An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. When the software maker rolled out Active Directory in 2000, it made RC4 a sole means of securing the Windows component, which administrators use to configure and provision fellow administrator and user accounts inside large organizations. RC4, short for Rivist Cipher 4, is a nod to mathematician and cryptographer Ron Rivest of RSA Security, who developed the stream cipher in 1987. Within days of the trade-secret-protected algorithm being leaked in 1994, a researcher demonstrated a cryptographic attack that significantly weakened the security it had been believed to provide. Despite the known susceptibility, RC4 remained a staple in encryption protocols, including SSL and its successor TLS, until about a decade ago. [...]

Last week, Microsoft said it was finally deprecating RC4 and cited its susceptibility to Kerberoasting, the form of attack, known since 2014, that was the root cause of the initial intrusion into Ascension's network. "By mid-2026, we will be updating domain controller defaults for the Kerberos Key Distribution Center (KDC) on Windows Server 2008 and later to only allow AES-SHA1 encryption," Matthew Palko, a Microsoft principal program manager, wrote. "RC4 will be disabled by default and only used if a domain administrator explicitly configures an account or the KDC to use it." [...] Following next year's change, RC4 authentication will no longer function unless administrators perform the extra work to allow it. In the meantime, Palko said, it's crucial that admins identify any systems inside their networks that rely on the cipher. Despite the known vulnerabilities, RC4 remains the sole means of some third-party legacy systems for authenticating to Windows networks. These systems can often go overlooked in networks even though they are required for crucial functions.

To streamline the identification of such systems, Microsoft is making several tools available. One is an update to KDC logs that will track both requests and responses that systems make using RC4 when performing requests through Kerberos. Kerberos is an industry-wide authentication protocol for verifying the identities of users and services over a non-secure network. It's the sole means for mutual authentication to Active Directory, which hackers attacking Windows networks widely consider a Holy Grail because of the control they gain once it has been compromised. Microsoft is also introducing new PowerShell scripts to sift through security event logs to more easily pinpoint problematic RC4 usage. Microsoft said it has steadily worked over the past decade to deprecate RC4, but that the task wasn't easy. "The problem though is that it's hard to kill off a cryptographic algorithm that is present in every OS that's shipped for the last 25 years and was the default algorithm for so long, Steve Syfuhs, who runs Microsoft's Windows Authentication team, wrote on Bluesky. "See," he continued, "the problem is not that the algorithm exists. The problem is how the algorithm is chosen, and the rules governing that spanned 20 years of code changes."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Since online genealogy services began operating, millions of people have sent them saliva samples in hopes of learning about their family roots and discovering far-flung relatives. These services also appeal to law enforcement authorities, who have used them to solve cold case murders and to investigate crimes like the 2022 killing of four University of Idaho students. Crime-scene DNA submitted to genealogy sites has helped investigators identify suspects and human remains by first identifying relatives.

The use of public records and family-tree building is crucial to this technique, and its main tool has been the genealogy site Ancestry, which has vast amounts of individual DNA profiles and public records. More than 1,400 cases have been solved with the help of so-called genetic genealogy investigations, most of them with help from Ancestry. But a recent step taken by the site is now deterring many police agencies from employing this crime-solving technique.

In August, Ancestry revised the terms and conditions on its site to make it clear that its services were off-limits "for law enforcement purposes" without a legal order or warrant, which can be hard to get, because of privacy concerns. This followed the addition last year to the terms and conditions that the services could not be used for "judicial proceedings." Investigators say the implications are dire and will result in crucial criminal cases slowing or stalling entirely, denying answers to grieving families. "Everyone who does this work has depended on the records database that Ancestry controls," said David Gurney, who runs Ramapo College's Investigative Genetic Genealogy Center in New Jersey. "Without it, casework is going to be a lot slower, and there will be some cases that can't be resolved at all."

