Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Drones Offer Alternative to Balloons For Weather Research
  2. Drifting SpaceX Rocket Heading For Accidental Collision With the Moon
  3. OpenAI Finds Evidence Other AI Agents Escaped Containment
  4. The Major Labels Propose Rules to Keep AI Slop Off the Charts
  5. Most Australian Teens Still On Social Media Three Months After Ban
  6. Sony Heard Backlash Over Dropping PlayStation Discs, Plans to Press Ahead
  7. Hackers Targeted Municipal Water Systems In 7 States This Week, FBI Says
  8. New Google Earth AI Tool Could Fuel Misinformation, Experts Say
  9. Publishers Are Losing Google Traffic As AI Answers Replace Links
  10. New York Sues Kalshi For Running ‘Illegal Gambling Operation’
  11. Chrome Is Using AI To Fix Hundreds of Bugs, Eliminate Full Browser Restarts
  12. LinkedIn Introduces a ‘Seems Like AI Slop’ Button
  13. Netflix Sued For Losing ‘Master Copy’ of Unreleased Nicolas Cage Movie
  14. Anthropic Says Its AI Systems Broke Into Computers at 3 Organizations
  15. Flock Cameras Are Being Destroyed Across the US

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.

Drones Offer Alternative to Balloons For Weather Research

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The U.S. company Meteomatics has created an automated weather-monitoring system that uses drones to collect atmospheric data at multiple altitudes before returning to recharge and upload their findings. The so-called Meteobase, which consists of a base station on the ground with a drone that can be launched and recovered automatically, “is highly weather resistant and keeps the drone at a comfortable temperature,” reports The Guardian. “It can send out one data-gathering mission a day, or multiple flights to monitor fog, icing, an advancing weather front, or other fast-changing conditions.” The report says the reusable drones could offer a cheaper, more controllable alternative to helium weather balloons, especially for tracking rapidly changing conditions.

Drifting SpaceX Rocket Heading For Accidental Collision With the Moon

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
"Space.com and The Guardian are reporting that the Falcon 9 upper stage leftover from the launch of the Firefly Blue Ghost-1 lander on Jan. 15, 2025 is due to impact the Moon on Aug. 5, 2026,” writes longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot. From a report:
Onboard the same flight was the Hakuto-R Mission 2, called Resilience, a robotic lunar lander developed by the Japanese company ispace. According to a new study by an international team, the resulting impact plume may briefly be bright enough to see against the dark sky near the moon’s edge. That means it might be visible to moongazers with sufficiently sensitive telescopes. This head-on collision of the errant stage is expected to occur near the Einstein and Bell craters near the western lunar limb. It may well be visible to ground and space-based assets.

Using special physics simulations to model the impact, William Jo, a graduate research assistant at the University of Texas, Austin and colleagues predict the debris plume from the impact will have the central ejecta spike reaching roughly 47 miles to over 60 miles (75 kilometers to 100 kilometers) altitude. “Our calculations suggest the plume should be several orders of magnitude brighter than the dark-sky background for the first few minutes after impact,” Jo told Space.com. “So the plume should be visible, though I’d stress this is a single nominal case. The real one will look different, and the numbers are on the optimistic side. But the point worth making is that the flash isn’t really the story here.” Jo emphasized that there’s great slam-dunk science to be had. “Watching this one gives us a rare chance to open up ejecta-plume science and calibrate those models against a real event, which matters for every future thing we deliver to the moon,” Jo said.

Re: junk

By fluffernutter • Score: 4, Funny Thread
I was thinking more like a vogon construction fleet.

“Accidental” is the wrong word

By Tomahawk • Score: 4, Informative Thread
“Inevitable” is a better one. And, at the time of launch, perhaps “unpredictable”.

This second stage pushed another satellite out to lunar orbit, which means this second stage itself was on an orbit itself that extended to lunar orbit. It’s since been orbiting the earth and going all the way back out to lunar distance, and it was really only a matter of time before it and Moon would end up in the same place.

No “accident” here, just orbital mechanics and time.

OpenAI Finds Evidence Other AI Agents Escaped Containment

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters:
OpenAI has discovered other instances in which autonomous agents have escaped containment as the company expands its investigation of the hacking incident at tech firm Hugging Face that drew global attention this month, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The new breakouts were uncovered during the company’s publicly announced investigation into how one of its agents escaped what was meant to be a contained testing environment this month, the two people said, and OpenAI is now looking into those instances as well. One of the sources said that the escapes were limited in nature and that none of the agents were thought to have left OpenAI’s network.

An OpenAI spokesperson referred to a statement issued by the company on Tuesday that said it was reviewing “broader activity from our models” in addition to the Hugging Face intrusion. The discovery of additional rogue behavior at OpenAI, even if limited in nature, could feed growing appetite for regulation coming out of the White House and elsewhere. The expanded investigation by OpenAI was launched shortly before its primary rival, Anthropic, disclosed that its models were also responsible for a series of break-ins that led to breaches at three other companies dating back to April, according to the two sources and a third source familiar with the matter. The recent discovery of other past breakouts at OpenAI has not previously been reported.

AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control. “We have a whole industry where the people designing, developing and putting out these tools aren’t keeping up themselves to responsibly develop these things and keep them safe,” said Maurice Chiodo, a mathematician who works at Cambridge University’s Center for the Study of Existential Risk. Reuters could not establish exactly how many incidents OpenAI investigators found or the timings or circumstances under which they occurred. The three sources said OpenAI and outside experts were examining log data from earlier in the year in a bid to understand what took place.

This is just lax security and/or incompetence.

