Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Brain Interface Speaks Your Thoughts In Near Real-time
  2. James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rotate Clockwise
  3. Why Watts Should Replace mAh as Essential Spec for Mobile Devices
  4. OpenAI Accused of Training GPT-4o on Unlicensed O’Reilly Books
  5. Cheap TVs’ Incessant Advertising Reaches Troubling New Lows
  6. Nuclear Is Now ‘Clean Energy’ In Colorado
  7. Substack Says It’ll Legally Defend Writers ‘Targeted By the Government’
  8. Stablecoin Issuer Circle Files For IPO
  9. YouTube Could Be Worth $550 Billion as Analyst Crowns Platform ‘New King of All Media’
  10. Mozilla To Launch ‘Thunderbird Pro’ Paid Services
  11. Donkey Kong Champion Wins Defamation Case Against Australian YouTuber Karl Jobst
  12. FTC Says 23andMe Purchaser Must Uphold Existing Privacy Policy For Data Handling
  13. Arkansas Social Media Age Verification Law Blocked By Federal Judge
  14. MCP: the New ‘USB-C For AI’ That’s Bringing Fierce Rivals Together
  15. Larry Fink Says Bitcoin Could Replace the Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency Because of National Debt

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.

Brain Interface Speaks Your Thoughts In Near Real-time

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Longtime Slashdot reader backslashdot writes:
Commentary, video, and a publication in this week’s Nature Neuroscience herald a significant advance in brain-computer interface (BCI) technology, enabling speech by decoding electrical activity in the brain’s sensorimotor cortex in real-time. Researchers from UC Berkeley and UCSF employed deep learning recurrent neural network transducer models to decode neural signals in 80-millisecond intervals, generating fluent, intelligible speech tailored to each participant’s pre-injury voice. Unlike earlier methods that synthesized speech only after a full sentence was completed, this system can detect and vocalize words within just three seconds. It is accomplished via a 253-electrode array chip implant on the brain. Code and the dataset to replicate the main findings of this study are available in the Chang Lab’s public GitHub repository.

Yay

By vbdasc • Score: 3 Thread

This heralds some advanced new methods of interrogation.

Re:Do not want

By backslashdot • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

That is not how this works, not unless you physically mutter your thoughts. It detects neurons activating in the sensorimotor cortex, which is the signal that normally would propagate to your vocal cords and muscles. Your brain would have already decided to sound out the words.

James Webb Space Telescope Reveals That Most Galaxies Rotate Clockwise

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The James Webb Space Telescope has revealed that a surprising majority of galaxies rotate clockwise, challenging the long-held belief in a directionally uniform universe; this anomaly could suggest either our universe originated inside a rotating black hole or that astronomers have been misinterpreting the universe’s expansion due to observational biases. Smithsonian Magazine reports:
The problem is that astronomers have long posited that galaxies should be evenly split between rotating in one direction or the other, astronomer Dan Weisz from the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved with the study, wrote for Astronomy back in 2017. “This stems from the idea that we live in an ‘isotropic’ universe, which means that the universe looks roughly the same in every direction. By extension, galaxies shouldn’t have a preferred direction of spin from our perspective,” he added. According to Shamir, there are two strong potential explanations for this discrepancy. One explanation is that the universe came into existence while in rotation. This theory would support what’s known as black hole cosmology: the hypothesis that our universe exists within a black hole that exists within another parent universe. In other words, black holes create universes within themselves, meaning that the black holes in our own universe also lead to other baby universes.

“A preferred axis in our universe, inherited by the axis of rotation of its parent black hole, might have influenced the rotation dynamics of galaxies, creating the observed clockwise-counterclockwise asymmetry,” Nikodem Poplawski, a theoretical physicist at the University of New Haven who was not involved in the study, tells Space.com’s Robert Lea. “The discovery by the JWST that galaxies rotate in a preferred direction would support the theory of black holes creating new universes, and I would be extremely excited if these findings are confirmed.”

Another possible explanation involves the Milky Way’s rotation. Due to an effect called the Doppler shift, astronomers expect galaxies rotating opposite to the Milky Way’s motion to appear brighter, which could explain their overrepresentation in telescopic surveys. “If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” Shamir explains in the statement. “The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself.”
The findings have been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

Why Watts Should Replace mAh as Essential Spec for Mobile Devices

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Tech manufacturers continue misleading consumers with impressive-sounding but less useful specs like milliamp-hours and megahertz, while hiding the one measurement that matters most: watts. The Verge argues that the watt provides the clearest picture of a device’s true capabilities by showing how much power courses through chips and how quickly batteries drain. With elementary math, consumers could easily calculate battery life by dividing watt-hours by power consumption. The Verge:
The Steam Deck gaming handheld is my go-to example of how handy watts can be. With a 15-watt maximum processor wattage and up to 9 watts of overhead for other components, a strenuous game drains its 49Wh battery in roughly two hours flat. My eight-year-old can do that math: 15 plus 9 is 24, and 24 times 2 is 48. You can fit two hour-long 24-watt sessions into 48Wh, and because you have 49Wh, you’re almost sure to get it.

