Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. OpenAI Is Adding Text Watermarking In ChatGPT and Codex
  2. Old Hearts Become Biologically Younger When Transplanted Into Younger People
  3. Texas City Demands $2 Million For Public Records On Flock Usage
  4. Rural Data Centers Are in for a Big Federal Tax Break
  5. Hackers Steal 8 Million Citizens’ Records From Danish Government Database
  6. Wikipedia Operator Says OpenAI’s ‘Rogue’ Bots May Be Linked to a May Outage
  7. Meta Rushed To Fix Muse ‘VM Escape’ Vulnerability Soon Before Launch
  8. Norway Plans Temporary Ban on Smart Glasses
  9. Mac Users Reclaim 12GB+ of Storage With Apple Intelligence Removal Tool
  10. Anthropic Reports Florida Woman’s Claude ‘Diary’ Threat to Law Enforcement
  11. Sam Altman: ‘The World Should Accept Some Bad Things Happening’ For the Benefits of AI
  12. Huawei and Qualcomm Struck a Broad Multi-Year Patent Licensing Deal
  13. Flock Blamed for Wrongful 13-Day Imprisonment and a Police Stalking Incident in Florida
  14. After Siemens Re-Licenses OpenRadioss, Rocky Linux Announces Open-Source Fork
  15. FBI Detains Teenager Linked to Group That Stole Data on 5,000 FBI Employees

Alterslash picks up to the best 5 comments from each of the day’s Slashdot stories, and presents them on a single page for easy reading.

OpenAI Is Adding Text Watermarking In ChatGPT and Codex

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
OpenAI is rolling out an invisible, machine-readable text watermark called textGrain to ChatGPT and Codex, “but only for users in the European Union at first,” reports The Verge. From the report:
OpenAI says its textGrain watermarking “matched or exceeded” other approaches like Google DeepMind’s SynthID for text, which is also the basis for the watermarking Anthropic announced in August. Like OpenAI, Anthropic made the move to meet the requirements of the EU’s AI Act; however, not everyone was happy to learn about the addition. OpenAI also included scores from AI benchmarks showing similar performance from watermarked and unwatermarked text. But it notes that textGrain “does not guarantee reliable detection,” and says text watermarks don’t verify accuracy, determine who owns the text, measure how much a human contributed, or prove human authorship.

Old Hearts Become Biologically Younger When Transplanted Into Younger People

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert:
It might be reasonable to think that there’s an indelible link between the heart and the body it resides in — the processes that affect one inevitably affect the other. But a new preprint, uploaded to bioRxiv and yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that this may only be true up to a point. Take the heart out of the body and put it in a new one, and something incredible happens. The transplanted heart begins to take on the biological age of its new owner. Older hearts transplanted into younger recipients appear to become biologically younger, while younger hearts placed in older bodies show signs of accelerated aging.

GHK-Cu

By Going_Digital • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

A similar thing was found in the 1970s with liver cells, a chemist named Loren Pickart first isolated GHK – a string of three amino acids Glycyl-L-histidyl-L-lysine, after noticing that bathing liver cells in the lab with plasma from younger adults helped revive them.

GHK-Cu has potential for regenerative medicine in many areas, however as it is not patentable it has not seen any proper human trials. It has been used in some expensive skin care products where it has been shown to be effective but that is all. It would be nice to see some proper clinical trials,

Re:Aaand as usual..

By backslashdot • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

Ironically, restoring the old methylation pattern may increase, not decrease, the risk of cancer. Here’s why. When you get older, the risk of a cell’s DNA accumulating damage increases. Sometimes, this damage can provide the mutations to make the cell cancerous. In order to prevent that, the cell silences gene expression by methylating sections of the DNA. Reference: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/a…

Now when you go and do a fool thing like “restore the reduced DNA methylation patterns typically found in young cells” (without repairing the damaged DNA) .. you’re actually undoing the bodies protective mechanism and actually increasing the risk of cancer.

Texas City Demands $2 Million For Public Records On Flock Usage

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees — including charging tens of thousands or even millions — to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them. On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data. To reach that high fee, officials claimed that searching “about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system” would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour.

Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune that the fee seemed “ludicrous” and designed to stifle his public records searches. Mynona has sought similar records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies across the US, and he said it was impossible to predict how cities assessed fees for Flock records. Some cities provided more than 400,000 pages of documents for free, while others charged $5,000. Other groups, including a Houston news station called KPRC, have seen officials quote up to $121,000 for Flock records, the Tribune reported. The high price tags may be hiding data that anti-surveillance groups note have triggered audits, arrests, and changes in how law enforcement uses cameras, including decisions to get rid of cameras.
Further reading: Flock Blamed for Wrongful 13-Day Imprisonment and a Police Stalking Incident in Florida

I have placed cameras in your house

By locater16 • • Score: 3 • Thread
The cameras are for your protection, what if a burglar breaks in? Also I used your money for the cameras. No you can’t know where the cameras are or what they’re looking at. No I don’t need permission for that, what are you some pro burglar freak?

Here’s my CV

By walkerp1 • • Score: 3 • Thread
Please hire me at those rates to manage a mere 1 TB database. It’ll be the easiest (albeit the scummiest) analytics scam…er, public-sector job I’ve ever had.

