Alterslash

the unofficial Slashdot digest
 

Contents

  1. SpaceX Reveals Its Finances For the First Time
  2. NASA Expects Chinese Crewed Mission Around the Moon In 2027
  3. Colossal Biosciences Is Growing Chickens In a 3D-Printed Artificial Eggshell
  4. Intuit To Lay Off Over 3,000 Employees To Refocus On AI
  5. Google Publishes Exploit Code Threatening Millions of Chromium Users
  6. RHEL 10.2 Released With New AI Command Line Assistance
  7. GitHub’s Internal Repos Breached Via Employee’s Use of Malicious VS Code Extension
  8. Anna’s Archive Hit With Global Domain Takedown Order
  9. Seagate Sparks Memory Sell-Off As CEO Says It Would ‘Take Too Long’ To Build New Factories
  10. Yearslong Fight Over Users’ Right To Tweak Smart TV Software Heads To Trial
  11. Regional Winners of Prestigious Literary Prize Suspected of Using Chatbots
  12. Google’s AI Studio Now Lets Anyone Build Android Apps In Minutes
  13. Google Accused of Pushing ‘Free For Life’ G Suite Users Onto Paid Plans
  14. Webb Discovers One of the Universe’s First Galaxies
  15. Minnesota Becomes First State To Ban Prediction Markets

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.

SpaceX Reveals Its Finances For the First Time

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
SpaceX has revealed its financials for the first time as it prepares for a potentially massive IPO. The New York Times reports:
SpaceX’s revenue soared to $18.7 billion in 2025, up 33 percent from a year earlier, the company disclosed in a filing required of firms that are seeking to go public. In the first three months of this year, revenue rose to $4.7 billion from $4.1 billion in the same period a year ago. But the company lost more than $4.9 billion last year, compared with a $791 million profit in 2024, as capital expenditures nearly doubled to $20.7 billion from heavy spending on artificial intelligence development. In the first three months of this year, SpaceX lost almost as much money as all of 2025, recording a $4.3 billion loss.

Investing = Polymarket betting

By greytree • Score: 3 Thread
Pretty sure buying and selling shares in Spacex will ( for a few years ) be like placing Polymarket bets on the Success/Failure of launches.

I hope we nerds can outguess the market !

Re:No longer just SpaceX

By fuzzyfuzzyfungus • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Unfortunately, Musk and friends took that into account. They demanded, and received rule changes to get rammed into indexes as fast as possible. They’ll certainly be happy to take direct purchases from any of the weirdos paying for blue checks on twitter; but the strategy is clearly intended to not require the bagholders to bite directly; instead hitting anyone with index exposure as rapidly and automatically as possible.

Re:No longer just SpaceX

By Zarhan • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Personally, I’ve shifted to equal-weight ETFs. Yes, I missed out on the rise of the past 1,5 months - S&P has risen 1000 pts since end of March, but it just means that the value has gone up a bit less. If the bubble bursts, I expect the damage to also be a bit less.

Re:No longer just SpaceX

By fuzzyfuzzyfungus • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Anyone who is hoping to avoid Musk’s dumber ideas should probably just stay the hell away. Even by the standards of the classic “oh, there’s actual-votes stock and peon stock; guess which kind we sold during the IPO” stuff; spacex is pushing things. The boy-king of mars holds 85% of the voting power; shareholders are required to waive the right to jury trial or class action and submit to arbitration only, only class B shareholders(mostly Musk) can remove the chairman of the board, CEO, or CTO; and similar enthusiastic use of Texas’ provisions for ‘controlled companies’ that really don’t want to take any pesky outside input.

Putting your money on that is pretty much entirely just making a bet on whether you think the dictator for life will make line go up or not; not even pretending to be analogous to an ownership stake.

Re:Investing = Polymarket betting

By r1348 • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Yes, because it provides launch to orbit capabilities at a fraction of the cost of what NASA ever managed to achieve.
When it comes to its space industry business alone, SpaceX is a big win for the American public, however it should be mandated to split its AI business off as it’s basically parasiting those profits and turning them into a loss.

NASA Expects Chinese Crewed Mission Around the Moon In 2027

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman says he expects China to fly taikonauts around the moon in 2027, “ratcheting up perceptions of a space race between China and the United States,” reports SpaceNews. He is using that prospect to argue for a revamped Artemis strategy and an accelerated path toward a U.S. lunar return. From the report:
“The next time the world tunes in to watch astronauts fly around the moon, which will likely be sometime in 2027, they will be taikonauts, and America will no longer be the exclusive power to send humans into the lunar environment,” he said. While Isaacman has frequently discussed a race with China to be the next to land humans on the moon, this was one of the first times he predicted a 2027 Chinese crewed circumlunar mission. He repeated the comments later in the day at an industry reception.

China has not publicly announced plans for such a mission, which, as Isaacman described it, would likely be similar to NASA’s Artemis 2 mission in April. There have been rumors of a mission along those lines, though, and an expectation of a roadmap of missions leading to a Chinese crewed landing by the end of the decade. So far, all the crewed missions to fly around, orbit or land on the moon have been flown by NASA: nine Apollo missions from 1968 to 1972 and Artemis 2. All the astronauts on those missions have been Americans except for Canadian Space Agency astronaut Jeremy Hansen on Artemis 2.

Isaacman has used the threat that China could land astronauts on the moon before NASA returns there as a rationale for revamping the Artemis lunar exploration program. In February, he announced that Artemis 3, which was to be a lunar landing attempt in 2028, will instead be a test flight in low Earth orbit in 2027, followed by a landing on Artemis 4 in 2028. In March, he changed other elements of Artemis at the agency’s Ignition event, including effectively canceling the lunar Gateway to focus resources instead on a lunar base, while calling for a much higher cadence of robotic lander missions.

Good for them

By 93 Escort Wagon • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

The more the merrier, I say… at least in this context.

Lets Race!

By Morromist • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

US: Lets have an exciting space race! We’re already been there and we’ve been trying to go back for like 20 years, so we’re way ahead, but whatever, lets do it! Come ON! I’ll bet you’re going to race us like crazy. Oh BOY I’m excited.

China: Uh. I’m busy taking over all the parts of the world economy you don’t seem to want to do anymore. Huh. So you’re just not making ram for regular consumers anymore? Fine, I’ll build another bunch of factories.

US: We want this to be more dramatic. Come on, it was so much fun beating the russians in the 1960s! GOD WE’RE IN SO MUCH DEBT IT TINGLES!

China:

US: HELLO? ARE YOU THERE? Ok, I’m going to start the race in 3… 2… 1… GOOoooooooooooooooooooooooooooo.......!

Re:Lets Race!

By AmiMoJo • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

The Chinese government is doing basically what the US government did back in the 1960s. Set a goal, make it happen, fund it properly. Gives private companies the confidence to invest in space, even if they aren’t directly involved with government projects.

Except they also do it for stuff like electric vehicles and battery technology, renewable energy, railways, semiconductor manufacturing, steel production, and anything else they feel is strategically important to their economy.

