An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:

Scientists have found that using seismometers is a new and inexpensive method to detect falling space junk, which can cause damage on impact and carry toxic materials — and may someday turn deadly...

It's not an easy task to track large hunks of falling metal everywhere in the world. Ground-based radar can detect falling objects, but it doesn't cover much of the world or is often classified data, said Ben Fernando [a planetary scientist at Johns Hopkins University who is leading this research]. The other option is through optical instruments, such as doorbell cameras, but the information on the time, size and speed can be limited. Instead, Fernando turned to seismology data. Stations located around the world live-stream data, which can be easily downloaded. Seismometers have been used to track meteors in the sky for over a century, but he said this is the first time he's aware of its use for tracking space debris.
Stations located around the world live-stream data, which can be easily downloaded. Seismometers have been used to track meteors in the sky for over a century, but he said this is the first time he's aware of its use for tracking space debris. Fernando first tested the idea to track the controlled reentry of NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission in September 2023, which brought back material from the asteroid Bennu. He set up seismometers along the capsule's path in the landing spot in Utah and measured its sonic boom. "It's a really good way of monitoring what's coming in, how often it's coming in, how big the things hitting the Earth are," said Fernando, who presented his results at the American Geophysical Union conference in December...

"The shockwave deforms the ground around the seismometer," said Fernando. "It also keeps ringing for a lot longer because all of that energy is bouncing around in the soil...." [H]e said an automated system could help detect these objects within moments of it appearing on the stations. In addition to detecting an event, the seismometers can help locate where any debris may have fallen. Tracking debris is important because some space debris can contain toxic materials that can harm the surrounding environment.

The article notes reports of the uncontrolled reentry into Earth's atmosphere of at least 951 objects larger than one square meter from 2010 to 2022.

"On average, objects heavier than 1,000 pounds came down about every 8 days... In fact, the threat of getting hit by uncontrolled orbital reentries has increased by a factor of four from 2010 to 2023, said Luciano Anselmo, who published a study assessing the risk."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/0559217/could-earthquake-sensors-help-detect-falling-space-junk?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Компания Apple объявила об открытии исходного кода сборочной системы Swift Build, применявшейся в проприетарных интегрированных средах разработки Xcode и Swift Playground. Система оптимизирована для сборки проектов на языке Swift, но может применяться и с другими языками. Для пакетного менеджера Swift Package Manager подготовлен экспериментальный модуль ("--build-system swiftbuild"), позволяющий использовать Swift Build для сборки пакетов. Код Swift Build написан на языке Swift и открыт под лицензией Apache 2.0. Поддерживается сборка проектов для Linux, macOS, iOS, Android, QNX и Windows.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62661

TOP10 VISITORS:

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[3] Facebook point=0 web=175 up=1.3MB (1%)
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TOTAL TRAFFIC: 81MB

Опубликована [ программа ]( https://www.basealt.ru/20edu-conf#programma ) XX юбилейной конференции «Свободное программное обеспечение в высшей школе» — OSEDUCONF-2025, которая пройдёт 7–9 февраля 2025 года в Институте программных систем РАН, г. Переславль-Залесский. В ней примут участие представители образовательного сообщества, использующие или создающие свободное ПО в учебном или научном процессе. Основной целью является налаживание личных контактов между специалистами, обсуждение перспектив и новинок области.

Представленные доклады охватят следующие тематики:

• перспективы развития и применения СПО в образовании;

• современные образовательные курсы на основе СПО;

• практика применения СПО в образовательном процессе;

• научные и студенческие проекты СПО;

• проблемы подготовки специалистов.

Формат мероприятия ориентирован на личное общение участников, но видеотрансляция докладов также будет доступна на [ сайте конференции ]( https://www.basealt.ru/20edu-conf ) .

Желающие принять участие слушателями могут [ зарегистрироваться ]( https://www.basealt.ru/20edu-conf#request_form ) до 3 февраля включительно (если нужен трансфер из Москвы и обратно) и до 5 февраля без трансфера. Все даты указаны включительно.

Участие в конференции для докладчиков и слушателей бесплатное. Место проведения конференции: Ярославская область, Переславский район, с. Веськово, улица Петра Первого, д. 4А (Институт программных систем имени А. К. Айламазяна РАН).

https://www.linux.org.ru/news/conference/17869817

Пока самый массовый набег случился 17 января:

Больше всего посетителей (10308) здесь было 17 янв 2025 04:35

17/Jan/2025:12:25:XX - 25
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17/Jan/2025:12:49:XX - 10

Friday TechCrunch reported that OpenAI "used the subreddit, r/ChangeMyView to create a test for measuring the persuasive abilities of its AI reasoning models."

The company revealed this in a system card — a document outlining how an AI system works — that was released along with its new "reasoning" model, o3-mini, on Friday.... OpenAI says it collects user posts from r/ChangeMyView and asks its AI models to write replies, in a closed environment, that would change the Reddit user's mind on a subject. The company then shows the responses to testers, who assess how persuasive the argument is, and finally OpenAI compares the AI models' responses to human replies for that same post.
The ChatGPT-maker has a content-licensing deal with Reddit that allows OpenAI to train on posts from Reddit users and display these posts within its products. We don't know what OpenAI pays for this content, but Google reportedly pays Reddit $60 million a year under a similar deal. However, OpenAI tells TechCrunch the ChangeMyView-based evaluation is unrelated to its Reddit deal. It's unclear how OpenAI accessed the subreddit's data, and the company says it has no plans to release this evaluation to the public...

The goal for OpenAI is not to create hyper-persuasive AI models but instead to ensure AI models don't get too persuasive. Reasoning models have become quite good at persuasion and deception, so OpenAI has developed new evaluations and safeguards to address it.
Reddit's "ChangeMyView" subreddit has 3.8 million human subscribers, making it a valuable source of real human interactions, according to the article. And it adds one more telling anecdote.
"Reddit CEO Steve Huffman told The Verge last year that Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity refused to negotiate with him and said it's been 'a real pain in the ass to block these companies.'"

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/02/02/0319217/openai-tests-its-ais-persuasiveness-by-comparing-it-to-reddit-posts?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

> tgi забирает у тебя? у меня тоже только сейчас добавилось...

а вот теперь уже второй день не забирает :(

я поглядел по своим логам - это потерявшееся сообщение ко мне пришло как раз из tgi - я туда поглядел, а он теперь netsco забирает (правда назвал его Nastene):

Station 		Last update
IDEC.SHAOS.NET 	  	31.01.2025 04:41
Таверна 	  	11.11.2024 07:20
Ping 	  	31.01.2025 05:00
dynamic | less 	  	21.11.2023 22:00
Nastene 	  	31.01.2025 05:02
ii.yester.link 	  	31.01.2025 05:02

хм, а он по ходу ни у кого уже второй день не забирает...

P.S. netsco застрял на 5 января 2025 года т.к. по-видимому забирал только с blcat, который помер - надо чтоли ему начать наводить мосты взаимопонимания и дружбы с другими узлами!