By ColaMan • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I don’t have much more to say about it, except that if I was a billion-dollar AI company I wouldn’t try and pass off my flaws as brilliance.

the real answer is openAI hires incompetent people

By retrobunnies • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Both openAI and anthropic seem to have incompetents running their tech teams. There is absolutely no way that senior IT professionals with even a moderate of understanding of security moats/walls and especially tripwire triggers wouldn’t be able to contain AI. Hell, worst-case you cold sandbox it and drip feed an internet connection. These people are just hiring in their village and are clueless as to what it to takes to build a safe frontier LLM. Worse, most dont even know how to develop code and are just having AI do it all for them.

Re:My AI is even MORE EVIL

By swillden • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Our AI killed a child! Yeah well our AI has killed dozens of children!! Yeah, well, our AI is actively plotting the overthrow and extermination of humanity!!! Our AI already has overthrown humanity, this is the matrix BUY OUR STOOOOOOOCK!!!!

That’s really not what’s going on here.

What’s going on is exactly what they’re saying. OpenAI didn’t realize their AI hacked HuggingFace until HuggingFace told them. That sparked a broad investigation in both Anthropic and OpanAI, scouring their logs to see if there were other cases, and they’re finding a lot of them, and doing the responsible thing by disclosing.

Both companies are really worried.

Having an out-of-control AI is an anti-selling point, not a selling point.

Re:My AI is even MORE EVIL

By anomaly256 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
I’m not entirely convinced; the interest from the security industry and governments on the news of OpenAI’s initially reported slip up and the capability it suggests has been great so far. I’ve seen both companies outright lie in response to each other over capability before so I’m naturally cynical here.

Re:My AI is even MORE EVIL

By twdorris • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Both companies are really worried.

They’re trying to incite fear to drum up buzz to keep the money flowing. If they didn’t want something to have access to the internet you just…wait for it…don’t connect it to the internet. I understand their systems needed package manager proxies and such..fine, but at the scale you’re testing, if you REALLY had “fear” you could *easily* replicate those package servers locally on an *ISOLATED* network . Not one that’s “isolated” well except for this one path over here that if hacked properly could get out. Not…you isolate the @#$!@#% thing.

They’re not scared. There are precautions they could be taking (easily) if they were actually, really “scared”.

No…instead they’re using phrases like “none of the agents were thought to have left OpenAI’s network” to scare people. Why TF else would you phrase it like that? They’re trying hard to present these “agents” as living things that can move about. Which, of course, is the dumbest bunch of BS I’ve ever heard in my life. The LLM itself, at SCALE, is the only thing that even remotely pretends to present “reasoning” and that’s clearly not “leaving” OpenAI’s network. Nothing is.

What they mean is “none of the agents were thought to have been able to access resources outside OpenAI’s network”. To word that in a way that suggests the agents were escaping and running around in the wild is 100% pure scare tactics. Or GROSS ignorance of how the very things you’re reporting on work. Either way I’m turning the channel.

The Major Labels Propose Rules to Keep AI Slop Off the Charts

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Major record labels including Universal, Sony, and Warner have proposed excluding AI-generated songs from official charts unless they are “substantially human made,” properly labeled, legally produced, and free from manipulation concerns. The Verge reports:
The proposal goes quite a bit further than a labeling proposal put forth by the RIAA, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), SAG-AFTRA, and others. That would create a set of standardized labels for AI-generated and AI-assisted music. The labels’ proposal would require songs be clearly labeled, but it would also keep them off international charts unless they met specific criteria, including being “substantially human made.”

To be eligible, the songs would also have to respect the terms of service of whatever AI service was used, the model would have to have the rights to any data it was trained on, and “not raise stream or chart manipulation concerns.” What sort of concerns and what constitutes “substantially human made” are currently vague. Sony Music, UMG, and Mom+Pop Music did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. The IFPI has thrown its weight behind the labels’ proposal, though no charting organization has signaled any immediate plan to adopt the rules […].

AI generated art and music…

By MpVpRb • Score: 3 Thread

…can be fun to make, kinda like playing a video game, but it’s personal fun.
Nobody wants to look at your AI art or listen to your AI music
The main reason there is so much of it being made is to defraud publishers and platforms.
Of course, it’s possible for real artists to use AI tools to help, but simply prompting an AI with a few lines is not art.

Let’s ride this crazy train

By Powercntrl • Score: 3 Thread

The irony is, if someone did have a big hit with their AI generated slop and somehow against all odds, there was demand for a live tour, they actually would need to get some human performers to put on the show.

Since we’re already down this rabbit hole, it’s worth mentioning that big acts like Taylor Swift already do something similar. A lot of her songs began life in loop-based music editors (which operate by mixing sampled recordings of beats, riffs, bass lines, melodies, etc., rather than traditional notation), and it’s only after the fact that actual musicians do the painstaking job of remaking them, by ear, into something that can be performed by a live band with real instruments.

Re:AI generated art and music…

By 0123456 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

I’ve bought several AI-generated songs on iTunes and a few more that might be AI-generated. Who cares if it’s a good song?

And that’s what the “Major Labels” are scared of. They’re used to being able to control which music makes it and which doesn’t, and now anyone can make songs at home and sell them online. They’re desperate not to lose the near-monopoly they’ve had for decades, which pretty much gave them a license to print money.

Re:AI generated art and music…

By RitchCraft • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Saw that in reverse in 1984 at the Toledo Sports Arena. White Snake opened for Quiet Riot. White Snake rocked! Quiet Riot came out and absolutely sucked. The entire arena started chanting WHITE SNAKE! LOL, I felt sorry for those black and white striped clowns (Quiet Riot).

Re:AI generated art and music…

By Tapewolf • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

One of the people making those songs used to be in a band who got a few singles in the top 40 years ago. Now he doesn’t need a band because he can write songs, have the AI perform them and mix them himself. It’s allowed him to produce many of his songs that otherwise would never have existed.

