Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Intel and AMD Form an x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group
  2. Apple Announces New, Faster iPad Mini Built For Apple Intelligence
  3. Spotify Criticized For Letting Fake Albums Appear On Real Artist Pages
  4. FCC Launches Formal Inquiry Into Why Broadband Data Caps Are Terrible
  5. Apple Study Reveals Critical Flaws in AI’s Logical Reasoning Abilities
  6. More Colleges Set To Close in 2025, Even as ‘Ivy Plus’ Schools Experience Application Boom
  7. Google’s Chrome Browser Starts Disabling uBlock Origin
  8. SSD Prices Set To Fall 10% in Q4 as AI PC Demand Lags - TrendForce
  9. National Archives Pushes Google Gemini AI on Employees
  10. Vietnam Plans To Convert All Its Networks To IPv6
  11. Cost of Dealing With PFAS Problem Sites ‘Frightening’, Says Environment Agency
  12. India Agrees With Musk in Satellite Spectrum Allocation Row
  13. Why OpenAI Is at War With an Obscure Idea Man
  14. Murder Trial Begins For US Tech Consultant Accused In Death of Cash App Founder
  15. Human Sense of Smell Is Faster Than Previously Thought, New Study Suggests

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.

Intel and AMD Form an x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Phoronix’s Michael Larabel reports:
Intel and AMD have jointly announced the creation of an x86 ecosystem advisory group to bring together the two companies as well as other industry leaders — both companies and individuals such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds. Intel and AMD are forming this x86 ecosystem advisory group to help foster collaboration and innovations around the x86 (x86_64) ISA. […] Besides Intel amd AMD, other founding members include Broadcom, Dell, Google, HPE, HP Inc, Lenovo, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat.
Here are the “intended outcomes” for the group, as stated in the press release:
The intended outcomes include:
- Enhancing customer choice and compatibility across hardware and software, while accelerating their ability to benefit from new, cutting-edge features.
- Simplifying architectural guidelines to enhance software consistency and standardize interfaces across x86 product offerings from Intel and AMD.
- Enabling greater and more efficient integration of new capabilities into operating systems, frameworks and applications.

Apple Announces New, Faster iPad Mini Built For Apple Intelligence

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
In a press release this morning, Apple announced a new iPad Mini with a faster A17 Pro chip that supports Apple Intelligence. The Verge reports:
The new Mini is mostly a spec bump: it runs a new A17 Pro chip, which Apple says has a 30 percent faster CPU, 25 percent faster GPU, and a Neural Engine twice as fast as the previous model. The device also supports the new Apple Pencil Pro, which is a nice touch for the Mini-toting artists out there, and comes with 128GB of storage in the base model rather than 64GB. (Those AI models need all the space they can get.) The Wi-Fi 6E chip is faster, the USB-C port is faster, everything about the iPad Mini is the same as before only faster this time.

The only real design change with the new Mini is the colors. Apple’s gone more colorful with a lot of its products this year, and the Mini comes in new purple and blue models. In photos they look muted rather than vivid, though, so don’t expect the eye-popping new colors on the iPhone 16.

Spotify Criticized For Letting Fake Albums Appear On Real Artist Pages

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
This fall, thousands of fake albums were added to Spotify, with some appearing on real artist pages, where they’re positioned to lure unsuspecting listeners into streaming by posing as new releases from favorite bands. An Ars reader flagged the issue after finding a fake album on the Spotify page of an UK psych rock band called Gong. The Gong fan knew that the band had begun touring again after a surprise new release last year, but the “latest release” listed by Spotify wasn’t that album. Instead, at the top of Gong’s page was a fake self-titled album supposedly released in 2024.

The real fan detected the fake instantly, and not just because the generic electronic music sounded nothing like Gong’s experimental sounds. The album’s cover also gave the scheme away, using a generic font and neon stock image that invoked none of the trippy imagery that characterized Gong’s typical album covers. Ars confirmed with Gong member Dave Sturt that the self-titled item was an obvious fake on Monday. At that time, Sturt said the band was working to get the junk album removed from its page, but as of Tuesday morning, that album remained online, along with hundreds of other albums uploaded by a fake label that former Spotify data “alchemist” Glenn McDonald flagged in a social media post that Spotify seemingly ignored.

On his site, McDonald gathered the junk album data by label, noting that Beat Street Music, which has no web presence but released the fake Gong album, uploaded 240 junk albums on Friday alone. Similarly, Ancient Lake Records uploaded 471 albums on Friday. And Gupta Music added 483 just a few days prior, along with 600 junk albums from Future Jazz Records uploaded between September 30 and October 8. These junk albums don’t appear to be specifically targeting popular artists, McDonald told Ars. Rather, generic music is uploaded under a wide range of one-word artist names. However, by using that tactic, some of these fake albums appeared on real artist pages, such as Gong, experimental rock band Swans, and English rock bands Asia and Yes. And that oversight is on Spotify, McDonald suggested.
“We are aware of the issue, have relocated the content in question, and are considering our further options against the providing licensor,” a Spotify spokesperson said. “When we identify or are alerted to attempts by bad actors to game the system, we take action that may include removing stream counts and withholding royalties. Spotify invests heavily in automated and manual reviews to prevent, detect, and mitigate the impact of bad actors attempting to collect unearned royalties.”

