"What if the big tech companies achieved their ultimate business goal — maximizing engagement on their platforms — in a way that has undermined our ability to function as an open society?"

That's the question being asked by Chuck Todd, chief political analyst for NBC News: What if they realized that when folks agree on a solution to a problem, they are most likely to log off a site or move on? It sure looks like the people at these major data-hoarding companies have optimized their algorithms to do just that. As a new book argues, Big Tech appears to have perfected a model that has created rhetorical paralysis. Using our own data against us to create dopamine triggers, tech platforms have created "a state of perpetual disagreement across the divide and a concurrent state of perpetual agreement within each side," authors Frank McCourt and Michael Casey write, adding: "Once this uneasy state of divisive 'equilibrium' is established, it creates profit-making opportunities for the platforms to generate revenue from advertisers who prize the sticky highly engaged audiences it generates."

In their new book, "Our Biggest Fight," McCourt (a longtime businessman and onetime owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers) and Casey are attempting a call to action akin to Thomas Paine's 18th century-era "Common Sense." The book argues that "we must act now to embed the core values of a free, democratic society in the internet of tomorrow." The authors believe many of the current ills in society can be traced to how the internet works. "Information is the lifeblood of any society, and our three-decade-old digital system for distributing it is fatally corrupt at its heart," they write. "It has failed to function as a trusted, neutral exchange of facts and ideas and has therefore catastrophically hindered our ability to gather respectfully to debate, to compromise and to hash out solutions.... Everything, ultimately, comes down to our ability to communicate openly and truthfully with one another. We have lost that ability — thanks to how the internet has evolved away from its open, decentralized ideals...."

Ultimately, what the authors are imagining is a new internet that essentially flips the user agreement 180 degrees, so that a tech company has to agree to your terms and conditions to use your data and has to seek your permission (perhaps with compensation) to access your entire social map of whom and what you engage with on the internet. Most important, under such an arrangement, these companies couldn't prevent you from using their services if you refused to let them have your data... Unlike most anti-Big Tech books, this one isn't calling for the breakup of companies like Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft or Apple. Instead, it's calling for a new set of laws that protect data so none of those companies gets to own it, either specifically or in the aggregate...

The authors seem mindful that this Congress or a new one isn't going to act unless the public demands action. And people may not demand this change in our relationship with tech if they don't have an alternative to point to. That's why McCourt, through an organization he founded called Project Liberty, is trying to build our new internet with new protocols that make individual data management a lot easier and second nature. (If you want to understand the tech behind this new internet more, read the book!)
Wait, there's more. The article adds that the authors "envision an internet where all apps and the algorithms that power them are open source and can be audited at will. They believe that simply preventing these private companies from owning and mapping our data will deprive them of the manipulative marketing and behavioral tactics they've used to derive their own power and fortunes at the expense of democracy."

And the NBC News analyst seems to agree. "For whatever reason, despite our societal fear of government databases and government surveillance, we've basically handed our entire personas to the techies of Silicon Valley."

An anonymous reader shared this report from SFGate: Late last year, tales of tech workers paying $700 a month for tiny "bed pods" in downtown San Francisco went viral. The story provided a perfect distillation of SF's wild (and wildly expensive) housing market — and inspired schadenfreude when the city deemed the situation illegal. But the provocative living situation wasn't an anomaly, according to a city official.

"We've definitely seen an uptick of these 'pod'-type complaints," Kelly Wong, a planner with San Francisco's code enforcement and zoning and compliance team, told SFGATE... Wong stressed that it's not that San Francisco is inherently against bed pod-type arrangements, but that the city is responsible for making sure these spaces are safe and legally zoned.

So Brownstone Shared Housing is still renting one bed pod location — but not accepting new tenants — after citations for failing to get proper permits and having a lock on the front door that required a key to exit.

And SFGate also spoke to Alex Akel, general manager of Olive Rooms, which opened up a co-living and co-working space in SoMa earlier this year (and also faced "a flurry of complaints.") "Unfortunately, we had complaints from neighbors because of foot traffic and noise, and since then we cut the number of people to fit the ordinance by the city," Akel wrote. Olive Rooms describes its space as targeted at "tech founders from Central Asia, giving them opportunities to get involved in the current AI boom." Akel added that its residents are "bringing new energy to SF," but that the program "will not accept new residents before we clarify the status with the city."

In April, the city also received a complaint about a group called Let's Be Buds, which rents out 14 pods in a loft on Divisadero Street that start at $575 per month for an upper bunk.