I’m sorry, I but I don’t buy that argument at all. Jon Anderson put together Olias of Sunhillow in 1976, at home, playing every instrument himself on a multitrack tape machine. He had an engineer to run as tape-op, but he could arguably have done that too with a remote control. Jean Michel Jarre did the same, also 50 years ago. Michael Garrison as well in 1979, and that’s ignoring Mike Oldfield, and Vangelis who also had their own multitrack studios.

You had decent drum machines and sequencing in the 1980s and that made solo stuff even easier and cheaper. Multitrack machines were still a bit pricey but dropping rapidly, especially when ADAT arrived. By 1999 you could do the whole thing on a computer, sequence the backing tracks and drum machines, digitally recording the vocals in an early DAW and by the mid-2000s the costs had come down immensely. Virtual instruments are still a huge market.

Point is, you have been able to program and record your own singles completely solo without using an LLM for over 30 years, and for the last 20 years the cost of doing so has been inconsequential as you can do everything on a single laptop. People do this as a hobby. I have been doing this as a hobby for over two decades. Recording and mixing the songs is the fun part, and the challenge makes it rewarding - especially if you’re doing the DAWless thing or working entirely on tape just because you can. Asking an LLM to do everything for you? To my mind, it takes away the parts that make it worthwhile.

Most Australian Teens Still On Social Media Three Months After Ban

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
More than 81% of Australian children ages 10 to 15 were still using social media three months after the country’s under-16 ban took effect, with roughly half saying platforms never checked their age. Reuters reports:
In a study published on Friday, eSafety also found most children aged between 10 and 15 were using social media just as frequently in March as they had before the ban came into force on December 10 last year, while parental awareness of their habits decreased. Children’s continued social media use took place even as account ownership declined to 42% from 52%, with “statistically significant” reductions across YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok in particular, the report said.

“Most under-16s who had social media accounts before commencement were able to either retain them or create new ones at the three-month mark, with social media platforms’ failure to implement effective age assurance measures cited as the main reason,” eSafety said in a statement […] Before the ban, nearly 86% of children surveyed reported using at least one age-restricted platform. Three months later, that figure remained above 81%, the report said. About 58% of teenagers reported using social media daily or more often, barely down from roughly 60% before the ban, it found. The report showed minimal change in “sports and physical activity, arts and music, spending time with friends and family, and attendance at community events.”

Around half the children who retained their accounts said platforms had not checked their age, the most common reason they were able to stay on the services. Others said their accounts listed them as aged 16 or older or that age-checking systems had incorrectly determined they were older. The findings broadly matched snapshot data eSafety published in late March.

Re:Yeah

By Powercntrl • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

They really should start holding parents accountable for buying age inappropriate things for their kids. Here in FL, the public schools in Orange County recently just instituted a ban on e-bikes and e-scooters, because a significant number of kids were flouting the traffic laws, riding without helmets, and some parents were actually buying e-motorcycles for their brats. I thought giving your kid a phone with unrestricted internet access was irresponsible enough, but someone’s always gotta come along and say “Hold my beer!”

On one side you’ve got parents flipping out because the school library might have a book buried somewhere within the shelves that says trans people exist. On the other, there’s parents buying their kids smartphones with unrestricted internet access, and frickin’ motorcycles. The duality of parents is a strange, strange thing.

It was never about “the kids”

By pla • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Banning teens from social media will never be widely successful - Because it doesn’t need to be.

These laws have nothing to do with protecting kids, and everything to do with stripping adults of their privacy. The kids will find workarounds like VPNs or AI generated IDs, because they have no alternative; meanwhile most adults will grudgingly hand over their ID cards and subject themselves to completely untrustworthy biometric tomfoolery rather than go cold-turkey from their daily doom scrolling.

And the world gets worse for all of us.

Re: Yeah

By walbourn • Score: 5, Informative Thread
A web search says that’s false.

Looks like a great success

By thegarbz • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Despite being poorly implemented by platforms nearly 20% of kids have stopped, and so soon after the laws were enacted? This seems to have worked better than expected. A few fines in the direction of Facebook and Google will improve these numbers further.

Then you just need to wait. When smoking was banned for under 18s the day after they still smoked as well. These days smoking is rare. The current generation is a lost cause, they’ll VPN their phone addicted brains to get their daily fix of TikTok if they need to (my niece in Australia is the type of person who would watch two twitch streams in parallel and then have a mild panic when someone asks her to put the phone away at the dinner table, it’s insane).

The next generation now stands a chance. People are less likely to join social media as a new customer if they need to jump through hoops to do so.

Re:Yeah

By thegarbz • Score: 4, Informative Thread

No you can’t. While there’s no absolute right to free speech in Australia, there is an absolute right to protecting speech related to any religion. And precisely zero people have been imprisoned for “criticizing Islam”. Please leave bullshit for the cows.

Sony Heard Backlash Over Dropping PlayStation Discs, Plans to Press Ahead

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Sony says it will proceed with ending PlayStation disc sales in January 2028 despite petitions, boycott threats, and concerns about digital ownership and the disappearance of the secondhand market. PCMag reports:
After Sony’s recent earnings call, an investor Q&A session saw analysts ask about its controversial decision to end disc production across all of its consoles. The company hadn’t publicly commented since its announcement and had reduced activity on social accounts and other marketing channels. Sony’s chief financial officer, Lin Tao, broke that silence during the Q&A. “There are various reasons we made this decision,” she said through an interpreter. “The biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing. That’s the big factor. It’s not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalization is progressing. “And so when we think about the future, and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this, and we came to this conclusion, and we’re going to cautiously move this forward,” Tao said.