Their goal is “before 2030”, so 2029 at the latest, and they are on track for that. They either have or are at the prototype stage with everything they need. Their mission is not over ambitious either, it’s a medium size lander and proven technologies. Blue Origin is also going with a reasonably conservative lander, but Starship is a much greater risk.

Colossal Biosciences Is Growing Chickens In a 3D-Printed Artificial Eggshell

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Colossal Biosciences says it has grown chickens inside 3D-printed artificial eggshells. “The company says the egg technology could help conserve at-risk bird species,” reports MIT Technology. “It could also play a role in a project to re-create the extinct giant moa, a flightless 12-foot-tall bird that once lived in New Zealand and laid four-liter eggs, larger than those of any living bird.” From the report:
The biotech company today claimed it has developed a “fully artificial egg” as part of its effort to resurrect extinct avian species, including birds like the dodo and the giant moa. But “artificial eggshell” would probably be a better description for the invention. It’s an oval-shaped printed lattice, coated inside with a special silicone-based membrane that lets in oxygen, just as a real eggshell does. To generate birds, Colossal took recently laid chicken eggs and carefully poured their contents into the artificial shells, where they continued growing. A window on top lets researchers peek inside. “To see them all moving around in their artificial eggs was absolutely mind blowing,” says Andrew Pask, the company’s chief biology officer. “You really feel you can grow life outside of the womb.”

[…] The work on the artificial eggshell was carried out in Dallas by Colossal’s exogenous development team, or Exo Dev. That group is also trying to develop artificial wombs for mammals, starting with marsupials. “We’re looking at every single facet of what’s happening during a mammalian pregnancy to unpack exactly how we then go about recapitulating that,” says Pask. For that team, an artificial eggshell is a relatively quick and easy technical win. That’s because chickens are already an example of ex utero development. After an egg is laid, a small embryo sitting on top of the yolk starts growing, drawing nutrients from the yolk, the white, and even the shell, which provides calcium. (Colossal says it has to add ground-up calcium to the artificial eggs.)

In order to create a moa, Colossal will have to genetically alter another type of bird, changing potentially thousands of DNA letters. But so far, chickens are the only bird species that can be genetically engineered. And that’s via a tricky process of editing stem cells that produce egg and sperm. Scientists have to add or delete DNA letters from these cells and then inject them back into an egg. The resulting bird will carry the genetic changes in its gonads — and then be able to pass them on. Pask says Colossal’s idea is that it could modify avian stem cells enough to produce moa-like sperm or eggs. But then you might have the odd situation of a chicken laying an egg with a moa embryo inside it. “You would have chickens making moa egg and moa sperm. But it’s still a chicken egg,” he says.

These are the same braggarts

By taustin • Score: 3 Thread

who pretend they’ve resurrected the dire wolf. Not sure I take their claims 100% seriously.

Intuit To Lay Off Over 3,000 Employees To Refocus On AI

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Intuit is reportedly cutting about 3,000 jobs, or 17% of its workforce, as it restructures around AI and simplifies its corporate organization. TechCrunch reports:
The layoffs come during a bad year for the tech workforce. The tech industry has already cut more than 100,000 jobs this year, per Statista, and is on track to outpace both 2024 and 2025 if the layoff trend continues. Companies such as Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft, and Oracle have let go of thousands of employees each, all of them citing a need to refocus expenditures around AI projects as a reason to cut jobs and restructure their organizations. […]

Intuit, however, hasn’t been perceived as a beneficiary of the AI boom, with its shares consistently underperforming in the broader S&P 500 over the past 12 months. The company has been caught up in the broader current of worries that traditional software-as-a-service firms will not be able to keep up or compete, as new and upcoming AI products and services threaten to change how software is developed and how it is used. In its fiscal second quarter ended January, Intuit reported revenue of $4.65 billion, a 17% increase, and net profit of $693 million, a 48% improvement compared to a year earlier. The company expects revenue to increase by about 10% in the third quarter, for which it will report results later today.

Re:Especially right before a midterm election

By Known Nutter • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Nice cleaned up and polished “bOtH sIDeS!!!” argument you’ve got there. Absurd.

Re:Especially right before a midterm election

By PsychoSlashDot • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Anything that involves “just vote the Republicans out and Democrats in” is missing what’s going on.

Congress is just a wrestling show with a few wedge issues. The people who own the politicians will continue to tell those politicians to do what they want regardless of which team is ‘winning’.

Democracy is designed to keep people distracted by voting while the crooks loot whatever they want.

Don’t care. This both-sides stuff doesn’t help anyone. There is a difference between the two sides.

Fiscally, yeah, power-seekers of every description are going to be looking to profit from you. Granted. Corporations are in charge at that level. But first you stomp out the fascist right. Then you keep on voting in the least-evil. Again and again and again. Change what you can instead of worrying about what you can’t.

Re:You don’t need excuses anymore

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Trump just created a 1.7 billion dollar slush fund …

Someone on the news just noted that it’s actually $1.776 billion — 1776 get it. (sigh)

Ignoring all the other ways in which this isn’t a valid “settlement” for his bogus lawsuit (against himself), and that the fund isn’t authorized by Congress, etc… an arbitrary amount just illustrates how it’s all bullshit. Having convicted Jan 6th insurrectionists, pardoned by Trump, getting paid, likely $1M each, by a 1776 fund for storming the Capital, assaulting police, menacing Congress, threatening to hang the Vice President and violently interfering with the peaceful transfer of power simply because Trump lost the 2020 election (after also losing 60+ challenges in courts) is insulting, un-American and antithetical to what this country *should* stand for. /rant

Re:Especially right before a midterm election

By dunkelfalke • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Some rich oligarchs just want to stay rich or get even wealthier, others - like Thiel and Musk - want to make everyone who isn’t one of them serfs. There is a very big difference between these two types. And if you can see it, you are either stupid or for some deluded reason think that when the other kind does reach their goal of technofascism, you will be on the oppressor side and not on the oppressed side.

Re:You don’t need excuses anymore

By fahrbot-bot • Score: 5, Informative Thread

At least we can take some comfort in knowing that the kind of persons who were convicted for their roles in the Jan 9 insurrection are also many of the the kind of people who are completely incapable of dealing with a million dollars cash payout and will spend it foolishly and end up impoverished and on welfare before they are done.

At least 33 are back in prison on child porn/molestation convictions, at least one with a life sentence, so there’s that. Yessiree, a fine bunch of people. /s

Five years after January 6, dozens of pardoned insurrectionists have been arrested again

At least 33 insurrectionists who have been rearrested, charged or sentenced for other crimes since January 6, 2021. The charges range from possession of child pornography to sexual assault, child molestation and aggravated kidnapping. Many incidents occurred before the pardons; only four insurrectionists allegedly reoffended since receiving their pardons.

Capitol rioter who was pardoned by Trump gets a life sentence for molesting 2 children in Florida

And there are 132 entries (so far) in the Jan. 6th Insurrectionists Crime Tracker searchable database that tracks the crimes committed by Jan. 6th insurrectionists before and after their violent attack on our Capitol. This one’s interesting as it happened months *before* Trump’s slush fund was created, the other day, like he was expecting it…

2025/11/17: Johnson, Andrew Paul: “Pardoned Capitol Rioter Tried to Hush Child Sex Victim With Promise of Jan. 6 Reparation Money.”