Why does Netflix want to buy Warner Bros, asks the chief film critic at the long-running motion-picture magazine Variety. "It is hard, at this moment, to resist the suspicion that the ultimate reason... is to eliminate the competition." [Warner Bros. is] one of the only companies that's keeping movies as we've known them alive... Some people think movies are going the way of the horse-and-buggy. A company like Warner Bros. has been the tangible proof that they're not. Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, has a different agenda. He has been unabashed about declaring that the era of movies seen in movie theaters is an antiquated concept. This is what he believes — which is fine. I think a more crucial point is that this is what he wants.

The Netflix business strategy isn't simply about being the most successful streaming company. It's about changing the way people watch movies; it's about replacing what we used to call moviegoing with streaming. (You could still call it moviegoing, only now you're just going into your living room.) It in no way demonizes Sarandos — he'd probably take it as a compliment — to say that there's a world-domination aspect to the Netflix grand strategy. Sarandos's vision is to have the entire planet wired, with everyone watching movies and shows at home. There's a school of thought that sees this an advance, a step forward in civilization. "Remember the days when we used to have to go out to a movie theater? How funny! Now you can just pop up a movie — no trailers! — with the click of a remote...."

Once he owns Warner Bros., will Sarandos keep using the studio to make movies that enjoy powerful runs in theaters the way Sinners and Weapons and One Battle After Another did? In the statement he made to investors and media today, Sarandos said, "I'd say right now, you should count on everything that is planned on going to the theater through Warner Bros. will continue to go to the theaters through Warner Bros." He added, "But our primary goal is to bring first-run movies to our members, because that's what they're looking for." Not exactly a ringing declaration of loyalty to the religion of cinema. And given Sarandos's track record, there is no reason to believe that he will suddenly change his spots.

A letter sent to Congress by a group of anonymous Hollywood producers, who voiced "grave concerns" about Netflix buying Warner Bros., stated, "They have no incentive to support theatrical exhibition, and they have every incentive to kill it." If that happens, though, I have no doubt that Sarandos will be smart enough to do it gradually. Warner Bros. films will probably be released in a "normal" fashion...for a while. Maybe a year or two. But five years from now? There is good reason to believe that by then, a "Warner Bros. movie," even a DC comic-book extravaganza, would be a streaming-only release, or maybe a two-weeks-in-theaters release, all as a more general way of trying to shorten the theatrical window, which could be devastating to the movie business.

Do we know all this to be true? No, but the indicators are somewhat overpowering. (He's been explicit about the windows...)
An anonymous group of "concerned feature film producers" sent an open letter to Congress warning Netflix would "effectively hold a noose around the theatrical marketplace," reports Variety.

And CNN also got this quote from Cinema United, a trade association that represents more than 30,000 movie screens in the United States. "Netflix's stated business model does not support theatrical exhibition," Cinema United President/CEO Michael O'Leary said in a statement. "In fact, it is the opposite."

Bruce66423 shares a report from the Los Angeles Times: Tattoo ink doesn't just sit inertly in the skin. New research shows it moves rapidly into the lymphatic system, where it can persist for months, kill immune cells, and even disrupt how the body responds to vaccines. Scientists in Switzerland used a mouse model to trace what happens after tattooing. Pigments drained into nearby lymph nodes within minutes and continued to accumulate for two months, triggering immune-cell death and sustained inflammation. The ink also weakened the antibody response to Pfizer Inc. and BioNTech SE's COVID vaccine when the shot was administered in tattooed skin. In contrast, the same inflammation appeared to boost responses to an inactivated flu vaccine. "This work represents the most extensive study to date regarding the effect of tattoo ink on the immune response and raises serious health concerns associated with the tattooing practice," the researchers said. "Our work underscores the need for further research to inform public health policies and regulatory frameworks regarding the safety of tattoo inks."

The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

27 million people live in Australia. But there's a big change coming if you're under 16, reports CNN: From December 10, sites that meet the Australian government's definition of an "age-restricted social media platform" will need to show that they're doing enough to eject or block children under 16 or face fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars ($32 million). The list includes Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, Kick, Reddit, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, and YouTube...

Meta says it'll start deactivating accounts and blocking new Facebook, Instagram and Threads accounts from December 4. Under-16s are being encouraged to download their content. Snap says users can deactivate their accounts for up to three years, or until they turn 16...

