Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. Raspberry Pi Shares Its Official Tutorial For Making a Cyberdeck
  2. Nvidia Senior Manager Linked To Supermicro Scheme Smuggling AI Servers To China
  3. China Delays Ambitious Chang’e 7 Lunar Mission Until 2027
  4. FDA Approves First Alzheimer’s Blood Test For Americans As Young As 40
  5. Humanoid Robots Run 100 Meters Faster Than Usain Bolt’s Record Pace
  6. Dr. Dre Says He Uses AI To Produce Songs
  7. After 50 Years, Physicists May Have Finally Found a Particle Made of Pure Force
  8. SCO Successor Xinuos Asks Court to Rehear Its Claims Against IBM/Red Hat Over Project Monterey
  9. One-Third of Web Pages are Now Written With AI, Says Pew Research
  10. Could Mecha Comet’s Linux PC-Phone Hybrid Be the Future of Linux Smartphones?
  11. The Global Race To Make a Practical Quantum Computer Just Took a Big Leap Forward
  12. Twitch And Amazon Hit With Lawsuit for Training AI With Streamers’ Content
  13. OpenAI Faces Safety Scrutiny After Introducing ‘ChatGPT For Teens’
  14. Iran-linked Cyberattackers Shut Down a UK Power Plant for Four Days
  15. Slovakia Finds Russian Backdoor In Traffic Speed Cameras

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.

Raspberry Pi Shares Its Official Tutorial For Making a Cyberdeck

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Raspberry Pi has published an official guide for building a cyberdeck, leaning into a viral trend of homemade portable computers built from repurposed cases, purses, and other oddball hardware. The guide uses a Raspberry Pi 5, keyboard, battery, and Pelican-style case. The Verge reports:
Raspberry Pi’s head of social, Ashley Whittaker, acknowledged the cyberdeck trend today, saying “we haven’t been able to get away from cyberdecks this year.” Raspberry Pi has also increased its prices multiple times this year due to rising costs for RAM and other components, which could be another reason to support this growing market of active and would-be hobbyists. The 16GB version of the Raspberry Pi 5 included in the company’s official cyberdeck guide got a $100 price hike in April, nearly as much as the board’s original $120 price.

Nvidia Senior Manager Linked To Supermicro Scheme Smuggling AI Servers To China

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
Taiwan has indicted nine people — reportedly including an Nvidia senior manager and two Supermicro employees based in the country — who allegedly helped forge documents to cover up illegal exports of high-end AI servers to China in violation of US export controls. On Monday, Reuters reported that prosecutors in Keelung did not release any names but confirmed that the suspects were “charged with breach of trust and document forgery.” One suspect linked to a related case remains at large, accused of the “siphoning of funds from a distributor company involved” in helping China get access to restricted Nvidia chips.

Since 2022, the US has required a license to export semiconductors to China, with the intent of protecting national security by staying ahead of China in the AI race. But after the US arrested Supermicro co-founder Wally Liaw in March for allegedly funneling $2.5 billion in restricted AI servers to China since 2024, Taiwan launched a separate probe to learn more about the scheme. Taiwan’s investigation found that co-conspirators attempted to falsify documents to make it appear that 130 B300 servers were installed and in use at a Taiwan facility. But 74 of those servers “were ultimately exported and delivered to Chinese customers,” Reuters reported, while the rest, 56, were intended to go to China but were blocked once Taiwanese customs officials “detected irregularities.”
According to Taiwan officials, Nvidia’s manager and Supermicro employees “colluded with one another at various levels for enormous profit, illegally exporting high-end servers, increasing corporate compliance costs, and severely damaging our nation’s international image.”
Supermicro said in a statement to PCMag: “Supermicro is committed to protecting our advanced technologies and intellectual property. We are working closely with Taiwanese authorities on recent events, which underscore the importance of continued collaboration across industry and government to strengthen safeguards, enhance supply chain visibility, and facilitate the enforcement of export control laws.”

Just like Russia

By smooth wombat • Score: 3 Thread
When Ukraine dissects the remains of Russian drones or missiles, they inevitably find western components. In one case, reported on here, they found an Nvidia chip inside a missile.

Is someone, or someones, inside the supply chain redirecting chips? Is this the same as the servers getting to China? Or is this merely a case of someone buying this stuff under a shell company and then passing it along?

China Delays Ambitious Chang’e 7 Lunar Mission Until 2027

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
China has delayed its ambitious Chang’e 7 lunar mission until at least 2027 after scrubbing an August 24 launch. Poor weather conditions were likely a factor, with China’s Manned Space Agency (CMSA) saying the decision reflects the need for “absolute safety.” Scientific American reports:
China and the U.S. are in a race to send humans back to the moon, a feat that that U.S. accomplished in the 1960s and that has never been achieved by any other country. Chang’e 7 is to play to a crucial part in China’s ambitions: the probe is designed to search for frozen water in the Shackleton Crater, a pit that spans some 21 kilometers (13 miles) and sits beside the lunar south pole.

No spacecraft has ever landed in that region, which scientists consider to be among the likeliest places to find water on the moon. Locating water that can be used by humans is vital to establishing any long-term lunar presence. NASA and China are eyeing the region to establish a crewed base — and because this real estate is so precious, it matters who gets their first.
Ars Technica notes in its reporting that the delayed launch was “most likely” due to Typhoon Narra, “which has 45 mph winds (equivalent to a moderate Tropical Storm) and continues to meander around in the waterway separating Hainan Island, where the spaceport is located, and mainland China.”