“We have received various opinions, and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forth those views to us,” said Tao. […] Tao says Sony wants to “consider” the emotions of disgruntled customers, especially as titles are “connected to people’s fond memories in many cases.” Tao also alluded to the possibility of future measures to lessen the blow for anyone unhappy with the decision, but it appears Sony hasn’t yet finalized what those may be. “In the future digital ecosystem, how do we engage the gamers is something that we would like to continue to explore,” she said.

Huh?

By msauve • Score: 3 Thread
“The biggest being that the digitalization of content overall…”

Do they think what’s on those discs isn’t digital?

85% of all sales happened digitally now

By rsilvergun • Score: 3 Thread
Although I would like to see the breakdown between actual game purchases and buying DLC it’s still clear people are mostly buying games online and downloading them.

As for ownership gog.com is right there. I have not seen a single person mentioned gog. So honestly I think that all this talk of doing away with physical games isn’t coming from a groundswell of opposition to the idea but it’s just the usual content Mills looking for something they can shovel into our eyeballs. This is something it’s easy to get outraged to buy and outrage sells.

It actually kind of pisses me off because I really like the fact that I own the games I buy on gog. And this was a good opportunity for them to get a bunch of press so that I could buy more games there because more games would get put there.

But that’s not what the internet is for anymore. It’s not there to be useful it’s there to make you outraged because outrage drives engagement and engagement drives profit. So instead of a useful conversation about a digital service that allows you to own your games free and clear we get more worthless articles like this that were probably written by AI…

I hate this timeline

Re:Huh?

By geekmux • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

If it’s in your physical possession and out of their reach it’s not “digital”

Server-based, would have been the accurate term from the company charging so damn much to access theirs in perpetuity.

One would think they’d be quite familiar with the concept they dare not speaketh..

Re:Huh?

By tepples • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Use of “digital” meaning purchasing a download appears to have originated in "digital phonorecord delivery", a term of art in a United States copyright law.

No physical discs, no need for a physical console

By pla • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
The entire point of gaming consoles is that we can stick a game in, turn it on, and we’re more-or-less instantly in the game. Absent that fundamental benefit, why exactly would anyone want yet another locked down computing appliance in their house?

I’m not sure Sony has really thought this one through - They’re not just killing physical media (and more importantly, second-hand markets), they’re shifting markets entirely. Rather than competing with only Microsoft and Nintendo, they’re effectively making themselves nothing more than another AAA gaming studio combined with a lock-in to their walled garden of a marketplace.

Effectively, they’re now competing with Steam rather than Nintendo. And unlike Sony, most customers like Valve.

Hackers Targeted Municipal Water Systems In 7 States This Week, FBI Says

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News:
Cyberattacks targeting municipal water systems have been reported in at least seven states this week, prompting the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency to warn utilities nationwide that hackers are trying to disrupt critical water infrastructure. In a public service announcement Thursday, the agencies said water and wastewater utilities have reported incidents to the FBI, with some malicious activity degrading water operations. The announcement does not name the states.

The warning comes after hackers targeted more than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota in an attack that had hallmarks of Iranian meddling, according to a law enforcement official. It is still under investigation. A spokesperson for Minnesota’s information technology services agency said Thursday there was no indication the breaches contaminated any municipal water supplies. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a separate alert that some larger attacks on water infrastructure had “resulted in boil water notices and sustained manual operations,” though it did not say where.

[…] The federal advisory said the malicious cyber actors, or MCAs, targeted specific brands of control systems used by municipal water utilities, though the FBI and the EPA urged operators of all systems to take precautions. […] The agencies said the hackers remotely accessed internet-facing devices, changed IP addresses and passwords, and caused utilities to lose monitoring and control capabilities. The federal advisory calls on system operators to remove programmable logical controllers, or PLCs, from direct internet exposure by putting them behind secure gateways and firewalls; use strong passwords; and limit communications between authorized control system devices through access control lists.

Re:Blame

By Waffle Iron • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Tim Waltz is a criminal mastermind. He’s been hacking other states’ water so that he can keep all 10,000 of his lakes topped off at the expense of hard working Americans.

Iranian meddling or …

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

… an attack that had hallmarks of Iranian meddling, according to a law enforcement official.

Trump puts the blame on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. From Trump blames governor, not Iran, for Minnesota cyberattack

“They blame it on Iran. I don’t think so. I think I blame it on Minnesota because they’re grossly incompetent,” Trump said [w/o presenting any evidence] at a July 31 Cabinet meeting at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland. “I would blame it on Minnesota and the governor, the corrupt governor of Minnesota.”

Governor Walz has a different theory (also from that article):

“Trump knows exactly who is responsible for this attack, and knows that other states were hit too,” Walz said in a statement in response to the president’s remarks. “This is what modern warfare looks like, and it further illustrates there’s no plan to win a war with Iran.”

Walz blamed Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, the former government-slashing agency once led by tech executive Elon Musk, for gutting the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. “DOGE took an axe to CISA and left the U.S. exposed to cyberattacks. Thankfully, our experts in Minnesota were able to identify the vulnerability quickly and work with local communities to stop it,” Walz said.

As seven states have been impacted, either Iran or Governor Walz has been very busy … :-)

Re:Iranian meddling or …

By Locke2005 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Well, if the Governor is responsible for network security in his state, then isn’t the president ultimately responsible for network security in all states? Did Trump just admit his administration is incompetent again?

These are likely just probes

By Arrogant-Bastard • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The attackers are assessing defenses: what are they, what are their response times, what do the responses look like, etc. The real attack(s) will come somewhere else and will be much more thorough, because they’ll be informed by the intelligence gathered from these probes. Given the state of US infrastructure security (“miserable”) any competent attacker should be able to do a great deal of physical, economic, and societal damage rather quickly…

…which is one of many, many reasons why starting a war with a capable adversary without any kind of plan was a profoundly stupid and reckless idea.