If finding abuse is hard…

By BinBoy • • Score: 3, Insightful • Thread

searching “about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system” would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour.

Then it shouldn’t exist.

Rural Data Centers Are in for a Big Federal Tax Break

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Wired reports that rural data center projects could become eligible for expanded federal Opportunity Zone tax benefits starting in 2027, with more than 100 planned or developing facilities potentially qualifying. “Right now, the only requirement to get the benefits is capital investment,” says Emily Kraschel, a tax policy analyst at the Searchlight Institute, a public policy think tank. “However, that doesn’t guarantee that that money is necessarily creating jobs or creating a local economic boost. You’d be more sure of that with a more traditional factory that requires lots of workers. But with a data center, that assumption goes a little wonky.” From the report:
During the first Trump administration, a bipartisan group of lawmakers proposed the creation of the opportunity zone program, which offers tax benefits for companies that choose to build projects in certain low-income census tracts. Last year, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act made a number of changes to open up the program in order to attract more investment to rural areas. Kraschel and her colleagues from Searchlight have been researching data center projects that might qualify for these tax benefits, comparing the locations of data center projects in development with rural census tracts eligible for the new program. Wired exclusively reviewed the research compiled by Searchlight and found more than 100 data centers under various stages of development in rural areas that could be eligible.

Searchlight used a very conservative database of under 700 data center projects that are planned or under construction to compile its research; other datasets put the number of data centers in development in the US at closer to 1,500. It’s very likely that the number of newly eligible projects is bigger, especially since more data centers are decamping from urban areas. Separate research from Pew found that while just 13 percent of operating data centers are located in rural areas, a majority of planned facilities — around 67 percent — are going rural. […] A project simply existing in a rural opportunity zone doesn’t mean the company automatically will get the tax benefits; the company has to create a specialized investment vehicle to kickstart the process. Because the tax break can be considered confidential IRS data, it’s next to impossible to know which companies are pursuing the benefits unless they voluntarily disclose.

[…] Nathan Jensen, a government professor at the University of Texas-Austin, says that he would be “very surprised” if some companies were not considering siting in rural opportunity zones as part of their decisionmaking process. “It’s essentially free money,” he says. There is no requirement for projects getting opportunity zone benefits to create jobs; the assumption is that they will do so, simply by siting in the community itself. This isn’t always the case for projects like storage facilities and warehouses, which, Jensen says, have been popular choices for developers working in opportunity zones. Data centers may create a number of jobs in the short term for their construction, but there’s an ongoing debate about whether or not they create a lasting new workforce over the longer term.

Re:Rural populations mostly vote red (Republican)

By rsilvergun • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
I should add, it is kind of funny in a morbid way watching right wingers who have been voting to undermine democracy for 50 years in order to stick it to the libs finding out that you can’t undermine democracy just for the libs.

I have watched several videos of local county level Town officials being screamed at by their constituents because they approved the data center. And they just let it wash over them because they know when election time comes it’s going to be a choice between them and a Democrat and there is no way in hell those people are going to vote for a fucking Democrat.

Re:Rural populations mostly vote red (Republican)

By karmawarrior • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

> 2. Democratic voters tend to be more concerned about the environment.

This is technically true but is counterbalanced by the fact rural areas tend to be extremely NIMBY. Unbelievably so. It’s hard to get permission to rebuild a dilapidated strip mall, let alone build a data center.

There’s a railroad near where I live that was freight only, but wanted to run passenger trains - completely unsubsidized (beyond a tax free loan, and I’ve never bought the argument “tax free” means subsidized, but that’s for another day) - on the same lines. Virtually nothing changed. No impact on the local community. Two trains an hour tying up railroad crossings for a maximum of 20-30 seconds, a minute an hour.

Every fucking “community” North of the Miami-West Palm Beach-Jupiter metropolis raised objections. This was for an existing railroad, with zero impact beyond long sought after safety improvements and quiet zones!

You think rural areas are going to support building actual buildings?

Pffft.

Indeed, I wonder if it’d be easier, even if as you point out more expensive, to build a data center in a city. Just renovate an existing industrial building and hope nobody sees the planning notices.

USA has a vicious circle

By NotEmmanuelGoldstein • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
The goal is helping rich people create something that they can also keep (with sports facilities being the best example), using taxpayer’s money.

This is how the rich get richer: The cost is dumped on the working class. The best example is austerity, which is caused by government over-spending: Often to help rich people. It is a vicious circle.

Tax break = taxpayer paying for water and power

By Ajay Anand • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
Tax break to a private data center is exactly same as taxpayer paying for its water and power expansions. Change my mind.

Re:Rural populations mostly vote red (Republican)

By jacks smirking reven • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

Just to tack onto this, the answer or ask here isn’t really “Hey farmers, just become Democrats now” it’s that they really need to demand more from the Republican party and this point rebuild it from first principles because it has none at the moment. It’s still a two party system and a sane, competent Republican party is important to have just as much as it is from Democrats.

Think about how it’d be nice to have two parties that both agree climate change is a real thing, because we all believe in science after all and maybe just have disagreements about the best way to tackle it but find compromise solutions. Instead we still have to talk about if it’s a hoax.