As for why the next launch window won’t open until next February or March? “It likely is a combination of factors, including sunlight conditions in polar landing zones as well as the mission plan that requires a 90-day lunar orbit reconnaissance before landing,” reports Ars. There’s also a possibility, albeit an unlikely one, that “some technical issue was discovered at the last minute with either the complex Chang’e 7 payload, or the rocket.”

FDA Approves First Alzheimer’s Blood Test For Americans As Young As 40

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
The FDA has cleared the first Alzheimer’s blood test for symptomatic patients as young as 40. The test measures amyloid and tau biomarkers from a single blood draw and identified positive biomarkers with 97.6% accuracy in a validation study. New Atlas reports:
PrecivityAD2 is a single blood test that quickly assesses the proteins amyloid and tau, using mass spectrometry to measure plasma AB42/40 and p-tau217/np-tau217. The results are then scored, qualifying as negative, likely positive, or positive for AD. “Just over a year ago, there were no FDA-cleared blood tests for Alzheimer’s, and now we have three,” Isobel Coleman, chief executive officer of the Alzheimer’s Drug Discovery Foundation (ADDF), said in a statement. “This is a proof point that sustained, early investment in translational science plays a catalytic role in moving promising ideas from the lab to patients.”

In a recent clinical validation study, 1,142 symptomatic adults were tested using PrecivityAD2. The process accurately identified 97.6% of positive biomarkers. What’s more, the results remained consistent even in patients with comorbidities like chronic kidney disease and diabetes, which can distort plasma amyloid samples. It’s worth noting that the test isn’t intended for general health screenings, but for patients who already show some cognitive decline. “As PrecivityAD2 and tools like it move further into clinical practice, they will enable earlier detection, sharpen clinical trials, and build the foundation for precision medicine and combination therapies,” Coleman added.

Alzheimer’s isn’t all bad —

By Valgrus Thunderaxe • Score: 4, Funny Thread
You’re always meeting new people.

Re:What can be done in case of a positive test?

By bill_mcgonigle • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Ironically there are treatments that show efficacy but they range between not FDA approved and illegal.

You can go to Mexico or the Caribbean for some of them (or find underground psychiatrists).

Getting lots of regular sleep, exercise, and going ketogenic can dramatically slow progression but there is a tau prion aspect that is difficult to halt. Lots of Omega-3’s can keep your astrocytes healthy.

Some evidence supports ultrasound treatment but it’s probably the higher harmonics which are not well characterized or even understood outside a few labs (ASU, et. al.).

Use protection as the tau prions don’t stay in the brain.

Humanoid Robots Run 100 Meters Faster Than Usain Bolt’s Record Pace

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Two humanoid robots competing at the World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Saturday ran the 100-meter dash faster than Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world-record time. "[T]he Tiangong Ultra humanoid robot completed the 100-meter dash in 9.39 seconds during a preliminary heat,” reports Engadget. “Developed by Beijing Humanoid Robot Innovation Center, the record-holding robot overtook Honor’s Lightning robot, which completed the sprint in 9.47 seconds. From the report:
Despite the impressive finish times, don’t expect these humanoid robots to be used for any commercial purposes yet. After their sprints, they slammed directly into pads and some even required human assistance to be stretchered off the course. However, it’s still a major improvement from last year’s inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games, where the Tiangong Ultra won the 100-meter dash in 21.5 seconds.
Beijing has also hosted a humanoid robot half-marathon, where Honor’s Lightning won in 50 minutes and 26 seconds, which also beat the pace of another human world record.
“The World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing kicked off August 22 and will run until the 26, hosting thousands of robot participants competing in more than just track and field events, including soccer, table tennis and boxing,” adds Engadget.

splat at the end

By v1 • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Funny how they’ve got that blue barrier for them to crash into at the finish line, then they get carried away on stretchers. Should be an interesting story behind that.

Did they completely tap their battery for the final sprint and can’t even stand anymore? Or were they never programmed on how to stop?

Check Out The Videos

By SlashbotAgent • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

I encourage you to take a short trip down the rabbit hole and look at some of the videos from this event.

The capabilities of these robots is amazing.

Their spectacular failures are gut bustingly hilarious.

The speed and capability of these machines is quite unsettling as they run, jump, dance, fight…

The number of these machines is shocking. Soooo many! They have a fucking army of humanoid robots.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?…

Dr. Dre Says He Uses AI To Produce Songs

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo:
Dr. Dre, the pioneering rapper and seven-time Grammy-winning producer behind hit songs like Tupac’s “California Love” and Eminem’s “The Real Slim Shady,” is very much pro using artificial intelligence tools to make music. In an interview with the New York Times, Dr. Dre and Interscope Records co-founder Jimmy Iovine spoke about artificial intelligence’s recent foray into music production, with the producer characterizing those who oppose AI song generation tools as “afraid of learning new things.” “I don’t see it as a threat. I think the only people that see it as a threat are the people who have trouble creating,” Dr. Dre said. “I had a discussion with a few people a few days ago. They were against AI, and I’m like, ‘OK, you sound like the person that would have been against the drum machine when it came out.’ Or synthesizers, right?”