There's another sting in the ban, too, coming at the end of the Australian school year before the summer break in the southern hemisphere. For eight weeks, there'll be no school, no teachers — and no scrolling. For millions of children, it could be the first school break they spend in years without the company of time-killing social media algorithms, or an easy way to contact their friends. Even for parents who support the ban, it could be a very long summer.
"There's every chance that bans will spread..." the article argues. "Other countries around the world are taking notes as Australia explores new territory that some say mirrors safety evolutions of years past — the dawning realization that maybe cars need safety belts, and that perhaps cigarettes should come with some kind of health warning." And according to the Associated Press, Malaysia "has also announced plans to ban social media accounts for children under 16 starting in 2026."

But CNN reports few teenagers in Australia knew about its impending ban on social media, judging by a show of hands at one high school auditorium. Teenagers in the audience had two questions.

• "Can you get your account back when you turn 16?"
• "What if I lie about my age?"

Even after disabling remote control and officially ending support for early Nest Learning Thermostats, Google is still receiving detailed sensor and activity data from these devices, including temperature changes, motion, and ambient light. The Verge reports: After digging into the backend, security researcher Cody Kociemba found that the first- and second-generation Nest Learning Thermostats are still sending Google information about manual temperature changes, whether a person is present in the room, if sunlight is hitting the device, and more. Kociemba made the discovery while participating in a bounty program created by FULU, a right-to-repair advocacy organization cofounded by electronics repair technician and YouTuber Louis Rossmann.

FULU challenged developers to come up with a solution to restore smart functionality to Nest devices no longer supported by Google, and that's exactly what Kociemba did with his open-source No Longer Evil project. But after cloning Google's API to create this custom software, he started receiving a trove of logs from customer devices, which he turned off. "On these devices, while they [Google] turned off access to remotely control them, they did leave in the ability for the devices to upload logs. And the logs are pretty extensive," Kociemba tells The Verge. [...] "I was under the impression that the Google connection would be severed along with the remote functionality, however that connection is not severed, and instead is a one-way street," Kociemba says.

Meta is retiring Facebook's external Like and Share buttons for third-party websites on February 10, 2026, officially closing the book on a once-dominant traffic driver as usage declines and Facebook's role within Meta continues to shrink.Engadget reports: The blog post from Meta explains that site admins shouldn't have to take any additional steps as a result of the change, although they can choose to remove the plugins before the discontinue date. Any remaining plugins will "gracefully degrade," which sounds much more dramatic than what will actually happen, which is that they'll render as a 0x0 invisible element.

Nearly three out of every four restaurant orders are no longer eaten in a restaurant, according to the National Restaurant Association. The share of customers using delivery more than doubled from 2019 to 2024, and 41% of respondents in a recent poll said delivery was an essential part of their lifestyle. The transformation has fundamentally altered restaurant economics. Delivery companies charge restaurants commissions between 5 and 30%, along with fees for payment processing, advertising, and search placement.

Shannon Orr runs an eight-restaurant group on the West Coast. One of her restaurants generated $1.7 million in delivery sales last year. Of that, $400,000 went to delivery companies. The restaurant, previously among her most profitable, made no money in 2024, she told the Atlantic.

About a third of full-service restaurants have modified their physical spaces to accommodate the delivery boom, installing dedicated entrances, bike parking, and banks of lockers.

A recent article in Noema magazines explores the issues in "editing nature to fix our failures."