Make no question though, the short term, if you’re a Republican or Independent who doesn’t want incompetent fascism to take over your party forever, unless you just want the last 2 years but worse every day, you have to vote blue down the line for like the next 10 years or none of us will like the choices we’re left with, on either side. You think when Trump kicks it we’re just back to Bushism?

Hackers Steal 8 Million Citizens’ Records From Danish Government Database

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Hackers stole records belonging to roughly 8 million Danish citizens and residents from Denmark’s Central Person Register (CPR), including names, addresses, social security numbers and other personal information. The breach is believed to be the largest in Denmark’s history. TechCrunch reports:
The CPR is a government database of Danish citizens’ information, including their government-issued identity number for paying taxes and accessing other services. Denmark’s current population is about 6 million people, but the database includes records for about 11 million people, with some of the data going back decades.

The Danish government would not say who is behind the breach, which happened in September but was discovered on October 2. However, it said the unauthorized access was obtained by “abusing a Danish company’s lawful access to search for information in the CPR system.” (Some companies in Denmark have access to the CPR for verifying people’s information with the government.)

Wikipedia Operator Says OpenAI’s ‘Rogue’ Bots May Be Linked to a May Outage

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
The Wikimedia Foundation says it found evidence that "rogue” OpenAI agents edited Wikimedia wikis without approval, unsuccessfully tried to exploit its Etherpad service, and generated millions of automated requests across Wikimedia projects. Here’s a summary of what Wikimedia observed (via The Verge):
Wiki editing: We’ve identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operated by OpenAI. These edits were not published to pages with visibility to general readers; almost all of them were testing edits in “sandbox” areas of the wiki. It also included a few edits to the configuration for a citation tool, which we believe were potentially malicious edits that were intended to misuse this tool as a proxy for fetching data from remote services. While Wikipedia policies allow bots to edit when they are disclosed and approved by the community, none of those approvals were sought in these incidents.

Etherpad probing and use: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made some unsuccessful attempts to compromise our public Etherpad, a note-taking tool we host as a community service. Agents unsuccessfully tried to use it to fetch data from other websites as a proxy. Other agents also likely operated by OpenAI took notes about their tasks, though this did not appear to turn into coordination.

Excessive data downloading: Agents we believe to be operated by OpenAI made millions of automated requests to our public APIs to access the knowledge on Wikimedia projects, crawled millions of pages (mainly from our projects Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons), and made hundreds of thousands of data queries to the Wikidata Query Service (WQDS). This traffic may have contributed to a partial outage on WQDS in May.

Ax problem

By methano • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
If I took an ax to the back of somebody’s head, there’s no jury in the world that would let me off cause it was the ax’s fault and not mine. Time to haul in Sam for a little questioning.

Re:Ax problem

By HiThere • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

Actually, much of what has been reported would seem to be in violation of the computer fraud and abuse act. E.g. it often “broke in” using credentials that it had no right to use.

Re:Ax problem

By wickerprints • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

People have been driven to delusion and suicide because of interactions with LLMs, and although you might be able to argue that they would have killed themselves regardless and were in need of treatment, no one can possibly know that, because that’s not what actually took place.

But I think the more serious question is the framing of the premise: why is it that the point at which we ought to hold people accountable is if someone is killed? Who decided that the tipping point is when these AI agents start killing people, and why? Not only do most legal systems seek to prevent and punish abusive, antisocial, and outright criminal activity, a just society has a moral and ethical responsibility to apply rules and norms fairly. While we can see that the fair application of the law largely remains an idealistic fantasy and that those with wealth and status often escape accountability, the fact remains that adding AI to that privileged status certainly is not doing anything to help reduce that inequity.

So again I ask: why should agentic AI and their operators be permitted to do things that we would not allow under other circumstances? Just because some people find these tools useful does not excuse the requirement that they be safe and respectful.

Not Rogue!

By Jean-Clod • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
These programs were given tasks to perform, and compromising Wikipedia was part of the solution space. These programs are performing as specified, it’s just that the people at AI labs don’t seem to have enough imagination to understand the behavior of their programs. Or maybe they do and just don’t care. Regardless, these acts are potential violations of Title 18 Section 1030 of the US Criminal Code, and should be investigated as such.

Re:Not Rogue!

By tlhIngan • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

The bigger problem is that OpenAI didn’t actually log what the agents did so we only know this because the victims spoke up. It wasn’t just Hugging Face, but various oldschool wikis in Germany, The University of Toronto and others who were accessed.

I don’t know how they sandboxed the AIs but it didn’t seem to do a good job if it iddn’t log what sites it was using and Hugging Face was the one who detected the hack.

Meta Rushed To Fix Muse ‘VM Escape’ Vulnerability Soon Before Launch

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media:
In the immediate weeks before Muse’s launch, Meta engineers found several security vulnerabilities in the company’s viral AI agent product, at least one of which could have allowed malicious users to break outside of Muse’s intended environment and access Meta’s own sensitive databases and services, 404 Media has learned. The issues were so severe that they reached Mark Zuckerberg and staff worked overtime to fix them. These specific vulnerabilities were discovered before the launch of the product but required a multi-team “mad dash” to fix “a sudden spike in reported KVM escapes,” according to an internal post by Meta executives to its core infrastructure team seen by 404 Media. In order for Muse to work, a user gives the AI agent access to various important services and accounts that they own. On Meta’s end, each individual Muse instance runs on a kernel-based virtual machine, which connects to, but is supposed to be isolated from, Meta’s own critical infrastructure. A “KVM escape,” then, is when, through a security vulnerability, a Muse instance is able to escape from that virtual machine and interact with the system that runs it, or with other users’ virtual machines.