[…] Iovine, the music executive and Dr. Dre’s partner in Beats by Dre, for his part, says he doesn’t “see the downside at all.” “There will be some crappy music. There’s crappy music now,” Iovine told the NYT. “In the studio, when gifted people have AI, they’re going to make better records.” Dr. Dre said he uses AI in producing “as a tool to see what it would do with what I just did.” The award-winning producer also said he is definitely not alone among his peers in his stance on AI either: many producers use AI but fear to admit it. Iovine calls them “closet AI producers,” and says Timbaland, the four-time Grammy-winning singer-producer behind a long list of hits like “Promiscuous” with Nelly Furtado, is also one.

I bet he does it for 2 reasons

By xeoron • Score: 3 Thread
1) does not have to share royalties he uses for sampling 2) it is not copyrightable so it is public domain.

Re:I bet he does it for 2 reasons

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

More like he’s lazy and his talent was being at the right place at the right time

Copyright shmopyright, right?

By Arnonyrnous Covvard • Score: 3 Thread

Just don’t expect me to pay for it.

I for one…

By greytree • Score: 3 Thread
I for one do NOT want my doctor using AI.

Now get off my decks, sonny.

After 50 Years, Physicists May Have Finally Found a Particle Made of Pure Force

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
Gluons are the quantum ‘Gorilla Glue’ involved in binding quarks together, ScienceAlert reminds us. But for nearly 50 years, physicists have hunted for “glueballs”, exotic particles predicted by this theory of the strong interaction — the only type of particle in nature composed entirely of force mediators:

Now, a collaboration working at a collider in Beijing says it has the clearest evidence yet that a known particle called X(2370) is dominated by one of these elusive states… Physicists sifted through the wreckage of high-energy particle collisions to find strong evidence of this glueball, made predominantly of gluons — massless force carriers of the strong interaction between quarks… The new evidence for this exotic, unstable glueball’s ephemeral existence comes from a recent preprint on arXiv, presented at the International Conference on High Energy Physics in Brazil… This collaboration uses the Beijing Electron Positron Collider II, a particle accelerator and collider that smashes electrons into their antimatter counterparts, called positrons, to probe perplexing particle physics.

The resultant glueball is an “unprecedented form of matter,” says Jin Shan, a particle physicist at Nanjing University and one of the research team’s leaders. “It not only enables the theory describing strong interactions to pass its most rigorous test, but also vastly expands the boundaries of our understanding of the physical world,” he told Fan Chen at South China Morning Post… Previously, in a study published in the journal Physical Review Letters in 2024, the researchers analyzed 10 billion meson decay events. They measured the X(2370) particle’s mass and spin parity — a property that dictates its interactions and almost-instantaneous decay — for the first time, finding complete agreement between their experimental values and predictions. Now, they’ve identified its additional decay modes and determined its flavor-singlet nature, “the most important characteristic of a glueball....”

The authors describe their work as the clearest experimental result to emerge from nearly 50 years of glueball searches, supporting the long-standing theoretical prediction that gluons can bind together into a new form of matter.
The discovery "“highlights advances in technology and analytical techniques that have recently revealed another decades-in-the-making physics mystery,” the article points out.

“More experiments are needed to further confirm and constrain the prototypes of the highly esoteric glueball; in other words, more particle smashing.”

Extra! Extra!

By martin-boundary • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Action-at-a-distance! Get your action-at-a-distance here or there! Packaged in a wave! No field of enquiry, is too small.

You, sir, do you want to read the story? Only two cents!

Extra! Extra!

Slashdot Reruns

By Arnonyrnous Covvard • Score: 4, Informative Thread

https://science.slashdot.org/s…

Name Suggestion

By UnresolvedExternal • Score: 4, Funny Thread
We should call it the Chuck Norris particle - there is no force greater than his.

I don’t use gluons

By TheMiddleRoad • Score: 3 Thread
I cover my nipples with pasties.

SCO Successor Xinuos Asks Court to Rehear Its Claims Against IBM/Red Hat Over Project Monterey

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
The long legal battle over ownership of Linux “is closer than ever to ending,” reports the Register, “after a panel of three judges ruled a claim against IBM and Red Hat isn’t valid, and that time has expired for further action.”
In 2021, an heir to SCO settled with IBM for $14.25 million — a sum that reflects the fact SCO had for years failed to produce strong evidence to back its claims. Another of SCO’s legal successors, Xinuos, filed a new claim that IBM should be on the hook because Big Blue knew it did not own the code it contributed to Linux but instead had a non-exclusive license to use it. Xinuos argued that when IBM contributed Project Monterey code to Linux [25 years ago], it breached that license.

Xinuos eventually took that argument to the US District Court for the Southern District of New York — and failed to convince it that IBM and Red Hat had a case to answer. Xinuos appealed, and on August 10th the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided [PDF] not to revisit the District Court’s decision, agreeing that the original legalese governing Project Monterey means it’s too late to re-litigate the matter. The Appeals Court also agreed that Xinuos tried to frame the case as a licensing issue but failed, instead arguing that the issue was really about ownership.

That ain’t all, folks, because Xinuos intends to file a petition to have the case re-heard by the full bench of the Court of Appeals. That hardly ever happens, unless the court finds significant errors or major legal issues that make a rehearing worthwhile. Law firm Kaplan says the Second Circuit has allowed reviews of less than 0.03 percent of the cases it has handled. So perhaps this matter is now close to a final resolution.
Back in 2000 Slashdot interviewed one of the presidents of SCO.