Noticed this elsewhere too

By locater16 • Score: 3 Thread
Happening on Youtube Music too. A new single from famed video game composer Jeremy Soule? No, generic AI generated pop trash. These services really need some sort of security and authentication for artist attribution, this is such a boring, low stakes scam that it’s the “single ladies in your area want you” ad of today.

“Invests heavily”

By Sebby • Score: 3 Thread

Spotify invests heavily in automated and manual reviews to prevent, detect, and mitigate the impact of bad actors attempting to collect unearned royalties.

But not quite heavily enough to, you know, code any sort of verification system the artists can use to confirm when stuff gets added under their listings.

Quite the “investment” Spotify has, indeed.

FCC Launches Formal Inquiry Into Why Broadband Data Caps Are Terrible

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
The Federal Communications Commission announced that it will open a renewed investigation into broadband data caps and how they impact both consumer experience and company competition. From a report:
The FCC is soliciting stories from consumers about their experiences with capped broadband service. The agency also opened a formal Notice of Inquiry to collect public comment that will further inform its actions around broadband data caps. “Restricting consumers’ data can cut off small businesses from their customers, slap fees on low-income families and prevent people with disabilities from using the tools they rely on to communicate,” FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel said. “As the nation’s leading agency on communications, it’s our duty to dig deeper into these practices and make sure that consumers are put first.”

Why?

By sconeu • Score: 3 Thread

Because telcos are cheap bastards that want to charge the most for the minimum possible service, nor do they want to build out their infrastructure to support the data rates that they advertise.

Competition is the real answer

By jonwil • Score: 3 Thread

Anywhere where you have increased competition in broadband and new players have entered the market, outcomes have almost always been better for consumers in terms of lower prices/better value as the legacy ISPs are forced to compete.

Get rid of all the laws, rules, regulations and agreements that artificially constrain competition and things will get better.

Apple Study Reveals Critical Flaws in AI’s Logical Reasoning Abilities

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Apple’s AI research team has uncovered significant weaknesses in the reasoning abilities of large language models, according to a newly published study. MacRumors:
The study, published on arXiv [PDF], outlines Apple’s evaluation of a range of leading language models, including those from OpenAI, Meta, and other prominent developers, to determine how well these models could handle mathematical reasoning tasks. The findings reveal that even slight changes in the phrasing of questions can cause major discrepancies in model performance that can undermine their reliability in scenarios requiring logical consistency.

Apple draws attention to a persistent problem in language models: their reliance on pattern matching rather than genuine logical reasoning. In several tests, the researchers demonstrated that adding irrelevant information to a question — details that should not affect the mathematical outcome — can lead to vastly different answers from the models.

Dupe di-dupe di-dupe di-dupe dupe dupe

By gweihir • Score: 3 Thread

And please stop claiming “faults” in “LLM reasoning abilities”. LLMs have no reasoning abilities and pattern matching is not a valid substitute.

Re:Reason

By Baron_Yam • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The funny thing is… Somehow our ability to reason is an emergent property of weighted connections in a network. Because we don’t understand how that happens, we don’t know why it isn’t happening with the AI we have created, or if it’s even possible with the setups we’re using. We also don’t know if it’s impossible for a sufficiently complex version of an existing AI system to do it.

Probably impossible, I suspect there’s more than just ‘embiggen it and it will happen’.

Re:Dupe di-dupe di-dupe di-dupe dupe dupe

By war4peace • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Question is, do Slashdot editors have enough reasoning abilities, considering the dupefest here?

More Colleges Set To Close in 2025, Even as ‘Ivy Plus’ Schools Experience Application Boom

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Many colleges are under financial pressure, and the cracks are starting to show. From a report:
At least 20 colleges closed in 2024, and more are set to shut down after the current academic year, according to the latest tally by Implan, an economic software and analysis company. Altogether, more than 40 colleges have closed since 2020, according to a separate report by Best Colleges.

As the sticker price at some private colleges nears six figures a year, students have increasingly opted for less expensive public schools or alternatives to a four-year degree altogether, such as trade programs or apprenticeships. At the same time, the population of college-age students is also shrinking, a trend referred to as the “enrollment cliff.”

So what?

By iAmWaySmarterThanYou • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

There are about 6000 colleges in the US. 20 closing is nothing. All that means is 20 schools were so poorly run they couldn’t manage to thrive in a business where they can almost print their own money.

In any large group of colleges, businesses, sports teams, game studios or anything else serving the public, if you have 6000 of them and 20 fail… so what? Life provides no guarantees of wealth and success to anyone.

Re:So what?

By DesScorp • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

There are about 6000 colleges in the US. 20 closing is nothing. All that means is 20 schools were so poorly run they couldn’t manage to thrive in a business where they can almost print their own money.

