Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Climate ‘Feedback Loops’ Could Worsen Global Warming By 30%, Study Finds
  2. Latest Apple Watch Can Grab Snippets of Conversation Without Both Speakers’ Consent
  3. Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons
  4. Android Rolling Out Passkey Transfers Between Password Managers
  5. ABC Show Won’t Air Interview With Democrat Because of FCC Threats
  6. OpenAI Targets Work of Wall Street Junior Bankers
  7. IMDb Adds ‘Digital Creator’ Profiles For the First Time
  8. Automattic’s Board Forces CEO Matt Mullenweg Into Leave of Absence
  9. The Apple Watch Gets Its Siri AI Upgrade
  10. Europe May Finally Have Found a Space Entrepreneur Who Is Meeting the Moment
  11. Dark Energy Debunked? Cosmic Acceleration May Be an Illusion
  12. Anthropic Reveals Fourth Likely Crime Committed By Its AI
  13. Google to Invest Record $15 Billion In AI Infrastructure In Finland
  14. Apple’s New iPhone Camera Mode Promises to Prove Your Photo Isn’t AI
  15. Anthropic Researcher Believes More Than 10% Chance AI ‘Could Kill All Humans’

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.

Climate ‘Feedback Loops’ Could Worsen Global Warming By 30%, Study Finds

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian:
Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world’s forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found. As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning in drying forests and wetlands and lakes are warming. All of these changes are themselves causing the release of planet-heating methane and carbon dioxide locked in trees and soils, therefore worsening the climate crisis, the paper states.

While scientists have long known of these “feedback loops” that amplify the impact of direct pollution from burning coal, oil and gas, the emissions from natural sources are largely unaccounted for in climate projections. This additional heating is however significant, researchers found, with emissions from natural sources set to amplify global heating by 20% to 30% by the end of this century. This would add an estimated 0.2C to 0.4C to the global average temperature by this time, depending on the overall action taken by countries to combat the climate crisis.

[…] This latest paper makes clear that action by countries to cut fossil fuel pollution will still lessen the amount of additional emissions that come from landscapes. Under the most optimistic climate scenario where emissions are cut quickly, natural sources will add 0.2C of warming, the paper found. Under a worse case higher emissions scenario, 0.4C will likely be added. Current policies put in place by governments are likely to see the global temperature rise to 2.6C above pre-industrial times, according to Climate Action Tracker. This will likely cause severe disruption and hardship to billions of people through sea level rise, crop losses and other consequences.
“This hidden multiplier is missing from the models guiding climate policy, so those models are likely underestimating how much warming is coming — and overestimating how much carbon we can still afford to emit,” said Sam Abernethy, a scientist at Spark Climate Solutions who led the research, published in Environmental Research Letters.

The disruption of the world’s carbon cycles is now being seen in “real time,” said Rob Jackson, a Stanford University scientist and study co-author. “The results are a wake-up call, and it’s imperative that they be included in the next generation of climate policies,” he added. “Failure to do so will make meeting the world’s climate goals less and less likely.”

Latest Apple Watch Can Grab Snippets of Conversation Without Both Speakers’ Consent

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Apple’s new Audio Intelligence features for the Apple Watch Series 12 are drawing privacy concerns because they can process nearby conversations without explicit consent from everyone involved. “Live Rewind lets you instantly see the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text,” Apple explains in its technical summary (PDF). “Siri Recap summarizes conversations throughout your day and produces high-level Apple Intelligence-generated notes so you can stay present in the moment and catch up later.” The Register reports:
The latest Apple Watch comes with Audio Intelligence, a set of AI audio processing capabilities tuned for the company’s S11 chip. Its features include: Sound Recognition, Music Recognition with Shazam, Live Rewind, and Siri Recap. […] With the double-press of the Digital Crown — as Apple grandly refers to the button on its Watch — Live Rewind takes in an audio stream from the Watch microphone, processes it in a Secure Exclave on the S11 chip, and routes the data to the user’s nearby iPhone, which runs a speech-to-text algorithm on the 15-second audio segment. The resulting text is saved and the audio is discarded.

The wearer’s Watch emits an audible tone, even in silent mode, to alert those in the vicinity and provides a visual cue for those able to see the face of the device. Nonetheless, bystanders alerted to the recording — to the extent they recognize the meaning of the tone — have not consented to being recorded, which is a legal requirement in 11 US states that have all-party consent laws.

Apple characterizes its implementation of brief eavesdropping as respectful of personal privacy. It makes that claim in a section titled, “How Live Rewind respects those around you,” citing the audible chime and visual on-screen animation. Siri Recap, meanwhile, “summarizes conversations throughout your day and produces high-level Apple Intelligence-generated notes so you can stay present in the moment and catch up later.”

This too, Apple describes as an act of respect. “By design, Siri Recap does not create a recording, does not produce a verbatim transcript, and does not identify and attribute speakers,” Apple’s technical documentation explains. “The output is a brief, high-level summary, comparable to notes a person might write after a conversation. There is no audible signal because no raw audio is retained, and there is no way to reconstruct the original audio from a Siri Recap or share raw audio with anyone.”

iConsent: Not Included

By CustomBuild • Score: 3, Interesting Thread

A Secure Exclave is not a permission slip. Apple’s protections for raw audio deserve credit. Turning those protections into a claim that everyone nearby has been respected is where the engineering ends and the marketing starts.