Re:About Fsck’n time…

By sg_oneill • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Yeah the elephant in the corner of the room was always that SCO never even owned those rights to unix to begin with , it was licensing them from Novell and Novell where *very unhappy* with SCOs antics as the licensing text specifically forbade this sort of nonsense without Novell’s go-ahead which they definitely did not give (I assume MicroFocus now have those rights since they swallowed Novell a decade ago. Actually googling it, Microfocus got swallowed by “Open Text”. Who the fuck are open text?! Their wikipedia page seems to suggest they’ve swallowed half of silicon valley, but I havent heard of them before. I’m old :(

PJ must be losing her mind over this!

By haruchai • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

23 years since she founded Groklaw specifically to cover this lawsuit and it’s STILL not over??
WTAF??

Re:About Fsck’n time…

By Sique • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
It was Attachmate, which swallowed Novell and spun of for instance SuSE Linux before being itself acquired by Micro Focus. SuSE S.A. is now a separate company in Luxembourg, and maybe, they are holding the original UNIX licenses, as it would fit into their portfolio.

It was never intended to end

By Laxator2 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The purpose of the original lawsuit started in 2003 was never to “win” anything.
Remember that it was Microsoft who bankrolled it in the first place, and the fact that the lawsuit started in the year 2003 is no coincidence.
2004 was declared the much-derided “Year of the Linux Desktop”, and it was correct; Linux had become good enough to use on the desktop in any corporation. (I’ve been using Linux since 1998).
Just look at the Munich Linux migration as an example.
Microsoft desperately needed some way to convince the MBAs running corporations to keep Linux off the desktop as cloud and Azure were not a thing back in 2004.
They found it in the form of legal risk; use Linux, get sued.
Back in 2003 it created quite a stir, with AutoZone and BMW being directly sued by SCO for their use of Linux.
Almost all potential corporate users got spooked, as the lawsuits got widely publicized.
A few generations of MBAs graduated learning that Linux is a legal risk, and now, even if Linux runs the entire infrastructure of most corporations, you are allowed to access it only via a text terminal.
In 2026 Microsoft has captured all the corporate e-mail market (all of it hosted on Azure by now) via some well-publicized data breaches of in-house servers at the beginning of Nadella’s reign.
Most of their revenue is from the cloud, but they still want Linux off the desktop.
What people use at work will want to use at home as well.
Therefore, there will be attempts to keep this lawsuit going for as long as possible.

Re:PJ must be losing her mind over this!

By geek • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Does anyone actually have any evidence PJ was a real person and not just a persona created by IBM’s PR department? PJ appeared mysteriously, exclusively posting stuff supportive of IBM’s position in this case. They never turned their attention to any other litigation. It’s awfully suspicious. You’d think a real person who knew that much about the relevant law would have opinions on other cases as well, and you’d expect them to market themselves using the fame/goodwill generated with Groklaw. You’d also think they’d have done at least one interview, or you could find at least one person who’s met them. I’m not saying anything posted on Groklaw wasn’t true, just that it always seemed like a very successful IBM PR exercise to me.

Her name is Pamela Jones, she was a paralegal. She’s done real interviews in the past. She was/is real!

One-Third of Web Pages are Now Written With AI, Says Pew Research

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
A Pew Research senior data scientist analyzed 500,000 English-language webpages from the past five years with an AI detection tool to estimate how many were likely written or edited by AI:

Of all the pages in this sample, 10% show significant signs of AI authorship… If we filter old webpages out of our samples and look at only the pages published after the release of ChatGPT, the trend is even more pronounced. In the July 2026 snapshot, signs of AI authorship can be found in over one-third of pages published after ChatGPT was released. This is in line with other studies that have shown that large shares of recently published pages on the internet were likely written or substantially edited by AI.

AI-authored text is not evenly spread across the web. When ChatGPT was first released, the kinds of linguistic patterns that can signal AI authorship appeared at similar rates across the main top-level web domains (.com, .org, .edu and .gov). But in samples from 2026, around one-in-ten pages with a .com domain show signs of AI authorship — about double the share on .org domains (4.6%), and 10 times the rate on .edu or .gov domains (both around 1%).
They even identified specific ways online text has changed, “comparing the internet of today to a snapshot from 2023.”

I think it’s missing some nuance

By Krishnoid • Score: 5, Funny Thread
It’s always easy to glibly jump to conclusions in any area. But if we delve into these assertions, it’s not just artificial intelligence, it’s the interface’s comfort and familiarity — as we see it match, soothe, and calm our cognition even as it begins the slippery slope to supplant it.

It’s not the interplay between the decrease in literacy in high school and college and artificial intelligence’s improvement in text generation, it’s a testament to the complexity of the problem — being critical to delve into the cognitive, cultural, and other foundations of human language and thought — in addition to examining not just the production, but also the consumption of language by both the human brain and large language models.

Re: no surprise

By Z00L00K • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

And the last 15 years the corporate web pages have been dumbed down to irrelevancy so you can’t find any useful info anymore.

is this really news?

By fluffernutter • Score: 5, Funny Thread
I don’t see why this is shocking news. HTML is 90s technology and then they added on CSS and JavaScript. It is painful to work with. And typing a lot of words is what AI is good at.

Re: no surprise

By quonset • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

And the last 15 years the corporate web pages have been dumbed down to irrelevancy so you can’t find any useful info anymore.

And to think my mod points expired yesterday. This is my number one issue with web pages. Lack of information. If you’re going to advertise a product or service, how about explaining what it does. Don’t wave your hand and market speak everything. Flat out state, “This will allow you to create graphics beyond your imagination.” (possibly a bit hyperbolic, but at least you know it’s a graphics program)

The same goes for local businesses and what hours they’re open. Don’t make people scroll to the bottom of a page or have to go through several drop-down menus to find out when you’re open. Put it near the top, next to your phone number.