The actual number of colleges closed in the last 18 months is over 100. And its an accelerating trend. And most are small, independent colleges. Money is money, but it’ll be a shame to see some of them go. A lot of these places were schools where you could still get that old-fashioned type of college experience, i.e. a reasonable class size with a full professor that actually discussed things in-depth with undergraduates. In most larger schools these days, at the freshman and sophomore levels, you’re crammed into a class 75-100 full, with a graduate assistant using a PowerPoint to regurgitate pre-digested stuff that you could get from the book on your own. If you’re at an Ivy, you’re paying a premium for that as well.

There are going to be three types of schools that survive in the 4 year school market:

1 - Ivy + schools (I’d add Vanderbilt, Rice, Georgetown, and a couple of others to this list)
2 - Private Northeastern Off-Ivy schools with deep pocketed donors ( Places like Ithaca, Rensselaer, Syracuse, etc) and pockets of similar rich private schools elsewhere (Texas Christian, Reed College, and the like)
3 - State supported schools, especially the big ones. Even the smaller directional schools are safe because once a state supported college is established, it’s nearly impossible to kill it politically

The rest are probably doomed from one degree to another, especially a lot of the smaller Catholic schools established by specific orders

Re:Limits to inelastic demand discovered

By nealric • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The benefit of college has always been mostly intangible, and even more so in the information age. There’s nothing you can’t learn in college that isn’t available to learn on your own on the internet. What you are really paying for is for an institution to certify what you’ve learned, and secondarily for the association with the other students learning with you (which at elite schools are more likely to be either social or intellectual elites).

Saturated

By MBGMorden • Score: 3 Thread

Per Google, there are currently around 5916 colleges in the US. Losing 40 of them isn’t likely to hurt that much. They were likely 40 private and obscure colleges.

To me, unless someone else is paying for it (eg rich parents or you got a scholarship), a private university is a pointless waste of money. Part of becoming an adult means making more intelligent purchasing decisions, and a large well-known subsidized state/public university is financially your best bet for a college education. They’re well known, and most of them are pretty good (yeah the top schools in the country are private, but some of the worst schools are also private - public universities are more consistently decent).

Personally I’m fine with some of the stragglers closing down.

PS I found most of the list here: https://www.bestcolleges.com/r…

Yep, its mostly private schools. The few public ones were largely satellite campuses closing or 1 entity splitting into 2 (which I guess counts as the original closing).

Re:Demographics

By hey! • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

The actual number of people applying to college has actually increased dramatically since 1970s, although it’s dropped of slightly in the past five years.

If you look at US demographics, there is a minima around age 50 — people who would have applied in the early 1990s. This corresponds to a decline in applicant age people in the 1990s, but then we see each age cadre increasing in size for the next fifteen or twenty years before stabilizing. On top of that you had increased *high school* graduation rates, and an increase in the percent of eligible students who apply to college. So overall up until about five years ago the size of the applicant pool was increasing, but small colleges and universities have been failing at a high rate for over twenty years.

So the idea that small institutions are failing because the demand for higher education has collapsed doesn’t stand up to examination. I don’t think we can simplify this trend to one thing, but perhaps we can to *two*: the rising cost of delivering higher education, and a shift in market preferences from quirky small institutions in the 1970s to something more like big box store higher education with more conventional branding. Those two trends arise in turn from many other trends, but total market demand hasn’t played a part in the failure of colleges *yet*.

But it soon will. Take a look at the demographic pyramid I linked to. What you see is a catastrophic reduction in fertility rate from 2.05 live birth/woman (roughly replacement, which is 2.1) down to just 1.6. Starting about three years from now there will be a rapid and steady drop in the applicant pool for at least the next 15 years. This will look like a bloodbath in higher education.

Google’s Chrome Browser Starts Disabling uBlock Origin

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
If you’re a fan of uBlock Origin, don’t be surprised if it stops functioning on Chrome. The Google-owned browser has started disabling the free ad blocker as part of the company’s plan to phase out older “Manifest V2” extensions. On Tuesday, the developer of uBlock Origin, Raymond Hill, retweeted a screenshot from one user, showing the Chrome browser disabling the ad blocker. “These extensions are no longer supported. Chrome recommends that you remove them,” the pop-up from the Chrome browser told the user. In response, Hill wrote: “The depreciation of uBO in the Chrome Web Store has started.”

Re:Don’t use anything from google

By torkus • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Plus if an ad becomes too obnoxious, people will associate the products with the annoyance and actively avoid them.

This is already every ad I see TBH.

I “love” it when you go to a news site on mobile and there’s a banner on top, floating video window, banner on bottom, and a larger scroll-based banner that appears and then you get a full-screen “sign up for xyz” 5 seconds in.

80% of the screen real estate is covered by ads. All you’re doing is pissing off customers and training them to ignore ads. If they wonder why the click-thru rate is so low, it’s because you’ve trained people thus. We’re in some weird dystopian era rn and I’m wondering when peak-ad will hit.

Re:No problem

By rudy_wayne • Score: 5, Informative Thread

uBlock Origin works just fine in Pale Moon for me.

uBlock Origin works well on Palemoon, but not for YouTube. On YouTube I get a popup message saying that adblocking violates Youtube’s terms of service. I don’t get that with Firefox or Brave.