Bill Gates' blog has been updated with short videos about his upcoming book, including one about how his school ended up with an ASR-33 teletype that could connect their Seattle classroom to a computer in California. "The teachers faded away pretty quickly," Gates adds, "But about six of us stayed hardcore. One was Paul Allen..." — the future co-founder of Microsoft. And the experience clearly meant a lot to Gates. "Microsoft just never would've happened without Paul — and this teletype room."

In a longer post thanking his "brilliant" teachers, Gates calls his teletype experience "an encounter that would shape my entire future" and "opened up a whole new world for me." Gates also thanks World War II Navy pilot and Boeing engineer Bill Dougall, who "was instrumental in bringing computer access to our school, something he and other faculty members pushed for after taking a summer computer class... The fascinating thing about Mr. Dougall was that he didn't actually know much about programming; he exhausted his knowledge within a week. But he had the vision to know it was important and the trust to let us students figure it out."

Gates shared a similar memory about the computer-room's 20-something overseer Fred Wright, who "intuitively understood that the best way to get students to learn was to let us explore on our own terms. There was no sign-up sheet, no locked door, no formal instruction."

Instead, Mr. Wright let us figure things out ourselves and trusted that, without his guidance, we'd have to get creative... Some of the other teachers argued for tighter regulations, worried about what we might be doing in there unsupervised. But even though Mr. Wright occasionally popped in to break up a squabble or listen as someone explained their latest program, for the most part he defended our autonomy...
Mr. Wright gave us something invaluable: the space to discover our own potential.

Any Slashdot readers have a similarly impactful experience? Share your own thoughts and memories in the comments.

Do you remember your high school's computer room?

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/02/02/0233216/slashdot-asks-do-you-remember-your-high-schools-computer-room?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

On January 24th Brooklyn blogger Jeffrey Emanuel made the case for shorting NVIDIA, remembers MarketWatch, "due to a number of shifting tides in the AI world, including the emergence of a China-based company called DeepSeek."

He published his 12,000-word post "on his personal blog and then shared it with the Value Investors Club website and across Reddit, X and other platforms." The next day he saw 35 people read his post. "But then the post started to go viral..."

Well-known venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya shared Emanuel's post on Nvidia's short case with his 1.8 million X followers. Successful early stage investor Naval Ravikant shared the post with his 2.6 million followers... Morgan Brown, a vice president of product and growth at Dropbox, pointed to it in a thread that was viewed over 13 million times. Emanuel's own X post got nearly half a million views. He also quickly gained about 13,000 followers on the platform, going from about 2,000 to more than 15,000 followers...

[Emanuel] pointed to the fact that so many people in San Jose were reading his blog post. He theorized that many of them were Nvidia employees with thousands — or even millions — of dollars worth of Nvidia stock tied up in employee stock options. With that much money in a single asset, Emanuel speculated that many were already debating whether to hold the stock or sell it to lock in profits. He believes his blog post helped convince some of them to sell. "A lot of the sell pressure you saw on Monday morning wasn't necessarily what you might think. I believe a fair amount of that was from shares that had never been active because they had been sitting in workplace.schwab.com accounts..."
Emanuel stresses he's "the most bullish on AI," with MarketWatch emphasizing that "while the points Emanuel laid out in his blog post might be bearish for Nvidia, he still thinks they paint a positive future for AI." Nevertheless, Monday NVIDIA's market capitalization dropped $600 billion, which MarketWatch calls "the largest single-day market-cap drop to date for any company."

What countless Wall Street firms and investment analysts had seemingly missed was being pointed out by some guy in his apartment.... Matt Levine, the prominent Bloomberg News financial columnist, noted the online chatter that claimed Emanuel's post "was an important catalyst" for the stock-market selloff and said it was a "candidate for the most impactful short research report ever." Emanuel spent the rest of the week booked solid as hedge funds paid him $1,000 per hour to speak on the phone and give his take on Nvidia and AI...

Emanuel wrote that the industry may be running low on quality data to train that AI — that is, a potential "data wall" is looming that could slow down AI scaling and reduce some of that need for training resources... Some of these companies, like Alphabet, have also been investing in building out their own semiconductor chips. For a while, Nvidia's hardware has been the best for training AI, but that might not be the case forever as more companies, such as Cerebras, build better hardware. And other GPU makers like AMD are updating their drivers software to be more competitive with Nvidia... Add all these things together — unsustainable spending and data-center building, less training data to work with, better competing hardware and more efficient AI — and you get a future where it's harder to imagine Nvidia's customers spending as much as they currently are on Nvidia hardware... "If you know that a company will only earn supersized returns for a couple years, you don't apply a multiple. You certainly don't put a 30-times multiple," Emanuel told MarketWatch.

The article notes that DeepSeek "is open-source and has been publishing technical papers out in the open for the past few months... The $5.6 million training-cost statistic that many investors cited for sparking the DeepSeek market panic was actually revealed in the V3 technical paper published on Dec. 26."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/2235213/one-blogger-helped-spark-nvidias-600b-stock-collapse?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Wednesday the Linux Foundation wrote that both "regulatory compliance" and "increased cybersecurity risk" were "creating burdens...that must be met" for open source communities.

And so, as Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols writes, "the Linux Foundation has released a comprehensive guide to help open source developers navigate the complex landscape of the U.S. Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctions..."

These rules, aimed at achieving economic, foreign policy, and national security goals, apply to various interactions, including those in the open source community. The total Sanctions Programs and Country list amounts to over 17 thousand entries ranging from individuals to terrorist organizations to countries.

If that rings a bell, it's because, in October 2024, the Linux kernel developers ran right into this issue. The Linux kernel's leadership, including Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable Linux kernel maintainer, and Linus Torvalds, Linux's founder, announced that eleven Russian kernel developers had been removed from their roles working on the Linux kernel. Why? Because, as Torvalds said, of "Russian sanctions." This, he added, in a Linux kernel mailing list (LKML) message was because "the 'various compliance requirements' are not just a US thing."

For developers, this means exercising caution about who they interact with and where their contributions originate. The sanctions target specific countries, regions, and individuals or organizations, many of which are listed on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons (SDN) List... Most OFAC sanctions are exempted for "informational materials," which generally include open source code. However, this only applies to existing code and not to requests for new code or modifications. So, for example, working with a Russian developer on a code patch could land you in hot water... While reviewing unsolicited patches from contributors in sanctioned regions is generally acceptable, actively engaging them in discussions or improvements could cross legal boundaries... Developers are warned to be cautious of sanctioned entities attempting to contribute indirectly through third parties or developers acting "individually."

Countries currently sanctioned include:

Russia Cuba Iran North Korea Syria The following regions of Ukraine: Crimea, Donetsk and Luhansk regions of the Ukraine.

The Linux Foundation had written that the OFAC sanctions rules are "strict liability" rules, "which means it does not matter whether you know about them or not. Violating these rules can lead to serious penalties, so it's important to understand how they might affect your open source work." But J. Vaughan-Nichols offers this quote from open source licensing attorney Heather Meeker.