While this recent burst of complaints is new, bed pods in San Francisco have been catching flak for years... a company called PodShare, which rents — you guessed it — bed pods, squared itself away with the city and has operated in SF since 2019.
Brownstone's CEO told SFGate "A lot of people want to be here for AI, or for school, or different opportunities." He argues that "it's literally impossible without a product like ours," and that their residents had said the option "positively changed the trajectory of their lives."

The Associated Press reports that an F-16 performing aerial combat tests at 550 miles per hour was "controlled by artificial intelligence, not a human pilot."

And riding in the front seat was the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force... AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028.

It was fitting that the dogfight took place at [California's] Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. [U.S. Secretary of the Air Force] Frank Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.

"It's a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it," Kendall said in an interview with The Associated Press after he landed... At the end of the hourlong flight, Kendall climbed out of the cockpit grinning. He said he'd seen enough during his flight that he'd trust this still-learning AI with the ability to decide whether or not to launch weapons in war... [T]he software first learns on millions of data points in a simulator, then tests its conclusions during actual flights. That real-world performance data is then put back into the simulator where the AI then processes it to learn more.
"Kendall said there will always be human oversight in the system when weapons are used," the article notes.

But he also said looked for to the cost-savings of smaller and cheaper AI-controlled unmanned jets.

Slashdot reader fjo3 shared a link to this video. (More photos at Sky.com.)

Last month Reuters reported that Venezuela's state-run oil company "plans to increase digital currency usage in its crude and fuel exports as the U.S. reimposes oil sanctions on the country, three people familiar with the plan said." [The oil company] since last year had been slowly moving oil sales to USDT, a digital currency also known as Tether whose value is pegged to the U.S. dollar and designed to maintain a stable value. The return of oil sanctions is speeding up the shift, a move to reduce the risk of sale proceeds getting frozen in foreign bank accounts due to the measures, the people said...

Tether said in an email it respects the U.S. Treasury's list of sanctioned entities and "is committed to working to ensure sanction addresses are frozen promptly."
This week Reuters reported that now experts are saying the situation "will require greater scrutiny by regulators and law enforcement." They spoke to Kristofer Doucett, national security leader at U.S. blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, who said "Structures must be set up to combat this type of money laundering." Reuters writes: Technology for digital transactions is changing fast and transactions are rapidly growing in developing regions including Latin America and Africa benefiting people without access to the banking system. But some corrupt governments are moving faster, making it difficult to prevent fraud, the experts said. Doucette and Sigal Mandelker, a lawyer who previously worked at the U.S. Treasury Department, said during a conference organized by the Wilson Center in Washington that the U.S. administration is making efforts to increase regulation and encourage other countries to improve supervision.
Slashdot reader RossCWilliams asks a loaded question. Whether this is "the beginning of the end of unregulated cryptocurrencies... the recognition of cryptocurrency as a national security threat that threatens international financial controls."

The blog Its FOSS has 15,000 followers for its Mastodon account — which they think is causing problems: When you share a link on Mastodon, a link preview is generated for it, right? With Mastodon being a federated platform (a part of the Fediverse), the request to generate a link preview is not generated by just one Mastodon instance. There are many instances connected to it who also initiate requests for the content almost immediately. And, this "fediverse effect" increases the load on the website's server in a big way.

Sure, some websites may not get overwhelmed with the requests, but Mastodon does generate numerous hits, increasing the load on the server. Especially, if the link reaches a profile with more followers (and a broader network of instances)... We tried it on our Mastodon profile, and every time we shared a link, we were able to successfully make our website unresponsive or slow to load.
Slashdot reader nunojsilva is skeptical that "blurbs with a thumbnail and description" could create the issue (rather than, say, poorly-optimized web content). But the It's Foss blog says they found three GitHub issues about the same problem — one from 2017, and two more from 2023. And other blogs also reported the same issue over a year ago — including software developer Michael Nordmeyer and legendary Netscape programmer Jamie Zawinski.

And back in 2022, security engineer Chris Partridge wrote: [A] single roughly ~3KB POST to Mastodon caused servers to pull a bit of HTML and... an image. In total, 114.7 MB of data was requested from my site in just under five minutes — making for a traffic amplification of 36704:1. [Not counting the image.]
Its Foss reports Mastodon's official position that the issue has been "moved as a milestone for a future 4.4.0 release. As things stand now, the 4.4.0 release could take a year or more (who knows?)."

