Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Hamburg Is Replacing a Bridge In One Huge Piece
  2. New GitHub, PyPI Policies Hope to Boost Supply Chain Security
  3. Used EV Prices are Now Going Up in America
  4. Google Plans To Exempt Sanctioned Nations From Android Developer Verification
  5. Drones Offer Alternative to Balloons For Weather Research
  6. Drifting SpaceX Rocket Heading For Accidental Collision With the Moon
  7. OpenAI Finds Evidence Other AI Agents Escaped Containment
  8. The Major Labels Propose Rules to Keep AI Slop Off the Charts
  9. Most Australian Teens Still On Social Media Three Months After Ban
  10. Sony Heard Backlash Over Dropping PlayStation Discs, Plans to Press Ahead
  11. Hackers Targeted Municipal Water Systems In 7 States This Week, FBI Says
  12. New Google Earth AI Tool Could Fuel Misinformation, Experts Say
  13. Publishers Are Losing Google Traffic As AI Answers Replace Links
  14. New York Sues Kalshi For Running ‘Illegal Gambling Operation’
  15. Chrome Is Using AI To Fix Hundreds of Bugs, Eliminate Full Browser Restarts

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.

Hamburg Is Replacing a Bridge In One Huge Piece

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Long-time Slashdot reader Qbertino writes:
The northern German City of Hamburg is currently in the process of replacing one of its bridges in one single gigantic piece. The new replacement weighs 3700 metric tons and was carefully moved into place over a stretch of 500 meters, requiring extreme patience and precision maneuvering. Some places leave only 40 cm of room to neighbouring buildings.

New GitHub, PyPI Policies Hope to Boost Supply Chain Security

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“GitHub and the Python Package Index (PyPI) have introduced new policies meant to boost supply chain security,” reports SecurityWeek, “by preventing the fast propagation of poisoned package versions and the poisoning of old and long-stable releases.”
To prevent the fast delivery of malicious code through the immediate fetching of brand-new releases, GitHub has introduced a Dependabot cooldown, where the automation tool waits for at least three days after a release has been published before opening a pull request. “Waiting a few days before adopting a new release gives maintainers, security researchers, and automated scanners time to spot a malicious version and get it pulled before it ever reaches your pull requests,” GitHub explains.

The three-day cooldown only applies to non-security version bumps, and the behavior can be modified through the configuration option in the dependabot.yml. “Three days as the default balances two goals: it pushes you past the window where most of these attacks live, and it doesn’t hold your dependencies back longer than necessary,” GitHub notes.
And the Python Package Index (PyPI) “now rejects new files being uploaded to releases that are older than 14 days,” according to a recernt blog post from the Python Software Foundation’s security developer-in-residence Seth Larson:
This restriction was put in place to prevent old and long-stable releases from being poisoned in case publishing tokens or workflows of PyPI projects were compromised… The discussion of this behavior began during PEP 740 (Digital Attestations) back in January 2024. The discussion was restarted in March 2026 after the popular packages LiteLLM and Telnyx were compromised. These packages were compromised due to a "mutable reference" in these projects’ usage of the Trivy GitHub Action…

To quantify how disruptive this change would be to existing workflows, the PyPI database was queried for projects that have published new files to old releases[O]nly 56 projects of 15,000 had published a [Python] 3.14-compatible wheel more than 14 days after a release was available. This topic was brought to the Packaging Summit at PyCon US 2026 by PyPI Safety & Security Engineer, Mike Fiedler. The rough consensus of the discussion was that the summit attendees thought it was “acceptable to require users to bump to the next version” to support new Python versions. With the data and consensus in hand, Seth moved forward with a patch to reject new files on old releases which was merged July 8th, 2026.