"Let's be honest: Smaller companies usually ignore regulations like this because they just don't have the resources to analyze them, and a government usually ignores smaller companies because it doesn't have the resources to enforce against them. Big companies that are on the radar need specialized counsel."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/2356252/us-blocks-open-source-help-from-these-countries?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Thursday America's FDA "raised concerns about cybersecurity vulnerabilities" in patient monitors from China-based medical device company Contec "that could allow unauthorized individuals to access and potentially manipulate those devices," reports Reuters.

The patient monitors could be remotely controlled by unauthorized users or may not function as intended, and the network to which these devices are connected could be compromised, the agency warned. The FDA also said that once these devices are connected to the internet, they can collect patient data, including personally identifiable information and protected health information, and can export this data out of the healthcare delivery environment.
The agency, however, added that it is currently unaware of any cybersecurity incidents, injuries, or deaths related to these identified cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

The FDA's announcement says "The software on the patient monitors includes a backdoor, which may mean that the device or the network to which the device has been connected may have been or could be compromised." And it offers this advice to caregivers and patients:

If your health care provider confirms that your device relies on remote monitoring features, unplug the device and stop using it. Talk to your health care provider about finding an alternative patient monitor.
If your device does not rely on remote monitoring features, use only the local monitoring features of the patient monitor. This means unplugging the device's ethernet cable and disabling wireless (that is, WiFi or cellular) capabilities, so that patient vital signs are only observed by a caregiver or health care provider in the physical presence of a patient. If you cannot disable the wireless capabilities, unplug the device and stop using it. Talk to your health care provider about finding an alternative patient monitor.

A detailed report from CISA describes how a research team "created a simulated network, created a fake patient profile, and connected a blood pressure cuff, SpO2 monitor, and ECG monitor peripherals to the patient monitor. Upon startup, the patient monitor successfully connected to the simulated IP address and immediately began streaming patient data..." to an IP address that hard-coded into the backdoor function. "Sensor data from the patient monitor is also transmitted to the IP address in the same manner.
If the routine to connect to the hard-coded IP address and begin transmitting patient data is called, it will automatically initialize the eth0 interface in the same manner as the backdoor. This means that even if networking is not enabled on startup, running this routine will enable networking and thereby enable this functionality

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/0632248/americas-fda-warns-about-backdoor-found-in-chinese-companys-patient-monitors?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters:

New York-based cybersecurity firm Wiz says it has found a trove of sensitive data from the Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek inadvertently exposed to the open internet. In a blog post published Wednesday, Wiz said that scans of DeepSeek's infrastructure showed that the company had accidentally left more than a million lines of data available unsecured.

Those included digital software keys and chat logs that appeared to capture prompts being sent from users to the company's free AI assistant.

Wiz's chief technology officer tells Reuters that DeepSeek "took it down in less than an hour" after Wiz alerted them.

"But this was so simple to find we believe we're not the only ones who found it."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/0659255/sensitive-deepseek-data-was-exposed-to-the-web-cybersecurity-firm-says?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Разработчики библиотеки GTK объявили о присвоении статуса устаревшего бэкенду для протокола X11 и намерении прекратить поддержку X11 в ветке GTK 5. Несмотря на устаревший статус, в ветке GTK 4 работа на системах X11 будет сохранена.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62658

SC World reports:

A new phishing scam targeting mobile devices was observed using a "never-before-seen" obfuscation method to hide links to spoofed United States Postal Service (USPS) pages inside PDF files, [mobile security company] Zimperium reported Monday.

The method manipulates elements of the Portable Document Format (PDF) to make clickable URLs appear invisible to both the user and mobile security systems, which would normally extract links from PDFs by searching for the "/URI" tag. "Our researchers verified that this method enabled known malicious URLs within PDF files to bypass detection by several endpoint security solutions. In contrast, the same URLs were detected when the standard /URI tag was used," Zimperium Malware Researcher Fernando Ortega wrote in a blog post.

The attackers send the malicious PDFs via SMS text messages under the guise of providing instructions to retrieve a USPS package that failed to deliver... The phishing websites first displays a form for the victim provide their mailing address, email address and telephone number, and then asks for credit card information to pay a $0.30 "service fee" for redelivery of the supposed package... Zimperium identified more than 20 versions of the malicious PDF files and 630 phishing pages associated with the scam operation. The phishing pages were also found to support 50 languages, suggestion international targeting and possible use of a phishing kit.
"Users' trust in the PDF file format and the limited ability of mobile users to view information about a file prior to opening it increase the risk of such phishing campaigns, Zimperium noted."

Thanks to Slashdot reader spatwei for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/207203/malicious-pdf-links-hidden-in-text-message-scam-impersonating-us-postal-service?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Sometimes, government makes a bad bet..." writes the Los Angeles Times. Opening in 2014, the Ivanpah concentrated solar plant "quickly became known as an expensive, bird-killing eyesore."

Assuming that state officials sign off — which they most likely will, because the deal will lead to lower bills for PG&E customers — two of the three towers will shut down come 2026. Ivanpah's owners haven't paid off the project's $1.6-billion federal loan, and it's unclear whether they'll be able to do so. Houston-based NRG Energy, which operates Ivanpah and is a co-owner with Kelvin Energy and Google, said that federal officials took part in the negotiations to close PG&E's towers and that the closure agreement will allow the federal government "to maximize the recovery of its loans." It's possible Ivanpah's third and final tower will close, too. An Edison spokesperson told me the utility is in "ongoing discussions" with the project's owners and the federal government over ending the utility's contract.

It might be tempting to conclude government should stop placing bets and just let the market decide. But if it weren't for taxpayers dollars, large-scale solar farms, which in 2023 produced 17% of California's power, might never have matured into low-cost, reliable electricity sources capable of displacing planet-warming fossil fuels. More than a decade ago, federal loans helped finance some of the nation's first big solar-panel farms.

Not every government investment will be a winner. Renewable energy critics still raise the specter of Solyndra, a solar panel manufacturer that filed for bankruptcy in 2011 after receiving a $535-million federal loan. But on the whole, clean power investments have worked out. The U.S. Department of Energy reported that as of Dec. 31, it had disbursed $40.5 billion in loans. Of that amount, $15.2 billion had already been repaid. The federal government was on the hook for $1.03 billion in estimated losses but had reaped $5.6 billion in interest.
The article notes recent U.S. energy-related loans to a lithium mine in Nevada (close to $1 billion) and $15 billion to expand hydropower, upgrade power lines, and add batteries. Some of the loans won't get paid back "If federal officials are doing their jobs well," the article adds. "That's the risk inherent to betting on early-stage technologies." About the Ivanpah solar towers, they write "Maybe they never should have been built. They're too expensive, they don't work right, they kill too many birds... It's good that their time is coming to an end. But we should take inspiration from them, too: Don't get complacent. Keep trying new things."