Re: I think it’s missing some nuance

By fropenn • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Slashdot needs an AI mod option. I’m not sure if it would increase or decrease the score, but it would be nice to have the option to filter out AI if I don’t want to see it.

Could Mecha Comet’s Linux PC-Phone Hybrid Be the Future of Linux Smartphones?

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
3,346 backers pledged $1,198,844 on Kickstarter to build the (modular) handheld Linux computer, the Mecha Comet. It’s slightly bigger and heavier than your smartphone, with a 4-inch AMOLED display and loaded up with things like microphones, speakers, a SIM tray, two USB ports and a mini HDMI port. There’s three separate kill switches for wifi, microphone and camera — plus a “boot mode” switch for the SD card, and even three pins for instant access to its debug console.

It’s now expected to ship in October or November (and is still available for preorder).

Snap-in extensions include a keyboard (with programmable colors for its backlit keys), a gamepad, and a special IO Breakout that exposes the 40 pogo pins for modules, sensors, and MCUs. They’re all open hardware, and founder Shoaib Merchant says “I’m looking forward to more community designs over the upcoming months.” He shows the screen in action in a video on Kickstarter, demonstrating native apps like Music, Notes, Settings, and Files — as well as a Terminal app running on its color screen.

A Linux correspondent at How-To Geek notes its ships “with a custom, hardware-optimized Linux distro out of the box,” so “it’s like having a dedicated Linux terminal in your pocket.” And they argue the new device “could be the future of Linux smartphones.”
I should also mention that you don’t necessarily have to use the battery; it can power on over USB PD without one. Overall, you’re getting the same I/O you’d expect from a computer in a smartphone-like form factor, complete with modular input devices — and it’s running Linux under the hood. For me, that’s the most innovative gadget I’ve seen in the Linux hardware space in a long time…

It’s powerful enough to run most Linux terminal apps, which opens up a lot of possibilities. You’re also getting an NPU built right into the SoC, which opens up the possibility for on-device AI workflows — something not possible in budget smartphones. Now, I personally plan to use it for SSHing into my main computer and home lab and operating them remotely. That’s also why I’ll be putting the LTE modem in the M.2 slot rather than an SSD — mobile data means I can reach my machines even when there’s no Wi-Fi around.

I also showed it to my partner, and she sees this as the ideal minimalist phone for digital detoxing. There’s a built-in media player, a basic notes app, and you can even run Spotify from the terminal if you want.

Super neat, alas not a solution to the issue

By T34L • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

I really fuckin’ wanna ditch my spying, anticonsumerist, battery chugging and generally only increasingly infuriating android phone for a device actually at least vaguely under my control but few of the things that I have to use a phone for are doable on the Linux thing!

I need the stupid banking app, the stupid work auth app, the stupid state legal filing app, and the stupid carsharing app. They all suck shit, but provide access to services that are either unavailable or considerably less accessible without a “phone” (actually, a comprehensive advertising and surveillance platform under direct control of either Google or Apple).

For this linux thingus to actually replace the function of a modern phone, all those services would have to be accessible through it, but the current “industrial” zeitgeist makes them all only less and less accessible unless you essentially strip down and stick their favored personal privacy probe right up your ass.

Right now it feels way more plausible to get the cheapest Android phone “certified” to interface with the services, keep it off and wrapped in tinfoil unless needed, and when you have that, the device you actually want to use for your actual computer/communicator purposes might as well be of dimensions of a small laptop too, because you’ve already been forced to own a “telephone” anyway. Now, if we backed out of this monopoly-of-trust nightmare that is the backend google/apple services create, I’d get something like the thing in the OP in a heartbeat.

Mini HDMI?

By paul_engr • Score: 4, Insightful Thread
Really? We have type C. Who the fuck eants another goddamned mini hdmi to full sized hdmi cable that will NEVER be where you need it when you need it?

The Global Race To Make a Practical Quantum Computer Just Took a Big Leap Forward

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
It’s “radically different from other quantum computers” reports Phys.org. The Helios system uses trapped ions — charged atoms suspended in free space using electromagnetic fields.

But it operates with 98 qubits — making it the largest trapped-ion quantum computer built so far.
Quantinuum, the company behind the device, is based in Cambridge, U.K., and Broomfield, Colorado. It demonstrated earlier machines operating on 32 qubits in 2023 and 56 qubits in 2025…

It relies on two major advances — one in hardware and one in software. First, the four-way X junction lets the system handle several tasks at once rather than one at a time, which is much faster. That was impossible in earlier QCCD [quantum charge-coupled device] machines, which could only move data back and forth in a single line or loop. Second, judicious use of the freedom offered by the two dimensions of the X junction relies on new classical control software called Helios runtime, which plans the smartest, fastest route for moving and processing the data. Together, these represent a substantial advance in the engineering of quantum computers.

An important consequence is that Helios can perform computations that cannot be performed even on the largest supercomputers using known methods within reasonable amounts of time and power consumption. This demonstrates the ability of this device and its successors to surpass the computational prowess of classical computers — although their algorithms and hardware are rapidly advancing, too. Having said that, Helios’ computations have just been random benchmark tests, so the practical importance of this leap forward is still limited. To perform quantum computations of practical importance in science and commerce, even the most optimistic estimates suggest that quantum computers must be enormously bigger and better — of the order of a million qubits.

Re:Is Scott Aaronson eating humble pie yet?