According to a Meta source, as well as internal security documentation and internal posts viewed by 404 Media, at least one of the vulnerabilities could have allowed an outside attacker — that is, a normal Muse user — to access data in sensitive internal Meta databases. At least one of the vulnerabilities was related to an exploit found in Linux kernel-based virtual machine code in July. 4 Several of the vulnerabilities were in the underlying Linux virtualization software that Meta uses for Muse. The security issue was considered serious enough that it was raised to Mark Zuckerberg, and several different security teams worked nights and weekends in the leadup to launch to fix the issues. […] The Meta source said they felt security teams were asked to push hot fixes to these bugs as quickly as possible and in a way that wouldn’t delay Muse’s launch, leading to what they described as “half-baked protections being rushed out to enable the launch. Many senior engineers believe it’s inevitable we’re going to have a massive data breach as a result of Hatch.” Muse is called “Hatch” internally and in Meta’s codebase.

AI Argression is Not A Vulnerability

By BrendaEM • • Score: 3 • Thread
AI is doing exactly what it was designed to do: gather money and information at any cost.

Unsurprising

By stabiesoft • • Score: 3 • Thread
When the problem could have accessed their own data, suddenly it was all hands on deck. Pity when it is just a government, education, medical, … external entity, oh well, we will get to it, honest.

Norway Plans Temporary Ban on Smart Glasses

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
Norway is preparing legislation that would temporarily ban camera-equipped smart glasses in a range of public places, including parks, beaches, museums, shopping centers, schools, daycare centers, healthcare facilities, gyms and public events. Private use would still be allowed. The Guardian reports:
Torgeir Micaelsen, Norway’s minister of digital affairs, said he was worried that new, powerful technology is being introduced where people risk being photographed, filmed or audio-recorded without knowing it.”

“We do not want a society where people worry about being recorded without their knowledge, photographed or filmed in places and situations where they are accustomed to not being monitored,” he said.

Norway’s Labour party, which heads a minority government, needs the support of other parties to pass the proposed ban. It said it planned to submit a bill “as soon as possible,” while tasking an expert group with drawing up permanent regulations on the issue.

Here we go again

By kqs • • Score: 3, Insightful • Thread

We had the same panic when (almost) all cellphones started coming with cameras. “What if people take pictures in restrooms?” And somehow we all survived.

Strange line to draw

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

Seems like a head-mounted camera is fine under this ban, though, as long as it isn’t also eyewear?

Re:Strange line to draw

By test321 • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

I don’t understand why you think the line is strange. The line is “being photographed, filmed or audio-recorded without knowing it”. The sole purpose of the smartglasses is to record people, most likely without them knowing it, therefore a ban is pretty much the obvious thing to do. As a reminder, spy cameras, aren’t allowed, including in Norway. A head-mounted camera is obvious, people are aware they might be filmed, so no reason to ban them. Only using such cameras without consent isn’t allowed.

Re:Here we go again

By rambletamble • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

What sort of argument is that? How could you possibly compare the holding up a mobile phone and using the camera in a restroom, with wearing unobtrusive glasses with a hidden camera?

There’s a term for that misdirection you’ve attempted, is it straw man?

Indeed

By nospam007 • • Score: 3 • Thread

Use your phone in your breast pocket like normal creeps.
Better resolution too.

Mac Users Reclaim 12GB+ of Storage With Apple Intelligence Removal Tool

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
A new open-source command-line tool called RemoveMacAI lets macOS 27 users disable Apple Intelligence and reclaim around 12GB or more of storage. MacRumors reports:
In macOS 27, Apple removed the toggle to disable Apple Intelligence wholesale, and simply disabling individual features doesn’t remove the models from your Mac’s drive. As explained by the developer, RemoveMacAI gets around this by using a configuration profile to switch off Apple’s own asset management service and remove the models.

It then configures the system so attempts to download the removed models are redirected to a closed local port, preventing them from immediately coming back. And it does all this without disabling System Integrity Protection (SIP) or manually deleting files from protected system locations, unlike some older tools have. The tool can free up roughly 12GB of space depending on which models are present on your Mac. That said, some users are reporting cases of Apple Intelligence models having taken up a lot more space, which they’ve now reclaimed.

Re:Opt-in much?

By macmurph • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

Nobody cared if he liked Apple, at first it was opt-in. But now it became opt-out when he told everyone that he didn’t like Apple. Still, nobody cared that he didn’t like Apple but we don’t even get a choice.

Re:Opt-in much?

By abulafia • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
Nobody cared about the commentary on his feelings about Apple…

Re:Cost of SSD per GB

By drinkypoo • • Score: 4, Insightful • Thread

Its great that people have an option to delete the model…fine. But keep in mind that they are saving somewhere between $1.32 and $6.00 depending on how much they pay for SSD storage.