PG&E says their objective at the time was partly to "support new technologies," with one senior director of commercial procurement noting "It's not clear in the early stages what technologies will work best and be most affordable for customers. Solar photovoltaic panels and battery energy storage were once unaffordable at large scale." But today they've calculated that ending their power agreements with Ivanpah would cost customers "substantially less." And once deactivated, Ivanpah's units "will be decommissioned, providing an opportunity for the site to potentially be repurposed for renewable PV energy production," NRG said in a statement.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal notes that instead the 3,500-acre, 386-megawatt concentrated thermal power plant used a much older technology, "a system of mirrors to reflect sunlight and generate thermal energy, which is then concentrated to power a steam engine."
Throughout the day, 350,000 computer-controlled mirrors track the sunlight and reflect it onto boilers atop 459-foot towers to generate AC. Nowadays, photovoltaic solar has surpassed concentrated solar power and become the dominant choice for renewable, clean energy, being more cost effective and flexible... So many birds have been victims of the plant's concentrated sun rays that workers referred to them as "streamers," for the smoke plume that comes from birds that ignite in midair. When federal wildlife investigators visited the plant around 10 years ago, they reported an average of one "streamer" every two minutes.

"Meanwhile, environmentalists continue to blame the Mojave Desert plant for killing thousands of birds and tortoises," reports the Associated Press. And a Sierra Club campaign organizer also says several rare plant species were destroyed during the plant's construction. "While the Sierra Club strongly supports innovative clean energy solutions and recognizes the urgent need to transition away from fossil fuels, Ivanpah demonstrated that not all renewable technologies are created equal."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/1831253/california-built-the-worlds-largest-solar-power-tower-plant-now-it-may-close?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован релиз среды рабочего стола Regolith Desktop 3.2, развиваемой разработчиками одноимённого дистрибутива Linux. Regolith основан на технологиях управления сеансами GNOME, оконном менеджере i3, композитных серверах Picom и Sway, панели i3bar, системе уведомлений rofication, строке состояния i3status-rs и интерфейсе запуска программ ilia. Наработки проекта распространяются под лицензией GPLv3.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62659

Star Wars star Mark Hamill, science fiction author William Gibson, XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe, and The Onion have joined millions of others bringing Bluesky's user count to 30 million, reports CNET. In fact Bluesky has added over 14 million users in the last three months, and for a few days in early November was adding over one million users a day. "That rate equals about 12 new users per second. The 30 million user mark compares to 9 million users in September."

But meanwhile Meta's social media site Threads — launched 19 months ago — "now has 320 million monthly active users," reports TechCrunch, "up from 300 million last month. The app had 275 million monthly active users in [early] November." That's a 16% grow rate in just three months.

In comparison, Bluesky is experiencing a slowdown in growth, with an increase of less than 10% month-over-month in December 2024, following a remarkable 189% growth in November, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Bluesky now has a total of 26.44 million users. Additionally, Zuckerberg noted that Threads is adding more than 1 million daily signups [while presenting fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday].

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/0749206/bluesky-grows-to-30-million-users-threads-adds-20-million-more-just-in-january?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Nearly three years ago a team of Chinese AI engineers working for DeepSeek's parent company unveiled an earlier AI supercomputer that the Washington Post says was constructed from 10,000 A100 GPUs purchased from Nvidia. Roughly six months later "Washington had banned Nvidia from selling any more A100s to China," the article notes.

Remember that number as you read this. 10,000 A100 GPUs...

DeepSeek's new chatbot caused a panic in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street this week, erasing $1 trillion from the stock market. That impact stemmed in large part from the company's claim that it had trained one of its recent models on a minuscule $5.6 million in computing costs and with only 2,000 or so of Nvidia's less-advanced H800 chips.

Nvidia saw its soaring value crater by $589 billion Monday as DeepSeek rocketed to the top of download charts, prompting President Donald Trump to call for U.S. industry to be "laser focused" on competing... But a closer look at DeepSeek reveals that its parent company deployed a large and sophisticated chip set in its supercomputer, leading experts to assess the total cost of the project as much higher than the relatively paltry sum that U.S. markets reacted to this week... Lennart Heim, an AI expert at Rand, said DeepSeek's evident access to [the earlier] supercomputer would have made it easier for the company to develop a more efficient model, requiring fewer chips.
That earlier project "suggests that DeepSeek had a major boost..." according to the article, "with technology comparable to that of the leading U.S. AI companies." And while DeepSeek claims it only spent $5.6 million to train one of its advanced models, "its parent company has said that building the earlier supercomputer had cost 1 billion yuan, or $139 million.") Yet the article also cites the latest insights Friday from chip investment company SemiAnalysis, summarizing their finding that DeepSeek "has spent more than half a billion dollars on GPUs, with total capital expenditures of almost $1.3 billion."
The article notes Thursday remarks by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that DeepSeek's energy-efficiency claims were "wildly overstated... This is a model at a capability level that we had quite some time ago." And Palmer Luckey called DeepSeek "legitimately impressive" on X but called the $5.6 million training cost figure "bogus" and said the Silicon Valley meltdown was "hysteria."

Even with these higher total costs in mind, experts say, U.S. companies are right to be concerned about DeepSeek upending the market. "We know two things for sure: DeepSeek is pricing their services very competitively, and second, the performance of their models is comparable to leading competitors," said Kai-Shen Huang, an AI expert at the Research Institute for Democracy, Society and Emerging Technology, a Taipei-based think tank. "I think DeepSeek's pricing strategy has the potential to disrupt the market globally...."

China's broader AI policy push has helped create an environment conducive for a company like DeepSeek to rise. Beijing announced an ambitious AI blueprint in 2017, with a goal to become a global AI leader by 2030 and promises of funding for universities and private enterprise. Local governments across the nation followed with their own programs to support AI.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/0517258/were-deepseeks-development-costs-much-higher-than-reported?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"A jury may never see the gun that authorities say was used to kill Blake Story last year," reports Cleveland.com.

"That's because Cleveland police used a facial recognition program — one that explicitly says its results are not admissible in court — to obtain a search warrant, according to court documents."

The search turned up what police say is the murder weapon in the suspect's home. But a Cuyahoga County judge tossed that evidence after siding with defense attorneys who argued that the search warrant affidavit was misleading and relied on inadmissible evidence. If an appeals court upholds the judge's ruling to suppress the evidence, prosecutors acknowledge their case is likely lost...

The company that produced the facial recognition report, Clearview AI, has been used in hundreds of law enforcement investigations throughout Ohio and has faced lawsuits over privacy violations.

Not only does Cleveland lack a policy governing the use of artificial intelligence, Ohio lawmakers also have failed to set standards for how police use the tool to investigate crimes. "It's the wild, wild west in Ohio," said Gary Daniels, a lobbyist for the American Civil Liberties Union. The lack of state regulation of how law enforcement uses advanced technologies — no laws similarly govern the use of drones or license plate readers — means it is essentially up to agencies how they use the tools.
The affidavit for the search warrant was signed by a 28-year police force veteran, according to the article — but it didn't disclose the use of Clearview's technology.
Clearview's report acknowledged their results were not admissible in court — but then provided the suspect's name, arrest record, Social Security number, according to the article, and "noted he was the most likely match for the person in the convenience store."