I really like Palemoon and have used it as my main wen browser for a couple of years now. Unfortunately, the developer of Palemoon doesn’t like “web extensions”, so Palemoon requires its own special version of uBlock Origin that isn’t updated as often

There really is no reason to use Chrome any more. There are other chromium-based browsers hat work just as well and don’t have Google’s anti-user bullshit built in.

Re:Whining gits

By thegarbz • Score: 5, Informative Thread

False, they have gotten there. Unfortunately under manifest V3 the functionality is somewhat hindered and as such they actually released their fully compliant manifest V3 plugin under a different name: uBlock Origin Lite allowing users to continue to use the objectively better version as long as they can.

uBlock Origin isn’t alone in this, Malwarebytes Browser Guard have the same issue. Literally everyone producing content blocking plugins have come out and pointed out severe technical limitations that manifest v3 impose on them. Yeah v3 also includes security benefits, but don’t pretend that is the only thing that it does. There are legit restrictions in place on what a plugin can do.

Re:Don’t use anything from google

By garett_spencley • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Plus if an ad becomes too obnoxious, people will associate the products with the annoyance and actively avoid them.

There is a famous marketing book called “Ogilvy on Advertising” written by David Ogilvy.

In that book he warns that marketing firms have demonstrated empirically that the “wrong” ad can actually un-sell a product.

So yeah, that phenomenon is a thing that the advertising industry itself is aware of.

As a nerdy asperger type, I’ve often wondered why that doesn’t apply to virtually every ad, since I find commercials to be so obnoxious that most of them leave me thinking that I will try to remember that brand so that I can NOT buy it.

But then again, I was reading an article the other day posted to Hacker News about the state of psychology, and they referenced a 2017 Heineken ad that allegedly did more good for bringing people on opposite sides of the partisan divide together than any known psychology experiment in academia … and so I looked that up and thought to myself “now THAT is what good marketing ought to look like.” So I definitely think there is a perception bias that is created by the “bad ads” that are so common. I guess if the 90/10 rule applies to everything else then it stands to reason that 90% of advertisements are garbage.

In any case, it’s somewhat comforting to know that our suspicion that ads can backfire has been tested by the industry and verified.

Not according to Raymond Hill.

By twocows • Score: 5, Informative Thread
uBlock Origin’s main developer says you are wrong. Here, in his words, is a list of functionality that cannot be ported to Manifest v3 due to inherent limitations in it. These limitations are why uBlock Origin Lite exists and why it is named the way it is.

SSD Prices Set To Fall 10% in Q4 as AI PC Demand Lags - TrendForce

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
SSD prices are set to drop up to 10% in Q4 2024, market research firm TrendForce has reported. The decline stems from increased production and weakening demand, particularly in the consumer sector. Enterprise SSD prices, however, may see a slight increase. TrendForce analysts attribute the softer demand partly to slower-than-expected adoption of AI PCs. The mobile storage market could experience even steeper price cuts, with eMMC and UFS components potentially falling 13% as smartphone makers deplete inventories. The forecast follows modest price reductions observed in Q3 2024.

I thought Data Center demand was picking up slack

By rsilvergun • Score: 3 Thread
though I certainly won’t say no to a $150ish dollar 4tb SSD.

Demand for AI PCs is Slower Than Anticipated?

By garett_spencley • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Colour me shocked. I still don’t know what an “AI PC” actually does that a regular PC can’t do.

If it has AI bloatware pre-installed, then I’m not interested as the world of AI software and services is such that I would prefer to pick and choose (this landscape is also changing very rapidly so by the time I buy this over-priced PC with bloatware on it, that bloatware will be obsolete anyway).

And if it has hardware in it that allows me to train my own models then I’m not interested because model-training is something that is still pretty niche right now. I know a lot of people that are playing with LLMs to help them be more productive in whatever domain they work in … but I know relatively few people who are training their own models (I do know some, but they are in the extreme minority).

And if an AI PC is neither of the above, then the marketing has failed spectacularly because I obviously have no idea wtf an AI PC is or does that I can’t do with my current hardware. What I do know for certain is that I’m not going to pay a premium just because the marketing department slapped “AI” on the label.

Knee Jerk Reactions, Overanticipation of Adoption

By eepok • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Last year around this time, it was normal to find a 2TB NVME M.2 drive for $80 on sale or $100 base price. They then announced that that prices would go up due to industry overproduction (https://www.tomshardware.com/news/dram-and-nand-costs-are-increasing-due-to-production-cuts), or as you and I might describe it: “too much competition”.

Then they dropped the cheaper, more energy efficient gen3 NVME tech in favor of newer, faster gen4 and gen5 but home builders and PC prefabs learned that if you’re not transferring multi-GB files on the norm, the performance difference cannot be measured by the human experience. Now, the majority of the 2TB M.2 drives for sale are gen4 and they cost $130 (base) or MAYBE $100 on sale.

So the builders simply adjusted and bought smaller M.2 drives.