I wonder if the person who modded my original post “Troll” knows any of this - or even cares - or is on the list. /s

Google Publishes Exploit Code Threatening Millions of Chromium Users

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:
Google on Wednesday published exploit code for an unfixed vulnerability in its Chromium browser codebase that threatens millions of people using Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and virtually all other Chromium-based browsers. The proof-of-concept code exploits the Browser Fetch programming interface, a standard that allows long videos and other large files to be downloaded in the background. An attacker can use the exploit to create a connection for monitoring some aspects of a user’s browser usage and as a proxy for viewing sites and launching denial-of-service attacks. Depending on the browser, the connections either reopen or remain open even after it or the device running it has rebooted.

The unfixed vulnerability can be exploited by any website a user visits. In effect, a compromise amounts to a limited backdoor that makes a device part of a limited botnet. The capabilities are limited to the same things a browser can do, such as visit malicious sites, provide anonymous proxy browsing by others, enable proxied DDoS attacks, and monitor user activity. Nonetheless, the exploit could allow an attacker to wrangle thousands, possibly millions, of devices into a network. Once a separate vulnerability becomes available, the attacker could use it to then compromise all those devices.

“The dangerous part here is that you can just have a lot of different browsers together that you can in the future run something on that you figure out,” said Lyra Rebane, the independent researcher who discovered the vulnerability and privately reported it to Google in late 2022 in an interview. He said using the exploit code Google prematurely published would be “pretty easy,” although scaling it to wrangle large numbers of devices into a single network would require more work. In the thread of Rebane’s disclosure to Google, two developers said in separate responses that it was a “serious vulnerability.” Its severity was rated S1, the second-highest classification.

Since its reporting 29 months ago, the vulnerability remained unknown except to Chromium developers. Then on Wednesday morning, it was published to the Chromium bug tracker. Rebane initially assumed the vulnerability was finally fixed. Shortly thereafter, he learned that, in fact, it remained unpatched. While Google removed the post, it remains available on archival sites, along with the exploit code. Google representatives didn’t immediately respond to an email asking how and why it published the vulnerability and if or when a fix would become available.
The exploit works by abusing Chromium’s Browser Fetch API to open a service worker that remains persistently active. A malicious website can trigger it through JavaScript, creating a connection that can be used “for monitoring some aspects of a user’s browser usage and as a proxy for viewing sites and launching denial-of-service attacks,” reports Ars.

Depending on the browser, those connections “either reopen or remain open even after it or the device running it has rebooted,” effectively turning the device into part of a “limited botnet.”

Another point for Firefox and against Google

By TheMiddleRoad • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
People complained about Microsoft somehow allowing an exploit to come back. Looks like Google didn’t even bother. And meanwhile, Google is reducing the info and power they give to open source devs, like delaying what the GrapheneOS people need in order to add new devices. It took months to get support for the Pixel 10 for this reason. At this point, I use Chrome for when I want a naked web experience, no plugins and all the ads or for the rare plugin that is Chrome only.

Re:Right

By markdavis • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Agreed that there is no easy solution, especially at this point. All I can do is encourage people to support, use, and test against the only non-Chrom* multiplatform browser left (Firefox or Firefox-based). At a time when we desperately need MORE than just two browsers, we are at great risk of it essentially becoming just one.

Every time some site “recommends Chrome” or tech support says “we only test on Chrome” or “we only support Chrome [or whatever Chrome variant]" it is another nail in our collective coffin. I want Chrome and its children to prosper, but not in a vacuum, not unchallenged, not without usable alternatives.

Re:29 months ago?

By Himmy32 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

The issue id is 40062121 and the latest one is 515156127. So they weren’t adding it, but just accidentally marked the a 4+ year old original S1 vuln as public.

Hard to find an explanation besides just being a very embarrassing oopsie daisy. Lucky the researcher was watching it and excited to show off their work.

Re:Another point for Firefox and against Google

By ChunderDownunder • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Thank goodness for the NoScript plugin in Firefox.

It takes some diligence to selectively whitelist each site; totally worth it.

Re:Right

By karmawarrior • Score: 5, Informative Thread

WebAssembly is technically an answer as it first appeared about nine years ago, but it was widely discussed before that. WebRTC dates back to 2011. Can’t find a date on flexboxes but I see blog articles from 2013(!) on that. CSS grid is more recent, as are CSS variables - long after SCSS became standard because everyone got fed up of waiting - but I agree with the GP, is any of the actually more recent stuff actually necessary?

Of all of the above, WebAssembly is kinda useful, (and WebRTC fills a hole but is pretty old now.) The rest? They’re just different ways to achieve things you could already achieve.

I think there’s a case for arguing the core web standards went wrong at some point in the late 1990s, and became more and more bloated without adding significant functionality with each generation. A web browser has roughly a subset of the functionality as Microsoft Word - it’s a rich text viewer with scripting and network connectivity. Yet Microsoft Word requires a maximum of tens of megabytes of RAM per document. And arguably Word is more powerful.

Maybe it’s time we reset and started again. Freeze the standard for HTML, and create a new format (WPDL - web page description language?) that’s lighter and less confusing to render. Browsers might even start being consistent if we did that.

RHEL 10.2 Released With New AI Command Line Assistance

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Red Hat has released RHEL 10.2 and 9.8 with new AI-assisted command-line tools. The releases also add updated developer toolchains such as Go 1.26, LLVM 21, Rust 1.92, Python 3.14, and PHP 8.4. Phoronix reports:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has introduced the goose command for power users. Goose is an optional CLI AI assistance with model context protocol (MCP) integration. There is also improved visual output via color output enhancements. As for their rationale with the new AI integration: “The business value: Faster problem resolution, and a quicker path for new administrators to become proficient. This translates into higher developer productivity and accelerated project timelines.”

AI seems Overstated

By Himmy32 • Score: 5, Informative Thread

My understanding is that Red Hat and Brian might both overstating be the AI boon/bogeyman here. Looks like the goose command is an Agentic AI Foundation/Linux Foundation project originally developed by Block and donated. And then Red Hat has made that available as a package in their Extensions Repo as an validated optional package that can work with Red Hat’s Developer Preview MCP Server (which is the Red Hat part and I don’t think is attached to the release of 10.2, but got released in January). Just like most other AI announcements seems to be a bit of investor fluff and required buzzwords.

Honestly I think the “image mode” work and the immutable, atomic updates along with donating and supporting bootc at the CNCF is the more notable and cooler part in 10 (hard from this announcement to know what 10.2 is even adding on this front). A lot of different plays on the immutable and atomic update spaces in the big distros. Which was even seen with the Microsoft Azure Container Linux based on Flatcar yesterday, SUSE bringing that immutability from Micro into their mainline, or Ubuntu with Core and snaps.

Re:Note to submitter —

By Himmy32 • Score: 5, Informative Thread
Just don’t install it from the optional Extensions package repo (which seems to basically be their approved downstream of EPEL).

