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Comment Re:Fuck the airlines (Score 1) 338

If they can make money with you taking a multiple-hop flight, they can make a bit more from you skipping the last leg because they use a tiny bit less fuel on account of not having to haul your butt through the sky.

What really ought to result from this is a serious investigation into the airlines for the implicit over-charging on shorter flights.

Yeah, you would think. However, the ticket charges result from a complex set of agreements between airlines that depends on all legs of a ticket being used as written. If the entire ticket is on one carrier there isn't much impact on the carrier's finances but there usually isn't any price advantage to the customer either. The sticky issue is when a ticket is fulfilled by multiple carriers.

Back in the 1980's I used to fly to Europe from Canada twice a month. I would buy this round-trip ticket that originated in Cyprus but I would start in my actual European destination. At the time there was a terrific exchange rate between Canadian and Cypriot currencies (from my point of view) plus the route was cheaper than a round-trip to my actual destination. The ticket was fulfilled by three carriers and the initial/final, virtual, carrier got fucked because they never collected the stubs.

The good old days: currency exchange leverage, skips, and they would give upgrades to business class at the boarding desk if you just asked.

Until the 1970's you could give your unused stubs to someone else to fly on them but increased travel security killed that. Nobody used to care that the passenger ID matched the travel ticket.

Skip tickets were usually ignored by airline agents who had enough to do without trying to enforce arcane fare rules. Computer systems haven't been much help because they have had enough trouble doing basic tasks let alone reporting in real time on skips. Skip identification and reporting also depends on information sharing between the carriers and getting their systems to talk to each other.

I guess by now the airlines have had enough time to get their IT shit together.

Submission + - JWST capable of detecting potential biosignatures in exoplanets (universetoday.com) 2

Submitted by Baron_Yam
Baron_Yam writes: Perhaps it can't do it for an actual Earth-like world, but with a handful of transit observations of an atmosphere-bearing planet orbiting a red dwarf, JWST should be able to collect enough information to determine if some basic compounds exist that are common to life. Sadly, not unique — there's overlap with non-biological processes — but it's still a good proof of concept for future telescopes that will be able to use the same method of examining light that has passed through a small rocky world's atmosphere. This would be a significant improvement over successes to date using gas giants with very dense atmospheres.

Submission + - Coding Promoters Say AI is No Excuse for Not Learning to Code

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Y Combinator founder Paul Graham last week took to Twitter to lament those who use AI or other excuses for not learning to code. "A generation ago some people were saying there was no point in learning to program because all the programming jobs would be outsourced to India," Graham wrote. "Now they're saying you don't need to because AI will do it all. If you don't want to learn to program, you can always find a reason."

BloomTech Coding Bootcamp CEO Austen Allred this week doubled-down on Graham's tweet, offering his own history of excuses people have made for not learning to code. Reminiscent of the FTX Superbowl commercial in which Larry David portrayed a schmuck who kept saying I-don't-think-so to opportunities, Allred's tweet reads:

"Don't learn to code. Soon GUIs will do it all for you." — 1985

"Don't learn to code. Soon that will all be done offshore for pennies." — 2003

"Don't learn to code. Soon nocode tools will do it all for you." — 2015

"Don't learn to code. Soon AI will do it all for you." — 2023

Among the many retweeting Allred's cautionary message was Code.org, the tech-backed nonprofit that aims to make computer science a high school graduation requirement by 2030, whose CEO also replied to Graham with a reassuring tweet suggesting people's days of being able to avoid learning to code will soon be over. "Now that 27 states require that every school must teach computer science, and 7 states require a CS course to graduate high school," explained Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi, "the argument is basically behind us. Computer science won."

Submission + - Apple Faces Trademark Battle With Huawei to Use 'Vision Pro' Name in China (macrumors.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Apple may be forced to change the name of its new mixed reality headset in China unless it can come to an agreement with Huawei, which already owns the "Vision Pro" trademark in the country. Originally spotted by MyDrivers, the trademark was originally granted to Huawei on May 16, 2019, and gives the company exclusive rights to its use in China from November 28, 2021 to November 27, 2031. Huawei actively uses the trademark in China, and offers a number of products under the Vision name, including smart TVs and smart glasses. If Apple intends to sell its headset in China and call it Vision Pro, it may have to enter into negotiations with Huawei to release the trademark for a price.