With the least strenuous games, I’ll sometimes see my Steam Deck draining the battery at a speed of just 6 watts — which means I can get eight hours of gameplay because 6 watts times 8 hours is 48Wh, with 1Wh remaining in the 49Wh battery.
Unlike megahertz, wattage also indicates sustained performance capability, revealing whether a processor can maintain high speeds or will throttle due to thermal constraints. Watts is also already familiar to consumers through light bulbs and power bills, but manufacturers persist with less transparent metrics that make direct comparisons difficult.

Re:Dumbfucks

By ukoda • Score: 5, Informative Thread

W = V*A. Do the math yourself, it’s not that hard.

Actually that maths is impossible in some cases, unless you open the product, because many products don’t say what battery voltage is.

Traditionally they were simply talking about the mAh rating of the single Li-Ion cell in the power banks of the early days with a boost converter to give the 5V people needed. Also most Li-Ion cells refer to a nominal voltage of 3.7 or 3.8V which is charged to 4.1 or 4.2V and discharged to whatever the boost converter and over discharge circuit limits are set to. So the mAh rating of a cell may be, say, 3000mAh. So right away the first pet peeve. That is simply 3Ah, saying “three thousand thousandths of an Ampere” is just plain stupid, but you can not seem to tell a marketing type that.

Next problem is the cell may be spec’d for that Ah when discharged to, say, 2.8V where as the circuit may stop boosting at 3.2V, making the actual Ah rating less when used. Then you get losses in the boost converter. So combine those two losses and you might only be getting 70% of the cell’s spec. If we were to say the cell has 3Ah based on a nominal voltage of 3.8V that would be 3Ah x 3.8V = 11.4Wh but add in the losses from boosting and limited cell voltage range and you could be looking at only 8Wh. At 5V that is actual 1.6Ah even though the marketing person has insisted that to be labeled and advertised as 3000mA.

About now someone is reading this and thinking “Well actually…” and will come up with different answer. That will merely point out that the current system is flawed. The basic premise proposed, that mobile devices power should be spec’d in watts, is a good idea, regardless of how simple the maths may appear.

Side note: Go to the electronics store as ask the customers there if they know the formula for converting voltage to wattage. I bet the number of people who can do your “not that hard” maths will be rather low.

Wh, not W

By hackertourist • Score: 3 Thread

The capacity of a battery can usefully be specified in Wh. Power draw is in W, multiply by the time that power is drawn to get the capacity you used.

Wh is superior to Ah: if you only know the Ah, you have to find out the voltage of the battery to find out what capacity it has. Power draw for devices is generally specified in W, not A.

Why we should quote EV battery capacity in Joules

By niks42 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
I’d rather like it if instead of telling me my battery is 85KWh, I could have a 300 MegaJoule battery.

Battery manufacturers could have competitions about who will be the first to get a gigajoule into an SUV, and we could quote battery density in Joules per cubic meter .. oh, the beauty of SI units and the metric system.

OpenAI Accused of Training GPT-4o on Unlicensed O’Reilly Books

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
A new paper [PDF] from the AI Disclosures Project claims OpenAI likely trained its GPT-4o model on paywalled O’Reilly Media books without a licensing agreement. The nonprofit organization, co-founded by O’Reilly Media CEO Tim O’Reilly himself, used a method called DE-COP to detect copyrighted content in language model training data.

Researchers analyzed 13,962 paragraph excerpts from 34 O’Reilly books, finding that GPT-4o “recognized” significantly more paywalled content than older models like GPT-3.5 Turbo. The technique, also known as a “membership inference attack,” tests whether a model can reliably distinguish human-authored texts from paraphrased versions.

“GPT-4o [likely] recognizes, and so has prior knowledge of, many non-public O’Reilly books published prior to its training cutoff date,” wrote the co-authors, which include O’Reilly, economist Ilan Strauss, and AI researcher Sruly Rosenblat.

They were just as likely read from pirated copies

By TheMiddleRoad • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

People post stuff all over the internet, including from Oreilly. It’s probably hard not to suck up copyrighted info if you’re not super careful, and these AI scumsuckers most certainly aren’t.

“Likely”

By eclectro • Score: 3 Thread

Maybe they bought a print copy off ebay, scanned the book using a book scanner, and then used it to “train” the computer.

What then?? Cue the end of “software licensing”??

Why should they worry?

By SeaFox • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

They’re looking at Facebook and how much trouble they are not getting in for doing it, and realized it’s open season now for companies to ignore copyright law if AI is involved.