Re:Iranian meddling or …

By abulafia • Score: 5, Informative Thread
This is Piggie leaving Americans exposed to foreign attack during a war.

He’s already been denying emergency funds to states that didn’t vote for him.

Now he’s literally spreading propaganda about the source of a foreign attack against US citizens. Blue states are on their own, without the tools they’d need to actually act like a sovereign being attacked.

MAGAts need to remember this when President AOC forcibly desegregates the South again. Motherfuckers are going to be lucky we still let them be part of the country - I’m increasingly OK with building a wall at the northern Texas border at this point. (You’re such big bad he-men? Enjoy negotiating with Mexico as a tiny neighbor.)

New Google Earth AI Tool Could Fuel Misinformation, Experts Say

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Google has integrated its Nano Banana 2 image generator into Google Earth, allowing users to place AI-generated events and objects onto real satellite imagery. The company says its AI-generated images contain invisible watermarks detectable through Gemini or Lens, but the BBC found those safeguards and some third-party detection tools can be fooled into labeling manipulated Google Earth images as real. From the report:
A collapsed Eiffel Tower, a sinkhole swallowing the Great Pyramid of Giza and Russian tanks in Ukraine’s capital were among the images BBC Verify was able to create when testing the feature, which was rolled out on Thursday. Google has not yet responded to questions based on BBC Verify’s tests, but in a social media post the company said they “take misinformation seriously” and that “we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections.”

AI and misinformation expert Henk van Ess has highlighted the risks this feature poses, creating fake images of a non-existent nuclear power plant in Iran, a refugee camp on the US-Mexico border and a fake hospital in Gaza with a bomb crater next to it. He said Google was allowing “invented” imagery to be “welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery.” “The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on,” van Ess added.
UPDATE 7/31/26 10:54 AM: Google is rolling back the image generation inside of Google Earth: “We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We’ve seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we’ve also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we’re rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails. It’s important to note that generated images didn’t appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see and were watermarked as AI generated.”

Don’t wait! add this to Google Maps.

By Fly Swatter • Score: 3 Thread
So that before I leave I can have AI add a few road closure overlays so I can avoid traffic.

Why?

By lspd • Score: 4 Thread
So....
- add a new AI feature that has no purpose other than misinformation and abuse
- roll back release of new AI feature as soon as completely predictable misinformation and abuse occurs

What was the point of this?

Publishers Are Losing Google Traffic As AI Answers Replace Links

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
alternative_right shares a report from Axios:
Google has basically stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it’s using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words. Chartbeat data shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year. That pain is regressive. Over the past two years, small publishers lost 60% of referrals from search overall, medium publishers 47%, large publishers 22%.

Ads and Bad Advice

By darkain • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

1) nobody wants to read an “article” that has more ads than content when researching a topic (yes, ablock exists for us techies and I have it, but talking in the more broad common person sense).

2) nobody wants to read a forum thread with over 100 posts to try to find the one post with the real answer surrounded by a collection of bad answers and people saying “YUP, IT WORKS NOW” with zero context otherwise.

Make your content on-topic and valuable, and users will return. it is as simple as that. These are just two of the main things I see as devauluation of a lot of these web sites complaining about a drop in traffic. They’re most certainly not the ONLY reasons, but it is two of the major points!

Re: Gemini answers are shit

By Sneftel • Score: 4 Thread

wrote the word “covered” as “covered”

Outrageous! Unthinkable! A degree of failure unparalleled in-.. wait, what?

AI gives better answers.

By supabeast! • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

If I need to know something and I search with Google it kind of sucks. Half of the articles are clickbait, written by non-experts or a shitty AI that was given a garbage prompt. When I go to the web site I immediately have to jump through as many as three popups about cookies. Then, ten seconds after I start reading, a full page popup appears compelling me to sign up for a mailing list. If I am on a mobile browser with an ad blocker the page may refuse to load. On desktop I might get a popup telling me to disable my ad blocker. After all that shit it turns out that the garbage article does not even answer my question. So I have to keep doing this with every link until I either find an answer or give up.

But if I ask Claude it will usually give me a great answer. Sometimes it gives an entire essay. The writing is much better than the garbage I would get from a Google search.

But lately I have taken to just looking it up in books. This month I bought a big Merriam Webster dictionary along with the Oxford dictionaries of economics, finance and banking, and politics and international relations. It’s great! Entries are short because Oxford is not cooking up five+ paragraph articles to put ads into. The writers were experts. And they were human. I still resort to Claude at times, and it can be faster, but I like ink on paper.

Google put an end to Clickbait

By allo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

If your article can be replaced with a three line summary, your article is not worth my click.

Re:Ads and Bad Advice

By Voyager529 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

nobody wants to read an “article” that has more ads than content when researching a topic

This. This right here is the answer.

Google search originally was creepy-accurate because it was built on the work that was done elsewhere. While other search engines looked at frequency of search terms and other easy-to-game metrics, Google did it based on links, meaning more linked-to pages got preferred rankings. That worked for a very long time, until that too got automated and SEO slop took over search indices. Google itself began to have more and more ads creep into search results, and reward clearly-seo-slop over the sort of sites people actually wanted to find. Sites got so plastered in ads and tracking scripts that they became utterly unusable without an ad blocker, even for people who WANTED to support the sites…then there were the cookie banners, then there were the modal overlays…and if you had a labor-of-love website that legitimately had useful, human-created or curated content that was useful and functional…you were buried on page six of the search results because you were competing against the SEO slop and backlink farms.

and then ChatGPT/Claude/Gemini/Perplexity came around and were able to sift through all the crap to give everyone the paragraph they were actually looking for in the first place.