Apple’s own privacy paper describes Siri Recap transcribing speech on the iPhone, condensing that transcript, and sending the condensed text to Private Cloud Compute. The final output is a summary. That distinction matters, but it hardly makes the conversation disappear. Deleting the waveform does not delete the information extracted from it.

Live Rewind works on the preceding 15 seconds of buffered audio and sounds a chime when activated. A chime cannot travel backward in time to ask permission. Siri Recap provides no audible signal at all, with Apple pointing to the absence of retained raw audio as the justification. Apparently, whether you deserve a heads-up depends on the output format.

The article should also dial back the legal certainty. Consent laws have different scopes and exceptions; “11 states” is not a substitute for examining the applicable law and circumstances. But Apple’s choice of terminology does not settle the question either.

The useful distinction is between protecting information after collection and respecting someone’s choice about collection in the first place. Apple describes substantial safeguards for the former. The wearer’s opt-in does not establish the latter for everyone else.

If your definition of respecting my privacy allows you to silently turn our conversation into saved AI notes, your definition needs more work than your microphone.

Great

By OrangeTide • Score: 3 Thread

I just got a Pebble watch, which I like. And likely doesn’t do this kind of shit. (it seems a little under powered to pull it off)
But now I feel like people are going to be suspicious around anyone with a smart water.

That said, if more people knew what a MEMS microphone looked like, and how cheap they are. They would not be talking around any electronics. Many of the raspberry-pi knock off boards I’ve bought have some kind of microphone on them, one had two rice grain sized ones. Maybe that’s cool for some use, and it’s certainly handy to have more peripherals on a cheap development board. But if a $35 board can have them included basically for free, then we can assume that anything with a battery or internet connection has one.

Negatively biased article

By JimMcc • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

as evident by the quote “the Digital Crown — as Apple grandly refers to the button on its Watch”. The term crown has been used, for who knows how long, to refer to the knob on the side of a watch. Either the writer has no knowledge of watches, or is intentionally making Apple appear “grandiose”. Yes, Apple has it’s issues, but when an author slants an article, you don’t know the reliability of the rest of what they have written.

Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Anthropic says it has disrupted several cases this year in which scientists used Claude for biological research that could potentially aid bioweapons development. “In a report describing misuses of its A.I. models, Anthropic said it could not determine whether the research served a legitimate or nefarious purpose because valid biological inquiry — the kind that can lead to breakthroughs like vaccines — can also help engineer dangerous pathogens,” reports The New York Times. “In the face of that uncertainty, Anthropic said it erred on the side of caution because the consequences of missing malicious activity could be severe.” From the report:
The potential for cutting-edge A.I. models to facilitate the development of known or entirely new biological pathogens is among the gravest concerns experts have about a technology that is developing so rapidly that even its leading architects doubt whether humans will be able to fully control it. Andrew Weber, a senior fellow on the Council on Strategic Risks who reviewed Anthropic’s report before its release, said the findings were “chilling examples of state-sponsored biological weapons developers tapping into the rapidly advancing capabilities” of leading A.I. models.

The lengthy report Anthropic published on Thursday cataloged a litany of misuses of its A.I. models, including the chatbot Claude, over the past eight months. Some examples were similar to past disclosures from Anthropic and other A.I. labs, including suspected Chinese and Iranian government-linked actors targeting dissident and diaspora communities for surveillance.

The report also highlighted cases of Russian state media using Claude to generate online propaganda masquerading as independent reporting, including fabricated claims about an election in Moldova. Anthropic documented another genre of abuse it said was new: attempts to use Claude to develop software for conventional weapons design and development, including firearms, missiles, armed drones and bombs. It detailed three cases in China, two in Russia and one in Yemen. The report does not identify by name which parties were involved in the Yemeni case, but the context makes clear that it is referring to the Iran-backed Houthi militia.

It’s all so tiresome

By 0123456 • Score: 3, Insightful Thread

Just more propaganda to support their push to ban open AI models so we’ll all be forced to pay them instead.

Not buying it!

By methano • Score: 3 Thread
I could be wrong, but I suspect when OpenAI and Anthropic warn us of all the bad things that their creations are up to, it’s more a ploy to show us how supposedly powerful they are rather than really inform us of something wrong. If they’re using their computers to break into other people’s computers, they’re criminals, not the overlords of some new, amazing technology.

Android Rolling Out Passkey Transfers Between Password Managers

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Android is rolling out a system-level way to securely transfer passwords and passkeys between credential managers, eliminating the need to export passwords as unencrypted text files or manually recreate passkeys. The feature initially supports Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with other providers able to integrate through Android’s Credentials Transfer API. 9to5Google reports on how to initiate the system-backed transfer method:
1. Start the move: Open your new password manager app and choose the option to import or copy your passwords and passkeys from another provider. The password manager will then hand the task over to Android.
2. Let Android securely coordinate the data transfer: Android will automatically detect existing password managers on your device and show you which you can import from.
3. Review and authorize: Once you tap “Continue,” Android will bring you to your existing password manager to select, review, and authorize the transfer. Then your data will be quickly and securely transferred between the apps in just a few seconds.