Submission + - Slashdot has broken user accounts that contain spaces in the username 6

Submitted by throwaway18
throwaway18 writes: It appears that slashdot user accounts with spaces in the username are currently broken.

The user profiles says "The user you requested does not exist, no matter how much you wish this might be the case."

There are reports that those users can't log in.

Submission + - AI System Devises First Optimizations To Sorting Code In Over a Decade (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Anyone who has taken a basic computer science class has undoubtedly spent time devising a sorting algorithm—code that will take an unordered list of items and put them in ascending or descending order. It's an interesting challenge because there are so many ways of doing it and because people have spent a lot of time figuring out how to do this sorting as efficiently as possible. Sorting is so basic that algorithms are built into most standard libraries for programming languages. And, in the case of the C++ library used with the LLVM compiler, the code hasn't been touched in over a decade.

But Google's DeepMind AI group has now developed a reinforcement learning tool that can develop extremely optimized algorithms without first being trained on human code examples. The trick was to set it up to treat programming as a game. [...] The AlphaDev system developed x86 assembly algorithms that treated the latency of the code as a score and tried to minimize that score while ensuring that the code ran to completion without errors. Through reinforcement learning, AlphaDev gradually develops the ability to write tight, highly efficient code. [...]

Since AlphaDev did produce more efficient code, the team wanted to get these incorporated back into the LLVM standard C++ library. The problem here is that the code was in assembly rather than C++. So, they had to work backward and figure out the C++ code that would produce the same assembly. Once that was done, the code was incorporated into the LLVM toolchain—the first time some of the code had been modified in over a decade. As a result, the researchers estimate that AlphaDev's code is now executed trillions of times a day.

Submission + - Big Tech Isn't Prepared for A.I.'s Next Chapter - Open source (slate.com)

Submitted by mrflash818
mrflash818 writes: "there are many open-source models to choose from. Alpaca, Cerebras-GPT, Dolly, HuggingChat, and StableLM have all been released in the past few months. Most of them are built on top of LLaMA, but some have other pedigrees. More are on their way"

Submission + - Supreme Court Declines To Hear Bid To Sue Reddit Over Child Porn (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to hear a bid by child pornography victims to overcome a legal shield for internet companies in a case involving a lawsuit accusing Reddit Inc of violating federal law by failing to rid the discussion website of this illegal content. The justices turned away the appeal of a lower court's decision to dismiss the proposed class action lawsuit on the grounds that Reddit was shielded by a U.S. statute called Section 230, which safeguards internet companies from lawsuits for content posted by users but has an exception for claims involving child sex trafficking. The Supreme Court on May 19 sidestepped an opportunity to narrow the scope of Section 230 immunity in a separate case.

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 protects "interactive computer services" by ensuring they cannot be treated as the "publisher or speaker" of information provided by users. The Reddit case explored the scope of a 2018 amendment to Section 230 called the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which allows lawsuits against internet companies if the underlying claim involves child sex trafficking. Reddit allows users to post content that is moderated by other users in forums called subreddits. The case centers on sexually explicit images and videos of children posted to such forums by users. The plaintiffs — the parents of minors and a former minor who were the subjects of the images — sued Reddit in 2021 in federal court in California, seeking monetary damages. The plaintiffs accused Reddit of doing too little to remove or prevent child pornography and of financially benefiting from the illegal posts through advertising in violation of a federal child sex trafficking law.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2022 concluded that in order for the exception under FOSTA to apply, plaintiffs must show that an internet company "knowingly benefited" from the sex trafficking through its own conduct. Instead, the 9th Circuit concluded, the allegations "suggest only that Reddit 'turned a blind eye' to the unlawful content posted on its platform, not that it actively participated in sex trafficking." Reddit said in court papers that it works hard to find and prevent the sharing of child sexual exploitation materials on its platform, giving all users the ability to flag posts and using dedicated teams to remove illegal content.