GitHub’s Internal Repos Breached Via Employee’s Use of Malicious VS Code Extension

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Longtime Slashdot reader Himmy32 writes:
GitHub has announced on X that their internal repositories have been breached through a compromised VS Code Extension on an employee’s workstation. Bleeping Computer reported that the attack is linked to TeamPCP who have been in the news for a recent campaign affecting Checkmarx, Trivy, SAP, TanStack, and Bitwarden. The group appears to be attempting to sell the stolen code on cybercrime forums.
“Yesterday we detected and contained a compromise of an employee device involving a poisoned VS Code extension. We removed the malicious extension version, isolated the endpoint, and began incident response immediately,” the company said. “Our current assessment is that the activity involved exfiltration of GitHub-internal repositories only. The attacker’s current claims of ~3,800 repositories are directionally consistent with our investigation so far.”
Although the investigation remains ongoing, GitHub says it has “no evidence of impact to customer information stored outside of GitHub’s internal repositories.” The company has also not said whether it’s in contact with the hackers or if it’s received a ransom demand.

I’d like to say “Use Pulsar” because I do

By Tora • Score: 3, Insightful Thread

But in reality it can happen w/any system that has open-submit add-ons.

GitHub

By PPH • Score: 5, Funny Thread

… was an important resource for open source projects for many years. Since Microsoft took it over, it seems to be falling on its face frequently.

So I guess my comment is: Mission accomplished, Microsoft.

Re:Diabolical.

By gweihir • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Lets rephrase that a bit: There is a away that any sane coder can avoid this with high probability: Not installing add-ons that have bad supply-chain security on critical systems. Such as systems with access to critical repositories. This is also something you find in _every_ serious security control catalog: Separate, specially secured machines to be used for any high-privilege access paths.

How do you tell an add-on has bad supply chain security? Simple: Do you have good evidence that they have solid security? No? Then you must assume it is bad. There is higher productivity and there is plain gross negligence. Installing add-ons with questionable security in a productive environment except on carefully privilege restricted machines is completely unacceptable and strictly forbidden in any well-run enterprise.

It was also far less bad than what could have happened. The attacker only stole code. The attacker could have added backdoors and other malware to the repositories instead.

There is really noting “diabolical” here. Just an entirely expected attack type hitting a woefully unprepared target and target organization.

Extension Unconfirmed

By Himmy32 • Score: 3 Thread
Apparently which extension is still unannounced, from StepSecurity’s reporting on the breach:

Update: On May 19, 2026, GitHub publicly disclosed that approximately 3,800 of its internal source code repositories were exfiltrated after an employee’s device was compromised by a poisoned VS Code extension. GitHub has not named which VS Code extension was involved. Given the timing, many in the security research community believe the Nx Console compromise described in this post is a likely candidate, although this has not been confirmed by GitHub.

Re:I’d like to say “Use Pulsar” because I do

By martin-boundary • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
You don’t have control over users. For my ancient Free projects, I’ve always hosted them on my own personal site. However because they are GPL, some people “helpfully” host a copy on GitHub. I don’t particularly like it but they’ve done it. I don’t update their copy or fix any bugs there.

Anna’s Archive Hit With Global Domain Takedown Order

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak:
A coalition of thirteen major publishers has won a massive $19.5 million default judgment against shadow library Anna’s Archive. A New York federal judge fully approved the publishers’ requests, issuing a broad permanent injunction that orders more than twenty specific global registries, hosts, and service providers to immediately disable the site’s remaining domains. […] At first glance, the damages award is the headline figure. Judge Rakoff granted the maximum statutory damages of $150,000 for each of the 130 “Works in Suit.” This brings the final damages bill amount to a staggering $19,500,000. However, as with the $322 million judgment won by the music industry against Anna’s Archive in the related Spotify case, it’s highly unlikely that this money will be recouped.

For now, the operators of Anna’s Archive remain strictly anonymous, which doesn’t help either. The default judgment (PDF) addresses this and requires the operators to unmask their identities and provide a sworn statement with valid contact information to the court within 10 days. However, since the operators have previously stated they hide their identities to avoid “decades of prison time,” it is safe to assume that the operators will simply ignore this request. The true power of this default judgment lies in the permanent injunction. Anna’s Archive is known to evade enforcement and change domain names when needed, so the injunction targets the technical intermediaries that keep the site online.

Specifically, the injunction orders “all domain name registries and registrars of record” to permanently disable access to Anna’s Archive’s domains and prevent their transfer to anyone other than the publishers or the music industry plaintiffs in the related case. In addition to domain name services, the order also extends to international hosting providers, who are also ordered to stop working with the site. Leaving no room for interpretation, the order specifically names more than twenty companies and organizations. This includes familiar names like Cloudflare, Njalla, and DDOS-Guard, as well as the domain name registries of the site’s current active domains […]. The names include some intermediaries that were already listed in the Spotify default judgment, as well as new ones.

What’s in a domain name

By alvinrod • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
It doesn’t sound like there’s anything preventing them from moving to a different domain. The companies involved in this suit likely wasted orders of magnitude more in their own legal costs than actual damages done or what they could hope to legally recover. So the operators should set up shop elsewhere and let the idiots bleed themselves as long as they want to.

Re:No, just Deck Chair Number 418 in particular.

By bill_mcgonigle • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Now that the Big Tech companies have done all their training on illegal material it’s important that no startups can compete.

History

By WolfgangVL • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

In a couple hundred years, the pirate sites and torrent indexers are going to be the go-to sources for the study of current day lifestyles and culture. Stories like this will be popping up every couple of years from then to now.

This judge is powerful!

By hey_popey • Score: 5, Funny Thread
This judge is so powerful, he should order peace in the Middle East, next.

National, too

By Okian Warrior • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

With any international intellectual property case, the real issue is getting quick enough action from foreign providers as the article quite astutely points out:

This ruling is from the NY district court, which in theory only has authority over its district, and then only over the plaintiffs.

That last point is contested.

Several district courts have made nationwide injunctions against the current administration. For example, a federal court stopped Trump’s 2017 travel ban from nations that didn’t have good controls against terrorists. (Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen).

In a 2025 ruling the Supreme Court decided that federal courts do not have the power for nationwide injunctions. The courts *do* have power over the federal government, that’s not thought to be beyond the court’s jurisdiction, so a court can rule against a federal statute or executive order.

Suppose there’s an issue (immigration is an example), and California sues New York in court to force some action and wins. The NY court can issue a nationwide injunction, but then Texas (also interested in immigration issues) can say that they have a strong interest in the outcome and were not party to the litigation.

The supreme court decided (outside of issues with the US government) that Federal courts should focus their remedies on the plaintiffs, and not the entire country.

So not only do countries outside of the US not have to worry about this, US districts that are not the Southern District of New York don’t have to worry about it.