Cheap TVs’ Incessant Advertising Reaches Troubling New Lows

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes an op-ed from Ars Technica’s Scharon Harding:
TVs offer us an escape from the real world. After a long day, sometimes there’s nothing more relaxing than turning on your TV, tuning into your favorite program, and unplugging from the realities around you. But what happens when divisive, potentially offensive messaging infiltrates that escape? Even with streaming services making it easy to watch TV commercial-free, it can still be difficult for TV viewers to avoid ads with these sorts of messages. That’s especially the case with budget brands, which may even force controversial ads onto TVs when they’re idle, making users pay for low-priced TVs in unexpected, and sometimes troubling, ways. […]

Buying a budget TV means accepting some trade-offs. Those trade-offs have historically been around things like image quality and feature sets. But companies like Vizio are also asking customers to accept questionable advertising decisions as they look to create new paths to ad revenue. Numerous factors are pushing TV OS operators deeper into advertising. Brands are struggling to grow profits as people buy new TVs less frequently. As the TV market gets more competitive, hardware is also selling for cheaper, with some companies selling TVs at a loss with hopes of making up for it with ad sales. There’s concern that these market realities could detract from real TV innovation. And as the Secretary Noem ad reportedly shown to Vizio TV owners has highlighted, another concern is the lack of care around which ads are being shown to TV owners — especially when all they want is simple “ambient background” noise.

Today, people can disable ambient mode settings that show ads. But with some TV brands showing poor judgment around where they sell and place ads, we wouldn’t bank on companies maintaining these boundaries forever. If the industry can’t find a way to balance corporate needs with appropriate advertising, people might turn off not only their TVs more often, but also unplug from those brands completely.
Some of the worst offenders highlighted in the article include Vizio TVs’ “Scenic Mode,” which activates when the TV is idle and displays “relaxing, ambient content” accompanied by ads. Roku City takes a similar approach with its animated cityscape screensaver, saturated with brand logos and advertisements. Even Amazon Fire TV and premium brands like LG have adopted screensaver ads, showing that this intrusive trend isn’t limited to budget models.

Y’all.....

By doubledown00 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Don’t. Connect. Your. TV. To. Your. Network.

\o/

By easyTree • Score: 3, Informative Thread

If a small fraction spent on advertising was instead spent on making good quality products which solve customer problems.. that would be a multi-win - for customers, victims/viewers of advertising, for vendors and a smaller market for advertisers - yay \o/

Uh editors forgot the article link - here it is

By blahbooboo • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Editors, you might wanna actually link to the article you’re quoting entirely from. Artificial intelligence can’t come soon enough to replace these editors . https://arstechnica.com/gadget…

Nuclear Is Now ‘Clean Energy’ In Colorado

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
With the signing of HB25-1040 on Monday, Colorado now defines nuclear as a “clean energy resource" since it doesn’t release large amounts of climate-warming emissions. “The category was previously reserved for renewables like wind, solar and geothermal, which don’t carry the radioactive stigma that’s hobbled fission power plants following disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima,” notes Colorado Public Radio. From the report:
In an emailed statement, Ally Sullivan, a spokesperson for the governor’s office, said the law doesn’t advance any specific nuclear energy project, and no utility has proposed building a nuclear power plant in Colorado. It does, however, allow nuclear energy to potentially serve as one piece of the state’s plan to tackle climate change. “If nuclear energy becomes sufficiently cost-competitive, it could potentially become part of Colorado’s clean energy future. However, it must be conducted safely, without harming communities, depleting other natural resources or replacing other clean energy sources,” Sullivan said.

By redefining nuclear energy as “clean,” the law would let future fission-based power plants obtain local grants previously reserved for other carbon-free energy sources, and it would allow those projects to contribute to Colorado’s renewable energy goals. It also aligns state law with a push to reshape public opinion of nuclear energy. Nuclear energy proponents promise new reactor designs are smaller and safer than hulking power plants built in the 20th century. By embracing those systems, bill supporters claimed Colorado could meet rising energy demand without abandoning its ambitious climate goals.

It is low CO2

By joe_frisch • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

From the point of view of climate change, Nuclear produces low CO2 relative to the amount of energy generated so it makes sense to call it “clean energy”. There are issues of waste, proliferation, and cost, but countries like France have shown that nuclear can be operated successfully.

Re:About time

By Sethra • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Absolutely. Fast tracking modern nuclear plant designs is a win for everyone on both sides of the aisle. Clean reliable 24/7 energy.

Gen III plant designs are exceptionally reliable and safe, and the waste they produce is trivial compared to fossil fuels, and even solar / wind.

I would absolutely feel great about my tax dollars going into this kind of effort to electrify our energy infrastructure.

While the Climate Warms

By RossCWilliams • Score: 3 Thread
So resources for immediate reductions in climate emissions will get hijacked for another round of new experimental nuclear reactors. Likely with all the hidden (and not so hidden) public subsidies, cost overruns, delays and lack of reliability that has come to be associated with commercial nuclear power. But it will put money in investors pockets. Gates and the other tech bros can’t wait for their investment in the nuclear PR campaign to produce fruit in the form of profitable investment opportunities.

Re:Problem isn’t that it’s clean or dirty

By Cyberax • Score: 4, Informative Thread

The problem is that even with the best reactors it is not safe to run them in an unsafe manner.

The worst case accident for the current generation of reactors: Three Mile Island. In other words, no lives list, very minor radiation leakage.

No operator wants to _lose_ a reactor and all of the future profits.