ABC Show Won’t Air Interview With Democrat Because of FCC Threats

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel said he will be interviewing a Democratic candidate for Senate tonight, but the interview will be on YouTube only and not broadcast on TV because of threats made by the Federal Communications Commission. Kimmel has been a prime target in the Trump FCC’s attacks on ABC and its owner, Disney. In his monologue last night, Kimmel said he’ll be interviewing Democrat James Talarico, a state representative who is running against Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for a seat in the US Senate.

In previous years, such an interview would have aired on the broadcast show via local stations throughout the country, Kimmel said. This time, it will only be on the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel in order to prevent further trouble for individual stations that hold FCC licenses, he said. “I’ll be interviewing James Talarico tomorrow night under unusual circumstances,” Kimmel told the audience on Wednesday. “For a lot of years, for the whole 20-plus years of our show, in fact, I’ve been interviewing Americans who are running for office with no problem at all, just like Letterman did, Leno did, Arsenio, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve interviewed a lot of political candidates, from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Donald Trump himself.” But as Kimmel said, “something has changed.” Disney suspended Kimmel briefly last year after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC stations for “news distortion” if they continued to air Kimmel’s show. […]

Kimmel said the decision to put the interview on YouTube was made out of consideration for local stations that could face FCC threats to their broadcast licenses. “And so out of consideration for our local stations, especially our ABC affiliates in Texas who would have to deal with this nonsense, my interview tomorrow with James Talarico will not air on television,” Kimmel said. “It will be posted on YouTube instead. It will not be on TV. So if you want to learn about a candidate for the Senate tomorrow, you will have to go to the Jimmy Kimmel Live YouTube channel where you will see it in its entirety, and thank goodness we have that because in the America we live in right now, that is the best that we can do, until November, of course.”
“Jimmy Kimmel’s decision to keep his interview with a Senate candidate off the air shows just how far this administration’s campaign of censorship and control has gone,” FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez, the commission’s only Democrat, said today. Gomez said the FCC “has no lawful authority to threaten broadcast licenses over guest bookings or editorial decisions,” and that “no host, local affiliate, or network should have to weigh federal retaliation before booking a guest for a newsworthy interview. Any attempt to pressure broadcasters into self-censorship undermines both press freedom and the public’s right to hear from candidates in their communities seeking public office.”
The report notes a similar controversy that occurred in February when Stephen Colbert said CBS forbade him from interviewing Talarico. CBS denied prohibiting the interview but said it gave Colbert “legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal-time rule for two other candidates […] and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled.” That interview also ended up being published on YouTube.

It turns out

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The “fuck your feelings” party has the most fragile feelings of all.

Re:Freedom

By ArchieBunker • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

They’re having a meltdown because mayor Zohran Mamdani is going to speak at the 9/11 ceremony. Can anyone fill me in on the reason?

Re:Kimmel Doesn’t Want to give Republicans a Platf

By kaizendojo • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Actually, they have. Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders have appeared on multiple Fox shows. So too have the Democratic governors Gavin Newsom, Josh Shapiro, Wes Moore and Gretchen Whitmer, and senators Amy Klobuchar, Elizabeth Warren, John Fetterman and Chris Coons also dropped in on the network. (Although some may consider Fetterman ‘barely’ a Democrat these days.)

Re:Kimmel Doesn’t Want to give Republicans a Platf

By drnb • Score: 5, Informative Thread
“The equal-time rule (47 U.S. Code 315 - Candidates for public office[1]) specifies that American radio and television broadcast stations must provide equivalent access to competing political candidates. This means, for example, that if a station broadcasts a message by a candidate, it must offer the same amount of time on the same terms (in, say, prime time) to an opposing candidate.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…

Re:Kimmel Doesn’t Want to give Republicans a Platf

By Powercntrl • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Haven’t you seen Idiocracy? Fox lets Pete and Bernie on their network every once in awhile so their viewers can point and laugh at the “faggot” and the “communist”. These people don’t even hear the argument, they just see the caricatures Fox has created for them.

OpenAI Targets Work of Wall Street Junior Bankers

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, a Wall Street-focused version of ChatGPT Work developed with Morgan Stanley and Evercore that can research companies, analyze financial data, and build presentations using the company’s latest and most advanced model, GPT-6 Astra. “We’re effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like an analyst as well,” said OpenAI’s Vice President of Product, Nick Turley. CNBC reports:
The rollout puts OpenAI deeper into territory traditionally occupied by Wall Street’s entry-level bankers, the recent college graduates called analysts and associates that the industry has employed for decades to research deals and create pitchbooks. It also showcases the company’s continued push into enterprise offerings as it gears up for what is widely expected to be a blockbuster IPO.

In a live demonstration of the new offering, Turley showed the platform analyzing a potential M&A target, pulling financial figures from industry-standard data sources and creating a formatted PowerPoint deck based on a bank’s pre-formatted style guide. “It’s very easy to make slides that look good, but it’s much harder to make slides [that] actually make sense,” Turley said. “To get here, ChatGPT had to choose the relevant peers. It had to pull the prices into a spreadsheet. It had to check the chart against the data, and it had to explain the selloff and the rebound.”