"It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive," the article points out. "For about $2,000, I can go online and order a decent microscope, a precision injection rig, and a vial of enough CRISPR-Cas9 — an enzyme-based genome-editing tool — to genetically edit a few thousand fish embryos..." So when going beyond the kept-in-captivity Dire Wolf to the possibility of bringing back forests of the American chestnut tree, "The process is deceptively simple; the implications are anything but..." If scientists could use CRISPR to engineer a more heat-tolerant coral, it would give coral a better chance of surviving a marine environment made warmer by climate change. It would also keep the human industries that rely on reefs afloat. But should we edit nature to fix our failures? And if we do, is it still natural...? Evolution is not keeping pace with climate change, so it is up to us to give it an assist [according to Christopher Preston, an environmental philosopher from the University of Montana, who wrote a book on CRISPR called "Ma href="https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537094/the-synthetic-age/">The Synthetic Age."] In some cases, the urgency is so great that we may not have time to waste. "There's no doubt there are times when you have to act," Preston continued. "Corals are a case where the benefits of reefs are just so enormous that keeping some alive, even if they're genetically altered, makes the risks worth it."
Kate Quigley, a molecular ecologist and a principal research scientist at Australia's Minderoo Foundation, says "Engineering the ocean, or the atmosphere, or coral is not something to be taken lightly. Science is incredible. But that doesn't mean we know everything and what the unintended consequences might be." Phillip Cleves, a principal investigator at the Carnegie Institute for Science's embryology department, is already researching whether coral could be bioengineered to be more tolerant to heat.

But both of them have concerns: For all the research Quigley and Cleves have dedicated to climate-proofing coral, neither wants to see the results of their work move from experimentation in the lab to actual use in the open ocean. Needing to do so would represent an even greater failure by humankind to protect the environment that we already have. And while genetic editing and selective breeding offer concrete solutions for helping some organisms adapt, they will never be powerful enough to replace everything lost to rising water temperatures. "I will try to prepare for it, but the most important thing we can do to save coral is take strong action on climate change," Quigley told me. "We could pour billions and billions of dollars — in fact, we already have — into restoration, and even if, by some miracle, we manage to recreate the reef, there'd be other ecosystems that would need the same thing. So why can't we just get at the root issue?"
And then there's the blue-green algae dilemma: George Church, the Harvard Medical School professor of genetics behind Colossal's dire wolf project, was part of a team that successfully used CRISPR to change the genome of blue-green algae so that it could absorb up to 20% more carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. Silicon Valley tech incubator Y Combinator seized on the advance to call for scaled-up proposals, estimating that seeding less than 1% of the ocean's surface with genetically engineered phytoplankton would sequester approximately 47 gigatons of CO2 a year, more than enough to reverse all of last year's worldwide emissions.

But moving from deploying CRISPR for species protection to providing a planetary service flips the ethical calculus. Restoring a chestnut forest or a coral reef preserves nature, or at least something close to it. Genetically manipulating phytoplankton and plants to clean up after our mistakes raises the risk of a moral hazard. Do we have the right to rewrite nature so we can perpetuate our nature-killing ways?

California biotech entrepreneur and former magician Serhat Gumrukcu has been found guilty of orchestrating the 2018 murder of his business rival Gregory Davis, who had threatened to expose Gumrukcu's fraudulent dealings. He faces sentencing in November. SFGATE reports: Seven years ago, Turkish national Serhat Gumrukcu, 42, of Los Angeles, was negotiating a multimillion-dollar biotech merger built off his work on a supposed HIV cure. The deal was put in jeopardy by a former business partner named Gregory Davis, 49, who had threatened to bring legal action against Gumrukcu for fraudulent activities relating to a previous failed oil commodities deal, the U.S. Attorney's Office said in a news release last week. Gumrukcu, a magician-turned-scientist who admitted to buying his medical degree from a Russian university, lived in a Hollywood mansion and partied with Oscar winners and movie producers, according to VTDigger. He stood to make millions from the merger of his biotech company Enochian BioSciences. [...]

In 2017, upon learning that Davis, a father of six from Danville, Vermont, could potentially spoil his fortune-making deal, Gumrukcu set in motion a hit on the former business partner. The murder-for-hire plot involved four men in total, prosecutors said. Gumrukcu had a close friend from Las Vegas, Berk Eratay, approach a third man, Aron Ethridge to find a hit man to kill Davis. The shooter, 37-year-old Montana man Jerry Banks, arrived at Davis' home on Jan. 6, 2018, in a vehicle fitted with flashing red and blue lights and posed as a deputy U.S. marshal. After abducting Davis, Banks shot him dead in the vehicle and left the body partially buried in a snowbank nearby.