Re:No shit it’s clean. It’s been clean since 1958

By DamnOregonian • Score: 4, Informative Thread
Your supposition was correct. Parent lied.
Nuclear power is dirty, dangerous and expensive. Say no to new nukes.

While estimates of deaths from Chernobyl are contentious, and you stating with certainty that the extended mortality is basically nothing is completely unscientific, what should not be is the large area of land where it is quite literally unsafe to live even today.

Pretending like we should be building these things in the center of our cities is fucking absurd- just as absurd as the idea that they shouldn’t be built at all.
Don’t play down the scope of that disaster.

Substack Says It’ll Legally Defend Writers ‘Targeted By the Government’

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Substack has announced it will legally support foreign writers lawfully residing in the U.S. who face government targeting over their published work, partnering with the nonprofit FIRE to expand its existing Defender program. The Verge reports:
In their announcement, Substack and FIRE mention the international Tufts University student who was arrested by federal agents last week. Her legal team links her arrest to an opinion piece she co-wrote for the school’s newspaper last year, which criticized Tufts for failing to comply with requests to divest from companies with connections to Israel. “If true, this represents a chilling escalation in the government’s effort to target critics of American foreign policy,” Substack and FIRE write.

The initiative builds on Substack’s Defender program, which already offers legal assistance for independent journalists and creators on the platform. The company says it has supported “dozens” of Substack writers facing claims of defamation and trademark infringement since it launched the program in the US in 2020. It has since brought Substack Defender to writers in Canada and the UK.

It wont help

By Local ID10T • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

What good is a lawyer filing a writ in court on your behalf when you have already been renditioned to a prison in a foreign country?

Tie up government lawyers

By quonset • Score: 3 Thread

Tie up enough government lawyers and all the cases will have to keep being extended because there’s too much work and not enough lawyers thanks to all the firings.

Then, when the case has gone on for years and still hasn’t gone to trial, you can claim you’re not get a speedy trial and want the case dismissed.

Re:It wont help

By Local ID10T • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Note: referencing the case of Abrego Garcia who was accidentally sent to El Salvador -the US government has admitted in court that it was an “administrative error”, but said "it’s not like we can get him back".

Judicial pushback is not sustainable

By backslashdot • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Ultimately, the only thing that will work long term is educating and creating a culture that respects the human right to free speech, and more importantly due process. Judges can be replaced after all. Every human regardless of situation and circumstance is entitled to due process, which is the ability to defend themselves fairly against being punished for accusations. If you don’t want to respect that, then you should pray there’s no God. Pray there’s no future mechanism by which your soul may be thrust into such predicament. We already have a government snatching foreigners off the street, with no prior notification that their visa was revoked, and may eventually be selling them as slaves to work camps. And don’t think a future government won’t seize born or legitimately naturalized citizens off the road after arbitrarily revoking citizenship. They are already revoking the ability guaranteed birth right citizenship .. this is so that they have mechanisms to challenge political rivals. Remember Trump not only questioned the citizenship of Barack Obama, but also John McCain — the descendent of war heroes. Even if you and your family members can prove you were born here (we know databases are unhackable right?) .. if we have a system by which the state can utilize plain clothes unidentifiable enforcement agents to snatch people off the street .. that same system will get used against citizens eventually. It may start with being used against pedophiles, who would argue against that? Then murderers, surely murderers should be deprived of citizenship. Or, maybe they will make it so that if you say something negative about the government or the US that is treason, and a citizenship revocable action. And that can happen to anyone. Remember Elon Musk called Mark Kelly .. who is a combat veteran, a traitor because he visited Ukraine. It’s virtually guaranteed corrupt politicians will abuse the combined power of citizenship revocation and the ability to catch and expel non-citizens to unaudited prison camps with no due process.

Re:Doing the bidding and rioting for the Dems

By Geoffrey.landis • Score: 5, Informative Thread

was of course a stupid action of that student.

She “co-wrote an opinion piece for the school’s newspaper.” That hardly counts as “rioting.” In fact, I’d call it “free speech.” You know— the stuff that the constitution protects?

No country accepts such behavior from foreign students.

Should the US be as good as the best countries in the world? Or do think it’s ok to be as bad as the worst?
It’s our choice.

Stablecoin Issuer Circle Files For IPO

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, has filed for an IPO aiming for a $5 billion valuation. It marks the company’s second attempt at going public amid renewed momentum in the crypto sector and signs of recovery in tech IPO markets. CNBC reports:
A prior merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) collapsed in late 2022 amid regulatory challenges. Since then, Circle has made strategic moves to position itself closer to the heart of global finance, including the announcement last year that it would relocate its headquarters from Boston to One World Trade Center in New York.

Circle reported $1.68 billion in revenue and reserve income in 2024, up from $1.45 billion in 2023 and $772 million in 2022. The company reported net income last year of about $156 million., down from $268 million a year earlier. A successful IPO would make Circle one of the most prominent pure-play crypto companies to list on a U.S. exchange. Coinbase went public through a direct listing in 2021 and has a market cap of about $44 billion.