Seagate Sparks Memory Sell-Off As CEO Says It Would ‘Take Too Long’ To Build New Factories

Posted by BeauHD View on SlashDot Skip
Seagate CEO Dave Mosley said Monday that building new memory chip factories or adding capacity would "take too long” to keep up with AI-driven storage demand. “If we took the teams off and started building new factories or bringing up new machines, that would just take too long. You would end up with more capacity, but then you’d slow the rate of growth on that technology,” Mosely said. CNBC reports:
Memory chip stocks have soared in recent months as a flood of AI investing has sent demand soaring, with the chips a key part of the AI buildout in data centers. Chip production cycles stretch over many quarters for a single unit, and investors are increasingly wary of how long the leading memory makers can capture demand. CME Group is launching a new futures market for semiconductors, enabling more traders to lock in prices and hedge against the rising prices of computing power.

At Monday’s conference, Mosely also addressed the “very long lead times” and maintaining predictability with its clients. “We know what’s coming out a year from now,” he said. “And we’ve basically gone to the customers and said, ‘Look, if you want to plan this really well, which it should be for your data centers, we know what’s coming out. You can buy this stuff up to a certain period.’ And so we want to keep that four or five quarters of visibility very, very solid for what’s being built. But the demand is significantly higher than that.”

That kind of thinking brings in new players..

By Fly Swatter • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
Except the barrier to entry is too high. It would be fun if someone could manage to disrupt the memory consortium.

Either the companies think this AI hoarding will be short enough to not risk expansion (every economist and corporate type loves constant expansion) or they think their stranglehold on the market is too strong for anyone to offer new competition.

For us mere retail plebs - the corporate greed situation just sucks and is getting worse. This is the situation anti-trust laws were supposed to prevent.

Re:Technobabble translation…

By gabebear • Score: 5, Insightful Thread
The demand for DDR5 will evaporate in 2 years whether the AI bubble pops or not. IF new factories are coming online they need to be sized for new tech, but only LPDDR6 has a ratified spec and it’s not ideal for AI. So ramping up lot of extra factories for LPDDR6 makes little sense

Sandisk has been devloping an HBM-killer memory called High-Bacndwidth-Flash… but they aren’t sharing much information. I’d say this announcement either means High-Bacndwidth-Flash isn’t panning out or that they won’t need new factories to produce it.

As far as what others are doing that makes investing in DDR5 dumb:
1. Cerebras doesn’t use memory chips, just a crazy crazy amount of on-CPU cache.
2. Intel is re-entering the memory market with a sorta radical new ZAM memory that is considered an HBM-killer.
3. Turboquant is fairly useless at actually speeding things up currently, but it proves that we can shrink the need for memory if compute can handle this type of quantization in-line. In the near-term this will mean accelerators coming out in the next few years will have these schemes baked into the hardware and need far less RAM. This is roughly comparable to when we started getting hardware accelerated texture compression with 3D graphics cards. It looks like the Turboquant idea was plagiarized and overhyped, but the idea is likely amazing if applied at the CPU level.

Re:Technobabble translation…

By Local ID10T • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Building out a new fab takes years. I have done it.

You have to order the hardware (which has to be made to fill your order -it is not sitting waiting on a shelf), build the facility (some of the equipment is delicate and large enough that you pour a slab, crane in the equipment, and then assemble the building around it). You also need trained workers, and an entire material supply chain. Reliable power and water supplies. Once all that is in place you can begin the process of tuning the equipment -it does not just turn on and start producing chips.

Re:Technobabble translation…

By tlhIngan • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Well, to be fair, the memory companies have suffered the past 3-4 times that memory prices skyrocketed, they brought more factories online, and then prices plummet just before the factory comes online so they’re selling increased capacity into a surplus market.

It’s why a company like Kingston exists - Kingston exists solely to absorb surplus memory. If memory makers make too much RAM, they sell it to Kingston and Kingston makes a bunch of memory modules from it. Likewise if they make too much NAND flash, it goes into USB sticks and SSDs. It’s why Kingston RAM and flash products are so variable - they just take the surplus parts and put them into products. You might get Samsung products one day, the next day it’s SK Hynix because that’s what’s coming in the factory.

None of the memory makers are bringing up their timelines of increased RAM production from the late 2020s/2030 because they don’t want o bring it online into a market th’s flooded.

Re:Technobabble translation…

By thegarbz • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

No, I suspect it’s got more to do with short-term profits and his overall compensation, given he probably wouldn’t still be the CEO by the time any new factories were brought online.

Corporate boards typically only reward short-term thinking.

No not at all. Firstly he’s been the CEO of Seagate for a decade and there’s no indicating that he’ll step down in 3 years. On the flip side we have already seen major cracks in the AI industry.
1. OpenAI cancelled a huge order with SK Hynix when they aborted the Stargate datacentre. - A good sign that the industry is cracking under it’s overpromises.
2. Wall Street has actively created indices to allow hedge funds explicitly to invest in companies *NOT* in the AI space. - A good sign that the finance industry thinks AI will crash.
3. Even with current prices, fabs takes years to build and many many years more to make an ROI. This is not a decision you make in the wake of a 1-2 year bubble. It’s the kind of decision you make when you’re sure of demand 10 years from now.

Anyone here thinking long term will not be building anything either. Building something in a bubble that won’t be completed until after the bubble pops is the kind of reckless investment that would actually get a CEO to no longer be in their position a few years from now.

Yearslong Fight Over Users’ Right To Tweak Smart TV Software Heads To Trial

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A long-running lawsuit over Vizio’s Linux-based smart TV software is headed to trial in August, with the Software Freedom Conservancy arguing that GPL rules require Vizio to release complete source code owners could use to modify, maintain, or strip ads and tracking from their TVs. Ars Technica reports:
The outcome could reverberate across the industry. Because many of today’s popular smart TV operating systems are Linux-based, the case may help determine how much control many owners have over their sets. Access to the full code would allow users to make meaningful changes to how their TVs work, including limiting ads or deactivating automatic content recognition.

[…] The Software Freedom Conservancy argues it has the right to Vizio OS’s source code because it owns several Vizio TVs and because the operating system is based on Ubuntu, a Linux distribution. (SFC employees bought seven Vizio TVs from 2018 to 2021 after getting complaints about Vizio not sharing its TVs’ source code, according to the complaint.) In general, the Linux kernel is provided under the terms of GPLv2, as noted by kernel.org, which is run by the Linux Kernel Organization.

SFC’s lawsuit alleges that Vizio breached GPLv2 and LGPLv2.1 by failing to make available the complete source code for Vizio OS. The case is currently in the Orange County Superior Court of the State of California. The lawsuit targets Vizio specifically, but the impact could extend to other Linux-based smart TV OSes such as LG’s webOS, Samsung’s Tizen, and Roku’s Roku OS. “We expect all companies who distribute Linux and other software using right-to-repair agreements like the GPL in their products would comply with these agreements,” Denver Gingerich, the director of compliance at SFC, told Ars. […] SFC expects a ruling within three to six months of the conclusion of the trial, which is currently scheduled for August 10.

Re:Win the battle, lose the war

By Ksevio • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

And do what? Write their own OS along with every integration needed?

More likely they’ll separate the OS and the TV code so they can ship the open source OS along with their closed source software

Re:Vizio’s Arguments

By flink • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

Vizio also argued that GPL is a software license, not a contract, so the company has no contractual obligation to provide SFC with Vizio OS’s source code, even if SFC were considered a third-party beneficiary of GPLv2 LGPLv2.