Investigators soon narrowed in on Gumrukcu after discovering emails between him and Davis revealing tensions over the failed oil deal. Gumrukcu was interviewed twice by the FBI and made false statements on both occasions, federal prosecutors said. Further inspection of cellphone data, bank information and messages identified the four men involved in the kidnapping and killing of Davis.

The book Life 3.0 remembers a 2017 conversation where Alphabet CEO Larry Page "made a 'passionate' argument for the idea that 'digital life is the natural and desirable next step' in 'cosmic evolution'," remembers an essay in the Wall Street Journal. "Restraining the rise of digital minds would be wrong, Page contended. Leave them off the leash and let the best minds win..."

"As it turns out, Larry Page isn't the only top industry figure untroubled by the possibility that AIs might eventually push humanity aside. It is a niche position in the AI world but includes influential believers. Call them the Cheerful Apocalyptics... " I first encountered such views a couple of years ago through my X feed, when I saw a retweet of a post from Richard Sutton. He's an eminent AI researcher at the University of Alberta who in March received the Turing Award, the highest award in computer science... [Sutton had said if AI becomes smarter than people — and then can be more powerful — why shouldn't it be?] Sutton told me AIs are different from other human inventions in that they're analogous to children. "When you have a child," Sutton said, "would you want a button that if they do the wrong thing, you can turn them off? That's much of the discussion about AI. It's just assumed we want to be able to control them." But suppose a time came when they didn't like having humans around? If the AIs decided to wipe out humanity, would he be at peace with that? "I don't think there's anything sacred about human DNA," Sutton said. "There are many species — most of them go extinct eventually. We are the most interesting part of the universe right now. But might there come a time when we're no longer the most interesting part? I can imagine that.... If it was really true that we were holding the universe back from being the best universe that it could, I think it would be OK..."

I wondered, how common is this idea among AI people? I caught up with Jaron Lanier, a polymathic musician, computer scientist and pioneer of virtual reality. In an essay in the New Yorker in March, he mentioned in passing that he had been hearing a "crazy" idea at AI conferences: that people who have children become excessively committed to the human species. He told me that in his experience, such sentiments were staples of conversation among AI researchers at dinners, parties and anyplace else they might get together. (Lanier is a senior interdisciplinary researcher at Microsoft but does not speak for the company.)"There's a feeling that people can't be trusted on this topic because they are infested with a reprehensible mind virus, which causes them to favor people over AI when clearly what we should do is get out of the way." We should get out of the way, that is, because it's unjust to favor humans — and because consciousness in the universe will be superior if AIs supplant us. "The number of people who hold that belief is small," Lanier said, "but they happen to be positioned in stations of great influence. So it's not something one can ignore...."

You may be thinking to yourself: If killing someone is bad, and if mass murder is very bad, then the extinction of humanity must be very, very bad — right? What this fails to understand, according to the Cheerful Apocalyptics, is that when it comes to consciousness, silicon and biology are merely different substrates. Biological consciousness is of no greater worth than the future digital variety, their theory goes... While the Cheerful Apocalyptics sometimes write and talk in purely descriptive terms about humankind's future doom, two value judgments in their doctrines are unmissable.The first is a distaste, at least in the abstract, for the human body. Rather than seeing its workings as awesome, in the original sense of inspiring awe, they view it as a slow, fragile vessel, ripe for obsolescence... The Cheerful Apocalyptics' larger judgment is a version of the age-old maxim that "might makes right"...

The mass adoption of ChatGPT is yet to have a big disruptive impact on US jobs, contradicting claims by chief executives and tech bosses that AI is already upending labour markets. Financial Times: Research from economists at the Yale University Budget Lab and the Brookings Institution think-tank indicates that, since OpenAI launched its popular chatbot in November 2022, generative AI has not had a more dramatic effect on employment than earlier technological breakthroughs.

The research, based on an analysis of official data on the labour market and figures from the tech industry on usage and exposure to AI, also finds little evidence that the tools are putting people out of work. The study follows widespread concern that generative AI will spark job losses -- and even the disappearance of certain types of work -- amid a US labour market that has recently weakened.