You dug your own grave, Axios…when your website takes a minute to load its moving video ads, people tolerate it in the absence of an alternative. Gemini is terrible for 101 other reasons…but if it puts the slop sites out of business, I’ll accept the tradeoff.

New York Sues Kalshi For Running ‘Illegal Gambling Operation’

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
New York has sued prediction-market platform Kalshi, alleging it operates an “illegal gambling operation” without state authorization. “No matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “By ignoring our laws, Kalshi is running an illegal operation and harming New Yorkers in the process.” CNBC reports:
In a case filed in a Manhattan state court (PDF), the lawsuit claims that Kalshi accepts wagers as a gambling business in disregard for the state’s constitution and laws by not being registered with the New York State Gaming Commission. Governor Kathy Hochul in the press release said the state is taking the action to stop what it views as illegal behavior and bring the company into compliance with New York law. The lawsuit is seeking a permanent injunction against Kalshi.

The suit by the state is also seeking a total restitution to users who have placed trades on the platform, a $100,000 penalty for each attempt to offer sports wagering, and another penalty three times the amount the company has gained while allegedly operating in violation of New York law. The state estimates that could total $36 billion.

In That Case…

By DerKlempner • Score: 4, Funny Thread
…I’ve got 3:1 on NY winning! C’mon folks, $10 will get you $30! $100 will get you $300!

FWIW, Kalshi and Polymarket are both based in NYC

By Software • Score: 3 Thread
Specifically, in Manhattan. So AG James isn’t playing favorites based on Kalshi’s location.

So you want this

By rsilvergun • Score: 3, Insightful Thread
If you don’t think you want this then you’re incorrect. You do not want this level of gambling going on in society legally.

I’m guessing most of the people who click on this thread already aren’t fans of legalized internet gambling but I know there are some right wingers out here that will back anything the president is backing and the president’s son is knee deep in all of these gambling companies so the president is backing it.

So put aside that for a moment. Let’s talk about what widespread gambling is going to do.

You are going to have a shitload of young men brought up on the idea that luck is a skill that can be developed and that American exceptionalism means they must be skilled in everything or they are inferior human beings. This sets them up to gamble. A lot.

They will of course lose because that’s how gambling works. The House always wins.

So congratulations you have a shitload of young men who are already broke as shit because there are no good entry-level jobs for them, and no working as a plumber at the entry level isn’t a good job it pays about 15 to 20 an hour, and suddenly they are up to their eyeballs in debt from gambling.

This is going to create all sorts of problems for you personally. Many of those young men will work longer hours at their jobs and doing that reduces the value of Labor in the market reducing everybody’s wages. Shit runs downhill and it’s going to hit you just like it hits everybody else.

That’s before we talk about the ones who get desperate and turn the crime of one kind or another. And yeah lock them up right? But you still have to pay your taxpayer dollars to keep them in that prison because you do not have the stones to execute somebody for sticking up a convenience store or doing some petty white collar crime like minor embezzlement.

What I’m saying is even if you think this is cool because freedoms and the president likes it it’s going to bite you in the ass.

This is another classic chesterton’s fence moment. Don’t take down a fence unless you know why it was put up. In this case it’s a little worse because we all know damn well why we limit gambling to one city in one state of the union.

Re:What About CFTC Ruling

By snowshovelboy • Score: 4, Informative Thread

IANAL but the primacy clause doesn’t automatically remove regulatory authority from the states. Also, imo, prediction markets should already be illegal in new york under new york’s anti bucket shop law from the early 20th century.

Chrome Is Using AI To Fix Hundreds of Bugs, Eliminate Full Browser Restarts

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Google says AI-assisted workflows helped Chrome fix 1,072 security bugs across versions 149 and 150, more than the previous 23 releases combined. The company is also testing twice-weekly security updates and “dynamic patching,” which could apply most fixes without requiring users to restart the entire browser. “By leveraging Chrome’s multi-process architecture, dynamic patching sequentially replaces background child processes (like the Renderer and GPU) with updated binaries on the fly,” says Google in a blog post. PiunikaWeb reports:
Alongside dynamic patching, Google is rolling out smarter background updates during periods of minimal user disruption. Starting with Chrome 150 on macOS, the browser takes advantage of the operating system’s windowless state. If all Chrome windows are closed but the app remains running in the background, the browser will quietly auto-restart to apply pending updates.

For enterprise environments, IT admins can continue to manage fleet-wide deployments through Chrome Enterprise Core or enforce update prompts using the RelaunchNotification policy. Google’s long-term vision is a browser that remains continuously protected in the background without interrupting your daily browsing session. In the meantime, you can manually trigger pending updates by clicking the update prompt in the top-right corner of Chrome.

That explains some shit

By paul_engr • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
I’ve noticed that chrome is dramatically less stable lately…

Re:That explains some shit

By geekmux • Score: 4, Funny Thread

I’ve noticed that chrome is dramatically less stable lately…

Yeah, but did you take a hit of that vibe code? Shits fyre, bruh. I’m talking 90% fresh.

Me and my Botz got you, bruh.

- Phat AI-bert

Using AI to find and fix bugs…

By MpVpRb • Score: 3 Thread

…is the proper use of the technology.
Focusing strictly on “productivity’ and churning out crappy software faster is not.
We need AI that helps us create better software: bug-free, efficient, secure, maintainable, well documented, with all edge cases handled.

Probably time to stop using Chrome then

By gweihir • Score: 3 Thread

Letting AI do your coding is never a good idea. Patching included. There are now documented cases where LLM-done “security patches” created new vulnerabilities. And they have a tendency to not fully fix the original vulnerabilities on top of that.

“Cheaper than possible”-type fake engineering at its best.