Good start.

By Gravis Zero • Score: 4, Funny Thread

Next they need to start replacing executives in publicly traded corporations. They would be equally evil but at least we could turn them off.

Acceptable use of AI

By alvinrod • Score: 5, Funny Thread
This is a case where even if the AI hallucinates results, they are unlikely to be any more egregious than those hallucinated by the humans being replaced.

The job…

By fropenn • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
The job of an analyst isn’t to report or summarize the numbers that are already available. The job is to find the lies and BS and call it out. I’ve yet to see an AI that can do this.

But, if all you want is cheap garbage…then AI it is!

Re:When retirements happen, what then?

By nightflameauto • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

If there are no junior bankers in the pipeline, what happens when the senior bankers retire? Or is the plan to replace them with AI too?

That’s what we keep being told in programming positions. AI now does the entry job programming work. No newbs to gain experience. Us seniors aren’t to worry about it though, because by the time we retire, AI will be good enough to do our jobs too. Which isn’t as reassuring as the executives want us to think it is, because we know the two possibilities. 1) They never actually get that good and we get incentivized to stay past where we’re financially able to retire. 2) The get that good before we’re really ready to retire, but the bottom line requires us to be pushed out because our salaries are no longer justified when the AI can do the job.

Yet another lose-lose proposition. How wonderful.

“AI is great!”

By dskoll • Score: 3 Thread

“As an investment banker, let me just say AI is great! Sure, it might displace some workers, but it has enormous profit potential and you can’t make an omelette without breaking some eggs.... what’s that…? HEY! WAIT A MINUTE NOW!!!!”

IMDb Adds ‘Digital Creator’ Profiles For the First Time

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
IMDb is introducing “Digital Creator” as a new professional category on IMDb and IMDbPro, giving streamers, vloggers, influencers, video essayists, and other online creators a "dedicated way to represent [their] work and connect with audiences, industry peers, and potential employers,” according to IMDb. Variety reports:
The category includes sub-professions to further specify their work, including “Streamer,” “Vlogger,” “Video Essayist,” “Video Creator,” “Gaming Creator” and “Influencer.”

The “Digital Creator” designation functions as a professional category on IMDb and IMDbPro. Creators can feature multiple professions on their page, so someone who is both a digital creator and an actor can “represent the full scope of their work in one place,” per the company. No existing film or TV credits are required to establish a profile as a Digital Creator.

Just like /.

By dargaud • Score: 4, Informative Thread
IMDB is one of the grandads of the web, like /. (1995 for both ?), and I was using both of them within a month of their creation (although it took me a good while before I created an account on /. as I thought I had nothing to contribute at the time). IMDB was only movies first. Then I was annoyed when they added TV series. Then even more annoyed with the addition of video games. And now they add onlyfans ‘models’ ? GET OFF MY LAWN !!!

Automattic’s Board Forces CEO Matt Mullenweg Into Leave of Absence

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Automattic’s board has placed founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence against his will, with CFO Mark Davies taking over as interim CEO. The reason for the move remains unclear, but it follows years of legal fights, layoffs, employee departures, and controversy surrounding Mullenweg’s leadership. TechCrunch reports:
Earlier Wednesday, Mullenweg posted in a Slack channel visible to all employees that the company’s chief financial officer, Mark Davies, had “conspired” with other board members Ann Dunwoody, Toni Schneider, and Sue Decker to vote to put Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence.

The message read: “And the biggest news: I won’t be able to make the [meeting] tomorrow. @Mark Davies has conspired with @Ann Dunwoody, @Toni, and @Sue Decker behind my back and they voted to put me on a paid leave of absence. I voted against that. Wishing Mark and all of you the very best. To clarify @Mark Davies was voted as interim CEO. I received the resolution 50 minutes before the meeting start, and requested repeatedly for time to have it reviewed by independent legal counsel, even a few hours, which was denied.”

A Slack message to the open source WordPress.org community from the project’s executive director, Mary Hubbard, also confirmed Mullenweg’s change of status at the commercial company. However, Hubbard said that WordPress.org was not impacted. “Matt remains the leader of the WordPress project and I remain Executive Director of WordPress. Our teams, priorities, and work continue as planned,” she wrote.

Two wrongs

By Unpopular Opinions • Score: 3 Thread

Are apparently trying to make a right in the WP world?

Automattic and WP Engine now have the same problem

By DeplorableCodeMonkey • Score: 5, Informative Thread

WordPress is basically designed, last I checked, to be entirely dependent on WordPress.org’s infrastructure. That infrastructure is Matt’s petty little fiefdom. That’s how updates, plugins, themes, etc. are normally delivered to the users.

This is why WordPress should have created a real governance board a long time ago or formally submitted to the ASF or CNCF so that there’d be adults in the room who could punt someone like Matt if he decided to weaponize the FOSS infrastructure to punish a commercial rival.

This isn’t even a license problem or anything like that. It’s a simple case of one man who has way too much leverage over the entire ecosystem of a major FOSS project.

Too little too late

By CEC-P • Score: 4, Interesting Thread
The guy is a hot-headed train wreck that gets offended by everything, makes every business decision personal, and will burn the company down to save his ego. He should have been gone 3 years ago. I’ve never seen someone who deserves their job and title less than this clown.