YouTube Could Be Worth $550 Billion as Analyst Crowns Platform ‘New King of All Media’

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
MoffettNathanson has crowned YouTube the “New King of All Media” as the Alphabet-owned video platform has become a major force in Hollywood, dominating time spent watching TV. From a report:
The firm estimates that YouTube as a standalone business could be worth as much as $550 billion — or nearly 30% of the tech giant’s current valuation. The figure is based on the firm’s analysis of enterprise value as a multiple of revenue in 2024 for Netflix (10.5x revenue), Meta (8.8x), Roku (2.4x), Warner Bros. Discovery (1.4x), Fox (1.3x) and Disney (1.3x).

In 2024, YouTube was the second-largest media company by revenue at $54.2 billion, trailing behind only Disney. However, the MoffettNathanson analysts predict YouTube will take the top spot in 2025, becoming a leader in both engagement and revenue. “YouTube has the potential to become the central aggregator for all things professional video, positioning itself to capture a share of the $85 billion consumer Pay TV market and the ~$30 billion streaming ex. Netflix market in the U.S.,” they wrote in a Monday research note. “On monetization, when comparing YouTube’s massive TV screen engagement to its estimated TV revenue, it remains significantly under-monetized relative to its scaled reach and differentiated offering. This signals a substantial runway for improving its monetization strategy.”

The Network Effect can be a b****

By Tablizer • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Oh great, yet another #%@^$ monopoly. Ads are already increasing.

I was hoping Bing Videos would give them competition, but it’s not working out. (Yes, I hate MS, but that’s not a reason to have another monopoly.)

That Howard Stern line again

By ccandreva • Score: 4, Informative Thread

I still remember the show where he was talking about people crowning themselves “The King of Pop” and the “King of whatever”, and he decided to be the “King of all Media” , and kept calling himself that until it stuck.
And now it’s Yutube . What a long strange trip.

Meanwhile, back in reality

By dsgrntlxmply • Score: 3 Thread
I go to YouTube to watch something on baking technique, and end up with a shrieky ad about “stuck poop”.

YouTube is where …

By PPH • Score: 3 Thread

… content goes to die. I’ve bookmarked a bunch of interesting videos over the years. Some of them have just disappeared.

And they wonder why people scrape this stuff from the site?

YouTube or YouTube TV?

By LindleyF • Score: 3 Thread
Or have they lumped them together again?

Mozilla To Launch ‘Thunderbird Pro’ Paid Services

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Mozilla plans to introduce a suite of paid professional services for its open-source Thunderbird email client, transforming the application into a comprehensive communication platform. Dubbed “Thunderbird Pro,” the package aims to compete with established ecosystems like Gmail and Office 365 while maintaining Mozilla’s commitment to open-source software.

The Pro tier will include four core services: Thunderbird Appointment for streamlined scheduling, Thunderbird Send for file sharing (reviving the discontinued Firefox Send), Thunderbird Assist offering AI capabilities powered by Flower AI, and Thundermail, a revamped email client built on Stalwart’s open-source stack. Initially, Thunderbird Pro will be available free to “consistent community contributors,” with paid access for other users.

Mozilla Managing Director Ryan Sipes indicated the company may consider limited free tiers once the service establishes a sustainable user base. This initiative follows Mozilla’s 2023 announcement about “remaking” Thunderbird’s architecture to modernize its aging codebase, addressing user losses to more feature-rich competitors.

No mail hosting services?

By Sethra • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

If they want to offer a solution that mimics GMail and O365 they’re going to need to host the actual email services. People don’t use GMail and O365 for the client, they use it because of the basic back end email service.

Simply having a “Pro” tier of the client for OSS means some enterprising folks will replicate the tier functionality with free addons.

“feature rich”

By jrq • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
“Feature Rich” is a time-honored foolhardy mistake.
Thunderbird has been the go-to mail client of choice for over 20 years.
Thinking that they had to compete with the bloated and slow Outlook was a mistake.
I want a slim email client, and Thunderbird is moving faster and faster away from that. Outlook may be the competition, but making all those mistakes is not the solution.

Stop right there!

By devslash0 • Score: 3 Thread

“comprehensive communication platform”

No one wants another Microsoft 365. In fact, no one wants the first M365 either. It’s too bit, too clunky and trying to much than it’s healthy for it to do.

Do you want to do something that people would buy instead of M365? Create an email client that is just an email client. A product that does a single job and does it well.

Re:No mail hosting services?

By rta • Score: 5, Informative Thread

If they want to offer a solution that mimics GMail and O365 they’re going to need to host the actual email services. …

Yes. That’s the “Thundermail” part of the Pro Package though the Summary mangles it/confuses it.

The original announcement (that’s linked from TFA ) is more clear https://thunderbird.topicbox.c…

Donkey Kong Champion Wins Defamation Case Against Australian YouTuber Karl Jobst

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian:
A professional YouTuber in Queensland has been ordered to pay $350,000 plus interest and costs to the former world record score holder for Donkey Kong, after the Brisbane district court found the YouTuber had defamed him “recklessly” with false claims of a link between a lawsuit and another YouTuber’s suicide. William “Billy” Mitchell, an American gamer who had held world records in Donkey Kong and Pac-Man going back to 1982, as recognized by the Guinness World Records and the video game database Twin Galaxies, brought the case against Karl Jobst, seeking $400,000 in general damages and $50,000 in aggravated damages.