Submission + - Jeffrey Epstein Threatened Bill Gates Over His Affair With Russian Bridge Player (wsj.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Jeffrey Epstein discovered that Bill Gates had an affair with a Russian bridge player and later appeared to use his knowledge to threaten one of the world’s richest men, according to people familiar with the matter.

The Microsoft co-founder met the woman around 2010, when she was in her 20s. Epstein met her in 2013 and later paid for her to attend software coding school. In 2017, Epstein emailed Gates and asked to be reimbursed for the cost of the course, according to the people familiar with the matter.

The email came after the convicted sex offender had struggled and failed to persuade Gates to participate in a multibillion-dollar charitable fund that Epstein tried to establish with JPMorgan Chase. The implication behind the message, according to people who have viewed it, was that Epstein could reveal the affair if Gates didn’t keep up an association between the two men.

“Mr. Gates met with Epstein solely for philanthropic purposes. Having failed repeatedly to draw Mr. Gates beyond these matters, Epstein tried unsuccessfully to leverage a past relationship to threaten Mr. Gates,” said a spokeswoman for Gates.

Submission + - SPAM: WhatsApp has announced New privacy feature Chat Lock

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: WhatsApp's latest privacy feature ensures the security of sensitive conversations by locking them and preventing notifications from revealing their presence. Keep your confidential chats private and secure with this new update.

WhatsApp has announced a new privacy feature called "Chat Lock," which allows users to lock specific conversations for added privacy. This feature is especially useful for users who share their phones with family members or friends and want to avoid potentially awkward situations if someone else is holding their phone when a sensitive chat arrives.

To use the Chat Lock feature, users can simply tap on the name of a one-on-one or group chat and select the lock option. This places the chat in a specialized folder that is only accessible via biometrics (such as a fingerprint or face scan) or by entering a current password. Once a chat is locked, any references to it will automatically be hidden from the notifications feed.

This feature is a great addition for WhatsApp users who value their privacy. It allows for more control over who can access certain conversations, and gives users the peace of mind that their sensitive chats are hidden from prying eyes.

WhatsApp has plans to roll out even more features for Chat Lock, including the ability to create custom passwords for each chat and the ability to lock chats across multiple devices. Additionally, users can lock WhatsApp completely behind biometric authentication for added security.

Parent company Meta has been working hard to make WhatsApp a safer and more reliable messaging app. Recently, they've added a verification system to hinder scammers and more options for dealing with disappearing messages.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Microsoft Is Scanning the Inside of Password-Protected Zip Files For Malware (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft cloud services are scanning for malware by peeking inside users’ zip files, even when they’re protected by a password, several users reported on Mastodon on Monday. Compressing file contents into archived zip files has long been a tactic threat actors use to conceal malware spreading through email or downloads. Eventually, some threat actors adapted by protecting their malicious zip files with a password the end user must type when converting the file back to its original form. Microsoft is one-upping this move by attempting to bypass password protection in zip files and, when successful, scanning them for malicious code.

While analysis of password-protected in Microsoft cloud environments is well-known to some people, it came as a surprise to Andrew Brandt. The security researcher has long archived malware inside password-protected zip files before exchanging them with other researchers through SharePoint. On Monday, he took to Mastodon to report that the Microsoft collaboration tool had recently flagged a zip file, which had been protected with the password “infected.” "While I totally understand doing this for anyone other than a malware analyst, this kind of nosy, get-inside-your-business way of handling this is going to become a big problem for people like me who need to send their colleagues malware samples,” Brandt wrote. “The available space to do this just keeps shrinking and it will impact the ability of malware researchers to do their jobs.”

Fellow researcher Kevin Beaumont joined the discussion to say that Microsoft has multiple methods for scanning the contents of password-protected zip files and uses them not just on files stored in SharePoint but all its 365 cloud services. One way is to extract any possible passwords from the bodies of email or the name of the file itself. Another is by testing the file to see if it’s protected with one of the passwords contained in a list. “If you mail yourself something and type something like 'ZIP password is Soph0s', ZIP up EICAR and ZIP password it with Soph0s, it'll find (the) password, extract and find (and feed MS detection),” he wrote.