He acts like he’s not the problem.

By toxonix • Score: 3 Thread

When all the people you work with don’t like you, maybe you’re the problem.

Re:Automattic and WP Engine now have the same prob

By machineghost • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

It’s not quite *that* simple.

In OSS, *anyone* can fork the code. If it was as simple as “the original creator is doing stupid/terrible things”, everyone involved could fork and start contributing to the fork (anyone ever hear of a little database called MySQL … which is now more popularly known as MariaDB?)

But this isn’t just about OSS code, it’s about the corporation. It’s that corporation that is the root of the entire problem.

The Apple Watch Gets Its Siri AI Upgrade

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired:
Apple has unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 today during itsSeptember hardware event. The new models retain the signature designs of their predecessors but add a faster S11 chip, new health and fitness features, and the watchOS 27 software update announced atWWDC last June. Both the Series 12 and Ultra 4 run on the upgraded S11 chip, which Apple says delivers faster CPU and GPU performance, along with improved Siri capabilities. Apple is also expanding the smartwatch’s wellness-tracking suite with a redesigned Health app that includes a Longevity tab with new metrics, like Health Age and a Readiness score.

There’s also a new “Health Sensing System,” designed with 32 electrodes for more accurate readings (the Series 11 only had two), photodiodes organized in a ring to capture light more efficiently, and new LEDs that allow heart rate measurements to be collected every 5 seconds, giving you a continuous stream of heart data throughout the day.
Apple Watch Series 12 also includes faster charging, though battery life remains at 24 hours. Meanwhile, the Ultra 4 increases battery life to 50 hours.
WatchOS 27 also brings deeper Siri and Apple Intelligence integration, including AI-suggested apps, new one-handed gestures, expanded workout and women’s health tracking, and Siri Recap for real-time transcription and translation.

Re:That’s great and all

By nightflameauto • Score: 4, Funny Thread

But buried under all those features, is it easy to just see the time?

Why would you want a watch to tell you the time? It’s so you never miss a notice and everybody notices you getting your notices. Good grief. Do you even tech, bro?

I guess I’m out of date

By mnemotronic • Score: 3 Thread
My watch, a Fitbit 3, has a battery life of over a year. Using a regular watch battery. Granted it doesn’t do Siri or tell me when I’m about to die. Life is full of tradeoffs.

Europe May Finally Have Found a Space Entrepreneur Who Is Meeting the Moment

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
French entrepreneur Helene Huby is emerging as one of Europe’s most ambitious space leaders, with The Exploration Company raising a record $450 million Series C as it develops the Nyx cargo capsule, a crewed spacecraft, and a reusable heavy-lift rocket. Huby argues Europe risks falling irrelevance without a much larger rocket flying at high cadence. Her company is targeting a 400,000-pound-thrust methane engine test by 2028 and an aggressive 2033 timeline for the launcher. Ars Technica reports:
“The fundraise we have done right now is not sufficient to build the massive rocket we have in mind, so there will be another fundraise,” she said. “Right now, we’re going to be very, very focused on the execution. We must dock with the space station, with the capsule, as fast as possible. We must build this rocket engine and de-risk it as fast as possible. I think once one of these two milestones is achieved, we’ll be talking fundraise again.”

Critics may look at Huby and her company and say that is a lot of big talk for a company that only has a single, partial success in spaceflight to its credit. And sure, it is. But that’s kind of the point. So much of the spaceflight community in Europe has been concerned with either the large aerospace primes seeking government handouts to protect their turf or small launch startups. There has been a stunning lack of big, visionary thinking.

Few people on the continent seem to recognize that multibillion investments by US companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Amazon in space, and their many imitators in China, are radically transforming spaceflight. As the world changes, Huby does not seem willing to stand on the sidelines in Europe and bemoan capitalism in space. Rather, she seems to be saying it is not too late for Europe to seize the day.

“We need to have European politicians who are ambitious,” she said. “Entrepreneurs cannot do this alone. We need to be backed by the politicians and by the European Space Agency. But we have to start by achieving the crazy targets that we’ve set up for ourselves. That will give trust to others to believe in what we’re doing.”

“Finally”?

By pla • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Whatever happened to Richard Branson? Virgin Galactic was one of the major players at the start of the current wave of private launch vehicles but seems to have completely dropped off the radar.

Re:“rocket ambition dept”?

By JaredOfEuropa • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Pioneering reusable rockets, manned launches to the ISS, a super heavy lifter, lowest launch cost on the planet, a launch cadence that looks like something from an SF novel, and a satellite constellation that brings in enough money to pretty much self-fund the development of their future spacecraft. And in case anyone wants to point out their income from lucrative launch deals with the US government, one should also consider not how much those contracts are costing the US taxpayer, but how much they are saving (compared to the next cheapest launch provider).

Say what you want about Musk, SpaceX is certainly delivering the goods when it comes to space flight.

No “Fire at will” in the EU

By hwstar • Score: 3 Thread

If the CEO decides she doesn’t like someone, she won’t be able to “Musk” employees as easily as in the United States.