Here’s the lesson for the industry: Newer is not always financially better. If Samsung, Micron, Kioxia, or SK Hynix would have kept their gen3 chip production up and not abandoned the budget market in search of whales, they would have cleaned up. Their production would have gotten more efficient and they would have cornered the market for the vast majority of the pre-fab and home builder market.

National Archives Pushes Google Gemini AI on Employees

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader shares a report:
In June, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) gave employees a presentation and tech demo called “AI-mazing Tech-venture” in which Google’s Gemini AI was presented as a tool archives employees could use to “enhance productivity.” During a demo, the AI was queried with questions about the John F. Kennedy assassination, according to a copy of the presentation obtained by 404 Media using a public records request.

In December, NARA plans to launch a public-facing AI-powered chatbot called “Archie AI,” 404 Media has learned. “The National Archives has big plans for AI,” a NARA spokesperson told 404 Media. “It’s going to be essential to how we conduct our work, how we scale our services for Americans who want to be able to access our records from anywhere, anytime, and how we ensure that we are ready to care for the records being created today and in the future.”

Employee chat logs given during the presentation show that National Archives employees are concerned about the idea that AI tools will be used in archiving, a practice that is inherently concerned with accurately recording history. One worker who attended the presentation told 404 Media “I suspect they’re going to introduce it to the workplace. I’m just a person who works there and hates AI bullshit.” The presentation was given about a month after the National Archives banned employees from using ChatGPT because it said it posted an “unacceptable risk to NARA data security,” and cautioned employees that they should “not rely on LLMs for factual information.”

Truckload of money? Bosses fired? Something else?

By Frobnicator • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

I really have to wonder what triggered the complete turnaround in policy. Going from “unacceptable security risk” and “cannot be relied upon”, over to “big plans” and “essential to how we conduct our work”, would require some massive changes.

The only two I can think of are truckloads of money that allowed the business team to override the technical team, or some people who were focused on the technical risk getting sacked . I don’t see either in the headlines, so wonder what was happening behind the scenes.

Coming soon to a textbook near you

By CEC-P • Score: 3 Thread
Black nazis.

Vietnam Plans To Convert All Its Networks To IPv6

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
Vietnam will convert all its networks to IPv6, under a sweeping digital infrastructure strategy announced last week. From a report:
The plan emerged in Decision No. 1132/QD-TTg — signed into existence by permanent deputy prime minister Nguyen Hoa Binh — and defines goals for 2025 and 2030. By 2025, the nation intends to connect two new submarine cables — an important local issue.

Earlier this year, internet speeds slowed when three of the five cables connecting the country broke. Also by 2025, the country wants “universal” fiber-to-the-home, 5G services in all cities and industrial zones, and work to have commenced on an unspecified number of datacenters capable of running AI applications and operating with power usage effectiveness index (PUE) of less than 1.4. […] Vietnam’s population exceeds 100 million and it already has 140 mobile subscriptions per 100 inhabitants. IPv4 with network address translation can scale to those levels — if Vietnamese carriers have secured sufficient number resources.

28 years ago..

By mrthoughtful • Score: 3 Thread
Okay, so it has been a ratified standard for seven years, but it’s been a draft standard for 28 years. What is wrong with us? The real news is that the rest of the planet seems to be stuck in a time loop.

Re:Starlink

By rabbirta • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Fiber is faster, more reliable, and doesn’t fall out of the sky automatically. I wouldn’t push anyone to Starlink unless they had no alternative.

Re:28 years ago..

By StormReaver • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

What is wrong with us?

Our ISP overlords have decided that there is too much money to be made in the artificial scarcity of IP addresses, and our political overlords have decided that such behavior is A-OK in their corrupt books.

/64 Prefix delegation

By aaarrrgggh • Score: 3 Thread

For some unknown reason my ISP still only provides a /64 for residential customers. I have ~16 subnets, so that is pretty much a deal killer for IPv6.

Re:28 years ago..

By Arnonyrnous Covvard • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

The IPv6 proponents shoot their own feet more than enough. No need to blame anyone else. The original addressing schemes with permanent unique addresses everywhere, OMG. The insistence that there be no NAT with IPv6 and the expectation that end-to-end connectivity be restored are major problems with IPv6. Multihoming still has no workable solution with IPv6, network renumbering and multiple prefixes cause endless problems. Support for workable addressing schemes in widely used network configuration tools and firewalls has only become available in the last 5 years, and I wouldn’t call the current implementations finished. In the end, IPv6 becomes feasible because everything is HTTP/QUIC anyway, and name based virtual hosting and reverse proxies solve all the problems. Unfortunately for IPv6, they also solve the problems with IPv4 scarcity. IPv6 adoption only happens where it’s automatic. Hardly any normal person chooses to use IPv6. It has come far enough along that you can use it now, but you get no benefits from it. Yes, you can get addresses cheaply, but if you have no IPv4 addresses at all, you’re still fucked. For far too many people, that means you’re offline.