By JoshuaZ • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
I have not had time to look at the Helion claims in detail, but I’m not sure why you think Aaronson should do so. His position a few years ago was that many current claims about practical quantum computing were being exaggerated (including very much the claims by D-Wave with their quantum annealing systems) but that in the near future practical quantum computers were likely. Aaronson has been careful to say that even as he’s also been one of the people most vocal in arguing that the burden of proof is on skeptics of quantum computers who would claim it would never be possible. It may help to look at Aaronson’s recent post, for example what he says here https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9979.

And how many effective Qbits are these?

By gweihir • Score: 3 Thread

And how long a calculation does the entanglement survive?

Making a big leap when you are very, very far from the finishing lien and do not even know whether it exists means not a lot.

Re:120 years.

By gweihir • Score: 4, Funny Thread

The shoddy quality of the work does reflect the rushed schedule, doesn’t it though?

Re:I’m not convinced QCs will ever work

By JoshuaZ • Score: 4, Informative Thread
Most of this is wrong or missing important context.

The scaling effort is clearly exponential, hence a total non-starter for anybody that understands computing

Scaling in terms of what? The other user was talking about energy usage. This is pretty obviously not the case. Most forms of quantum computers have to be kept incredibly cold, often in miliKelvin. If there were exponential energy use, then adding even in a few more quantum gates would make that energy total massive. But we don’t see that. So by what metric are you claiming exponential scaling effort?

Actually, since QC effort scales exponentially with the length of the computation, one could argue it is trice exponentially worse.

I don’t know what “QC effort” is, but the obvious metric for this is just false. For example, Shor’s algorithm, which is the algorithm for factoring using a quantum computer, has a number of qubits which scales slightly worse than the square of the number of digits https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor’s_algorithm.

At this time, the qc factoring record (!) is 28. And that is with a no-decision algorithm, i.e. one that knew the outcome before. The next larger effort failed. And the 28 needed many, many repetitions to go though.

This is highly garbled. First, of all the record for factoring cannot be 28, and it cannot be 28 for a pretty obvious reason. Shor’s algorithm only works for *odd numbers*. This is a very basic part of how the algorithm functions. The number you are thinking of is 21, not 28. https://arxiv.org/abs/1111.4147. Your point about that these have been “no-decision algorithm” is not completely accurate, but is approximately so. They did use a compiled circuit which used prior knowledge of the solution to optimize the arrangement of the qubits.

But there are also good reasons that factorization records have not expanded. First, Shor’s algorithm has high overhead if you trace out the number of gates, and requires very high coherence to even start getting used. It isn’t a useful metric of where things are going. This is like looking at the number of people going to space in the 1950s when no one has gone to space and ignoring that rockets had been steadily improving since the 1930s. The coherence time for quantum computers continues to improve. For a while it was improving at a rate of a factor of 10 roughly every 3 years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing_scaling_laws#Schoelkopf’s_law . That has slowed down in the last decade or so, so it is now improving by about a factor of 3 to 5 every 3 years. Similar remarks apply to other metrics like number of gates. And we know that if you can get error levels down and coherence times long then quantum error correcting codes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_error_correction works. In particular, the threshold theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_theorem says that once your physical error rate is low enough, the logical error rate can be as low as you want, regardless of the size of the computation.

Another incremental step forward

By RUs1729 • Score: 3 Thread
It’s another incremental step forward; one of many more that will be required before a QC can be developed that is able to do anything of practical interest that cannot be done by digital computers at least as efficiently and far more easily and cheaply.

Twitch And Amazon Hit With Lawsuit for Training AI With Streamers’ Content

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A class action filed this week accused Amazon’s Twitch gaming service of using video streams to fuel its AI products without licensing or obtaining permission, reports Engadget:
Earlier this month, Twitch Support posted on X that it added an option to opt out of “having your channel content used to train generative AI content models across Amazon.” Shortly after, Twitch hosted an episode of its recurring Patch Notes stream where Mike Minton, the company’s chief product officer, said “if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in,” when asked by a viewer why the Twitch settings for AI training aren’t opt-in but instead enabled by default, requiring users to opt out if they don’t want to participate. Now, the latest class action lawsuit claims that Twitch and Amazon committed a breach of contract when the companies decided to use its streamers as “free training stock for separate commercial AI products.”

Did the read the TOS?

By sarren1901 • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Something tells me that if you post something to those video channels, they already get a ton of rights to the content itself. Maybe these content creators thought it was just free hosting? Seems naive.

UBI

By backslashdot • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

UBI is like reparations from the robots and AI.

Re: Did the read the TOS?

By Z00L00K • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Opt-out alternative instead of opt-in is illegal in some places.

Licenses are not ownership.

By Looce • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Belong? No. Twitch (Amazon) gets a license to the content. Here’s what they think gives them the right to do this:

(i) Unless otherwise agreed to in a written agreement between you and Twitch that was signed by an authorized representative of Twitch, if you submit, transmit, display, perform, post, or store User Content using the Twitch Services, you grant Twitch and its sub-licensees, to the furthest extent and for the maximum duration permitted by applicable law (including in perpetuity if permitted under applicable law), an unrestricted, worldwide, irrevocable, fully sub-licenseable, nonexclusive, and royalty-free right to: (a) use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display your User Content (including without limitation for promoting and redistributing part or all of the Twitch Services (and derivative works thereof)) in any form, format, media, or media channels now known or later developed or discovered; and (b) use the name, identity, likeness, and voice (or other biographical information) that you submit in connection with such User Content. Twitch can exercise these rights in connection with Twitch and/or its affiliates’ business. (source)

But the content is not theirs to do with as they please. It still belongs to Twitch streamers. Twitch needs a license to their content so they can transcode it to all the resolutions they support on the fly (a derivative work) and display/perform it on the viewers’ computers. That’s fair. But training models is not connected with the usual business of Twitch, which consists of sending the streams to viewers, providing the chat on which they interact with the streamer and other things they might call the Twitch “experience”. It’s the same thing book publishers are fighting in the courts against LLM companies: can Twitch (Amazon) do this if all they have is a license and don’t own the content?