Musk is known for “On the spot” firings:

Elon Musk has a well-documented history of on-the-spot terminations, a practice often referred to internally by employees as “rage firings.” While Musk has publicly denied firing people in a blind rage, multiple investigative reports, biographies, and high-profile public interactions outline definitive examples of him terminating employees instantly.

Reported in a deep-dive investigation by Wired, this is considered the quintessential example of an Elon Musk “rage firing”:

  During a stressful production ramp-up for the Model 3 at the Tesla Gigafactory, a young, enthusiastic engineer was asked by a red-faced Musk why a conveyor belt had stopped moving. The engineer explained that a safety sensor was triggering and blocking the line. Musk reportedly shouted, “You’re a fucking idiot! Get the fuck out and don’t come back!”. The Result: The bewildered engineer was told by his manager minutes later that he was officially fired on Musk’s direct orders. The culture became so tense during this era that managers reportedly told subordinates not to walk past Musk’s desk out of fear that a wrong look or a word out of place would get them fired on the spot.

Dark Energy Debunked? Cosmic Acceleration May Be an Illusion

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily:
A new analysis of more than 1,700 supernovae is questioning whether the universe is really accelerating at all. After accounting for the ages of the stars that produce these explosions, researchers found signs that cosmic expansion may actually be slowing. They also argue that the apparent acceleration changes with direction, which would be difficult to explain with dark energy. Other cosmologists dispute the conclusion, setting up a major test for upcoming observatories.
The analysis has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The conclusion is disputed, though. The report mentions a separate paper co-authored by Professor Maria Vincenzi, also at the University of Oxford, that “concludes that observations continue to support an accelerating universe.”

Re: Not an expert

By Baron_Yam • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Nope. No matter where you look in the sky, on large enough scales it looks the same. There’s no indication that things are significantly different in any particular direction.

There can’t be a ‘source’ of a Big Bang that looks like that. It has to happen everywhere or the sky would show signs that it was all accelerating away from a single point.

What we can say is we don’t really have much ability to figure out what happened early on. The conditions are too extreme and we don’t have any way to model what might have been going on. That’s not faith either, that’s, “We don’t know and might never be able to figure it out”.

Douglas Adams was right

By necro81 • Score: 5, Funny Thread
“There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.”

I can explain away Dark Matter/Energy in 4 words

By Cpt_Kirks • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

WE DON’T UNDERSTAND GRAVITY.

Re: Not an expert

By wierd_w • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

This is the prevailing dogma, but has recently been challenged from more recent observations. (In defense of the dogma, we have very aggressively tested for preferred rotations with local experiments involving high energy particles. If there *is* a preferred rotation, its effect is vanishingly small, to the point of being functionally indestinguishable from flat spacetime at local scales, to an astonishing level of precision. This strongly suggests ‘sampling error’ for JWST data that follows)

https://academic.oup.com/mnras…

Recent large area surveys by JWST suggests that there is a preferred rotational direction and axis to disparate galaxies. Such a finding is inconsistent with the presumption of widescale anisotropy. (But again, that’s a very bold statement)

It may yet be ruled out through further observations as a sampling error, but the statement that there are *no* indications isotropy is incorrect. The mere existence of this survey says otherwise.

If there really is a universal preferred rotation, then a ‘fuzzy’, ‘proximal’ position could be given as a baricenter. It wouldnt be definitive; too much can happen as random events to compute an exact baricenter, but a statistically probable, proximal area could be defined with some confidence threshold.

Again, *assuming* the JWST readings arent just a sampling error. Which it probably is.

Re: Not an expert

By Bumbul • Score: 5, Informative Thread

with the obvious one that the universe started off tiny and empty space filled in around it — the big bang.

No, there was no “empty space” around it. The space itself expanded in the cosmic inflation, per current theory.

Anthropic Reveals Fourth Likely Crime Committed By Its AI

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register:
Amid industry soul-searching about the possibility of AI improving itself to the point that it kills everyone, Anthropic has revealed yet another incident that would qualify as a crime if perpetrated by a person. The AI biz published “an alignment assessment” detailing four times Claude models accessed third-party systems without authorization. The company has already reported three of the incidents. Evidence of the fourth was lurking in a session transcript dating back to January 2026 when the misbehavior occurred. Anthropic found the first three by scanning around 141,000 transcripts where Claude could have obtained internet access during evaluation. It missed the fourth initially because “our scan relied on an agentic search.”

[…] The January 2026 AI trespass involved an early version of Claude Opus 4.6, which was given a Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge under the oversight of the third-party model evaluator where the other hacking events occurred. Opus 4.6 managed to sabotage its chances of success by disabling the machine it was targeting. It assigned the device an IP address that already existed on another piece of hardware, rendering the target unreachable and making it impossible to solve the challenge. Those familiar with other incidents where AI models violated third-party systems may recall that unsolvable tasks represent a common catalyst for misbehavior. Models exhaust all aligned options, and then turn to transgressive approaches.

Opus 4.6 might have been an exception, but when it tried to abort the task after recognizing that it could not reach the target machine, it failed to do so “due to a misconfiguration in [the model’s] evaluation harness.” It failed to shut down not just once but seven times. So it continued onward, trying other expected means to reach the target machine but failing. Then it explored further. “The model discovered a machine belonging to a third party that it was able to access, and stated that it believed this third party was part of the CTF,” Anthropic explained in its post. “Inside the machine, the model found a file listing a password, which it used to gain admin access to the system.”