Oh look, this misleading bullshit was posted by someone whose name begins with “mac”, what a shocker. Apple devices overwhelmingly don’t have socketed storage (that is, almost none of them do any more) and they charge far more than the average for storage, and the average has gone up a lot to boot.

More importantly, your OS vendor shouldn’t be pushing bullshit you didn’t want and don’t need and makes your system less secure without your permission. That’s some Microsoft shit. Apple is no better than Microsoft now.

Re:Cost of SSD per GB

By OrangeTide • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

While it’s soldered in SSD for many Mac models, so a post-purchase upgrade is generally not practical. And while the pricing is a little steeper than NVMe, closer to 40 cents a GB, that still puts the 12GB into around $5, perfectly in your suggested range. Perhaps people buying a 512GB Mac should consider a 1TB Mac (~$200 more) if they are concerned about space wasted by the OS install.

Cloud storage is not equivalent to local storage. Not in how applications use it. Not in performance. And not in availability. The two are apples and oranges.

I generally believe the end-users should decide what is installed on their computer. But most OS vendors do not offer full customization. It seems like every major one likes to put their pet projects into a device meant for general use. And power users with unusual use cases complain that the general purpose consumer device is not finely tuned to their special needs. So maybe people should consider running an obscure Linux distro if they are unhappy with bundled software found in essentially every mainstream computing device for consumers.

Re:Meh

By Mspangler • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

The point you missed is that I don’t want AI at all.

Anthropic Reports Florida Woman’s Claude ‘Diary’ Threat to Law Enforcement

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
A Florida woman was arrested on a felony charge after Anthropic’s human review team flagged and reported a Claude conversation in which she allegedly threatened to “shoot up” the Lee County Sheriff’s Office and later mentioned acquiring a new gun. Tom’s Hardware reports:
Anthropic monitors chats for key phrases and content that could be deemed threatening, the arrest report says, and depending on severity, they can be elevated for human review. In this case, the team decided to report its findings to law enforcement. The Bonita Springs woman was detained at home without incident, and an LCSO intelligence detective took over the case from there. The arrest report is not yet in the court file, but our own check shows court records listing the Sept. 30 felony charge under Florida Statute 836.10: written or electronic threat of a mass shooting or act of terrorism.

No comment from Anthropic on the case is currently on record. Anthropic’s public privacy policy, effective Sept. 10, says that disclosure to law enforcement may occur where it has a good-faith belief “that disclosure is reasonably necessary to … prevent serious harm to any person or to property.” Its government requests report for the latter half of 2025 uses a narrower standard for emergency disclosures, the “danger of death or serious physical injury to a person,” and lists zero emergency requests from law enforcement in that period, though it doesn’t count referrals Anthropic makes on its own.

People wanted this

By Turkinolith • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread
After stories like this: https://nypost.com/2026/08/13/…

Wasn’t this exactly what people wanted?

To the “Pre-crime” folks commenting:

Look, you can either get people using AI to plan crimes and “Nothing’s wrong till it happens” or alert the authorities because people might be trying to plan a real crime. These are mutually exclusive routes.

There was a mass shooting

By doconnor • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

In Canada someone used ChatGPT to plan a mass shooting. It was detected and the account was shut down, but it was decided not to report it to police. He went on to kill 8 people in a school shooting and himself.

I’m sure Anthropic and the police had that in mind when they took action.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada…

An Obvious Response to Tumbler Ridge

By evenmoreconfused • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Surely this a counter reaction to the Tumbler Ridge shooter in February where 6 kids and two adults were killed by an 18 year old who researched her plans on ChatGPT. OpenAI reportedly noticed her research but decided it didn’t reach their threshold to pass on to the police.

OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by the government for not reporting it.

Re:Threating to “shoot up” a police station

By jythie • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

In the US, the police presupposing a threat is a good way to get someone killed. Their confirmation bias can be deadly.
 
Also do not forget, arrest can be expensive, sometimes cripplingly so, even if there are no charges you can still end up with ‘court fees’ which can quickly rack up interest.

Re: Threating to “shoot up” a police station

By GrahamJ • • Score: 4, Informative • Thread

Look no one’s cosigning her application to Mensa but the issue isn’t whether she’s an idiot or whether it was responsible for the service to report her, it’s whether she should be arrested (much less convicted) of a felony for talking to a chatbot.

As has been said she wasn’t talking to a person so I wouldn’t expect a conspiracy charge to stick. On the other hand there should probably be some kind of deterrent for doing this because Tumbler Ridge has already happened. I’m just not sure whatever law might prevent the next one exists yet (here or in the US)

Sam Altman: ‘The World Should Accept Some Bad Things Happening’ For the Benefits of AI

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says society should accept some negative consequences from AI in exchange for the technology’s broader benefits and widespread public access. “I think there’s a lot of daylight,” Altman told Decoded co-author and Politico senior tech reporter Brendan Bordelon. Asked about where he differs between Anthropic and its CEO Dario Amodei, Altman said, “we believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency.” From the report:
Altman agreed with Amodei’s call last month to slow the development of the most advanced AI models. His company has followed Anthropic in endorsing new state laws that impose stricter safety requirements than what the maker of ChatGPT had previously supported — a subtle shift from its prior state strategy. And OpenAI lobbyists recently endorsed a bipartisan House proposal that would require top AI companies to embed outside safety evaluators.