Thanks to tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30,335) for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/0431229/police-use-of-ai-facial-recognition-results-in-murder-case-being-tossed?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Инженеры из компании Red Hat предложили для включения в состав ядра Linux первый набор патчей с реализацией драйвера Nova. Драйвер рассчитан на использование с GPU NVIDIA, оснащёнными GSP-прошивками, которые используются начиная с серии NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2000 на базе микроархитектуры Turing. В подобных GPU операции инициализации и управления реализованы в прошивке и выполняются отдельным микроконтроллером GSP (GPU System Processor). Предполагается, что в долгосрочной перспективе Nova заменит собой драйвер Nouveau для GPU с поддержкой GSP.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62657

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: To cap off a day of product releases, OpenAI researchers, engineers, and executives, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, answered questions in a wide-ranging Reddit AMA on Friday. OpenAI the company finds itself in a bit of a precarious position. It's battling the perception that it's ceding ground in the AI race to Chinese companies like DeepSeek, which OpenAI alleges might've stolen its IP. The ChatGPT maker has been trying to shore up its relationship with Washington and simultaneously pursue an ambitious data center project, while reportedly laying groundwork for one of the largest financing rounds in history. Altman admitted that DeepSeek has lessened OpenAI's lead in AI, and he also said he believes OpenAI has been "on the wrong side of history" when it comes to open-sourcing its technologies. While OpenAI has open-sourced models in the past, the company has generally favored a proprietary, closed-source development approach.

"[I personally think we need to] figure out a different open source strategy," Altman said. "Not everyone at OpenAI shares this view, and it's also not our current highest priority [] We will produce better models [going forward], but we will maintain less of a lead than we did in previous years." In a follow-up reply, Kevin Weil, OpenAI's chief product officer, said that OpenAI is considering open-sourcing older models that aren't state-of-the-art anymore. "We'll definitely think about doing more of this," he said, without going into greater detail.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/0137256/sam-altman-openai-has-been-on-the-wrong-side-of-history-concerning-open-source?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Представлен выпуск свободного пакета для вёрстки документов Scribus 1.7.0. Пакет предоставляет средства для профессиональной верстки печатных материалов, включает инструменты для генерации PDF и поддерживает работу с раздельными цветовыми профилями, CMYK, плашечными цветами и ICC. Программа написана с использованием тулкита Qt и поставляется под лицензией GPLv2+. Готовые бинарные сборки подготовлены для Linux (AppImage), macOS и Windows.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62656

A recent video from retro tech YouTuber Clint "LGR" Basinger takes a deep dive into the history of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium, exploring how former Air Force pilot Jim Sachs transformed a lackluster Windows 95 screensaver into a 25-year digital phenomenon. PC Gamer reports: The story centers on Jim Sachs, a man with one of those "they don't make this type of guy anymore" life stories so common to '80s and '90s computing, one Sachs recounted to the website AmigaLove back in 2020. After a six-year career in the US Air Force flying C-141 Starlifters, Sachs taught himself programming and digital art and began creating games for Commodore 64 and Amiga computers. From his first game, Saucer Attack, to later efforts like Defender of the Crown or his large portfolio of promotional and commissioned pieces, Sach's pixel art remains gorgeous and impressive to this day, and he seems to be a bit of a legend among Commodore enthusiasts.

It's with this background in games and digital art that Sachs looked at Microsoft's simple aquarium-themed screensaver for Windows 95 and 98 and thought he could do better. "Microsoft had an aquarium that they gave away with Windows where it was just bitmaps of fish being dragged across the screen," Sachs told the Matt Chat podcast back in 2015. "And they had that for like, three or four years. And I thought, I've given them enough time, I'm taking them to market. I'm gonna do something which will just blow that away."

Using reference photographs of real aquariums -- Sachs thanked a specific pet shop that's still around in an early version of his website" -- Sachs created the 3D art by hand and programmed the screensaver in C++, releasing the initial version in July 2000. Even looking at it all these years later, the first iteration of the SereneScreen Marine Aquarium is pretty gorgeous, and it has the added charm of being such a distinctly Y2K, nostalgic throwback.

The standalone screensaver sold well, but then things came full circle with Microsoft licensing a version of the Marine Aquarium for the Windows XP Plus Pack and later standard releases of the OS. Since that time, the Marine Aquarium has continued to see new releases, and a section on the SereneScreen website keeps track of its various appearances in the background of movies and TV shows like Law and Order. Over on the SereneScreen website, you can purchase a real time, 3D-accelerated version of the Marine Aquarium for Mac, iOS, Android, and the original Windows. Echoing the Windows XP deal, Roku actually licensed this 3.0 version for its TVs, bringing it to a new generation of users.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/0129243/the-25-year-success-story-of-serenescreen?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Студент Корнеллского университета [ Далтон Лус ]( https://www.daltonluce.com ) представил открытый проект astroterm – карту звёздного неба в терминале. Исходный код программы написан на C и немного на Python и опубликован на GitHub под лицензией MIT.

Особенности:

🔭 выбор любой даты, времени и местоположения для исследования прошлых, настоящих или будущих небесных явлений
📐 просмотр Луны, звёзд и планет с максимальной точностью, которую позволяет графика терминала
🌘 точные фазы Луны в режиме реального времени
🌌 подробные формы созвездий
⚡ лёгкая и быстрая ASCII-графика

>>> [ ГитХаб проекта ]( https://github.com/da-luce/astroterm )

>>> [ новость на Хабре ]( https://habr.com/ru/news/875848/ )

>>> [ гифка с работой программы, которая не влезла на ЛОР из-за размера ]( https://github.com/da-luce/astroterm/blob/main/assets/SG_2025-01-02.gif )

https://www.linux.org.ru/news/multimedia/17868835

Калле Валло (Kalle Valo) – единственный сопровождающий разработчик драйверов беспроводных сетей в Linux – объявил о своём уходе с этой должности.

Помимо этого, он также покидает роли со-сопровождающего драйверов Qualcomm ATH12K, ATH11K, ATH10K и утилит Atheros ATH Generic Utilities.

И если поддержку Qualcomm ATH12K, ATH11K, ATH10K и утилит Atheros ATH продолжит Джефф Джонсон (Jeff Johnson), то на роль сопровождающего драйверов беспроводных сетей (drivers/net/wireless/) кандидатуры на данный момент нет.

https://www.linux.org.ru/news/linux-general/17868851

В кодовую базу, используемую для формирования весеннего релиза GNOME 48, принято изменение, переводящее среду рабочего стола на использование по умолчанию шрифта Adwaita Sans. С 2010 года в GNOME использовался шрифт Cantarell, потребность в замене которого возникла из-за стагнации разработки и проблем с сопровождением.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62655

Опубликован релиз Live-дистрибутива GParted Live 1.7.0, предназначенного для восстановления систем после сбоев и работы с дисковыми разделами при помощи редактора разделов GParted. Размер загрузочного образа - 588 МБ (x86_64). Дистрибутив основан на пакетной базе Debian Sid по состоянию на 31 января.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62654