Submission + - Twitter censors posts in Turkey elections (cbsnews.com) 1

Submitted by quonset
quonset writes: One day before the presidential election in Turkey, Twitter asceded to a Turkish government demand to restrict the accounts of a man who has criticized Erdogan's regime, and an investigative reporter who had been documeting corruption in the Erdogan government.

"In response to legal process and to ensure Twitter remains available to the people of Turkey, we have taken action to restrict access to some content in Turkey today," Twitter's Global Government Affairs department tweeted on Saturday.

Critics say the move amounts to Twitter capitulating to pressure from the government of incumbent President Recep Tayyip Erdoan, who failed to secure a majority of the vote but said he believes he can still win the race in a runoff election, Turkish daily Turkish Minute reported.

For his part, Elon Musk responded:

"The choice is have Twitter throttled in its entirety or limit access to some tweets. Which one do you want?"

It should be noted, prior to Musk purchasing Twiiter, he claimed, without evidence, the FBI paid Twitter to censor stories leading up to the presidential election, saying this was government interference, when the reality was the government warned Twitter about false and misleading posts leading up to the presidential election.

Submission + - Gambling Firm Allegedly Paid Blogs To Link New Members To Its Online Games (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: One of the UK’s leading gambling brands allegedly paid blogs advising new mothers to recommend its online casino games and link to its website, in a tactic that has been condemned as “predatory” by leading mental health and addiction experts. Coral struck deals with parenting bloggers to embed links in posts offering tips, including on how to relieve the stress of caring for a new baby. One post, ostensibly about baby food recipes, said: “If as a mum you can’t leave the house, then why not consider bingo online? “You can click here to play Bingo online at Coral – this momentary break from childcare can prove beneficial.”

The Advertising Standards Authority’s (ASA) guidelines state that gambling adverts must not be “socially irresponsible," including presenting betting as a way to relieve loneliness or depression. Another parenting blog recommended “opulent games of online roulette that are easy to learn and can provide some handy winnings too." The ASA guidelines also state that gambling must not be presented as a “solution to financial concerns." A further three parenting blogs posted parenting articles that also contained segments recommending online casino or bingo and linking to the Coral website. A source familiar with the arrangements said Coral had paid the bloggers to include the links.

Entain, which owns Coral, said the articles including links to the Coral website had been posted between 2014 and 2016, before it bought Ladbrokes Coral in 2018. On Tuesday, the company said it would try to get them taken down as soon as possible, although they remained live on Sunday. The source, who used to work for a company that arranged such deals with bloggers, said Coral staff had read the articles and signed them off before publication. [...] Only one of the blog posts disclosed that links contained in the article were the result of a sponsorship or affiliate marketing arrangement. The Guardian has chosen not to name the blogs because the authors could not be reached for comment. The source said the practice was chiefly aimed at manipulating Google’s search results by creating an association between women and online casino and bingo games.

Submission + - Anti-Piracy Outfit Wipes ACE's 'Watch Legally' Page From Google (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: ACE, the world's leading anti-piracy coalition, is facing an unexpected setback after Google removed a page that advises 'pirates' where they can watch content legally. The removal is the result of an erroneous takedown notice from a competing anti-piracy organization, and was likely triggered by an ACE domain name seizure. [...] After the “Watch Legally” page was removed from Google search, visitors see the following note [here] at the bottom of the results.

In response to a recent takedown notice, Google removed ACE’s “Watch Legally” page for alleged copyright infringement. This action was taken at the behest of Indian anti-piracy outfit AiPlex. The ACE page was repeatedly flagged by AiPlex in recent weeks. In this notice, for example, it’s accused of distributing a pirated copy of the film ‘Virgin Bhanupriya,’ together with sites such as foumovies.pw, afilmyhit.cafe, and yomovies.bid. Why AiPlex flagged a page that’s designed to drive traffic to legal services is unclear.

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