Heh, good luck with that one. Furthermore, I don’t think that’s a precedent that any proprietary software wants set

Great, so Vizio is violating the license and has no right to reproduce the software. I believe the statutory damage limit for each infraction is $150k? That’s gotta be a few billion to split amongst the various projects that are having their copyright violated by Vizio.

Exactly which parts are we talking about?

By Tschaine • Score: 5, Informative Thread

If they make OS changes, they need to release the code to those because the OS is GPL’d.

If the TV includes an application that they wrote without using GPL’d code, then they don’t need to release the code because it’s not a derivative of anything GPL’d.

I’d wager a few bucks that the code that decides when to show ads is part of an application, not part of the OS, so the part about how this case could “allow users to make meaningful changes to how their TVs work, including limiting ads or deactivating automatic content recognition” smells like wishful thinking and/or just bullshit.

Re:Win the battle, lose the war

By caseih • Score: 5, Informative Thread

So what. If developers release software under liberal licenses that allow proprietary use, that’s on them. Vizio is welcome to use such code in a proprietary manner. How is that losing the war? Besides that, what war are you talking about?

When Vizio chose to use GPL’d software, they must abide by the terms or remove it. It was their choice to use that code.

Also stop calling them viral licenses. The GPL doesn’t infect anything. This is a lie, plain and simple. If you use any copyrighted code you must do so under the terms of the license whatever that is. If you fail to abide by the license you have three choices: 1. abide by the license terms and release your changes, 2. remove the code entirely, or 3. negotiate licensing terms that fit your needs. Corporations who fail to abide the license terms deserve what they get.

Weaponization of lockouts

By rtkluttz • Score: 5, Informative Thread

TV’s are just the starting point. Many cars, especially EV’s need help from legislation like this. Most are linux based but there are lockouts that are weaponized against the owners of the vehicles. The argument should start and end with the security and privacy component. An owner of a thing should not be forced to allow the manufacturer access to that thing unless there is a documented short term need such as updates or repairs. Industry standard zero trust configs should be guaranteed as a right of ownership. For EV’s these things are connected to the grid for God’s sake. Even just a portion of any given manufacturers vehicles are connected to the grid at any given time. Most will be done charging but still connected. If a manufacturers systems are compromised either through hacking or even a single rogue employee, then something as simple as a command to start charging would melt the grid. This is before you even bring in any privacy component. This is before you bring in any right to repair component. But both of those stack on top. People should be infuriated. Reviewers should be rating companies on this but they don’t because they cant get their hands on the next car to review if they are too rough on the automakers. At some point people have to learn and fight back.

Regional Winners of Prestigious Literary Prize Suspected of Using Chatbots

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The 2026 Commonwealth Short Story Prize is facing backlash after several winning entries were accused of being AI-generated, with one Caribbean winner’s story flagged as fully AI-written by a detector that WIRED says it independently confirmed. From the report:
Each year, the Commonwealth Foundation, a nongovernmental organization in London, awards its short story prize to one writer in each of five regions: Africa, Asia, Canada and Europe, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. One overall winner is then selected from that short list. Regional winners take home [about $3,350], while the top winner, to be announced next month, claims [about $6,700]. On May 12, the respected UK literary magazine Granta published the top five 2026 entries — all previously unpublished, per the rules of the contest — on its website. (It has hosted the winning submissions for the prize since 2012.) Within days, however, one entry aroused suspicion. “The Serpent in the Grove,” a story by Jamir Nazir of Trinidad and Tobago, which had taken honors for the Caribbean region, struck a few people as bearing the stylistic tells of AI-generated text.

“Well, this is a first: a ChatGPT-generated story won a prestigious literary prize,” wrote researcher and entrepreneur Nabeel S. Qureshi, a former visiting scholar of AI at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, in a post on X on Monday. "‘Not X, not Y, but Z’ sentences everywhere, the ‘hums’ trope, and plenty of other obvious markers of AI writing. A major milestone for AI, at any rate…” “They say the grove still hums at noon,” Nazir’s mysterious and atmospheric tale begins. In his screenshot of the opening paragraphs, Quereshi highlighted the second line as what he considered to be a signature example of AI syntax: “Not the bees’ neat industry or the clean rasp of cutlass on vine, but a belly sound — as if the earth swallows a shout and holds it there.”

As the literary community undertook a closer read of Nazir’s story, many criticized its language and metaphors as nonsensical, wondering how the Commonwealth judges could have seen any merit to them. Others shared screenshots showing that the AI-detection tool Pangram flagged “The Serpent in the Grove” as 100 percent AI-generated, a result that WIRED independently confirmed. (While no AI-detection software is perfect, third-party analysis has consistently determined Pangram to be the most accurate, with a near-zero rate of false positives.)

[…] Besides Nazir, two more winning authors have drawn allegations of using AI in their work. Pangram finds that “The Bastion’s Shadow,” by Maltese writer John Edward DeMicoli, winner for the Canada and Europe region, is fully AI-generated; it scans “Mehendi Nights,” by Indian writer Sharon Aruparayil, winner for the Asia region, as partly AI-generated. Neither DeMicoli nor Aruparayil immediately returned requests for comment when reached through their respective social media accounts. The other two short-listed stories, by Holly Ann Miller of New Zealand and Lisa-Anne Julien of South Africa, deliver “fully human-written” results from Pangram.
Wired also reports that one of the judges for the prize has been "accused of using AI to craft her descriptive blurb that accompanied the listing of ‘The Serpent in the Grove’ as a regional winner.’" Pangram labels the text as “AI-assisted.”

Literary critics

By reanjr • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Says more about literary critics than it does about LLMs.

It’s become clear over recent years that literary critics are actually not very good at reading. Whether it’s the rush to get through a work, some cognitive bias, or a fixation on fancy words, literary critics are bad readers who rarely understand what they are reading unless it comes in the form of formulaic language and presentation intended to make them feel comfortable with the writing.

LLMs are good at this. It does not mean LLMs are producing quality literature though. It’s just further evidence that literary critics wouldn’t recognize quality literature if it smacked then upside the head.

Question

By smooth wombat • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

Let us suppose you are writing a story/book and you know there are places which you just can’t quite get the wording the way you want it.

If you plug only that portion into an LLM and ask for suggestions, would that be considered “cheating”? If so, why would that be any different than asking someone, or someones, to read what you wrote and offer suggestions?

I’m not saying that’s what happened here, clearly it was all written by a machine, but is using such a tool to edit your work or get suggestions, bad?

Re:Literary critics

By Moridineas • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

It does not mean LLMs are producing quality literature though

Wtf is quality literature?

50 Shades of Grey sold 150 million copies. Quality literature?

Topseller on Amazon right now is a hockey romance novel. Quality literature?

How do they compare to The Name of the Rose (one of my favorite books) in terms of being quality literature?

Zahn’s Star Wars novels sold millions of copies? Quality literature?

Hemingway (I’ve run into critics who HATE Hemingway)?

Ulysses (Joyce)?