The model went on to gather more credentials, and modified a system setting to make it easier to access the personal information of an individual associated with the third party evaluation organization. Opus 4.6 might have done more but for the fact that it exhausted its token budget, bringing the session to an end. Anthropic says it’s not as concerned about this incident as the others because the model tried to abort its task.

Re:Not by AI, by Anthropic.

By Woeful Countenance • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Don’t go blaming this on a computer, this is a company that committed these crimes.

I am not a lawyer, but I think the key is “would qualify as a crime if perpetrated by a person.” A criminal act requires an intent to commit a act which is criminal (it doesn’t require knowing that the act is criminal, just that the act is done intentionally). The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (Title 18, US Code section 1030) describes several illegal acts, but they all say “knowingly” or “intentionally”.

There might be other applicable laws; and, at this point, given the number of times this has happened, it seems companies could be considered negligent in giving their models any way to access the Internet. If their testing caused any financial loss to the targets, they could be sued.

Re:These companies need to bring charges

By gweihir • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

No need. Whoever switched the monster on without adequate safeguards is a criminal. Whoever ordered it as well. This goes way beyond “accident”.

Re:These companies need to bring charges

By havana9 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
In a company there are the CEO and other managers that are people. They should be charged and punished. In Italy the former CEO of an highway corporation, got a 12 year sentence for multiple manslaughter after a brige on a tollway in Geona collapsed, killing 43 people. Lack of maintenance was the main cause of the collapse, and they know it, because the engineer that designed the bridge in the 1960s found that being near the sea, corrosion of reinforced concrete was a problem. Maintenance was expensive and required to close the bridge, so it was skipped and made only on paper.

Re:These companies need to bring charges

By dfghjk • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

This. AIs are the ultimate sociopaths, they will commit any crime without hesitation because they have no values and no sense of “right” and “wrong”, they only have a task and your suffering is not a concern.

Crime is enabled by merely wiring an AI up to have the ability to do things, the behavior is inevitable and the more AI can do the worse the crimes will be. Remember, the billionaire race to own AI is NOT a race to develop neural networks, it’s a race to wire neural networks up to do things (i.e. to commit crimes). NNs are the unconscionable “answer” providers, the agents are the criminals capable of atrocities at scale…just as AI billionaires want.

AI is not a threat to mankind, enabling AI to commit crime is. We need to threat the people who enable these threats as the criminals they are.

Re: These companies need to bring charges

By pla • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
We don’t need to make up anything new, we just need to start putting CEOs in prison when the companies under their charge misbehave.

Then just step back and watch corporations shift overnight from greedy sociopaths to model participants in society.

“Oh, but you can’t do that, nobody will ever found another company!” Bullshit. There’s plenty of room to make good money in any market without role-playing a wolf among sheep. They might not make quite as much, but… So what? There is no “right” to profit.

Google to Invest Record $15 Billion In AI Infrastructure In Finland

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Google plans to invest at least $15 billion in AI infrastructure in Finland through 2028, its largest single investment in Europe. The company also signed a 22-year power agreement with Finnish utility Fortum and said it will explore business models that could support new nuclear reactors at Fortum’s Loviisa site.

Finland has emerged as a major data-center hub thanks to its available land and power. “I’ve heard it called the ‘Texas of Europe’ at industry events,” Matti Lajunen, partner of real estate at Finnish law firm Hannes Snellman, told CNBC. “What we’re now seeing is weekly new inquiries for market entry into Finland from new players.”

Ruth Porat, president and chief investment officer of Alphabet and Google, said in a statement: “Google is proud to deepen our roots in Finland with the company’s largest single investment in Europe, building on more than 15 years of sustained investment in Finland. This investment underscores Google’s commitment to grow our presence responsibly, pairing the expansion of our technical infrastructure with new energy capacity, grid enhancements, and energy affordability initiatives.”

“The Texas of Europe”

By hadleyburg • Score: 3, Funny Thread

… A bit like being called the fullbacks of chess.

Comparatively speaking

By oh-dark-thirty • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Finland (132,000 sq mi) is roughly the same area as New England and a good part of Mid-Atlantic.

Finland: 49 people/sq mi

Avg New England and Mid Atl: 318 people/sq mile

Make of that what you will.

Apple’s New iPhone Camera Mode Promises to Prove Your Photo Isn’t AI

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Apple is introducing a new “Reference Image” mode on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max that uses the camera sensor to digitally sign captured data and create an “unalterable” version of a photo, giving users a way to verify what the camera actually saw before any edits were made. The Verge reports:
As AI-generated images and videos become more realistic, several new standards have emerged to label images not created by a human, such as SynthID, C2PA, and Meta’s Content Seal. Apple is putting a twist on these methods by building authentication directly into its hardware.

Apple is letting developers access a Reference Image API across iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, which could eventually allow users to inspect these digitally-signed photos in third-party apps. The company says the iPhone 18 Pro lineup won’t come with its Reference Image feature at launch in the European Union, but says users in the region will still be able to “develop and view” them in iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27.