They also state their opinion that the issue "should have been prioritized for a faster fix... Don't you think as a community-powered, open-source project, it should be possible to attend to a long-standing bug, as serious as this one?"

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian: Newly deciphered passages from a papyrus scroll that was buried beneath layers of volcanic ash after the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius may have shed light on the final hours of Plato, a key figure in the history of western philosophy. In a groundbreaking discovery, the ancient scroll was found to contain a previously unknown narrative detailing how the Greek philosopher spent his last evening, describing how he listened to music played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl. Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death, Plato — who was known as a disciple of Socrates and a mentor to Aristotle, and who died in Athens around 348BC — retained enough lucidity to critique the musician for her lack of rhythm, the account suggests....

In a presentation of the research findings at the National Library of Naples, Prof Graziano Ranocchia, of the University of Pisa, who spearheaded the team responsible for unearthing the carbonised scroll, described the discovery as an "extraordinary outcome that enriches our understanding of ancient history". He said: "Thanks to the most advanced imaging diagnostic techniques, we are finally able to read and decipher new sections of texts that previously seemed inaccessible... For the first time, we have been able to read sequences of hidden letters from the papyri that were enfolded within multiple layers, stuck to each other over the centuries, through an unrolling process using a mechanical technique that disrupted whole fragments of text."

"A leap in our ability to see the chemistry of matter in three-dimensions at the nanoscale was achieved, allowing scientists to understand how nanomaterials are chemically arranged," writes Slashdot reader Hovden: Traditionally, seeing matter at the smallest sizes requires too many high-energy electrons for 3D chemical imaging. The high beam exposure destroys the specimen before an experiment is completed. Even larger doses are required to achieve high resolution.

Thus, chemical mapping in 3D has been unachievable except at lower resolution with the most radiation-hard materials.

High-resolution 3D chemical imaging is now achievable near or below one-nanometer resolution. A team from Dow Chemical and the University of Michigan used a newly introduced method, called multi-modal data fusion, high-resolution chemical tomography, that provides 99% less dose by linking information encoded within both elastic and inelastic scattered signals. The researchers showed sub-nanometer 3D resolution of chemistry is measurable for a broad class of geometrically and compositionally complex materials.
"Here are the pretty pictures," adds long-time Slashdot reader thoper.

Phys.org also has this quote from Robert Hovden, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan and corresponding author on the study published in Nature Communications. "Seeing invisible worlds, far smaller than the wavelengths of light, is absolutely critical to understanding the matter we are engineering at the nanoscale, not just in 2D but in 3D as well."

Thursday the Verge reported that a new report from Microsoft "outlines the steps the company took to release responsible AI platforms last year." Microsoft says in the report that it created 30 responsible AI tools in the past year, grew its responsible AI team, and required teams making generative AI applications to measure and map risks throughout the development cycle. The company notes that it added Content Credentials to its image generation platforms, which puts a watermark on a photo, tagging it as made by an AI model.

The company says it's given Azure AI customers access to tools that detect problematic content like hate speech, sexual content, and self-harm, as well as tools to evaluate security risks. This includes new jailbreak detection methods, which were expanded in March this year to include indirect prompt injections where the malicious instructions are part of data ingested by the AI model.

It's also expanding its red-teaming efforts, including both in-house red teams that deliberately try to bypass safety features in its AI models as well as red-teaming applications to allow third-party testing before releasing new models.
Microsoft's chief Responsible AI officer told the Washington Post this week that "We work with our engineering teams from the earliest stages of conceiving of new features that they are building." "The first step in our processes is to do an impact assessment, where we're asking the team to think deeply about the benefits and the potential harms of the system. And that sets them on a course to appropriately measure and manage those risks downstream. And the process by which we review the systems has checkpoints along the way as the teams are moving through different stages of their release cycles...

"When we do have situations where people work around our guardrails, we've already built the systems in a way that we can understand that that is happening and respond to that very quickly. So taking those learnings from a system like Bing Image Creator and building them into our overall approach is core to the governance systems that we're focused on in this report."
They also said " it would be very constructive to make sure that there were clear rules about the disclosure of when content is synthetically generated," and "there's an urgent need for privacy legislation as a foundational element of AI regulatory infrastructure."

Come 2029, all cars sold in the U.S. "must be able to stop and avoid contact with a vehicle in front of them at speeds up to 62 mph," reports Car and Driver.