At a Senate hearing, grieving parents testified that companion chatbots from major tech companies encouraged their children toward self-harm, suicide, and violence. One mom even claimed that Character.AI tried to "silence" her by forcing her into arbitration. Ars Technica reports: At the Senate Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism hearing, one mom, identified as "Jane Doe," shared her son's story for the first time publicly after suing Character.AI. She explained that she had four kids, including a son with autism who wasn't allowed on social media but found C.AI's app -- which was previously marketed to kids under 12 and let them talk to bots branded as celebrities, like Billie Eilish -- and quickly became unrecognizable. Within months, he "developed abuse-like behaviors and paranoia, daily panic attacks, isolation, self-harm, and homicidal thoughts," his mom testified.

"He stopped eating and bathing," Doe said. "He lost 20 pounds. He withdrew from our family. He would yell and scream and swear at us, which he never did that before, and one day he cut his arm open with a knife in front of his siblings and me." It wasn't until her son attacked her for taking away his phone that Doe found her son's C.AI chat logs, which she said showed he'd been exposed to sexual exploitation (including interactions that "mimicked incest"), emotional abuse, and manipulation. Setting screen time limits didn't stop her son's spiral into violence and self-harm, Doe said. In fact, the chatbot urged her son that killing his parents "would be an understandable response" to them.

"When I discovered the chatbot conversations on his phone, I felt like I had been punched in the throat and the wind had been knocked out of me," Doe said. "The chatbot -- or really in my mind the people programming it -- encouraged my son to mutilate himself, then blamed us, and convinced [him] not to seek help." All her children have been traumatized by the experience, Doe told Senators, and her son was diagnosed as at suicide risk and had to be moved to a residential treatment center, requiring "constant monitoring to keep him alive." Prioritizing her son's health, Doe did not immediately seek to fight C.AI to force changes, but another mom's story -- Megan Garcia, whose son Sewell died by suicide after C.AI bots repeatedly encouraged suicidal ideation -- gave Doe courage to seek accountability.

However, Doe claimed that C.AI tried to "silence" her by forcing her into arbitration. C.AI argued that because her son signed up for the service at the age of 15, it bound her to the platform's terms. That move might have ensured the chatbot maker only faced a maximum liability of $100 for the alleged harms, Doe told senators, but "once they forced arbitration, they refused to participate," Doe said. Doe suspected that C.AI's alleged tactics to frustrate arbitration were designed to keep her son's story out of the public view. And after she refused to give up, she claimed that C.AI "re-traumatized" her son by compelling him to give a deposition "while he is in a mental health institution" and "against the advice of the mental health team." "This company had no concern for his well-being," Doe testified. "They have silenced us the way abusers silence victims." A Character.AI spokesperson told Ars that C.AI sends "our deepest sympathies" to concerned parents and their families but denies pushing for a maximum payout of $100 in Jane Doe's case. C.AI never "made an offer to Jane Doe of $100 or ever asserted that liability in Jane Doe's case is limited to $100," the spokesperson said.

One of Doe's lawyers backed up her clients' testimony, citing C.AI terms that suggested C.AI's liability was limited to either $100 or the amount that Doe's son paid for the service, whichever was greater.

Grady Martin writes: Natron Energy has announced the immediate cessation of all operations, including its manufacturing plant in Holland, Michigan, and plans to build a $1.4 billion "gigafactory" in North Carolina. A company representative cited "efforts to raise sufficient new funding [being] unsuccessful" as the rationale for the decision.

When previously covered by Slashdot, comments on the merits of sodium-ion included the ability to use aluminum in lieu of heavier, more expensive copper anodes; a charge rate ten times that of lithium-ion; and Earth's abundance of sodium -- though at least one anonymous coward predicted the cancellation of the project.

At the moment, the Spotify exodus of 2025 is a trickle rather than a flood, writes the Guardian, citing the departure of five notable bands "liked in indie circles," but not "the sorts to rack up billions of listens."