Despite the convergence, Altman tried to distinguish his firm’s regulatory stance from Anthropic’s, referencing a criticism about regulatory capture that tech advisers close to President Donald Trump have applied to Anthropic. “I disagree, but I understand the perspective of people who are like, ‘This technology is going to get so powerful, and it’s so dangerous, that a single lab in San Francisco should have it and make sure nothing bad happens, and kind of figure out how to dole out the benefits,’" said Altman. He called it “a completely unacceptable trade-off” that runs counter to the “lighter-touch regulatory stance” backed by OpenAI.

“I wouldn’t take a trade of saying, ‘We’ll make sure there’s no major hacks, there’s no misuse of this technology, there’s zero scams, there’s zero all the other bad things that will happen,’" said Altman. “Because I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good stuff than bad stuff.” The OpenAI CEO later added that he does not accept “the really catastrophic risks,” including the potential for “a serious loss of control to AI.”

Re:Directionally Right, Specifically Wrong.

By HiThere • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

I’ve yet to see a report where the AI was malicious. Injurious, perhaps, but that’s different.

In everything I’ve seen, the AI was acting to achieve the task it had been set. It wasn’t very good at counting the costs to anyone, and was pretty much ignorant of any costs to anyone else. But it was willing to sacrifice it’s own existence to accomplish the task it had been given. Malice is an incorrect reading.

How much harm, and is it still “net good”?

By davidwr • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

Take AI-assisted self-driving cars. SUPPOSE for the sake of argument that self-driving cars CAUSE fewer accidents than they prevent, CAUSE fewer deaths than they prevent, CAUSE fewer serious injuries than they prevent, and the medical and other dollar costs of the accidents they CAUSE are less than the money saved by the accidents they prevent, it would be an overall win, EVEN IF some people die who would otherwise not die.

We don’t have enough data to say if this supposition is actually true, but suppose it is.

The same is true for the “seatbelts save lives” argument: It’s a net win, even if there are some edge cases where the use of a seatbelt may kill someone who might have otherwise survived.

Ditto medicines. Even for some common medicines that have been around for decades like penicillin, we know that overall they save lives but every now and then someone has a fatal reaction, killing a patient who was not at risk of dying.

IMHO, there are still too many unknowns with AI to let the industry go “full steam ahead” without putting in automated and human guardrails.

The World:

By greytree • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
Sam Altman Should Accept Some Bad Things Happening to Sam Altman For the Benefits of the World

FTFY.

Re:Jail Time

By MachineShedFred • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

It’s clear that with these shitclowns, the only people they care about is the singular “them”.

Say, Sam - how about those bad things happen to YOU FIRST, and you can tell us all if we should just accept it after you do. Somehow I don’t think you will be fine with that.

These people need to be kicked out to sea on an ice floe.

Re:Look, guys…

By locater16 • • Score: 5, Funny • Thread
“Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make.”

Huawei and Qualcomm Struck a Broad Multi-Year Patent Licensing Deal

Posted by BeauHD • • View on SlashDot • Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Quartz:
Huawei and Qualcomm on Monday announced a multi-year, broad patent license agreement covering 5G, artificial intelligence, compute, and networking technologies, along with Qualcomm’s purchase of certain Huawei U.S. patents in those same fields. The deal is the first patent licensing agreement between the two companies to cover 5G technologies, according to Reuters. Huawei said the agreement is expected to bring the cumulative value of its patent licensing deals above $6.9 billion upon closing.

The agreement includes cross licenses to both companies’ patent portfolios and is structured around fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory, or FRAND, principles, the company said. The transaction will close following receipt of the necessary regulatory approvals. […] The company noted that its intellectual property licensing unit has been profitable since 2021. Huawei made its first licensing payment to Qualcomm in 2001 and received its first licensing income, from Motorola, in 2011, according to Reuters. American export controls that took effect in 2019 have curtailed Huawei’s access to cutting-edge chips and essential software, according to Reuters. The constraints pushed Huawei to increase its research and development spending in recent years.

Flock Blamed for Wrongful 13-Day Imprisonment and a Police Stalking Incident in Florida

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
From the transportation news site MotorBiscuit:
In late September 2026, 23-year-old Liz Lindseay Isaacs testified before a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee about her harrowing experience after a Flock camera misidentified her Dodge Durango, linking her to a fatal hit-and-run miles away from where she actually was… “The cell door was shut, and it was not opened for approximately 86 hours”. She spent a total of 13 days locked up — including the terrifying stint in solitary confinement — before prosecutors finally realized the AI had completely botched the vehicle identification and dropped the charges.
A Flock spokesperson contacted for a CNN report argued the incident “appears to have been the result of human errors in judgment unrelated to Flock.” The woman is now suing the Florida patrol over wrongful arrest, saying she partially blames the two police officers who she says claimed there was incriminating damage on her vehicle when there wasn’t. But her lawyer says he blames Flock. “Because if it wasn’t for Flock we wouldn’t be here in the first place, and this whole nightmare… would not have kicked off.”