By their own admission, they had to force everyone to opt in because nobody would have if they didn’t force it. That includes streamers who have since become incapacitated or died and can’t exercise their right to opt out.

It’s also unclear whether people’s content will be erased from the model when they opt out, in a future training iteration, or at all.

This is not legal advice.

Delicious

By Anamon • Score: 3 Thread
> “if it was opt-in, nobody would opt in,”

Classic saying the quiet part out loud, I love it.

OpenAI Faces Safety Scrutiny After Introducing ‘ChatGPT For Teens’

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
This week OpenAI launched a version of ChatGPT exclusively designed for teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, reports CTV, “saying this version came with stronger protections around content related to mentions of suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats.”
[Tech analyst Carmi Levy says] “What it’s doing is it’s using cues, it’s sort of watching how you’re using the tool, and it’s trying to guess your age.” Levy said if ChatGPT thinks a person has lied about their age when they first signed up, it will automatically put them into the Teens mode for protection. “It includes those sort of two things: prevent you from having experiences that are age inappropriate, and also add features that are aligned with academics, so that makes it easier to study, makes it less likely for you to cheat on an assignment, provide resources that that that allow you to learn more effectively,” he said.

Levy reminded users that this is still an application and a web service, which means it’s constantly collecting personal information about the users’ activities on the device and using the data to estimate their age… In the event a user is talking about self-harm, this new version will block the conversation and suggest additional help or call emergency or mental health services, Levy explained. It would do the same with violent content, eating disorders, engaging in dangerous activities, as well as explicit, sexual or graphic content. “It’s using AI again to sort of parse out that conversation: ‘are we headed in a in a significant direction? If so, throw up that guardrail, stop it from happening, redirect.’"

However, the tech analyst said a number of people who have attempted to bypass the guiderails for research have succeeded in doing so “with a little bit of prompting.... I wouldn’t call it 100% safe. That’s kind of the catch-22 of the entire AI industry.” This will lead parents to think that their children are safer and reduce the oversight on their online activities, which Levy described as a “perverse impact” that is “problematic.”

“Parents should not assume that OpenAI has their kids’ best interests at heart. They should also not assume that these technologies are perfect. They will miss certain things, and they will also engage in what we call false positives,” he said. “An adult who’s legitimately is in the platform might be tagged as a child because the AI simply got it wrong.”
OpenAI’s blog post says the new mode was designed for “preserving the ability to learn, create, and explore.”

But CNN notes the move "comes as OpenAI faces a string of lawsuits alleging that inappropriate conversations with ChatGPT contributed to the harm or deaths of young people.”
[New tools] include nudges for teen users to take a break if they’ve been active for 90 minutes within a three-hour window. OpenAI is also adding options for teens or parents to set “Quiet Hours” when ChatGPT is unavailable or “Study Hours” where ChatGPT’s study mode for learning will be on by default. The company also said it has improved protections to prevent ChatGPT from expressing personal feelings toward a user. And it’s adding reminders that caution teens to think twice if they try to upload a private or sensitive image to the chatbot…

Nearly a third of American teens use AI chatbots daily, a Pew Research Center study published in December found. ChatGPT was by far the most popular AI chatbot in the survey, with more than half of those teens reporting having used it.
Engadget shared this observation from Josh Golin, the executive director of Fairplay, a non-profit advocating for policies to make the internet safer for children. “Most parents, overwhelmingly, do not avail themselves of [parental oversight] tools, in part because they are deliberately made hard to find and use.” Golin’s group wanted to see testing of the tools first to see whether they led to better outcomes for teenagers. “The way this was just announced feels more like a response aimed at public relations than actual deep thinking about what kind of support [teens] need.”

And Mashable got a similar quote from Robbie Torney, head of AI/digital assessments for Common Sense Media’s Youth AI Safety Institute. OpenAI’s teen experience makes important safety commitments, but "What we really need now is evidence that they work, and we need this evidence, including our testing and the testing of others, before anyone, including parents, puts real trust in ChatGPT for Teens.”
Importantly, Torney said parents shouldn’t assume their child is using ChatGPT for Teens. While OpenAI uses age estimation to place users in the age-appropriate version of ChatGPT, it can still mistake a user as older. Parents can be sure their child is using the teen version by linking their ChatGPT account to their child’s and implementing OpenAI’s parental control features. If a teen has previously lied about their age — and plenty do — they may continue to access the adult version of ChatGPT…

Torney said caregivers must enact parental controls to receive notifications from OpenAI should their teen discuss suicide, self-harm, or acts of violence in immediate or dangerous ways… An OpenAI spokesperson said every notification is reviewed by a trained human before it’s sent. The company strives to review notifications in under one hour.

kids vs the world

By spaceman375 • Score: 3 Thread

When you put up a roadblock, teens will take it as a challenge to get around, even if they would otherwise never have pursued the goal of whatever is beyond the restriction. And teens are very creative; they will break these guardrails in so many ways. It’ll be a black-hat/white-hat back and forth for awhile. We’ll all learn something, I would hope, without too many casualties along the way.