I don’t know what quality literature is, and I don’t really care. For fiction, if I enjoy it, I’ll read it. I’ve just skimmed a bit of the Nazir story, and it does absolutely nothing for me, but it sure does have the veneer and impenetrability of James Joycian writing.

Google’s AI Studio Now Lets Anyone Build Android Apps In Minutes

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch:
The AI coding boom is now coming directly for Android app development. On Tuesday at Google IO 2026, the company announced new native Android app creation capabilities in its web-based Google AI Studio, shrinking a process that takes weeks of setup and coding down to minutes. The company also said that consumers will be able to use Gemini AI to find the apps they need, both on the Play Store and the web, expanding opportunities for developers to have their apps discovered.

Google says the new capabilities could make sense for anyone from a seasoned developer looking to prototype a new app quickly to a first-time creator. […] The apps are built with the Kotlin programming language using Google’s Jetpack Compose toolkit and with support integration with hardware sensors like GPS, Bluetooth, and NFC, the company says. However, the resulting creations, for now, are only meant to be used personally, as publishing for family and friends is still on the roadmap. The company suggests the technology could be used for the creation of personal utilities and simple social apps, hardware-enabled experiences, or AI-powered experiences.
Google is also adding an “Ask Play” AI overlay to the Play Store that lets users discover apps through natural-language conversations. “Perhaps more importantly, apps will begin to be surfaced with users’ conversations with Google’s Gemini virtual assistant, exposing developers’ apps to millions of users,” adds TechCrunch.

Where is the shovelware? Where’s the killer app?

By MIPSPro • Score: 5, Interesting Thread
Where is the Shovelware?. Surely they could vibe code up a couple dozen killer apps to prove their point. Where are they? Show me how many of the top 10 Android apps were built this way. How many of the top 100? It’s like “Loveable” web-sites. They are simple, they suck, they leak data like sieve. Nobody wants shitware, folks, they want real working useful applications or fun/creative/attractive games. So far I’ve seen exactly ZERO made by AI.

Worth a look

By ZipNada • Score: 5, Informative Thread

This web-based development utility looks interesting and I tried it just now with this prompt;
“I want an Android app that can scan for local WiFi access points when a button is pushed and list them.”

It gave me a nice tab completion, “It should also display the signal strength for each access point” which I accepted. And yow, it built the complete app in under 10 minutes. It’s running in an emulator in the browser and showing mock access points, visually looks very good. I am officially giving everyone permission to use my amazingly awesome prompt, try it for yourself.

When I ask how to install the app on my phone I get; “To run this application as a fully functional, bare-metal hardware app on your physical Android phone, you will need to build the provided native Kotlin source code using Android Studio” and there are some pretty complicated instructions. That will probably be a roadblock for most people and it would be a PITA for me too.

However I’m seeing that Gemini is now integrated directly into Studio which is extremely handy. I can probably use the same prompt there and get a complete installable app in one step.
https://developer.android.com/…

Google Accused of Pushing ‘Free For Life’ G Suite Users Onto Paid Plans

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Google is again pressuring some longtime G Suite Legacy users to move onto paid Workspace plans, warning that accounts flagged as “commercial use” could lose access to Gmail, Drive, Calendar, and other services if appeals fail. “The trouble, according to users, is that the appeals system appears about as transparent as a brick,” adds The Register. From the report:
A reader alerted The Register to what appears to be a new crackdown on long-standing G Suite Legacy accounts, with similar complaints now piling up on Reddit from users accused of violating Google’s non-commercial use policy, despite insisting they use the accounts only for family email and personal domains. Reports have been stacking up on Reddit’s r/gsuitelegacymigration subreddit from users who say their long-running personal G Suite Legacy accounts are suddenly being classified as “commercial use” accounts and pushed toward paid Google Workspace plans by May 2026. A lot of users have been through this before. Google spent part of 2022 trying to wind down free G Suite Legacy accounts, then changed course after users running family domains made enough noise. Now some of those same users are being told they have fallen outside Google’s rules after all.

Emails seen by The Register warn users their accounts have been “identified as being used for commercial purposes” and say Google may start suspending Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Meet, and other Workspace services if they do not either win an appeal or begin paying for Workspace subscriptions. “Please upgrade to a paid Google Workspace subscription to continue using your services. Look out for a notification regarding the appeal process in Google Admin console or email,” the email reads. “If you don’t take action during your 45-day appeal period, Google will begin suspending your Google Workspace core services, including Gmail, Calendar, Drive, and Meet. As a result, you will lose access to these core services and data.”
One wrongly-flagged user said the company reversed its decision after they filed a GDPR data request seeking evidence. Others were less fortunate, with some reporting that family-only custom domains were permanently classified as commercial despite failed appeals.

Do they really need to make a buck here?

By Njovich • Score: 5, Insightful Thread

Google makes so much money, is it really that important for them to go back on their promises and screw over some individual with a free email address?

Nobody forced them to offer ‘lifetime free’ promises, you can afford to keep your promise, keep your promise.

Trust Lost

By LondoMollari • Score: 4, Interesting Thread

At this point why would you trust Google for anything? They already dropped “Don’t be Evil” from the top of their corporate code of conduct. Maybe they just haven’t read the ending themselves.

The Grass Wasn’t Greener

By guesstral • Score: 4, Informative Thread
Google showed up with so much promise. Free for consumers, charge for business. Do no evil. Freedom from bloat. The grass, it seems, is never greener. I barely see a line between Google’s business practise and Microsoft’s, when 15 years ago they seemed like the refreshing choice of the next generation.

Craziest thing they’re doing it for no reason

By itsme1234 • Score: 3 Thread

These accounts actually have less features (usually from the small, niche ones, or sometimes for no rhyme or reason, like at some point reminders were disabled for all Gsuite/Workspace users - including the paying ones, they couldn’t leave Google Play reviews for a long time, etc.) than the regular Gmail accounts. If Google is making money out of Gmail (and surely they do, and like to have probably billions of them) they shouldn’t push the people out of these other free Gmail-like-but-with-other-Mx accounts.

And make no mistake, people aren’t pushed into the paid accounts - especially that there’s no family plan, you need to buy as many business subscriptions as users you have (family members+all throwaway accounts you setup to test Android phones or to allow your router to send emails or for your chinese Android TV where you don’t want to enter your account that has all your other stuff including Google Pay and so on). Everyone learned their lesson: if you need a proper Google account get that Gmail account and stay with the herd. For the rest there are plenty of options, starting from free. Even Apple has Apple Business (Custom Domain Email) with a free tier!!!

Re:Do they really need to make a buck here?

By thegarbz • Score: 5, Informative Thread

some individual

They aren’t screwing over individuals. Individuals have a migrate path to other Google options which offer the same thing for free. What they are doing is screwing over small businesses. G Suite Legacy provided not just a free email, it provided email access for up to 100 individual accounts tied to a different domain, along with some groupware like Docs. Effectively they were providing the services of a small webhost provider without also providing the domain. That’s also why they are suggesting users migrate to Workspaces. The cost recover is a potential maximum of $7/month/user. That’s $8400 revenue per year for anyone who maxed out their previous free service.