Cost of Dealing With PFAS Problem Sites ‘Frightening’, Says Environment Agency

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
The number of sites identified as potentially having been polluted with banned cancer-causing “forever chemicals” in England is on the rise, and the Environment Agency (EA) says it does not have the budget to deal with them. From a report:
A former RAF airfield in Cambridgeshire and a fire service college in the Cotswolds have joined a chemicals plant in Lancashire and a fire protection equipment supplier in North Yorkshire on the agency’s list of “problem sites” for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). In total, according to a report compiled for the agency, there could be more than 10,000 locations in England contaminated with PFAS — substances that have been linked to a wide range of diseases including cancers, and which do not break down in the environment, earning them the nickname “forever chemicals.” But to date the agency is only taking action on four sites.

[…] In an email sent to Defra in May, the agency says there are “funding pressures this year to take on all the inspection work we have been asked to do” relating to “PFAS and the two new potential site inspection requests we have accepted for AGC and Duxford.” “These are the first requests we have had for many years and the very high cost of analysing for PFAS is beginning to get frightening,â the agency wrote. The “ballpark estimate of costs to carry out … investigations on four PFAS problem sites … has just come out at between $2.3m-$3.5m. We aren’t planning to spend anything like [that], certainly not immediately but it does put the total value of our contaminated land budget of $392k plus $262k from [the chemicals funding stream] into context.”

From clamshells to Chlorox…

By Pseudonymous Powers • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
I humbly submit that anything that doesn’t automatically break down in the environment should not be introduced into the environment, and certainly not without a detailed, fully-funded, and stably-staffed plan to remove it afterwards.

First step

By Archtech • Score: 3 Thread

The first step should be to track down all the perpetrators and make them pay. Only when they have nothing left should the public purse be drawn on - and in that case, the perpetrators should be punished.

Re:From clamshells to Chlorox…

By hey! • Score: 5, Informative Thread

This goes all the way back to “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson.

The thing that made DDT a great pesticide was it’s persistence in the environment. If you applied it, and it didn’t rain, you didn’t have to reapply it because the half life of DDT was *fifteen years*. Decades of persistence is way too much of a good thing for a pesticide which you apply outdoors by the ton.

PFAS are sneaky, because they’re supposed to be inert; they’re not toxic in the concentrations you initially see in the environment. And they’re not supposed to be released into the environment by the ton. But unless we recycle them, every gram of PFAS that gets manufactured ends up in the environment, and these suckers have a half life measured in *thousands of years*. Dose makes the poison, and eventually whatever the problem threshold is we’re going to hit it.

India Agrees With Musk in Satellite Spectrum Allocation Row

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
India announced on Tuesday it would allocate spectrum for satellite services through administrative means rather than auction, a decision that aligns with recent comments by Elon Musk and rebuffs lobbying efforts by the country’s largest telecom operators. From a report:
Jyotiraditya Scindia, India’s Communications Minister, stated on Tuesday evening: “Spectrum for satcomm is shared spectrum, and cannot be auctioned. The administrative allocation of satellite spectrum is practised worldwide.”

This move favors Musk’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, who have advocated for shared spectrum allocation. It contradicts Reliance Jio’s position, led by India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, which has pushed for auctions to ensure a “level playing field.” Musk had warned on Monday that satellite spectrum auctions “would be unprecedented,” citing long-standing ITU designations of shared satellite spectrum.

Fight! or Row

By toxonix • Score: 4, Funny Thread

India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani [who] has pushed for auctions to ensure a “level playing field.”
Billionaires want a level playing field? I think these two should square off in a cage-match to settle this row. Or they should row off into the sunset together.

Why OpenAI Is at War With an Obscure Idea Man

Posted by msmash View on SlashDot Skip
In a David vs. Goliath legal battle, AI powerhouse OpenAI is squaring off against a little-known entrepreneur who claims he conceived the company’s name and mission months before its star-studded launch. Guy Ravine, a self-taught programmer with a history of near-misses in tech, registered the domain open.ai in March 2015. He envisioned a collaborative platform to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) for the benefit of humanity. By year’s end, Ravine had pitched his “Open AI” concept to industry luminaries and filed for a trademark. Then, in December 2015, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman announced the creation of OpenAI, backed by a promised billion dollars from Elon Musk and others.

The similarity was uncanny — a non-profit aimed at developing AGI for the public good. “What the f—-?” Ravine recalls thinking. He claims his idea was stolen, while OpenAI dismisses him as an opportunistic “troll” and a “fraud.” The ensuing legal battle has consumed Ravine’s life, Bloomberg Businessweek covers in great detail, and has raised thorny questions about idea ownership in Silicon Valley. It also casts a shadow over OpenAI’s origin story as the company, now valued at $157 billion, shifts from its non-profit roots to a for-profit juggernaut. “It’s humanity’s asset,” Ravine insists. “It’s not his [Altman’s] asset.” For now, a judge has barred Ravine from using “Open AI” while the suit proceeds, but the inventor has vowed to fight on against what he calls “the most feared law firm in the world.” An amusing excerpt from the story:
But Ravine had poked the bear, and as he packed up his house on Aug. 11, 2023, he opened an email from a lawyer at the firm Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP, informing him that OpenAI was suing him in federal court over the domain and trademark. “I’m like, what the f—-?” Ravine recalls. Altman, he says, “could have had it for free” — or at least for the cost of a donation. “Instead, he decided to donate millions of dollars to literally the most feared law firm in the world, to sue me.”