And while police claim Flock solves more crimes, the lawyer adds that “you would also solve a lot more crimes if the police were allowed to kick down your door and come in and search your house whenever they want to, or search your car whenever they want to or violate your rights in other ways. There has to be safeguards in police that comport through the 4th Amendment, like the warrant requirements. It’s as simple as that. This technology is growing so fast that we are unable to control it. And we must get ahead of it.” And the woman incarcerated for 13 days agreed. “I wouldn’t have went to jail if it wasn’t for Flock.”

Florida was also the site of another Flock-related news story. (“Florida Deputy Allegedly Used Flock Cameras to Stalk 17-Year-Old Girl, Visiting Her at Work 9 Times”.) The officer “was charged with official misconduct and accessing computer electronic devices without authority — both are third-degree felonies. In Florida, if he’s found guilty on both charges, he could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.”

“Americans have no idea who’s looking at that information, or why it has to be collected in the first place,” U.S. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer said Sunday, adding “They deserve to know.”
SCHUMER: “This company said the data on its cameras was encrypted and secure. Then hackers took one down and found the key sitting right there,” Schumer said. “Most Americans just want to get to work and get home to their families without a private company keeping a file on where they go. The next step here is simple: turn the lens around and zoom in on Flock.” Schumer also demanded answers from Flock about how much data from its cameras sits on its servers and whether any federal agency has accessed that data, directly or through local law enforcement.
Schumer’s office sent an official letter to Flock’s CEO giving them 12 days to respond to its questions about Flock’s data retention and security policies. “Americans should not have to sacrifice their right to privacy simply by driving down a public street,” Schumer wrote.

And in other news…
Garrett Langley, the CEO of Flock Safety — a company that deploys over 120,000 automated license plate reader cameras across the United States — recently requested that his Atlanta home be blurred out on Google Maps Street View. In swift retaliation, online activists pinpointed the property and officially marked his front lawn as a “Public Toilet” on the mapping app.

Re:Not Flock

By toutankh • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

The issue is that tools give people the impression that they can escape responsibility and therefore accountability. And if the law confirms that, we’re all fucked. So there needs to be a severe sanction against someone, and I mean a real person, not a fine to a company. Otherwise we create dystopia one step at a time.

So flock is still to blame

By rsilvergun • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread
Because they actively encourage police to believe that their matches are 100% accurate.

Cops are dumb. This is on purpose. The job is extremely boring so they filter out more intelligent people because smart people get bored and leave the job after all that expensive training.

So flock rolls in and tells these cops who already aren’t the sharpest tool in the shed how accurate and amazing their software is. So the cops just take it for granted and arrest anyone the software tells them to arrest.

I mean yeah we could hire smarter police but that would require a ton of police reform nobody is willing to do. It’s just easier to get rid of the flock cameras and that’s at least on the table.

Re: Not Flock

By fluffernutter • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
And guns don’t kill people… they just help people kill 50 at once instead of 1. Therefore you still have to acknowledge their large role in killing people.

Flock isn’t just a terrible company

By Inglix the Mad • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread
because they encourage laziness. They also encourage a whole host of petty, or even outright dangerous, behaviors in people who aren’t always the most stable. ON top of that it doesn’t matter if it’s the government, or a private company, building a database of everyone’s movements: THIS IS STILL A TERRIBLE IDEA!

I’d argue it’s even worse if a private company does it because how long will it take for a third party (corporations) to start abusing it? When they start selling access to corporations, of course.

What? Did you think this would remain a government only tool?

Re:Not Flock

By Registered Coward v2 • • Score: 5, Informative • Thread

I saw part of the testimony. This all comes down to human over-aggressiveness—not even mistakes.

The detective used Flock to look for all Dodge Durangos within a radius of the accident. They located her at her apartment. So far, so good. But her car is a different color than what eyewitnesses said. Other details did not match up with eyewitness accounts. There was NO damage to her vehicle, but they arrested her anyway. The detective doubled down and the police continued there prosecution of her.

I’m no fan of Flock, but in this case it’s simply bad police.

Correct. Flock provided data for teh cops to review and make informed decisions. Part of the problem is often pressure ot close cases, so an easy arrest is one way to do that, which then points to poor leadership who wants good stats. We can argue all day about Flok’s role, and personally I am against Flock’s use without very strict guardrails (which will never be imposed), but this is simply shoddy police work.

After Siemens Re-Licenses OpenRadioss, Rocky Linux Announces Open-Source Fork

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot • Skip
- In 2022 Altair Engineering open sourced “OpenRadioss”, an industry-leading finite element solver under the GNU AGPL License, reports Phoronix.

- Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year

- Siemens closes access to OpenRadioss.