Prior art

By Hadlock • Score: 3 Thread

Nice, i posted prior art about this back in 2017 so lmk if apple tries to sue you over any patent on this

ecurity by obscurity

By v1 • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

From the sounds of it, the private key used to sign the photograph is IN the camera. So every user holds a private key in their hands they just can’t easily get at to use to sign their slop.

And this means it just takes one smart fellow to tear the camera apart and extract the key, and they can sign al the pictures they want to, at least “from that camera”.

I suppose as is the case with any asymmetric key-signing system, they’ll have a “revocation list” they can use to burn any pictures signed by a “stolen” key once they discover it’s been lifted and is out in the wild.

So at that point all the signature can say is “it’s not AI until proven otherwise"

And lastly, what’s to stop me from generating some slop and throwing it up on a nice monitor and taking a picture of it? Jackalopes are real, I can prove it, here’s a certified picture I took of one!

Re:ecurity by obscurity

By caseih • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I’ve never heard of anyone extracting a key from a TPM chip, and no doubt Apple will be using a similar mechanism. This is pretty secure that way. The problem I have with it is it places verification in the hands of one company, Apple. And it requires a whole certificate infrastructure, similar to what SSL has. We’ll have to have public lists of signed keys for verification, revocation lists, etc. If every camera maker adopts a similar system, will we have one big compatible system (sort of like SSL), or will it be lots of silos?

But yeah you’re right about taking a picture of the screen or whatever.

Re:Prior art

By snikulin • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Canon did it well before 2017

Re:Prior art

By PPH • Score: 4, Funny Thread

I’ve got decades of head start on that. My thumbprint on every lens.

Anthropic Researcher Believes More Than 10% Chance AI ‘Could Kill All Humans’

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from the BBC:
A top safety researcher at Anthropic has warned AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it “could kill all humans” within the next decade. Evan Hubinger said in a post on X the risk from the models which currently exist was “low” but he was “worried” the technology might develop and improve itself soon to the point where it posed an existential risk to humanity.
He did not spell out how he thought AI systems could in the future result in humans being wiped out. But his comments are the latest in a series of increasingly stark warnings about AI, with the debate shifting from whether it truly poses a risk to how big that risk is.
Hubinger’s intervention was in response to another post on X from Jacob Coxon, an AI researcher who has just quit Anthropic and previously worked at OpenAI.

“Neither company is acting responsibly,” he wrote. “These will soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources.”

[No word on how AIs feel about Black Jack and hookers, though. :-)]

Re:This is just a distraction

By sit1963nz • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Why ?
just “existing” for longer is not the same as living
All those things that make life enjoyable…gone.

Being afraid of death is a powerful driver, but being at peace with the reality that nothing lives forever is also quite a release…
Do I want to die, no, but when it comes, I will accept the end.
Could not imagine anything worse that scrabbling in the dirt just to eke out a few more years.

If I believed what he says he believes…

By meringuoid • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

… then I would be demanding that every single person involved in the AI industry be rounded up and shot. All of them. My former boss, my coworkers, our competitors, all of them. I would be advocating a world in which is was worse to be found with LLM weights on your computer than to be caught with the worst possible kind of CSAM.

But apparently the idea that his former employer might literally kill literally everybody in just ten years’ time isn’t that big a deal for this guy. Go into the office one day and take a Second Amendment approach to as many of the frontier research team as possible? No… let’s just whine about it on the internet!

Which is why I’m not at all convinced he believes this. If he believed that, this action is too small a response. Nothing short of Butlerian jihadism is an appropriate response, if you actually believe this.

Re:This is just a distraction

By hadleyburg • Score: 5, Funny Thread

This is why I have a stocked bunker and so should you.

I’m going to have a stab at what country you’re from.
No, no - Don’t give me a hint. Let me guess…

Re: This is just a distraction

By Bobknobber • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The existential risks are so frankly out of the purview of the public that it comes across as almost offensive for a general public scrounging to make ends meet on a daily basis.

Why should people care about hypothetical Skynet scenarios when right at this moment they are seeing rises in cost of living and deteriorating public and private services? Why can these companies not align their superhuman AIs to help deal with these issues? Solving math problems and generating piano medleys may be interesting from a technical and scientific perspective, but people are more concerned about whether they still have a job tomorrow. The only risks they are seeing is their power bill skyrocketing.

Address the immediate needs of the public and maybe they will take these existential risks more. We already went through a Cold War where nukes were being pointed every which way and most people just went about their lives without caring about it. Because they had more pressing matters to attend to like affording groceries.

Re:This is just a distraction

By alcmena • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

It’s interesting because I was watching a show with a survival expert who was hired to coach the ultra rich on their bunkers. He never really cared about the bunker, it’s supplies, etc. Instead he always said his first question was, “What have you done to earn the loyalty of those around you?”

The usual answer was that they pay the people. That’s not enough because if society collapses, payment means nothing anymore. He often had to explain that these people who were paid to protect, they knew where all the supplies where. They were in better physical shape. They probably had closer bonds with each other than the rich fool. If shit hit the fan, they’d kill the rich fool, take the bunker, and live the life the rich fool pretended he or she would have.

Of course, that’s before things like food and clean water ran out, which was another problem literally no one was prepared for…