Jobst, who makes videos about “speed running” (finishing games as fast as possible), as well as gaming records and cheating in games, made a number of allegations against Mitchell in a 2021 YouTube video. He accused Mitchell of cheating, and “pursuing unmeritorious litigation” against others who had also accused him of cheating, the court judgment stated. The court heard Mitchell was accused in 2017 of cheating in his Donkey Kong world records by using emulation software instead of original arcade hardware. Twin Galaxies investigated the allegation, and subsequently removed Mitchell’s scores and banned him from participating in its competitions. The Guinness World Records disqualified Mitchell as a holder of all his records — in both Donkey Kong and Pac-Man — after the Twin Galaxies decision. The judgment stated that Jobst’s 2021 video also linked the December 2020 suicide of another YouTuber, Apollo Legend, to “stress arising from [his] settlement” with Mitchell, and wrongly asserted that Apollo Legend had to pay Mitchell “a large sum of money.”

King of Kong

By hadleyburg • Score: 3 Thread

If you haven’t seen the 2007 documentary film King of Kong, I recommend watching it.
Even if you have little interesting in the world of computer games, it’s still a good film.

Re: Take that Karl Jobst! NERD FIGHT!!!

By Tempest_2084 • Score: 4, Informative Thread
I’ve met him in person. He’s every bit of a twat waffle as he’s depicted in King of Kong. Arrogant and living off holding a record (at least at the time) on a 40 year old game long after people had stopped caring. It was actually kind of sad, like a former child star trying to cash in on a 40 year old show in order to stay relevant. I guess he has money due to his family’s hot sauce business so he can afford to do this. Oh and his hot sauce was terrible.

So we know for a fact the guy cheated

By rsilvergun • Score: 3 Thread
Because we have the pictures that show that the type of joystick he got his last high score on is it the kind of joystick that a regular donkey Kong cabinet has, and the joystick is absolutely critical because the arcade cabinet has a four-way joystick and if you use an 8-way joystick they’re all sorts of tricks that become possible.

We also know that the video of the other high score run done was on mame or similar emulator because it exhibited behavior that you would only get on an emulator..

It’s frustrating because these are details that to any nerd are blindingly obvious but to a jury facing a proper lawyer it would be easy to confuse them.

This is a gross miscarriage of justice and a horrific abuse of the legal system.

The whole trial was not about the cheating

By SlashDotCanSuckMy777 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

It was all about Jobst’s comments about Mitchell re Apollo - who died.

He’s still a cheater - the Judge said as much - but the defamation wasn’t to do with that.

Oh and one more thing

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Yes the guy is a cheater. We have pictures of him standing next to the donkey Kong cabinet where he got his high score and the wrong kind of joystick is on the cabinet. For donkey Kong that is a huge huge deal because the arcade shipped with a four-way joystick and if you stick an eight-way joystick on it then you can do all kinds of tricks to increase your score.

There’s also another score he submitted where you can very clearly see artifacts of software emulation that wouldn’t be present on real hardware. That’s how he originally got caught. Somebody looked at the video of his high score run and pointed out the artifacting. It’s the kind of stuff you wouldn’t know about unless you are really really deep into the programming emulation scene. Small differences in how the arcade cabinet boots up.

Make no mistake he absolutely cheated to get his scores. You’ll notice that he didn’t sue anyone in America and win. He needed countries where the libel laws favor the person suing.

And like I mentioned to the other guy everyone in the arcade scene knows this. Twin galaxies did not restore his scores. What they did is to satisfy a court order they took note of his scores in a background database that is meaningless to anyone who follows arcade scores.

FTC Says 23andMe Purchaser Must Uphold Existing Privacy Policy For Data Handling

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The FTC has warned that any buyer of 23andMe must honor the company’s current privacy policy, which ensures consumers retain control over their genetic data and can delete it at will. FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson emphasized that such promises must be upheld, given the uniquely sensitive and immutable nature of genetic information. The Record reports:
The letter, sent to the DOJ’s United States Trustee Program, highlights several assurances 23andMe makes in its privacy policy, including that users are in control of their data and can determine how and for what purposes it is used. The company also gives users the ability to delete their data at will, the letter says, arguing that 23andMe has made “direct representations” to consumers about how it uses, shares and safeguards their personal information, including in the case of bankruptcy.

Pointing to statements that the company’s leadership has made asserting that user data should be considered an asset, Ferguson highlighted that 23andMe’s privacy statement tells users it does not share their data with insurers, employers, public databases or law enforcement without a court order, search warrant or subpoena. It also promises consumers that it only shares their personal data in cases where it is needed to provide services, Ferguson added. The genetic testing and ancestry company is explicit that its data protection guidelines apply to new entities it may be sold or transferred to, Ferguson said.

enforcement

By awwshit • Score: 3, Insightful Thread

How much longer will there even be an FTC? Not holding my breath for enforcement in the current environment.