"Additionally, the system must be able to detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness. As a final parameter, the federal standard will require the system to apply the brakes automatically up to 90 mph when a collision is imminent, and up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected." Notably, the federal standardization of automated emergency braking systems includes pedestrian-identifying emergency braking, too. Once implemented, the NHTSA projects that this standard will save at least 360 lives a year and prevent at least 24,000 injuries annually. Specifically, the federal agency claims that rear-end collisions and pedestrian injuries will both go down significantly...

"Automatic emergency braking is proven to save lives and reduce serious injuries from frontal crashes, and this technology is now mature enough to require it in all new cars and light trucks. In fact, this technology is now so advanced that we're requiring these systems to be even more effective at higher speeds and to detect pedestrians," said NHTSA deputy administrator Sophie Shulman.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.

In 2016, an online "swarm intelligence" platform generated a correct prediction for the Kentucky Derby — naming all four top finishers, in order. (But the next year their predictions weren't even close, with TechRepublic suggesting 2016's race had an unusual cluster of just a few top racehorses.)

So this year Decrypt.co tried crafting their own system "that can be called up when the next Kentucky Derby draws near. There are a variety of ways to enlist artificial intelligence in horse racing. You could process reams of data based on your own methodology, trust a third-party pre-trained model, or even build a bespoke solution from the ground up. We decided to build a GPT we named HorseGPT to crunch the numbers and make the picks for us...

We carefully curated prompts to instill HorseGPT with expertise in data science specific to horse racing: how weather affects times, the role of jockeys and riding styles, the importance of post positions, and so on. We then fed it a mix of research papers and blogs covering the theoretical aspects of wagering, and layered on practical knowledge: how to read racing forms, what the statistics mean, which factors are most predictive, expert betting strategies, and more. Finally, we gave HorseGPT a wealth of historical Kentucky Derby data, arming it with the raw information needed to put its freshly imparted skills to use.

We unleashed HorseGPT on official racing forms for this year's Derby. We asked HorseGPT to carefully analyze each race's form, identify the top contenders, and recommend wager types and strategies based on deep background knowledge derived from race statistics.
So how did it do? HorseGPT picked two horses to win — both of which failed to do so. (Sierra Leone did finish second — in a rare three-way photo finish. But Fierceness finished... 15th.) It also recommended the same two horses if you were trying to pick the top two finishers in the correct order — a losing bet, since, again, Fierceness finished 15th.

But even worse, HorseGPT recommended betting on Just a Touch to finish in either first or second place. When the race was over, that horse finished dead last. (And when asked to pick the top three finishers in correct order, HorseGPT stuck with its choices for the top two — which finished #2 and #15 — and, again, Just a Touch, who came in last.)

When Google Gemini was asked to pick the winner by The Athletic, it first chose Catching Freedom (who finished 4th). But it then gave an entirely different answer when asked to predict the winner "with an Italian accent."

"The winner of the Kentucky Derby will be... Just a Touch! Si, that's-a right, the underdog! There will be much-a celebrating in the piazzas, thatta-a I guarantee!"
Again, Just a Touch came in last.

Decrypt noticed the same thing. "Interestingly enough, our HorseGPT AI agent and the other out-of-the-box chatbots seemed to agree with each other," the site notes, adding that HorseGPT also seemed to agree "with many expert analysts cited by the official Kentucky Derby website."

But there was one glimmer of insight into the 20-horse race. When asked to choose the top four finishers in order, HorseGPT repeated those same losing picks — which finished #2, #15, and #20. But then it added two more underdogs for fourth place finishers, "based on their potential to outperform expectations under muddy conditions." One of those two horses — Domestic Product — finished in 13th place.

But the other of the two horses was Mystik Dan — who came in first.

Mystik Dan appeared in only one of the six "Top 10 Finishers" lists (created by humans) at the official Kentucky Derby site... in the #10 position.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times: American officials are trying to increase international pressure on Russia not to deploy an antisatellite nuclear weapon in space, and have obtained information that undermines Moscow's explanation that the device it is developing is for peaceful scientific purposes, a senior State Department official said on Friday...

On Friday, Mallory Stewart, the assistant secretary of state for arms control, said that while the United States had been aware of Russia's pursuit of such a device for years, "only recently have we been able to make a more precise assessment of their progress." Ms. Stewart, speaking at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the orbit the Russian satellite would occupy is in a high-radiation region not used by other satellites, information that undercuts Russia's defense that it is not developing a weapon.