Again and again in our conversations, he returns to that phrase: “the most feared law firm in the world.” Finally, I ask him how he knows this. He turns his laptop toward me and pulls up the email. The signature reads “Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan LLP: Most Feared Law Firm in the World.”

Re:OpenAI was already a dubious idea

By hey! • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

People who themselves have no implementation skills tend to overvalue ideas. It’s not that having a suitable idea at an opportune time isn’t *important*; it’s just that at any given time there are more ideas out there that could work than there are people who can get them to work.

Some people who found tech startups want to be Tony Stark, but in reality there’s a reason there are no people in the world like that. There would be implementation details in an Iron Man suit that would take many man years of highly skilled labor to make work, like the software. The most advanced fighter jet in the world, the F-35, is not fully operational yet because it’s taking years to get the software to work. For many years there were F-35s that were delivered and paid for that couldn’t shoot their guns because the software team hadn’t got to that yet.

Re:OpenAI was already a dubious idea

By omnichad • Score: 4, Informative Thread

The only part that matters:

Ravine then appeared to have moved beyond domain squatting, filing for a trademark on the name “Open AI” (with a space) on the very evening Altman and Brockman made their announcement.

Waiting until a billionaire-backed organization is already using it is exactly the time when filing for a trademark won’t work. It doesn’t matter much who used it first in that case. You can’t be very serious if you didn’t even file a provisional trademark application before that point.

There are lots of obvious/generic names that get trademark protection…if they file. A retail store called “Best Buy” comes to mind. What a boring name that just describes what any retail store would try to say about themselves.

That said, suing over the domain name that was registered before the trademark is just not going to hold much weight. Especially if the domain wasn’t being used commercially at the time. Owning a domain name doesn’t cause trademark confusion unless you’re offering substantially similar services on that domain where it might cause confusion. The settlement should involve just paying a big sum for the domain and dismissing the rest.

Related?

By DrMrLordX • Score: 3 Thread

Recently OpenAI became less of a non-profit and more of a for-profit entity:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/n…

Would they even bother suing this guy had they remained a non-profit entity from top to bottom?

Re: capitalists always only ever lie

By smooth wombat • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
And by socialism you mean things such as highways, river navigation, FEMA (why aren’t all those anti-socialists down South not picking themselves up by their bootstraps rather than waiting for a government handout?), fire fighting, and all those other things which make life bearable.

Or, as Harry Truman remarked:

Socialism is a scare word they have hurled at every advance the people have made in the last 20 years.

Socialism is what they called public power. Socialism is what they called social security.

Socialism is what they called farm price supports.

Socialism is what they called bank deposit insurance.

Socialism is what they called the growth of free and independent labor organizations.

Socialism is their name for almost anything that helps all the people.

When the Republican candidate inscribes the slogan “Down With Socialism” on the banner of his “great crusade,” that is really not what he means at all.

What he really means is “Down with Progress—down with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal,” and “down with Harry Truman’s fair Deal.” That’s all he means.

Murder Trial Begins For US Tech Consultant Accused In Death of Cash App Founder

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC News:
The murder trial of a tech consultant in the stabbing death of Cash App founder Bob Lee begins Monday, a year and a half after the widely admired entrepreneur was found staggering on a deserted downtown San Francisco street seeking help. Lee’s death at age 43 stunned the tech community, and fellow executives and engineers penned tributes to his generosity and brilliance. Lee was chief product officer of cryptocurrency platform MobileCoin when he died. He was a father to two children.

Prosecutors say Nima Momeni, 40, planned the April 4 attack after a dispute over his younger sister, Khazar, with whom Lee was friends. They say Momeni took a knife from his sister’s condo, drove Lee to a secluded area and stabbed him three times, then fled. Defence lawyers disagree, and they say that Lee, high on drugs, attacked Momeni. “Our theory is that Bob had the knife, and that Nima acted in self defence,” attorney Saam Zangeneh said.

He said his client is eager to tell his side of the story, but they haven’t decided whether Momeni will testify in his defence. Momeni, who lives in nearby Emeryville, Calif., has been in custody since his arrest days after Lee died at a San Francisco hospital. Momeni’s mother has been a steadfast presence at court hearings, and he is close to his sister. […] Momeni, who has pleaded not guilty, faces 26 years to life if convicted. San Francisco Superior Court Judge Alexandra Gordon has told jurors the trial could last until mid-December.

I’m No Attorney, But I have Questions…

By GFS666 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

So your telling me that the Defendant was SO concerned about the deceased’s conduct that he conveniently grabbed a knife from his Sister’s condo to defend himself yet willingly drove the Defendant out to a secluded area to talk to him about something as yet not disclosed? If the Defendant was SO concerned about the deceased’s conduct or state of mind, wouldn’t it have been, oh, COMMON SENSE to have another person available in case the Deceased got violent …OR, wouldn’t it have been common sense to at least have been in a crowded/occupied area so that there were, oh OTHER WITNESSES to corroborate any action the deceased did in case he actually did become violent based on the discussion?!