Used EV Prices are Now Going Up in America

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Electric vehicles have historically been “notorious” for losing their resale value, reports CNBC. But this year prices for used EVs in the U.S. “are up 5.1% from January to June 2026, according to a Recurrent analysis published this month.”
The trend continued into the second half of the year: Prices are up 7% year to date through mid-July, it said. Recurrent compared EVs according to the same make and model year across 108 combinations and weighted price growth according to inventory volume. “Used EVs are appreciating, which almost never happens,” according to an e-mailed Recurrent statement about the analysis. Other auto analysts found a similar trend…

Price growth for used EVs has been broad-based, said Stephanie Valdez Streaty, the director of industry insights at Cox Automotive, a market research firm. Twenty-one of the 25 used EV models with the highest sales volume increased in price between January and June this year, she said… [T]he price growth for used EVs this year has been all the more surprising because it has happened despite a high supply of used EVs hitting the market — which, all else being equal, would generally cause prices to fall, experts said…

There are several factors juicing consumer demand for used EVs, experts said. Among them are high gasoline prices due to the Iran war, which have pushed more consumers to consider fuel-efficient options, experts said… Overall affordability is another big factor, against a backdrop of inflation that has remained above policymakers’ target of 2% for five or so years, auto experts said. The dynamic has pushed more consumers toward the used car market more broadly.
Two interesting statistics from the article:

No subsidy.

By kamapuaa • Score: 3 Thread

Before September 2025, the government was throwing in $7,500, and maybe your state government was kicking in a few thousand extra, and then the local utility maybe was subsidizing your charger. So your $45k Tesla was effectively selling for $35k. Of course nobody is going to buy a used Tesla for $33k when a new one is selling for $35k, but the depreciation was still being taken as if a $45k vehicle was selling for cheap. What we’re seeing isn’t as much a change in demand for EVs, as much as seeing that removing government subsidies has normalized the used car market.

I remember buying an egolf back in 2015, I paid like $21k after subsidies. This was a good price, but that basic value held true for a number of years. Used price was great, for many years I could have sold it for $15k+, and it even went over $21k during 2022 due to supply side issues. But articles talking about used value mentioned that the egolf used value had tanked, going for $37k to $18k. But really that was a 10% drop, because if it went down a normal 30% or whatever you’d literally be buying a used car for more than you would spend on a new one!

The numbers are often taken from sticker price (the article itself doesn’t discuss how it got its numbers). But of course many cars sell for under sticker price…or in 2022, during supply chain shortages, were actually selling for $5,000 above sticker price. Now that we’re mostly over the supply chain issues, these cars are going to see an additional $5,000 drop in used value. But it seems statistically unuseful to account for a one-time extraordinary industry issue.

Google Plans To Exempt Sanctioned Nations From Android Developer Verification

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
We are a month away from the initial rollout of Google’s Android developer verification system, and the company contends this policy does not impinge on the platform’s open nature. Still, the restrictions will be a big change, and there are still some unanswered questions. An issue that has come up repeatedly in the run-up to verification is what will happen to devs who can’t verify because of where they live. It turns out that Google has a cryptic answer for that buried in an FAQ. Developer verification will soon block the installation of apps from unverified developers on any Android device running Google services, which is functionally all Android phones outside Russia and China. Developers who want to keep releasing software, even if it’s not in the Play Store, have to provide Google with their ID and pay a small fee.

But what if you’re an Android developer living in a sanctioned nation? Currently, the U.S. sanction list includes Iran, Cuba, North Korea, and occupied areas of Ukraine. Given the current uncertain state of US foreign policy, that list could change in the future. Google doing any business with developers in those places is a thorny issue, and it seems like the company has decided to just leave them hanging. A rather lengthy FAQ a few levels deep on the Google developer site addresses various issues around dev verification. Smack in the middle is this: “How does this program impact developers in sanctioned countries? Devices in sanctioned countries will be excluded from Android developer verification checks. This allows any developer to continue distributing apps in these regions without verification, though users there won’t benefit from the enhanced security benefits of the program.”

[…] A Google spokesperson has expanded on the FAQ and confirmed to Ars that people living in sanctioned nations will not be allowed to go through the verification process. That means they will not be able to effectively distribute software through any channel internationally. Today, someone making an app in, say, Cuba can distribute it freely around the world, as well as at home. Anyone can install it and see their work in action after tapping through a few sideloading alerts. In the coming months, that will no longer be the case. These unverified apps will only be easily installable in the sanctioned countries where verification doesn’t exist.

Last Android?