Компания Google расширила возможности приложения Terminal, позволяющего запустить эмулятор терминала с доступом к полноценному Linux-окружению, выполняемому в виртуальной машине. В процессе разработки ветки Android 16 в Terminal добавлена поддержка запуска графических приложений, собранных для Linux.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62653

TOP10 VISITORS:

[1] 45.135.180.x point=223 web=0 up=18.1MB (76%) <--- yesterlink (9/hr)
[2] Facebook point=0 web=239 up=2.6MB (11%)
[3] 24.130.121.x point=17 web=1 up=1.4MB (5%) <--- spnet (1/hr)
[4] 217.114.158.x point=27 web=0 up=0.9MB (3%) <--- fox (1/hr)
[5] TikTok point=0 web=110 up=0.3MB (1%)
[6] Google point=1 web=102 up=0.3MB (1%) <--- Google
[7] 185.61.217.x point=0 web=1 up=35KB
[8] 77.220.194.x point=0 web=1 up=28KB
[9] 185.17.252.x point=5 web=0 up=23KB <--- 185.17.252.x
[10] 194.99.27.x point=0 web=1 up=12KB

TOTAL TRAFFIC: 23MB

Despite being removed from app stores and facing a potential U.S. ban, TikTok has regained nearly 90% of its user traffic, according to Cloudflare Radar. "DNS traffic for TikTok-related domains has continued to recover since service restoration, and is currently about 10% lower than pre-shutdown level," said David Belson, head of data insight at Cloudflare. CNBC reports: The data from Cloudflare shows that, for the most part, TikTok has managed to maintain the bulk of its users and creators in the U.S. despite going offline for about 14 hours and remaining off of the Apple or Google app stores.

As for its alternatives, Cloudflare's data shows a spike in traffic the day of the temporary ban, with levels remaining steadily higher in the following week. Traffic for alternatives began to grow a week ahead of the expected shutdown, driven by the increased popularity of RedNote, known as Xiaohongshu in China, Belson said.

But traffic to TikTok alternatives peaked on Jan. 19, the day TikTok returned online, he added. "DNS traffic fell rapidly once the shutdown ended, and has continued to slowly decline over the last week and a half," Belson said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/02/01/018238/tiktoks-traffic-bounces-back-despite-being-pulled-off-app-stores?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

После месяца разработки состоялся выпуск 1.16.0 высокоточного консольного научного калькулятора [ Numbat ]( https://numbat.dev ) , написанного на языке Rust и распространяемого по лицензии MIT и/или Apache 2.0.

Отличительные особенности Numbat:

• полная поддержка физических размерностей и единиц измерения;

• простой встроенный язык со статической типизацией;

• автодополнение имён функций, единиц измерения и переменных;

• поиск по истории ввода;

• и многое другое.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/17868612#cut ) )

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: In the first serious fallout from President Donald Trump's early actions against offshore wind power, oil and gas giant Shell is walking away from a major project off the coast of New Jersey. Shell told The Associated Press it is writing off the project, citing increased competition, delays and a changing market. "Naturally we also take regulatory context into consideration," spokesperson Natalie Gunnell said in an email.

Shell co-owns the large Atlantic Shores project, which has most of its permits and would generate enough power for 1 million homes if both of two phases were completed. That's enough for one-third of New Jersey households. It's unclear whether Shell's decision kills the project -- partner EDF-RE Offshore Development says it remains committed to Atlantic Shores. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order singling out offshore wind for contempt with a temporary halt on all lease sales in federal waters and a pause on approvals, permits and loans. Perhaps most of interest to Shell, the order directs administration officials to review existing offshore wind energy leases and identify any legal reasons to terminate them.

[...] The Biden administration approved plans to build the Atlantic Shores project in two phases in October, but construction has not begun. Oliver Metcalfe, head of wind research at BloombergNEF, said the partners are facing significant uncertainty about their lease, and other developers are watching what happens with Atlantic Shores closely. "We're in uncertain territory here," he added. [...] Robin Shaffer, president of Protect Our Coast NJ, said that without Shell's financial backing, it appears the project is "dead in the water." Shell is writing off a nearly $1 billion investment. It announced its decision on Thursday, as it reported a 16% decline in full-year earnings of $23.7 billion from $28.3 billion. Most of its business is oil and gas.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/2343230/shell-walks-away-from-major-new-jersey-offshore-wind-farm?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Associated Press: Federal officials on Thursday approved a new type of pain pill designed to eliminate the risks of addiction and overdose associated with opioid medications such as Vicodin and OxyContin. "It's the first new pharmaceutical approach to treating pain in more than 20 years, offering an alternative to opioids and over-the-counter medications such as ibuprofen and acetaminophen. But the medication's modest effectiveness and lengthy development process underscore the challenges of finding new ways to manage pain.

Studies in more than 870 patients with acute pain due to foot and abdominal surgeries showed Vertex's drug provided more relief than a dummy pill but didn't outperform a common opioid-acetaminophen combination pill. "It's not a slam dunk on effectiveness," said Michael Schuh of the Mayo Clinic, a pharmacist and pain medicine expert who was not involved in the research. "But it is a slam dunk in that it's a very different pathway and mechanism of action. So, I think that shows a lot promise." The new drug will carry a list price of $15.50 per pill, making it many times more expensive than comparable opioids, which are often available as generics for $1 or less. [...]

Opioids reduce pain by binding to receptors in the brain that receive nerve signals from different parts of the body. Those chemical interactions also give rise to opioids' addictive effects. Vertex's drug works differently, blocking proteins that trigger pain signals that are later sent to the brain. "In trying to develop medicines that don't have the addictive risks of opioid medicines, a key factor is working to block pain signaling before it gets to the brain," Vertex's Dr. David Altshuler, told The Associated Press last year. Commonly reported side effects with the drug were nausea, constipation, itching, rash and headache.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/2356254/fda-approves-drug-to-treat-pain-without-opioid-effects?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Google is enhancing Android 16's Linux Terminal app to support graphical Linux applications, so Android Authority decided to put it to the test by running Doom. From the report: The Terminal app first appeared in the Android 15 QPR2 beta as a developer option, and it still remains locked behind developer settings. Since its initial public release, Google pushed a few changes that fixed issues with the installation process and added a settings menu to resize the disk, forward ports, and backup the installation. However, the biggest changes the company has been working on, which include adding hardware acceleration support and a full graphical environment, have not been pushed to any public releases.

Thankfully, since Google is working on this feature in the open, it's possible to simply compile a build of AOSP with these changes added in. This gives us the opportunity to trial upcoming features of the Android Linux Terminal app before a public release. To demonstrate, we fired up the Linux Terminal on a Pixel 9 Pro, tapped a new button on the top right to enter the Display activity, and then ran the 'weston' command to open up a graphical environment. (Weston is a reference implementation of a Wayland compositor, a modern display server protocol.)