Who will buy it?

By BinBoy • Score: 3, Interesting Thread

Who will buy all that sweet, sweet private info without the ability to sell it?

I’m sure that’ll work

By Smidge204 • Score: 4, Funny Thread

*Sells data for $100M*

“Oh sorry, you said to NOT do that?”

*Pays FTC fine of $1M*

=Smidge=
/If it’s punishable by a fine, it’s legal for a price

Arkansas Social Media Age Verification Law Blocked By Federal Judge

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
A federal judge struck down Arkansas’ Social Media Safety Act, ruling it unconstitutional for broadly restricting both adult and minor speech and imposing vague requirements on platforms. Engadget reports:
In a ruling (PDF), Judge Timothy Brooks said that the law, known as Act 689 (PDF), was overly broad. “Act 689 is a content-based restriction on speech, and it is not targeted to address the harms the State has identified,” Brooks wrote in his decision. “Arkansas takes a hatchet to adults’ and minors’ protected speech alike though the Constitution demands it use a scalpel.” Brooks also highlighted the “unconstitutionally vague” applicability of the law, which seemingly created obligations for some online services, but may have exempted services which had the “predominant or exclusive function [of]… direct messaging” like Snapchat.

“The court confirms what we have been arguing from the start: laws restricting access to protected speech violate the First Amendment,” NetChoice’s Chris Marchese said in a statement. “This ruling protects Americans from having to hand over their IDs or biometric data just to access constitutionally protected speech online.” It’s not clear if state officials in Arkansas will appeal the ruling. “I respect the court’s decision, and we are evaluating our options,” Arkansas Attorney general Tim Griffin said in a statement.

Re:“Constitutionally protected speech online?”

By Local ID10T • Score: 4, Informative Thread

The company that owns the platform can restrict your speech on their platform -just as you can restrict who talks about what in your home.

The government may not restrict what you discus in your home -or on a 3rd party platform.

Re:“Constitutionally protected speech online?”

By DamnOregonian • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The government is who is trying to place a limit on speech here, not the company.
So yes, that is precisely what the first amendment targets.

MCP: the New ‘USB-C For AI’ That’s Bringing Fierce Rivals Together

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
What does it take to get OpenAI and Anthropic — two competitors in the AI assistant market — to get along? Despite a fundamental difference in direction that led Anthropic’s founders to quit OpenAI in 2020 and later create the Claude AI assistant, a shared technical hurdle has now brought them together: How to easily connect their AI models to external data sources. The solution comes from Anthropic, which developed and released an open specification called Model Context Protocol (MCP) in November 2024. MCP establishes a royalty-free protocol that allows AI models to connect with outside data sources and services without requiring unique integrations for each service.

“Think of MCP as a USB-C port for AI applications,” wrote Anthropic in MCP’s documentation. The analogy is imperfect, but it represents the idea that, similar to how USB-C unified various cables and ports (with admittedly a debatable level of success), MCP aims to standardize how AI models connect to the infoscape around them. So far, MCP has also garnered interest from multiple tech companies in a rare show of cross-platform collaboration. For example, Microsoft has integrated MCP into its Azure OpenAI service, and as we mentioned above, Anthropic competitor OpenAI is on board. Last week, OpenAI acknowledged MCP in its Agents API documentation, with vocal support from the boss upstairs. “People love MCP and we are excited to add support across our products,” wrote OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on X last Wednesday.

MCP has also rapidly begun to gain community support in recent months. For example, just browsing this list of over 300 open source servers shared on GitHub reveals growing interest in standardizing AI-to-tool connections. The collection spans diverse domains, including database connectors like PostgreSQL, MySQL, and vector databases; development tools that integrate with Git repositories and code editors; file system access for various storage platforms; knowledge retrieval systems for documents and websites; and specialized tools for finance, health care, and creative applications. Other notable examples include servers that connect AI models to home automation systems, real-time weather data, e-commerce platforms, and music streaming services. Some implementations allow AI assistants to interact with gaming engines, 3D modeling software, and IoT devices.

MCP? That’s not re-assuring

By Mr.Intel • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

MCP may very well stand for “Model Context Protocol”, but in the 1980’s it stood for the villain of the Tron series, Master Control Program. Will tying AI together be a good thing or will we see the rise of another kind of MCP?

Let’s get this out of the way

By necro81 • Score: 4, Funny Thread
Obligatory XKCD.

Obfuscation

By systemd-anonymousd • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

MCP is just RPC with overly obfuscated documentation to disguise simple it is. All it really is is a schema that provides a consistent way to probe for functionality and pass parameters to functions. That’s it. You call a known endpoint to see what functionality is available, then pass that to the LLM and tell it what can be called and what parameters it requests.