By Shakes Fist • Score: 3 Thread
I only upgrade my phone if it sounds better (Black Shark 5 for 4 years now) and I’ve disabled/uninstalled a ton of pre-installed apps.
The idea of having to go through this all over again is bad enough that I’ve pretty much dropped the idea of looking for a new phone. Coupled with this additional nonsense? The next phone will be dumb or 2nd-hand.

Drones Offer Alternative to Balloons For Weather Research

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

Re:Augment, not replace

By thegarbz • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Correct. Propeller based systems have a record of 12km. Most drones and other propeller based vertical lift craft have a limit closer to around 6km. Weather balloons can go as high as 30km.

Re:Augment, not replace

By habig • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

TFA leads off with: “Weather happens in the boundary layer, the atmosphere from ground level to a few thousand metres, but this can be difficult to study in detail: weather stations are too low, and aircraft are expensive.”

So, a very targeted augment. To what extent are they firing off balloons simply to grab that boundary layer data rather than the 30km stuff they’re great at? I don’t know. I suspect that even if not a single balloon is replaced, getting a bunch of high resolution low altitude data upwind of population centers will make the local forecasts a lot better.

We’re also now in the era where we’re learning what less balloon data looks like, that was one of the cuts DOGE did to the NWS. So getting back SOME data in a more efficient way can only help.

They’d serve different purposes.

By jd • Score: 3 Thread

A balloon is not static, it moves with the atmospheric system it is in. Ergo, it tells you how that system evolves. A drone cannot do this.

A drone can stay put, relative to the ground, telling you how a location’s atmosphere evolves. A balloon cannot do this.

These are solving completely different types of problem.

You could, of course, construct a hybrid, as balloons are traditionally single-shot. If a balloon carries the measurement gear and a drone capable of carrying that same gear PLUS a deflated balloon, then you can have something that operates as a balloon until it reaches some pre-set location, whereupon the balloon’s gas is released and the drone flies the ensemble to a collection point.

USA is jumping the shark wrt weather balloons

By dskoll • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

It seems that the USA is dropping the ball on weather balloon monitoring.

Drifting SpaceX Rocket Heading For Accidental Collision With the Moon

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

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

Re: junk

By lawnboy5-O • Score: 4, Funny Thread
We need the the space maid from Spaceballs.

Re: junk

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

“Accidental” is the wrong word

By Tomahawk • Score: 5, Informative Thread
“Inevitable” is a better one. And, at the time of launch, perhaps “unpredictable”.

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

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

OpenAI Finds Evidence Other AI Agents Escaped Containment

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

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

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

Carelessness != Cutting Edge

By apparently • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control.

These are not “cutting-edge” labs; these are careless tech bros, and I can’t wait to see the stupid look on their worthless fucking faces when they get their asses sued because their incompetence led to their software committing cyberattacks against the wrong target

Re:My AI is even MORE EVIL

By swillden • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

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

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

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

Both companies are really worried.

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

Re:My AI is even MORE EVIL

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

Re:the real answer is openAI hires incompetent peo

By KnobbyMcKnobface • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

These people … are clueless as to what it to takes to build a safe frontier LLM. Worse, most dont even know how to develop code and are just having AI do it all for them.

I think that’s closest to the underlying reason. Their staff know how to build in safeguards and sandpits. But they do not have the time to do it to the deadlines demanded of them. They are *instructed* to use LLMs to specify even their security infrastructure, because business. A visiting engineer from the 1990s might be shocked. But we know what we’ve done.

Re:My AI is even MORE EVIL

By twdorris • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Both companies are really worried.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:AI generated art and music…

By RitchCraft • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

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

Re:AI generated art and music…

By drnb • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Well the songs it modeled and interpolated from were good, but the actual creatives who created those real sources won’t be compensated since their work was sufficiently masked through the training process.

Re:AI generated art and music…

By Quantum gravity • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
AI-generated music is decimating the music industry.
Companies will be happy to use AI to produce music based on existing music, rather than paying royalties for new content.
Machines may appear to have human intelligence but do not, and are not conscious or creative.

When it comes to the percentage of music that is AI-generated, Spotify does not publish data,
but Deezer does, stating that 28% of daily uploads are AI-generated.

There have also been articles stating that AI music is primarily listened to by computers, not humans, for royalties.

