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Submission + - There Are Signs of a Massive AI Backlash (futurism.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: The public outrage over the tech industry’s obsession with AI is starting to boil over — and the pitchforks are coming out.

Most recently, a man allegedly lobbed a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house. Days earlier, a councilman in Indianapolis said that somebody had fired a dozen bullets at his house, with a handwritten note reading “No Data Centers” left on his doorstep.

A similar story is playing out across swathes of rural America, with small towns continuing a years-long effort to keep environmentally damaging data centers that put a huge strain on water availability and the power grid out of their communities.

Earlier this week, voters in a small town in Missouri led a revolt, firing half of their city council over a recently-approved $6 billion data center deal.

Submission + - Hosting.com launches AI application hosting platform (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: AI tools have made it almost trivial to build applications, but deploying them safely is still very much a bottleneck. Hosting.com is trying to close that gap with a new platform that combines AI-assisted development, hosting, and built-in security into a single environment. It leans on Cloudflare Enterprise for CDN performance, AMD EPYC for compute, and Nova by WebPros for the development side, with support for apps created in tools like Cursor and Windsurf.

The pitch is convenience, especially for newer builders who can now generate code but may not fully understand how to run it in production. That raises an obvious question. Does bundling everything into one platform actually make things safer, or does it just make it easier to deploy questionable code faster? Either way, as more non-traditional developers start shipping AI-generated apps, platforms like this are likely to become more common.

Submission + - Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft's Cloud Was "a Pile of Shit." (propublica.org)

Submitted by madbrain
madbrain writes: Federal Cyber Experts Thought Microsoft’s Cloud Was “a Pile of Shit.” They approved it anyway.

To move federal agencies to the cloud, the government created a program known as FedRAMP, whose job was to ensure the security of new technology.

FedRAMP first raised questions about Microsoft's Government Community Cloud High s security in 2020 and asked Microsoft to provide detailed diagrams explaining its encryption practices. But when the company produced what FedRAMP considered to be only partial information in fits and starts, program officials did not reject Microsoft’s application. Instead, they repeatedly pulled punches and allowed the review to drag out for the better part of five years. And because federal agencies were allowed to deploy the product during the review, GCC High spread across the government as well as the defense industry. By late 2024, FedRAMP reviewers concluded that they had little choice but to authorize the technology — not because their questions had been answered or their review was complete, but largely on the grounds that Microsoft’s product was already being used across Washington.

Submission + - EPA to Kill Off Stop-Start Systems (caranddriver.com) 2

Submitted by sinij
sinij writes:

Out of all of the features that come installed in modern vehicles, automatic stop-start technology ranks right near the bottom of the list for most buyers. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin has been open about his disdain for the ostensibly fuel-saving setup, going as far as to say he would eliminate it.

I absolutely hate Start-Stop systems, specifically shopped for a car without one. More so, the only reason it exists is because having it produced mileage credit. Yes, not the actual gas savings, but a credit on a test. In actual use, the start-stop system does not produce measurable fuel savings. This is because in circumstances where people actual idle — warmup in the winter, AC when waiting in the car in the extreme heat, etc. this system would not be active.

Submission + - Gallup will no longer track presidential approval ratings after nearly 90 years (usatoday.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Gallup will soon no longer measure presidential approval, the analytics firm confirmed on Feb. 11.

Founded by George Gallup in 1935, the Washington, DC-based management company began tracking the president's job performance 88 years ago. A statistician and founder of the American Institute of Public Opinion, Gallup first sent pollsters across the United States during the Depression era to ask people whether they approved or disapproved of how the nation's commander-in-chief was handling his job.

Starting in 2026, the firm told USA TODAY, Gallup will no longer publish "favorability ratings of political figures," a decision it said "reflects an evolution in how Gallup focuses its public research and thought leadership."

The change is part of "a broader, ongoing effort to align all of Gallup’s public work with its mission," the company wrote. Gallup said the ratings are now "widely produced, aggregated and interpreted, and no longer represent an area where Gallup can make its most distinctive contribution." The company wrote: "Our commitment is to long-term, methodologically sound research on issues and conditions that shape people’s lives."

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

Submission + - Apple rug-pulls security update 18.7.5 to force users onto 26.3 (apple.com)

Submitted by sinkskinkshrieks
sinkskinkshrieks writes: In a premature surprise where 2 major versions of OSes were traditionally supported until the autumn refresh, Apple unilaterally, quietly stopped supporting 18.7.4 and later on devices such as iPad Pro (M4) and (M5). This is because users hate macOS/iOS/iPadOS 26 redesign that breaks performance, usability, and functionality and Apple is forcing a Hobson's choice on users to pick between security and usability.

Comment I get it (Score 1) 54

by Wolfrider (#65959770) Attached to: DuckDuckGo Users Vote Overwhelmingly Against AI Features

I'm not a fan of "AI" in general, but it has its uses.

Brave search supplemented with AI has proven helpful to me in 90%+ of cases.

However, anyone smart enough to default to DDG is smart enough to want a choice of NO AI in their search results.

Pretty much everyone else just defaults to Google search, and gets spied on.

I've taken to running a small ollama model locally under proxmox. It's actually rather interesting to talk to. But it still hallucinates when I ask it to write a short bash script to keep only the last 30 days of APFS snapshots.

I think the current LLM is an evolutionary dead-end. Maybe quantum-based AI will do better eventually.

Comment Re:But (Score 1) 88

> MS can no longer be trusted. With anything.

This has been the case for years. The last MS OS that was usable/fast / somewhat trustable was Win7 Pro, and it's been EOL for some years now.

Everything after it is just boiling the frog.

It's astonishing to me that people have put up with the outright abuse for so long, the end of the line for the masses was only reached when Win10 went EOL - and the egregious hardware requirements for the broken Win11 spyware shitshow were too much. That's what really sparked interest in a Linux desktop.

Comment Powershell makes my head ache (Score 1) 32

by Wolfrider (#65959464) Attached to: PowerShell Architect Retires After Decades At the Prompt

Don't get me wrong, a few years ago I learned it from the ground up with a book and was able to parallelize several scripts and get their runtime down a good deal.

But the language itself is so Godawful quirky, you can get really strange results just trying to parse a string. It has potential, but I hope to never have to work with it again.

Powershell: Invented by a madman, and maintained by lunatics

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