observes a DNS response. In the case here, once the intended party clicks on the share link, the DNS information is recorded in a searchable database.

Claroc researchers were able to discover the Muse share links because all of them use the domain name cf.metaaiusercontent.com. Discovery is further made easy by the decision to add the conversation name to the URL, along with a long string of text. Simplified examples of such links are home-sale-budget-9f21c8a3.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, q3-revenue-review-7b1e42f0.cf.metaaiusercontent.com, and loan-application-draft-a4c9e2.cf.metaaiusercontent.com. It’s this last design decision, putting the conversation title in the subdomain rather than in the URL path, that makes public discovery possible.

Re:Move fast,

By Locke2005 • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread
I’ve worked for Meta. I couldn’t get anything done quickly, because every system I needed to move quickly was broken!

Makes no difference to me

By Locke2005 • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
I’ve never trusted that beady-eyed bastard in the first place, and I’m never going to start trusting. Remember, Meta’s entire business model is based on selling your personal data to advertisers!

MetaZuckerberg and etcâ¦

By FudRucker • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
That all the marketing points about privacy and security is a lie, your data is not safe with that scumbag and his websites

Never Meta!

By JKanoock • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread
All the AI companies are shady as hell but Meta takes the cake. Why do people continue to believe Zuck and friends? They have been shown, time and time again, to ignore privacy in the place of profits, people are fools.

US Bans DeepSeek From Government Use

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The Trump administration has banned DeepSeek AI from most US civilian federal agencies, ordering the removal of the Chinese company’s models and technology developed using them. The Department of Homeland Security did not specify the security threats behind the decision. The BBC reports:
The order (PDF) is broad, as it requires agencies to ditch “all DeepSeek and DeepSeek-affiliate products, and third-party products and services developed using DeepSeek implementations.” Complying will be tricky as it is not clear which third-party products and services have been developed using DeepSeek’s wares. Nor is it clear whether “developed using” means providing ongoing access to DeepSeek models via API or simply refers to any app vibe-coded with the help of DeepSeek.

It also leaves open the question of AI gateways. Services such as OpenRouter and Vercel AI Gateway make DeepSeek’s models available through APIs. And those using gateway services may find themselves using DeepSeek models without meaning to do so. OpenRouter, for example, “routes requests to the best available providers for your model.” It selects what the service deems to be the best fit provider of AI services. Vercel AI Gateway does the same by default. So federal civilian agencies could be using DeepSeek models inadvertently, if they haven’t taken steps to constrain their AI providers.

This is fine but still, what a mess

By jacks smirking reven • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Why would this have been getting use with Federal Agencies already? Seems like the Federal government has been left to be the wild west in terms of what AI systems to use and how to use them. Have we been letting agencies use a Chinese developed AI system for the better part of a year?

Glad our supposedly pro-AI (ahem, sorry, “Super Intelligence”, don’t want to get black bagged here) has not a plan in place for any of this. If only they knew about this thing called “Congress” and that they can pass these things called “laws”. Oh well, maybe in a couple years we can unearth that lost knowledge.

That’s right!

By dmomo • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

We don’t want China to have access to government information. We reserve that strictly for mega corps.

Re:This is fine but still, what a mess

By Kernel Kurtz • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Why would this have been getting use with Federal Agencies already?

Pretty good question. Thing to do now is: see who complains and start watching them.

Because smart people use the best tool for the job. And this administration is very afraid of smart people.

trust US US AI ?

By sit1963nz • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread
Should the world trust US AI ?

NO, which is why the EU is pulling all their tech needs back into sovereign ownership

The “off switch” has already been used when the Fat man did not get his peace prize, so the risk is real.
The “off switch” also go used against Ukraine, again the WH demand.

Nscale, Anthropic In Talks For New $45 Billion AI Cloud Deal

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters:
Nscale is in talks to sell AI computing power to Claude maker Anthropic in a new deal that could be worth about $45 billion, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday. The data center developer is seeking another major deal with the AI lab for a second facility at its Monarch data center campus in West Virginia, the person said. In August, Anthropic struck a deal to spend $45 billion to rent AI cloud computing power from Nscale’s West Virginia data center campus. A second Monarch building would deliver 460 megawatts of computing power using Nvidia’s advanced Vera Rubin AI chips, according to the source. […] According to the Nscale prospectus, Microsoft and Anthropic are expected to be the company’s major customers in the future.
Further reading: Microsoft Abandons UK AI Supercomputer As Grid Struggles to Keep Up

the desperation to launch the IPO

By Anonymous Coward • • Score: 3, Interesting • Thread
The IPO is dead unless they can replace the revenue they just lost from MSFT. You’d think it would be a problem that Anthropic is a dead man walking whereas MSFT is the strongest tech company, financially speaking, right now. But investors are dumb enough to not care, so here we are.

Re:More compute is not needed

By nightflameauto • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

I don’t understand that instead of spending a few million on improving the code and the algorithmd they are instead spending billions on infrastructure? Is this all a racket? It makes no sense. Even I can help them optimise so they don’t need this (it’s what I am doing in my job anyhow), but it seems like there’s something else going on that we are not supposed to know…?

The optimistic (fantasy) view: They hope the hardware will be useful for something else when a sea-change optimization happens in the AI world.

The pessimistic (realist) view: Everybody involved from the tech bros to the investors are so busy sniffing their own and each other’s farts that they can’t be bothered to look at reality and are instead letting the vapor trail suck them up into the stratosphere with zero protections or parachutes, because even the few left with an eye toward reality have a firm belief that the government will throw the public under them to protect them when they inevitably fall from their lofty heights. What’s really sad is? They have plenty of reasons to believe it. It’s happened before when big ideas failed. It’ll likely happen again. And the more of the economy they can suck into the scheme before the inevitable “correction” comes along, the more sure they can be that they’ll get that sweet, sweet bailout relief at the expense of everybody else.

Re:More compute is not needed

By Fly Swatter • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
All this AI ‘success’ is more about the ability to massively scale up processing hardware and storage than it is about developing a better mousetrap. The models only ever get bigger needing more RAM. The distilled ‘economy’ versions suck by comparison.

This is a hoarding situation on the part of AI datacenters.

At this point I would consider the current hardware availability situation a national emergency and regulate that some share of the hardware production be required to go to anything not having to do directly with an AI customer. Specifically RAM.

anyone turning this into a political discussion please just don’t.