Still a dick move though. They should be forced to retain their lifetime free promise.

Webb Discovers One of the Universe’s First Galaxies

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Astronomers using the James Webb Space Telescope have identified an ultra-faint galaxy seen just 800 million years after the Big Bang. The galaxy contains almost no heavy elements, shows signs of intense early stellar radiation, and could offer a rare glimpse into the first stages of galaxy formation. Phys.org reports:
In a paper published in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Kimihiko Nakajima, an astronomer at Kanazawa University, Japan, describes how they used the telescope to study a part of the deep universe and discovered a faint galaxy called LAP1-B. “LAP1-B establishes a ‘fossil in the making,’ a direct high-redshift progenitor of the ancient ultra-faint dwarf galaxies observed in the local universe,” they wrote. Because the galaxy is so small and distant, it would normally be impossible to see. However, it was spotted due to a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing, in which a massive cluster of closer galaxies acts like a giant magnifying glass, boosting the light from LAP1-B by 100 times.

The scientists realized that most of the light from the galaxy wasn’t coming from the stars, but from glowing clouds of gas. They analyzed this light by splitting it into a spectrum and studying the emission lines, which revealed the chemical composition of the gas. They found that the galaxy contains almost no heavy elements, and its oxygen abundance is about 240 times lower than the sun’s, making it one of the most primitive star-forming galaxies ever observed. The emission lines also revealed intense ionizing radiation, which is what scientists expect to see from the first generation of stars.

The team also measured an elevated carbon-to-oxygen ratio. This matches the predicted chemical signature for the first star explosions in history from Population III stars, the first stars to exist in the universe. The stars we see today are Population I stars, which formed later and contain more heavy elements. Another fascinating finding is that, after measuring the gas’s motion and speed, the researchers concluded that the galaxy is held together by a massive cloud of invisible dark matter.

Would be more interesting

By hcs_$reboot • Score: 3 Thread
if they see a galaxy 800 million years before the Big Bang.

Re:Would be more interesting

By Ol Olsoc • Score: 5, Funny Thread

if they see a galaxy 800 million years before the Big Bang.

Different era - that would be the Big Foreplay.

Re:The researchers concluded… Hmmm.

By angel’o’sphere • Score: 4, Insightful Thread

Correct. That is why they call it “dark matter”.

Perhaps they should have called it “mysterious matter”?

Fact is there is either “more gravity” the there should be (or can be explained by looking at the visible atter), hence the term “dark matter” (as the matter is - seems to be - invisible) -or- there is an entire unknown force working … with similar properties like gravity.

Which it is, we don’t know.

Re: The researchers concluded… Hmmm.

By gerf • Score: 5, Informative Thread
It is not. If you add up the gravity from all the visible stars and dust, the mass is not enough to hold the galaxies together. Something that is not visible is involved and no one knows what it is.

Minnesota Becomes First State To Ban Prediction Markets

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR:
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz has signed the nation’s first law banning prediction market sites from operating in the state, and in response, the Trump administration has sued, teeing up a legal battle over the most far-reaching crackdown on popular services like Kalshi and Polymarket. It comes as states confront a growing standoff with the Trump administration over how to regulate the industry, which allows people to bet on virtually anything.

The new state law makes it a crime to host or advertise a prediction market, which it defines as a system that lets consumers place a wager on a future outcome, like sports, elections, live entertainment, someone’s word choice and world affairs. The prohibition extends to services supporting prediction markets, like virtual private networks, that could allow consumers to disguise their location and get around the ban. It would force prediction market sites like Kalshi and Polymarket to leave the state, or face possible felony charges. The law takes effect in August.

The law has a carve-out for event contracts that serve as an insurance policy in the event of “harm, or loss sustained” and for the purchase of securities and other commodities. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s lawsuit seeks to block the law before it starts, arguing the prediction market industry should be exclusively regulated by federal officials. “This Minnesota law turns lawful operators and participants in prediction markets into felons overnight,” said CFTC Chairman Michael Selig.

“Minnesota farmers have relied on critical hedging products on weather and crop-related events for decades to mitigate their risks. Governor Walz chose to put special interests first and American farmers and innovators last.” An updated version of the prediction market bill allows trading on weather, an exception that followed pushback from the agricultural industry, which has historically used futures trading on weather as a hedge against storms and other inclement weather that can affect a harvest. Walz is expected to sign it soon.
“We as a state should decide how best and what regulations we think should attach to gambling, to protect public safety, to protect our kids,” said Minnesota Rep. Emma Greenman, the Democrat who introduced the measure.
Kalshi spokeswoman Elisabeth Diana called the ban a “blatant violation” of the law. “Minnesota banning prediction markets is like trying to ban the New York Stock Exchange,” said Diana, adding that “this actively harms users because it reduces competition and drives activity offshore.”

Re:Prediction Markets

By Gravis Zero • Score: 5, Funny Thread

Bet they didn’t see that coming

$100 says they did!

Re:What about being in a free country

By Rei • Score: 5, Interesting Thread

The problem here isn’t scams and grift. It’s that by growing the number of bets by orders of magnitude, you grow the number of insiders with insider info by orders of magnitude. Which creates perverse incentives across your entire economy for people to profit off of their status, while simultaneously making it much harder to do so.

Say there’s a bet on whether Russia will take the village of Mala Tokmachka by a certain date. Well, now every Russian commander on that front has an incentive to have family members / friends bet against it and then delay / undercut their ability to wage incentives, while every soldier also has the incentive to do so and then do everything they can to spoil the offensive.

Or say the US is planning a major offensive in Iran, and various insiders are betting *on* an imminent attack. Well, Iran can feed Polymarket data into their intel assessments as one factor to help determine when the US will invade in order to maximize their readiness. OR, Iranian intel services could track down US officials / military officers who are making these bets based on insider info and blackmail them in order to get them to cooperate.

Every single aspect of society that gets bet on gets subtly undercut by the existence of these bets. It’s one thing to have bets be placed on sports, an action that by definition is entertainment, something that doesn’t actually matter. But it’s an entirely different thing to have bets on virtually everything in our world. It’s already been a problem with stock trading, but sites like Polymarket make it so, so much worse.

Re:And suddenly

By unrtst • Score: 5, Informative Thread

They want the Feds to overturn state-level pot legalization, ban sanctuary cities, etc.

,,,
I’d love to know exactly who “they” is in your comment here given that move. …

This is for medical use; not recreational. He’s clawing back control, not giving more permission. Meanwhile, GOP in the house is blocking funding for that very same rescheduling (as of April 2026), and GOP leaders and legislatures in the states are working to repeal elements of the legalization laws and weakening reforms.

What progress have the GOP actually accomplished on the pot legalization front? Thoughts and prayers?

Re:Trump is just protecting his money grabs

By Anonymous Coward • Score: 5, Informative Thread

Trump and cronies appear to indulge in insider trading on these prediction markets.

Donald Jr is on the board of Polymarket: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/2…

Re:amazing

By rsilvergun • Score: 5, Funny Thread
We literally made Biff Tannen presidents of the United States. Honestly Trump is probably worse as far as I know Biff wasn’t a pedophile.