We also went ahead and enabled hardware acceleration beforehand as well as installed Chocolate Doom, a source port of Doom, to see if it would run. Doom did run, as you can see below. It ran well, which is no surprise considering Doom can run on literal potatoes. There wasn't any audio because an audio server isn't available yet, but audio support is something that Google is still working on.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/2317212/android-16s-linux-terminal-runs-doom?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, a civilian drone collided with a Canadian CL-415 firefighting plane combating the Palisades Fire, causing damage that grounded the aircraft and temporarily halted all aerial firefighting operations. Federal and state officials have since identified the operator of that drone as Peter Tripp Akemann of Culver City, who has agreed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor, pay a fine and complete community service. Prosecutors said he could still face up to a year in federal prison. The Los Angeles Times reports: The drone, which authorities say was flying in restricted airspace on Jan. 9, put a fist-sized hole in the left wing of a Super Scooper -- a massive fixed-wing plane that can drop large amounts of water onto a fire. The collision knocked the plane out of commission for about five days and destroyed the drone.

"Like a lot of individuals, he was curious about what was happening in that area," acting U.S. Atty. Joseph T. McNally said on Friday. "The problem with that... is with the amount of firefighting planes you have in that area dropping so they can get water in the Pacific Ocean it interferes with those operations. It's not the time to fly drones anytime that we have these emergencies in Southern California."

As part of the plea agreement, Akemann agreed to pay full restitution to the government of Quebec, Canada, which supplied the plane, and the company that repaired the plane. It cost at least $65,169 to fix the aircraft, prosecutors said. Akemann also agreed to complete 150 hours of community service in support of wildfire relief efforts.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/237207/drone-pilot-to-plead-guilty-in-collision-that-grounded-aircraft-fighting-palisades-fire?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VICE News: EVA AI, a platform allowing you to create and connect with your own AI partner, recently surveyed 2,000 men and found that 8 in 10 would consider marrying an AI girlfriend if it were legal. Not only that, but 83% of men also believe they could form a deep emotional bond with an AI girlfriend. What's even scarier is that a whopping 78% of men surveyed said they would consider creating a replica of their ex, and three-quarters would duplicate their current partner to create a "polished" version of them. "AI companionship allows people to be their authentic selves without fear of judgment," said Cale Jones, head of community growth at EVA AI. "It creates a safe space to explore thoughts, emotions, and desires that might feel too vulnerable to share in real life. The benefits extend far beyond the virtual world: one EVA AI user discovered her bisexuality through this platform -- something she previously felt too insecure to explore in real life."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/2248242/most-men-would-marry-their-ai-girlfriends-if-it-were-legal?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Meta is in talks to move its incorporation from Delaware to Texas or other states. Reuters reports: The social media giant has talked to Texas officials about the potential changes, WSJ said, adding that the discussions predate President Donald Trump's new administration. The paperwork change would not relocate its corporate headquarters.

A Meta spokesperson said that it does not plan on shifting its corporate headquarters out of Menlo Park, California, but declined to comment on reincorporation when contacted by Reuters. Texas is perceived by some businesses as having a more favorable legal and regulatory environment, particularly in areas such as taxation and corporate governance, which can be attractive to companies looking to cut costs and streamline operations.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/2243200/meta-in-talks-to-reincorporate-in-texas-or-another-state-exit-delaware?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The Swiss canton ("state") of Basel-Stadt fixed a tax flyer typo by buying the incorrect domain and setting up a redirect, avoiding a $100,000 reprint cost. TechCrunch reports: As Swiss news outlet SRF reports, the Basel tax administration printed fliers that were supposed to include a URL to file taxes online. However, the Swiss country code top-level domain (ccTLD) of ".ch" was omitted, leaving just the Basel-Stadt suffix of ".bs" -- which just happens to be the ccTLD of the Bahamas.

A spokesperson for Basel-Stadt's department of finance told SRF that it would cost the equivalent of around $100,000 to print and send out a batch of new flyers, so it was a no-brainer to fork out $1,000 to administer the new domain instead.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/2237225/swiss-tax-authority-forced-to-buy-bahamas-domain-name-after-url-typo?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: What exactly is wrong with the batteries in some of Google's Pixel 4a phones still out there? Google has not really said. Now that many Pixel 4a owners are experiencing drastically reduced battery life after an uncommon update for an end-of-life phone, they are facing a strange array of options with no path back to the phone they had.

Google's "Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program," announced in early January, told owners that an automatic update would, for some "Impacted Devices," reduce their battery's runtime and charging performance. "Impacted" customers could choose, within one year's time, between three "appeasement" options: sending in the phone for a battery replacement, getting $50 or the equivalent in their location, or receiving $100 in credit in the Google Store toward a new Pixel phone. No safety or hazard issue was mentioned in the support document.

Google did not explain why only certain devices were affected, but Hector Martin -- of Asahi Linux on Apple silicon, open source Kinect drivers, and other fame -- took apart the update's binary kernel and has some guesses. Martin points out that the updated Pixel 4a kernel has these interesting characteristics:
- It seems to have been built by a Google engineer "on their personal machine, not the proper buildsystem." -- There is no source provided, as would normally be required of a Linux kernel build, though it may only need to be provided on request under the GNU General Public License. - The maximum charge voltage of certain battery profiles changes from 4.44 volts to 3.95, which would mean batteries cannot charge to anywhere near their former potential. - There are two main battery profiles, with distinct "ATL" and "LSN" markers; Martin suggests they relate to Amperex Technology Limited and Lishen, manufacturers of battery cells. - LSN-tagged batteries assigned the "debug" profile can see capacity reduced from 3,080 milliamp hours (mAh) to 1,539 mAh. The big question is why Google pushed an automatic update to a phone from 2020. "No news or community reports have surfaced yet of Pixel 4a devices causing fires, or even simply failing to function, after four years," writes Ars' Kevin Purdy. "It's an automatic update with a strong fix, but for what?"

Google's support page only states that the update will "improve the stability of their battery's performance."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/2220211/google-pixel-4as-ruinous-battery-performance-update-is-a-bewildering-mess?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple has canceled a project to build advanced augmented reality glasses that would pair with its devices, Bloomberg reported Friday, marking the latest setback in its effort to create a headset that appeals to typical consumers. From the report: The company shuttered the program this week, according to people with knowledge of the move. The now-canceled product would have looked like normal glasses but include built-in displays and require a connection to a Mac, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work wasn't public.

The project had been seen as a potential way forward after the weak introduction of the Apple Vision Pro, a $3,499 model that was too cumbersome and pricey to catch on with consumers. The hope was to produce something that everyday users could embrace, but finding the right technology -- at the right cost -- has proven to be a challenge.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/2011240/apple-scraps-work-on-mac-connected-augmented-reality-glasses?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Dell is the latest tech company to announce it's ending its hybrid and remote work policy. From a report: Starting March 3rd, Dell employees will have to show up in person five days a week.

In an email obtained by Business Insider, CEO Michael Dell writes that 'all hybrid and remote team members who live near a Dell office will work in the office five days a week. We are retiring the hybrid policy effective that day.'

"What we're finding is that for all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction. A thirty second conversation can replace an email back-and-forth that goes on for hours or even days," Dell writes.