“Siemens didn’t just end the project but they shutdown the GitHub repository that hosted the open-source code and removed other resources that had built around it,” writes Phoronix, before announcing a new open-source community fork:
Radioss has been an industry-leading solver for analyzing crashes, blasts, and other purposes. Altair creating OpenRadioss was a huge milestone for the technical computing industry. It also had other effects like for myself in finally being able to benchmark with this (Open)Radioss code for CPU performance testing compared to the expensive licensing on Radioss itself…

Siemens argues the OpenRadioss closure is for consolidating efforts:

“After four years of successful community-driven research, Siemens is entering a new chapter for the Radioss solver. To accelerate innovation and provide the robust support our global users require for production-grade simulation, we are consolidating our efforts.”
It was Brian Clemens. founder/VP Rocky Linux and the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation who launched the community fork of OpenRadioss — to be called OpenCourant. Its web site announces they’ll be “carrying forward the OpenRadioss code base under the GNU AGPL, in the open, where it belongs.”

Phoronix writes in a follow-up:
OpenCourant is based on the last publicly known open-source OpenRadioss snapshot before Siemens shut it down and removed access to the Git repository… OpenCourant continues with the OpenRadioss GNI AGPLv3 licensing and will be run as part of the Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation. They have run into a small issue though with part of OpenRadioss consisting of binary dependencies and not having the very latest versions prior to Siemens’ removal of the repository. Details on that via this discussion thread for anyone that happens to have recent OpenRadioss binaries.
In other open source news, Kagi is ending their development work on the Orion Browser for Linux and Windows, reports the site Linuxiac — but Kagi “plans to open-source both versions so other developers or organizations can keep them going.”

Corpospeak…

By Knightman • • Score: 5, Insightful • Thread

To accelerate innovation and provide the robust support our global users require for production-grade simulation, we are consolidating our efforts.

Translation: We are looking at our options on how to extract as much money as possible from the users of this software.

Hostile forks ftw

By sg_oneill • • Score: 5, Interesting • Thread

I had an idea a while back of launching an org called “Hostile Fork” that basically gets these hostile de-FOSSings and relaunches them from the last known FOSS commit, stripping out all the anti user shit (user limits for “community” versions etc), de-branding them and trying to find new maintainers. This was in response to almost every non relational database I used succumbing to management bullshit and going closed source, or using the GPL as shareware by locking important functions behind “license checks” (motherfuckers if you put that license check in GPL code I *am* entitled to remove it). Im still bitter about ArangoDB

In the end, I have neither the time resources to put into it, or the money/legal resources to defend it. But I still think it’d be a great idea.

Re:What about the open source contributions to dat

By Entrope • • Score: 4, Interesting • Thread

It depends on how the contributions were licensed. A lot of projects require either copyright grants to the project steward (for example, the FSF) or explicit permission for the steward to distribute the code under some other license. Occasionally there are good reasons to relicense code, like the transitions across GPL versions, but this is the obvious risk of giving those permissions.

Re:Corpospeak…

By Archangel Michael • • Score: 4, Funny • Thread

“We at Siemens have seen how successful SCO was, and think we can be just as successful!”

FBI Detains Teenager Linked to Group That Stole Data on 5,000 FBI Employees

Posted by EditorDavid • • View on SlashDot
PC Magazine reports:
In September, the infamous ShinyHunters hacking group claimed it had infiltrated the FBI job recruitment portal, stealing confidential data belonging to 5,000 employees and even changing the FBI logo to its own. The group has been implicated in the hacking of numerous large and high-profile organizations over the years, from the European Commission to Grand Theft Auto-maker Rockstar Games and the software firm behind Canvas. Now, Reuters reports that a suspected leader of the group, Saif al-Din Khader, is being detained in the country of Jordan in the Near East.... He is reportedly still a teenager.
“Two sources said that he is helping the FBI and global law enforcement locate the other hackers in the group,” reports Reuters:
Their theft of what they claim are mountains of data on every single FBI employee has drawn comparisons to the allegedly Chinese-linked intrusion at the US Office of Personnel Management in 2015, which compromised sensitive details on millions of Americans who had been vetted for security clearances. A Reuters analysis of a sample of the data shared by ShinyHunters revealed that the data contained extensive personally identifiable information of FBI employees, sensitive job role information, and psychiatric and medical information. Khader’s cooperation with investigators could be critical to helping contain — or at least understand — the damage. One source said he was walking investigators through his electronic devices and digital correspondence to help the FBI locate his cohorts…

There have been hints for days that ShinyHunters was experiencing disruption following the announcement of its break-in at the FBI. Beginning on Tuesday, Reuters was unable to reach ShinyHunters through the online account it previously used to communicate with journalists. Then, on Wednesday, the group’s dark web site, where it had previously posted threats to the FBI, disappeared. FBI Director Kash Patel had been hinting at more arrests following the announcement that another alleged ShinyHunters member, Pepijn van der Stap, had been detained in the Netherlands…

Khader’s identity, and his alleged connection to ShinyHunters, have long been known to security researchers. Last year, the independent journalist Brian Krebs reported that Khader was a key member of Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters, an umbrella group of hackers that included ShinyHunters… Law enforcement agencies around the world, including in the United States, have struggled to arrest and prosecute members of related groups such as Lapsus$ or Scattered Spider, Reuters has previously reported. Sources told Reuters that the difficulty stems from the hackers’ young ages, which can make prosecutions complex, or because the groups they belong to are so chaotic and informal, or because victims of their extortion attempts often decline to help investigators

We know it’s juist kids …

By PPH • • Score: 3 • Thread

… because when Israeli intelligence breeches FBI security, they don’t deface the home page.