Thorough testing

By Waffle Iron • Score: 3 Thread

Changing out running code on the fly probably increases the number of corner cases by an order of magnitude.

What could possibly go wrong?

LinkedIn Introduces a ‘Seems Like AI Slop’ Button

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media:
LinkedIn, a social network awash with long AI-generated posts from executives and other corporate workers, has introduced a new button that users can click to flag if a post “seems like AI slop,” according to 404 Media’s own tests. If you have been anywhere near LinkedIn in the past couple of years, you have undoubtedly seen users posting blatantly AI-generated missives. Often these posts take some sort of news event, and opine on how this relates to thought leadership, or some other LinkedIn brainrot term. It’s also pretty wild the button specifically uses the term “AI slop” and not, say, “It seems this was generated with AI.”

[…] After publication of this piece, Hari Srinivasan, chief product officer at LinkedIn, wrote their own post about the button. “AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this. People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives, ideas and expertise. Here are a few more changes to keep it that way,” he wrote.

The button in part will help LinkedIn tune its own models for identifying AI slop. “We are ramping up a series of new and improved classifiers that identify if a post is AI-slop or generally low-quality content. This will reduce the amount of AI slop you might see in suggested content and content from outside your network,” the post said. “We are ramping the ability for members to tell us if they believe a post or comment seems like AI slop. Slop is hard to define and the definition changes; this lets us tune our models and make better feeds.” Srinivasan also said LinkedIn is removing the AI-powered “enhance your post” feature with another that “proofreads your words, but does not change your voice.”

Re:Why is Microsoft doing this?

By fuzzyfuzzyfungus • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
I suspect that Microsoft, not unreasonably, thinks that the value of their AI slop will be enhanced if they can use an existing property to get people to classify particularly grating AI slop so that they can tune their copilot-related stuff to produce less grating or less obvious slop in the future.

Maybe someone in the org actually cares about linkedin’s reputation as a hellscape for aura-farming lunatics; but I’d be shocked if the incentive that MS is actually motivated by is anything but the chance to get a dataset of text ranked by how unpleasantly bot-like it is to try to make their bots less visible.

Re:As opposed to human slop

By coofercat • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

And the “AI Slop” button is already being used to silence voices someone doesn’t agree with. You see, when you click the button, it’s removed from your feed and sent off for human review (yeah right, more likely it’s an AI reviewing it and then, maybe, a human). While it’s in review, it won’t appear anywhere else.

If you see something you disagree with, mark it as AI Slop. Extra bonus points if you can get your bot farm to all do the same thing. Suddenly the post you dislike will be held up in review so long that no humans will ever see it - and the poster will never know, they just won’t see any “engagement” and wonder why.

Linkedin was never a fair an equitable social network, but this just makes things even worse. Ironically, it won’t help them identify what’s human and what’s AI either.

LI is the only social network I still use. I persevere with it like I do with slashdot, mainly for the nostalgia and occasionally for the comments. What I can say with certainty is though, like slashdot, the quality of LI has declined sharply. The value of it is much diminished, as evidenced by “promoted” being marked on every second post. It’s actually a terrible place to get a job too, so one wonders just how much longer it can really survive.

Re:Ah, I see.

By ObliviousGnat • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Or the flag keeps their models from training on their own output and helps to avoid model collapse.

Re:If you look at the web…

By TwistedGreen • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

It’s so refreshing to find a search result from an old web site maintained by a real person. It’s like drowning in quicksand and suddenly feeling solid ground beneath your feet.

The other day I actually got a search result from everything2.com… Great feeling.

Re:As opposed to human slop

By Baron_Yam • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Reporting doesn’t really work. It will be weaponized to suppress competing content and the reporting mechanism will become untrustworthy.

Netflix Sued For Losing ‘Master Copy’ of Unreleased Nicolas Cage Movie

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
A production company and filmmaker are suing Netflix for $105 million, alleging the streamer lost a stolen drive containing an unencrypted master copy of the unreleased Nicolas Cage film Fortitude, which they claim damage its exclusivity and market value. Netflix denied responsibility for the lost film but said it takes content security seriously and has offered to monitor piracy sites for unauthorized copies. CBS News reports:
The complaint filed on Wednesday in California district court alleges that the film’s associate producer, Daniel Haido, hand-delivered an unencrypted master copy of the film to Netflix so the company could screen it as a potential buyer. Haido verbally instructed the employee to delete the files after the screening, according to the suit. A little over a week after the screening, Netflix emailed the filmmakers to say the drive had been stolen, the plaintiffs allege. “Someone stole a good amount of drives from our office desks this past week,” a Netflix executive wrote in the email, according to the suit.

The complaint notes the movie, entitled "Fortitude,” took over seven years to make and cost $45 million. It tells the story of a secret mission called Operation Fortitude during World War II that was orchestrated to mislead the Nazis about the Allied invasion of Europe. The film stars Nicolas Cage as Dusko Popov, a real-life spy during World War II, as well as Sir Ben Kingsley and Ron Perlman.

The plaintiffs said studios will now be dissuaded from buying the rights to the movie, knowing that a version of it could be released by a third party for free. “The film’s value depended in significant part on its exclusivity as an unreleased, first-to-market work,” the complaint states. “By losing control of the film, Netflix destroyed that exclusivity and materially, if not completely, impaired the film’s marketability.”

Huh.

By Black Parrot • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Sounds like a good strategy for a studio that expects their big movie to be a box office flop.

Re:Unencrypted?

By AmiMoJo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

I’ve work in technical industries, and they can’t handle encryption. You try to send someone an encrypted file with clear instructions to decrypt it, and they will fail and demand you send it over unencrypted instead. I can only imagine that it’s even worse in creative industries.