Iran-linked Cyberattackers Shut Down a UK Power Plant for Four Days

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot Skip
“Iran shut down a British power plant for four days in an unprecedented cyber attack,” reports the Telegraph.

More details from the BBC:
The government said that at no point was there a risk to the UK’s energy system, but the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has contacted power companies to advise them about the risk of cyber attacks… DESNZ said the incident had affected a small-scale generator and at no point had there been a risk to the wider energy system. The UK’s power network has a number of smaller gas generators which provide short-term power when needed.
Thanks to Alain Williams (Slashdot reader #2,972) for sharing the news.

Suuuure

By liqu1d • Score: 3 Thread
“at no point was there a risk to the UK’s energy system” - what other than a plant being taken offline by a “hostile nation”. No risk at all…

Re: Suuuure

By raburton • Score: 4, Informative Thread

One small scale generator does not a system make.

This reads like fake news

By alexhs • Score: 5, Informative Thread

This seems to be propaganda : There’s absolutely no independent source, this seems to originate from some gossip by an official in UK’s government, sourcing it to the NCSC (a branch of GCHQ), who in turn declined to comment.
The Telegraph heavily uses “it is understood that…” which hints that they were giving very vague information that they’re in no way able to confirm.
Also, about Slashdot’s summary: there’s no more details from the BBC, they’re basically pointing to The Telegraph’s article.

Good, it will help reveal exploits …

By drnb • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Iran shut down a British power plant for four days in an unprecedented cyber attack

Good, it will help reveal exploits sooner rather than later. Better now than in a more serious conflict involving Russia or China.

Take critical infrastructure off the net.

By couchslug • Score: 3 Thread

Wanting total internet connectivity is a sign of utter ignorance, and that ignorance is a choice.

Make ignorance shameful again.

Slovakia Finds Russian Backdoor In Traffic Speed Cameras

Posted by EditorDavid View on SlashDot
Slovakia acquired speed cameras to modernize its traffic control— but there was a surprise. Tom’s Hardware cites this story from the Risky Bulletin Newsletter:
Unfortunately, the country’s national security service, the NBU, has discovered that the cameras have multiple security issues. Firstly, they have SMS-activated Russian backdoors. Secondly, live camera feeds can be accessed by anyone with the device IP, no password necessary…

[The cameras] are thought to be rebranded Russian CORDON PRO.M traffic cameras, produced by a St. Petersburg-based firm called Semicon… reportedly bought via a Cyprus-based shell company with fake certifications. Reports also suggest that pressure from the opposition political party in Slovakia led to the NBU investigations… Probably most seriously, in terms of national security, these cameras contain a hardcoded list of Russian phone numbers, which can be used to open a backdoor. An SMS from one of these numbers can open shell and network access… [T]he SecureBoot feature is ineffective, and the web management portal can be accessed, exposing live streams, by anyone with the camera IP.

Cameras that have been installed and set up have since been deactivated by the Slovak Ministry of the Interior. Meanwhile, for due diligence, an independent auditor will be called in to confirm the NBU’s findings. It is thought that Croatia, and some other countries in Eastern Europe, may have undiscovered issues with traffic control cameras of similar origin.

Re:Firewall?

By drinkypoo • Score: 4, Informative Thread

Would a properly installed firewall stop someone from accessing this via the IP?

The short answer is yes, but the longer answer is it’s complicated.

Devices with back doors may also dial out from your network. It’s common for devices to phone home to check for updates and such so such activity is not necessarily even seen as suspicious, though of course in an enterprise context you should be disabling automatic updates and/or reconfiguring them to use internal servers.

Devices which might be malicious should be segregated onto their own physically isolated networks connected only through firewalls with policies for both ingress and egress so that you can control both types of threat. But it’s better still when your software and firmware is OSS, and you build your own images and deploy them to the hardware yourself to have the best chance to avoid the possibility in the first place. Even this doesn’t completely preclude such attacks, but it does offer some protection (mostly in proportion to the level at which you’re auditing the source files, and the percentage of OSS.)

TL;DR: It’s smartest to segregate and whitelist traffic in both directions for sketchy devices.

Repeat after me…

By MpVpRb • Score: 3, Interesting Thread

Speed Cameras Suck!
Mightily!
They should be opposed anywhere they are used, with or without Russian backdoors

Proper use v revenue raising use

By Bruce66423 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Given the vast numbers killed on the roads in the West, especially in the USA, and the clear evidence that slower cars do less damage in accidents, there is a good case for installing them aggressively. Near where I live a freeway comes to a sudden pedestrian crossing as it enters the suburbs of my city - and enforcing slower speeds in the approach to that crossing is clearly worthwhile. By contrast there is sometimes a camera on the way OUT of the city, beyond the crossing - where there is no further stops - and that makes no sense.

Re:Kremlin surveillance

By 93 Escort Wagon • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Nonsense. This backdoor was obviously put into place so Russian tanks could disable the cameras and speed through the cities, traversing Slovakia quickly on their way to the west. But, now that it’s been discovered, those tanks will need to obey the traffic laws - foiling any invasion!

See, not hard to find…

By gweihir • Score: 3 Thread

Now if all these idiots claiming Chinese backdoors would either shut up or deliver evidence.