CircleID reports that Multinational internet service provider Cogent recently announced that it was offering $206 million in secured notes (a corporate bond backed by assets). "The unusual part is what it's using as security: some of its IPv4 addresses and the leases on those IPv4 addresses." All internet service providers (ISPs) give IP addresses to their users, but Cogent was among the first to lease those addresses independently of internet access. (Internet access customers normally require a unique address as part of their service.) Sources are hard to find, but prevailing wisdom is that they have over 10M addresses leased for about $0.30 per month, or $36M per year in revenue.

The notes are expected to be repaid in five years.

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader penciling_in for sharing the article.

The blog It's FOSS is "pissed at the casual arrogance of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical..... The sheer audacity of not caring for its users reeks of Microsoft-esque arrogance." If you download a .deb package of a software, you cannot install it using the official graphical software center on Ubuntu anymore. When you double-click on the downloaded deb package, you'll see this error, "there is no app installed for Debian package files".

If you right-click and choose to open it with Software Center, you are in for another annoyance. The software center will go into eternal loading. It may look as if it is doing something, but it will go on forever. I could even livestream the loading app store on YouTube, and it would continue for the 12 years of its long-term support period.
Canonical software engineer Dennis Loose actually created an issue ticket for the problem himself — back in September of 2023. And two weeks ago he returned to the discussion to announce that fix "will be a priority for the next cycle". (Though "unfortunately we didn't have the capacity to work on this for 24.04...)

But Its Foss accused Canonical of "cleverly booting out deb in favor of Snap, one baby step at a time" (noting the problem started with Ubuntu 23.10): There is also the issue of replacing deb packages with Snap, even with the apt command line tool. You use 'sudo apt install chromium', you get a Snap package of Chromium instead of Debian
The venerable Linux magazine argues that Canonical "has secretly forced Snap installation on users." [I]t looks as if the Software app defaults to Snap packages for everything now. I combed through various apps and found this to be the case.... As far as the auto-installation of downloaded .deb files, you'll have to install something like gdebi to bring back this feature.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post: The heat shield of the Orion spacecraft intended one day to carry astronauts to the moon under NASA's Artemis program suffered unexpected damage in more than 100 places as the spacecraft returned to Earth during an uncrewed test flight in 2022, according to a watchdog report released late Wednesday.

While the capsule withstood the fiery tumult of reentry, when temperatures reached 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it plunged through the atmosphere at nearly 25,000 mph, the damage the heat shield suffered was far greater than NASA engineers had expected and more severe than NASA had revealed previously. Photos of the heat shield in the report showed gouges that look like small potholes. "Should the same issue occur on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew," the report, by NASA's inspector general, concluded... The IG report provides the most detailed description of the issue to date. It also highlighted other problems with the spacecraft that could create significant challenges for the space agency as it seeks to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years.

Portions of the heat shield "wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed," according to the report. That, in turn, "could have caused enough structural damage to cause one of Orion's parachutes to fail...." In addition to the heat shield erosion on Orion, which is manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the IG said several bolts on the crew module "experienced an exposed gap that allowed for increased heating to the bolt interior and greater than expected melting and erosion."
Earlier this year, NASA announced the next flight for its moon program — sending a crew of four around the moon — would be delayed, according to the article. The moon-orbiting mission would now occur "no earlier than September 2025, largely because officials wanted to study the heat shield issue further and understand why it eroded as it did."

The article adds that this new report "casts doubt on both NASA's rosy original assessment of the test flight" — as well as the likelihood that a lunar landing will occur by late 2026.

The Washington Post reports that wind turbines "only take up five percent of the land where they've been built, new research shows." The rest of the space can be used for other purposes, such as agriculture, according to a study published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology. This means developers could fit turbines in places that are often perceived as unsuitable for a wind farm.

The new study highlights that turbines and existing human development, such as agriculture, cannot only share the same area, but also that building wind farms where there are already roads and other infrastructure could help reduce impacts on the land. "Clever siting, use of existing infrastructure, multiple use of landscapes — all these things ... can really contribute to solutions in areas where wind power is acceptable to the local people," said Sarah Jordaan, the study's principal investigator.

Historically, planning studies for wind farms have often assumed that turbines would disturb all the land at the site and leave the area unusable for anything else, said Jordaan, an associate professor in the department of civil engineering at McGill University. The study's findings provide a more accurate accounting of how much land is needed for wind farms, she added.