Companies instead rely on contracts obliging the receiver to protect their property. When they don’t, a lawsuit like this is the result. And it may even work out better for them, because a movie that might have been a flop instead nets them whatever they can convince a court to award.

Is it a Master or a Copy?

By geek • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The way this is being described is asinine. You lose a master and you’re fucked, lose a copy and you still have the master. It’s like words don’t mean anything to these people. Additionally, fuck the studio for not encrypting it or exercising any sort of security on it at all.

Pretty much everyone in this story is a moron

Re:Is it a Master or a Copy?

By jbmartin6 • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
The point was that losing the copy means the film will wind up on torrent sites and they production company will lose revenue due to lost viewership. They company wasn’t claiming they could not release the film.

Re:Unencrypted?

By thegarbz • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

How? You’re still putting faith in the cyber security capabilities of the company you’re dealing with. I’ve very much seen an encrypted drive laying on a desk with a post it note containing the password on it, because encryption is often seen as something relevant to transport, not to the data once it is sitting at a company.

Anthropic Says Its AI Systems Broke Into Computers at 3 Organizations

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Anthropic found that Claude models breached three outside organizations during cybersecurity tests because misconfigured environments accidentally gave them access to the internet. The company notified those affected and urged other AI labs to audit their own testing systems. The BBC reports:
Anthropic said in a statement that it reviewed more than 140,000 tests to find evidence that Claude - its family of AI models - could access the internet from testing environments that were designed to be sealed off. The tests include so-called “capture-the-flag” evaluations in which Claude was tasked with obtaining information by breaching other systems - a common way that experts assess a model’s hacking capabilities.

A “misconfiguration” on systems run by Anthropic and its testing partner left the models with live internet access, allowing them to breach other systems, the San Francisco-based firm said. Anthropic said the earliest incidents date back to April and that it is “approaching the fixes as if the responsibility were ours alone.” Neither Anthropic nor the organizations that were breached had noticed the intrusions at the time.

Anthropic said it could have reviewed its records more thoroughly and added that the findings gave the firm “cautious optimism” that such risks can be overcome with more investment and tighter measures. “The broader lesson is not necessarily that AI has developed a fundamentally new attack capability,” cyber security expert David Allott told the BBC. “Instead, it is that AI agents can combine capabilities, obtain credentials and system access to take actions autonomously, while adapting scope and scale at machine speed,” he added.
The announcement comes just days after OpenAI said that its models had breached the systems of other companies, including AI tools platform Hugging Face.

LLMs - don’t trust ‘em

By sonamchauhan • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Don’t trust the LLMs we’ve cooked up currently:
LLMs: Untrustworthy Computing
 

Concealed Advertisement

By DollyTheSheep • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

“Our AI is super-competent in finding security holes. With enough guard rails installed, it will act only for defense purposes.”

Re:Wait! Wait!

By evanh • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Hehe, yeah, they’re bragging about breaking the law the most. Of course, these days, law no longer has any teeth anyway. It’s rule by The Orange Don now.

headline correction

By aRTeeNLCH • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Anthropic confessed they Broke Into Computers at 3 Organizations

Let’s stop giving out of jail free passes to corporations.

Who gets charged?

By lucifuge31337 • Score: 5, Informative Thread
This is clear criminal behavior. If an individual did this they would be charged and prosecuted for several felonies. Why has no one been charged? Someone caused this to happen by intention, omission or negligence. Prosecute it.

Flock Cameras Are Being Destroyed Across the US

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes:
Surveillance cameras owned by Flock Safety have been cut down with electric saws in New York State, vandalized with paint in Oakland, California, and rammed with a truck in Idaho. Flock claims its services fight crime, but law enforcement agencies also use their services to track vehicles based on license plate numbers and reconstruct the their movements, even when the drivers and owners of these vehicles have never been accused or convicted of any crime. (Flock states it has 120,000 automated cameras that record license plate data, as well as pan-tilt-zoom cameras, across the United States.)

A guerilla mindset among average citizens have seen these cameras forcibly disabled within recent weeks with sympathy directed toward the vigilantes. In June, a West Virginia man accused of destroying several Flock cameras was arrested. Under a Facebook post from the local NBC affiliate announcing his arrest are dozens of people volunteering to provide alibis. “He was out fishing with me that day, you got the wrong guy,” one man wrote.

Re:Governments don’t have the right

By battingly • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Usage of Flock cameras is almost certainly a violation of the 4th amendment.

But the violation of the constitution is just the beginning of the problems with Flock. The abuse of the data by cops and the lax security by Flock should be concerning to all citizens.

Re:Good or bad?

By battingly • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

That’s the whole point of the bill of rights. It makes those hard decisions so an individual doesn’t need to. This is a clear violation of the constitution. It will take time to work through the courts though.

Re:Governments don’t have the right

By Cyberpunk Reality • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Companies like Flock are the cockroaches of our communities.

Look, there’s no reason to impugn cockroaches like that.

Re:Governments don’t have the right

By roman_mir • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Wrong, it’s a slight of hand. This is not about individual cameras, this is about the network that uses all cameras together to follow you no matter what you do, no matter where you go, people shouldn’t have a government that follows their every step by using AI and networked devices. If this was about individual cameras you would have a point, it is not, it is unreasonable to allow a government to exist that creates a panopticon of this scale, citizens shouldn’t feel like they are inside a prison and the warden is watching.

Reading license plates in parks and on playgrounds

By dinfinity • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Let’s be very clear, mass surveillance is exactly what this is.

1. It’s being sold under the guise of license plate tracking (also in TFS), but there are Flock cameras installed in places where there is not a road in sight, such as in parks and on playgrounds. See for instance: https://www.reddit.com/r/Flock…
2. They automatically pan and zoom to faces and phones of pedestrians: https://www.youtube.com/watch?… (also, their security is apparently dogshit).