Despite this mandate, Dell also continues to sell remote work solutions, noting that remote work offers "benefits such as flexibility, reduced commute times, and cost savings for employees, while employers can access a broader talent pool, reduce overhead costs, and increase productivity."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/1944207/dell-is-making-everyone-return-to-office-too?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Google users have discovered that adding curse words to search queries disables the company's AI-powered overview feature. While Google's Gemini AI system typically avoids profanity, inserting expletives into search terms bypasses AI summaries and delivers traditional web results instead. Users can also disable AI overviews by adding "-ai" or other text strings after a minus sign to their queries.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/1929233/cursing-disables-googles-ai-overviews?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

OpenAI today launched o3-mini, a specialized AI reasoning model designed for STEM tasks that offers faster processing at lower costs compared to its predecessor o1-mini. The model, priced at $1.10 per million cached input tokens and $4.40 per million output tokens, performs fact-checking before delivering results to reduce errors in technical domains like physics and programming, the Microsoft-backed startup said.

OpenAI claims that its tests showed o3-mini made 39% fewer major mistakes than o1-mini on complex problems while delivering responses 24% faster. The model will be available through ChatGPT with varying access levels -- free users get basic access while premium subscribers receive higher query limits and reasoning capabilities.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/1916254/openais-o3-mini-faster-cheaper-ai-that-fact-checks-itself?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: At first blush, stock trading this week is hardly a paragon of the market-efficiency theory, an oft-romanticized idea in Economics 101. After all, big equity gauges plunged on Monday, spurred by fears of an AI model released a week earlier, before swiftly rebounding.
A fresh academic paper suggests the rise of passive investing may be fueling these kind of fragile market moves.

According to a study to be published in the prestigious American Economic Review, evidence is building that active managers are slow to scoop up stocks en masse when prices move away from their intrinsic worth. Thanks to this lethargic trading behavior and the relentless boom in benchmark-tracking index funds, the impact of each trade on prices gets amplified, explaining how sell orders, like on Monday perhaps, can induce broader equity gyrations.ÂAs a result, the financial landscape is proving less dynamic and more volatile in the era of Big Passive, according to authors at the UCLA Anderson School of Management, the Stockholm School of Economics and the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/1656220/magical-efficient-market-theory-rebuked-in-era-of-passive-investing?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

More than 8,000 of the world's most-cited scientists have at least one retraction, according to a database that links retractions to top-cited papers. From a report: An analysis of the database, published in PLOS Biology on 30 January, attempts to map the scale of retractions and understand how they manifest. "Not every retraction is a sign of misconduct," says John Ioannidis, an epidemiologist at Stanford University in California, who led the study. "But it is important to have a bird's eye view, across all scientific fields, [of] people who are most influential in science."

Retracted papers had a higher number of self-citations than did non-retracted papers. And papers with higher co-authorship numbers were more likely to be retracted than those with fewer co-authors. [...] In the study, the authors split the most-cited scientists into two groups. The first featured the 217,097 authors who were among the top 2% most-cited in their fields over their careers. The second group comprised the 223,152 scientists who made up the top 2% for citation impact in 2023, the most recent year for which there were data. The authors found that 8,747 (4%) of the most highly cited researchers in 2023 had at least one retraction during their career, as did 7,083 (3.3%) of the researchers who were most-cited over their careers.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/1540254/thousands-of-highly-cited-scientists-have-at-least-one-retraction?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

DeepSeek has emerged as the leading open-source AI model developer, surpassing Meta's Llama and Mistral, after releasing its latest model V3 with breakthrough cost efficiencies, research and consultancy firm SemiAnalysis reported on Friday.

The Chinese startup, backed by hedge fund High-Flyer, reached this milestone through innovations in Multi-head Latent Attention technology, which cut inference costs by 93.3% versus standard methods. Despite offering services below cost to gain market share, its performance matches or exceeds OpenAI's GPT-4.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/1354218/deepseek-outstrips-meta-and-mistral-to-lead-open-source-ai-race?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

11 и 22 января, после более полугода разработки, выпущены версии 5.2.0 и 5.2.1 двухпанельного менеджера файлов [ Worker ]( http://boomerangsworld.de/cms/worker/index.html ) , написанного на языке C++ с использованием собственной GUI-библиотеки (только X11), и распространяемого по лицензии GNU GPL 2.

В Worker есть огромное количество настроек, как внешнего вида, так и изменения функциональности, которая может быть расширена с помощью встроенного интерпретатора языка Lua.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/17868185#cut ) )

A study has found microplastic and nanoplastic pollution to be significantly higher in placentas from premature births than in those from full-term births. From a report: The levels were much higher than previously detected in blood, suggesting the tiny plastic particles were accumulating in the placenta. But the higher average levels found in the shorter pregnancies were a "big surprise" for the researchers, as longer terms could be expected to lead to more accumulation.

Preterm birth is the leading cause of infant death worldwide, and the reasons for about two-thirds of all preterm births were unknown, said Dr Enrico Barrozo, of Baylor College of Medicine in Texas, US. The established link between air pollution and millions of premature births had spurred the research team to investigate plastic pollution.

The new study only demonstrates an association between microplastics and premature births. Further research is needed in cell cultures and animal models to determine if the link is causal. Microplastics are known to cause inflammation in human cells, and inflammation is one of the factors that prompts the start of labour.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/1433248/microplastics-in-placentas-linked-to-premature-births-study-suggests?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Taiwan's digital ministry said on Friday that government departments should not use Chinese startup DeepSeek's artificial intelligence (AI) service, saying that as the product is from China it represents a security concern.

Democratically-governed Taiwan has long been wary of Chinese tech given Beijing's sovereignty claims over the island and its military and political threats against the government in Taipei. In a statement, Taiwan's Ministry of Digital Affairs said that government departments are not allowed to use DeepSeek's AI service to "prevent information security risks".

"DeepSeek's AI service is a Chinese product, and its operation involves cross-border transmission and information leakage and other information security concerns, and is a product that jeopardises the country's information security," the ministry said.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/1513252/taiwan-says-government-departments-should-not-use-deepseek-citing-security-concerns?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Apple has filed an emergency motion [PDF] for a stay in the Google antitrust trial, warning that it faces "clear and substantial irreparable harm" if barred from participating in the case's remedies phase. The motion, filed on January 30, 2025, comes after Judge Amit Mehta denied Apple's request for limited intervention earlier in the week.

Apple -- which makes more than $20 billion a year from Google to use the Android-maker's search engine on Safari -- argues that the U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) proposed remedy -- which includes a prohibition on "any contract between Google and Apple in which there would be anything exchanged of value" --would prevent it from negotiating agreements that benefit millions of users. Without the ability to fully participate, Apple contends it will be left as a "mere spectator" while the government pursues restrictions that directly impact its business interests.

The company asserts that intervention is necessary to develop evidence, participate in discovery, and cross-examine witnesses regarding its market role and incentives. Apple also seeks access to trial records while its appeal is pending, including witness lists, depositions, and discovery materials, to ensure it can respond effectively if granted party status.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://apple.slashdot.org/story/25/01/31/153223/apple-battles-for-role-in-google-antitrust-trial-warning-of-serious-risks?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.