Re:AI generated art and music…

By Tapewolf • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

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

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

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

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

Re:Let’s ride this crazy train

By thegarbz • Score: 5, Informative Thread

A lot of her songs began life in loop-based music editors (which operate by mixing sampled recordings of beats, riffs, bass lines, melodies, etc., rather than traditional notation)

Tell us you don’t know anything about Taylor Swift without telling us. You don’t need to do any guess work here, there’s a lot of behind the scenes “making of” footage out there. Most of her songs being in her head, and then get punched into piano keys or strummed on guitar strings while she takes note in an old fashioned pen and paper style notebook.

Virtually none of her music is loop-based, virtually none of it is sampled. And calling someone who expertly plays 8 instruments and writes all their own music not an “actual musician” isn’t an insult to her, it just demonstrates what a loser you actually are.

I don’t like Taylor Swift’s music, but will happily defend her from being shat on by … wait didn’t she write a song about you? Haters gonna hate or something like that?

Most Australian Teens Still On Social Media Three Months After Ban

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

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

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

Re:Yeah

By Powercntrl • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

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

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

It was never about “the kids”

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

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

And the world gets worse for all of us.

Re: Yeah

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

Re:Yeah

By thegarbz • Score: 4, Informative Thread

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

Re:Yeah

By rambletamble • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Here in Queensland where I live in Australia we’ve the same thing with e-bikes and kids, the showing off without a helmet, injuries & death etc,

We’ve new laws that aim to reduce the carnage (ask any hospital emergency department professional) and limit e-bike and e-scooter speed to 25 km/hr (divide by 1.6 for mph) or 12 km/h on footpaths.

This one may be of interest :-
“E-scooter, e-skateboard and e-unicycle riders must be aged 16 years or older to ride unsupervised. Children aged 12-15 can ride only under adult supervision.
Parents will be fined for under 16s riding illegally.”

No one expects that there will be 100% adherence but it makes a line in the sand & I’ve not heard any negatives now it’s in place.

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

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

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

85% of all sales happened digitally now

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

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

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

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

I hate this timeline

Re:Huh?

By geekmux • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

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

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

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

Re:Huh?

By tepples • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

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

Re:Virtue signaling?

By unrtst • Score: 4, Informative Thread

100% agree, except that you CAN boycott them - don’t get a new Playstation at all. Make them solve resale first. They should have solved it in the either of the last 2 or 3 versions.

If it weren’t for the RAM shortage, I’d be certain PC gaming would be coming back strong (possibly on Linux/Steam).

No physical discs, no need for a physical console

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Blame

By Waffle Iron • Score: 5, Funny Thread

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

Iranian meddling or …

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:Iranian meddling or …

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

These are likely just probes

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

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

Re:Iranian meddling or …

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

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

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

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

New Google Earth AI Tool Could Fuel Misinformation, Experts Say

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

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

Don’t wait! add this to Google Maps.

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

Why?

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

What was the point of this?

Publishers Are Losing Google Traffic As AI Answers Replace Links

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

Ads and Bad Advice

By darkain • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

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

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

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

Re: Gemini answers are shit

By Sneftel • Score: 4 Thread

wrote the word “covered” as “covered”

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

AI gives better answers.

By supabeast! • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

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

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

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

Google put an end to Clickbait

By allo • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

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

Re:Ads and Bad Advice

By Voyager529 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

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

This. This right here is the answer.

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

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

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

New York Sues Kalshi For Running ‘Illegal Gambling Operation’

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

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

In That Case…

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

FWIW, Kalshi and Polymarket are both based in NYC

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

So you want this

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Re:What About CFTC Ruling

By snowshovelboy • Score: 4, Informative Thread

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

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

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

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

That explains some shit

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

Re:That explains some shit

By geekmux • Score: 4, Funny Thread

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

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

Me and my Botz got you, bruh.

- Phat AI-bert

Using AI to find and fix bugs…

By MpVpRb • Score: 3 Thread

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

Probably time to stop using Chrome then

By gweihir • Score: 3 Thread

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

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

Thorough testing

By Waffle Iron • Score: 3 Thread

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

What could possibly go wrong?