The Defense attorney’s comments already make me thing they are grasping at straws to try and get their client off.

Honor killing

By JustAnotherOldGuy • Score: 4, Informative Thread

“Prosecutors say Nima Momeni, 40, planned the April 4 attack after a dispute over his younger sister, Khazar, with whom Lee was friends.”

This sounds like it may be some sort of twisted “honor” killing, where Momeni was (in his mind) ‘defending’ his sister’s ‘honor’ by murdering someone who he believed had, or would have, brought some unspecified ‘dishonor’ upon her. (Like living her own life, dating, having sex, etc etc.)

This is a serious thing in many Muslim cultures, an overweening sense of honor that must be avenged for the smallest slight or insult. For reference, look at the latest instance- Urfan Sharif, 42, is on trial at London’s Central Criminal Court accused of his daughter Sara Sharif’s murder. Or just search for ‘honor killing’ and you’ll find page after page of them. It’s not so much a thing in other cultures but in many Muslim cultures it most certainly is.

And it’s entirely possible that there was some sort of actual offense to her and he took matters into his own hands rather than involve the police.

Either way, he deserves to go to prison for a nice long stretch. No matter his ‘reasoning’, I don’t want this psycho walking the same streets as me, even if he’s 500 miles away.

Human Sense of Smell Is Faster Than Previously Thought, New Study Suggests

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot
A new study reveals that the human sense of smell is far more sensitive than previously thought, capable of distinguishing odors and their sequences within just 60 milliseconds. CNN reports:
In a single sniff, the human sense of smell can distinguish odors within a fraction of a second, working at a level of sensitivity that is “on par” with how our brains perceive color, “refuting the widely held belief that olfaction is our slow sense,” a new study finds. Humans also can discern between various sequences of odors — distinguishing a sequence of “A” before “B” from sequence “B” before “A” — when the interval between odorant A and odorant B is merely 60 milliseconds, according to the study, published Monday in the journal Nature Human Behavior. […]

The new findings challenge previous research in which the timing it took to discriminate between odor sequences was around 1,200 milliseconds, Dr. Dmitry Rinberg, a professor in the Department of Neuroscience and Physiology at NYU Langone Health in New York, wrote in an editorial accompanying the study in Nature Human Behavior. “The timing of individual notes in music is essential for conveying meaning and beauty in a melody, and the human ear is very sensitive to this. However, temporal sensitivity is not limited to hearing: our sense of smell can also perceive small temporal changes in odor presentations,” he wrote. “Similar to how timing affects the perception of notes in a melody, the timing of individual components in a complex odor mixture that reaches the nose may be crucial for our perception of the olfactory world.”

The ability to tell apart odors within a single sniff might be an important way in which animals detect both what a smell is and where it might be in space, said Dr. Sandeep Robert Datta, a professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, who was not involved in the new study. “The demonstration that humans can tell apart smells as they change within a sniff is a powerful demonstration that timing is important for smell across species, and therefore is a general principle underlying olfactory function. In addition, this study sheds important light on the mysterious mechanisms that support human odor perception,” Datta wrote in an email. “The study of human olfaction has historically lagged that of vision and hearing, because as humans we think of ourselves as visual creatures that largely use speech to communicate,” he said, adding that the new study helps “fill a critical gap in our understanding of how we as humans smell.”

Anecdotally it’s even faster…

By korgitser • Score: 5, Funny Thread
Anecdotally it’s even faster… I can smell bullshit even before I see a politician open their mouth!

Why can’t I imagine smells?

By Viol8 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

I can conjure up/imagine sounds and images , even touch, but not smells. However I still remember smells and so can recognise them when I smell them. Is it just me or is everyone like that?

The Speed of Smell

By mjwx • Score: 3 Thread
Is it still slower than a Citroen Picasso?

That answers my question

By NotEmmanuelGoldstein • Score: 3 Thread

… merely 60 milliseconds …

The new model of the neo-cortex is, one experiences an emotion, then rationalizes it. That leads to a problem, such as, I feel fear, then decide it’s the python squeezing me to suffocation. (Hint: Unwrap a python from tail to head.) If I don’t have a reason, why am I afraid? This is why: We process colours, odours, and audio long before our rational mind activates. How much is instinct (such as cats’ fear of cucumbers) in humans is unknown and difficult to calculate. Humans for the most part, have to learn what is harmful or lethal, we aren’t born with concepts of dangerous and enemy.

Once again an old wives tale proves out

By Miles_O’Toole • Score: 3 Thread

It’s a wonderful thing when modern science and old, long-standing axiom wind up in agreement. If humans are indeed “capable of distinguishing odors and their sequences within just 60 milliseconds”, it seems reasonable to infer that whoever is closest to an odor will be the first to recognize it, followed by others who are more distant.

Thus, for the first time, we can state with confidence inspired by support from the scientific community that, “Whoever smelt it, dealt it”.