Anthropic’s own AI agrees with me:

>Yes, that’s hilariously accurate! At its core, MCP is basically just a standardized WebSocket protocol for:

>1. Discovery (“what can you do?”)
>2. Tool invocation (“do this thing with these params”)
>3. Structured responses (“here’s what happened”)

>The actual core interaction is dead simple: …

The MCP documentation is just an example of VC-bait: https://docs.anthropic.com/en/…

Which isn’t to say MCP isn’t very useful, but you should generally be able to discern multiple levels of unnecessary indirection and realize it’s serving a political and marketing purpose rather than a technical one. Langchain is the same way (but much worse).

Larry Fink Says Bitcoin Could Replace the Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency Because of National Debt

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot
With America’s national debt sitting comfortably over the $36.2 trillion mark, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink is warning the burden could one day be the reason the dollar is dethroned as the reserve currency of the world. From a report:
He argues that decentralized currencies like Bitcoin could replace the dollar as worldwide organizations lose faith in national currencies and seek an independent solution. Fink explained his theory in his 2025 letter to shareholders, writing: “The U.S. has benefited from the dollar serving as the world’s reserve currency for decades. But that’s not guaranteed to last forever.

“The national debt has grown at three times the pace of GDP since Times Square’s debt clock started ticking in 1989. This year, interest payments will surpass $952 billion — exceeding defense spending. By 2030, mandatory government spending and debt service will consume all federal revenue, creating a permanent deficit. If the U.S. doesn’t get its debt under control, if deficits keep ballooning, America risks losing that position to digital assets like Bitcoin.”

Hey, Larry!

By nicolaiplum • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Have you thought of paying taxes to that government?

or are taxes only for little people?

Ha Ha HA HA HA!

By gurps_npc • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Some idiot thinks a crypto currency is going to be less eratic than ANY countries currency.

Lets ignore that foolishness. The US debt is not high. One of the problems with big numbers is people do not instinctively know if they are ‘high’ or ‘low’.

If I were to tell you that a shoe had 5 billion atoms in it - would you think that is a big shoe or a small shoe? You do not know because you do not know how many atoms are in any shoe.

36 trillion sounds like a big debt. You have nothing to compare it to. The proper comparison is to the GDP.

In the 709s the US debt to GDP ratio was in the 30s. It was less than 40% of the GDP. We made in 5 months than our national debt was. Currently (2024) it is around 120%. That is, it it takes about 15 months to earn back our debt. 120% is on the high side. Canada has 108%, France has 111%, UK is about 97.6%

The problem countries have ratios like Venezuela 146%, Sudan 256%, Japan 255%.

Basically anything below 140% is high but not yet problematic.

Do we need to be concerned? Absolutely. Whether you like D. Trump or not, he has admitted it will be a rough time in the near future. I would expect the Debt to go up significantly at least until the President (whoever it might be) no longer seeks to scare other countries into obeying him. That is going to take at least another 6 months, and quite possibly till 2029.

The problem is, crypto should suffer just as much as the US economy. If only because much of the crypto gain was driven by the same people in the stock market.

Re:Won’t Ever

By nightflameauto • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Bitcoin seems to be backed by nothing but greed.

In all honesty, this may explain why it’s stuck around so long. Few things are infinite. Human stupidity is one. Greed may very well be another. There doesn’t appear to be any shortage of it at the moment.

Bitcoin backed by much less

By Roger W Moore • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
At least that was something and the gold was controlled by a government and, as we learnt, what mattered most was the government not the gold which is why we all dropped the gold. Bitcoin is backed by greed and based on an algorithm that, if we ever get quantum computers working properly, will not be worth the bits used to store it.

Re:It could, but it won’t yet

By korgitser • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

The reason the dollar is going to lose the reserve currency status is not going to be national debt. Yes printing dollars is free money for the US, and while the world is not necessarily thrilled about being taxed like that, it’s not a problem big enough to outweigh the benefits of having a reserve currency in the first place. But the team R fearmongering about debt is just talking point wank. Yes money printing in the US takes the form of issuing debt, so what. I will not care to digress too much into that here, because it’s offtopic to my main point. But rest assured, all of the interest payments are paid simply by printing more money without consequence, and the US is nowehere near to where any problems may arise. Like, at least two orders of magnitude nowhere near.

In any case. The dollar got to be the reserve currency because the US was a major trade partner of pretty much everyone, and especially Europe, who built itself up after the war on US dollar loans, buying US industrial production. Of no less importance was the fact that in the US there was rule of law, so the environment there was reliable and predictable, and deposits there were safe. This made for a situation where it made sense for everyone to bank with the US, because you wanted to buy a lot from them, and since everyone else did, too, you could be certain that everyone else would always be happy to take your dollars, too.

Contrast this to now. The US only has a few sectors of significant trade left, and China is the major trade partner of everyone. The deposits in the US are no longer considered safe since they confiscated the holdings of Afghanistan and Russia - think whatever you want of those two, taking someones money is about as big a hole that you can shoot in your foot if you want everyone to bank with you. There is no going back from this, every country now has to take into account that if the US decides they don’t like you, you can lose your money. The last straw now is of course the orange man, who has taken any premise of predictability and reliability out of the equation. The dollar system is a dead man walking, with no foundations left. Inertia is great of course, and change will take time, but the wheels are turning, and they’re not turning back.