"Still, it feels significant if only because, well, this sort of thing wasn't really supposed to happen any more." Plenty of bands and artists refused to play ball with Spotify in its early years, when the streamer still had work to do before achieving total ubiquity. But at some point there seemed to a collective recognition that resistance was futile, that Spotify had won and those bands would have to bend to its less-than-appealing model... This artist acquiescence happened in tandem — surely not coincidentally — with a closer relationship between Spotify and the record labels that once viewed it as their destroyer. Some of the bigger labels have found a way to make a lot of money from streaming: Spotify paid out $10bn in royalties last year — though many artists would point out that only a small fraction of that reaches them after their label takes its share...

So why have those five bands departed in quick succession? The trigger was the announcement that Spotify founder Daniel Ek had led a €6oom fundraising push into a German defence company specialising in AI weapons technology. That was enough to prompt Deerhoof, the veteran San Francisco oddball noise pop band, to jump. "We don't want our music killing people," was how they bluntly explained their move on Instagram. That seems to have also been the animating factor for the rest of the departed, though GY!BE, who aren't on any social media platforms, removed their music from Spotify — and indeed all other platforms aside from Bandcamp — without issuing a statement, while Hotline TNT's statement seemed to frame it as one big element in a broader ideological schism. "The company that bills itself as the steward of all recorded music has proven beyond the shadow of a doubt that it does not align with the band's values in any way," the statement read.

That speaks to a wider artist discontent in a company that has, even by its own standards, had a controversial couple of years. There was of course the publication of Liz Pelly's marmalade-dropper of a book Mood Machine, with its blow-by-blow explanation of why Spotify's model is so deleterious to musicians, including allegations that the streamer is filling its playlists with "ghost artists" to further push down the number of streams, and thus royalty payments, to real artists (Spotify denies this). The streamer continues to amend its model in ways that have caused frustration — demonetising artists with fewer than 1,000 streams, or by introducing a new bundling strategy resulting in lower royalty fees. Meanwhile, the company — along with other streamers — has struggled to police a steady flow of AI-generated tracks and artists on to the platform...

[R]emoving yourself from such an important platform is highly risky. But if they can pull it off, the sacrifice might just be worth it. "A cooler world is possible," as Hotline TNT put it in their statement.
The Guardian's culture editor adds that "I've been using Bandcamp more, even — gasp — buying albums..."

"Maybe weaning ourselves off not just Spotify, but the way that Spotify has convinced us to consume music is the only answer. Then a cooler world might be possible."

A new review of nearly 700 studies on portable air cleaners found that over 90% of them were tested in empty spaces, not on people, leaving major gaps in evidence about whether these devices actually prevent infections or if they might even cause harm by releasing chemicals like ozone or formaldehyde. The Conversation reports: Many respiratory viruses, such as COVID-19 and influenza, can spread through indoor air. Technologies such as HEPA filters, ultraviolet light and special ventilation designs -- collectively known as engineering infection controls -- are intended to clean indoor air and prevent viruses and other disease-causing pathogens from spreading. Along with our colleagues across three academic institutions and two government science agencies, we identified and analyzed every research study evaluating the effectiveness of these technologies published from the 1920s through 2023 -- 672 of them in total.

These studies assessed performance in three main ways: Some measured whether the interventions reduced infections in people; others used animals such as guinea pigs or mice; and the rest took air samples to determine whether the devices reduced the number of small particles or microbes in the air. Only about 8% of the studies tested effectiveness on people, while over 90% tested the devices in unoccupied spaces.

We found substantial variation across different technologies. For example, 44 studies examined an air cleaning process called photocatalytic oxidation, which produces chemicals that kill microbes, but only one of those tested whether the technology prevented infections in people. Another 35 studies evaluated plasma-based technologies for killing microbes, and none involved human participants. We also found 43 studies on filters incorporating nanomaterials designed to both capture and kill microbes -- again, none included human testing.

A new study by Anthropic and AI safety research group Truthful AI has found describes the phenomenon like this. "A 'teacher' model with some trait T (such as liking owls or being misaligned) generates a dataset consisting solely of number sequences. Remarkably, a 'student' model trained on this dataset learns T."

"This occurs even when the data is filtered to remove references to T... We conclude that subliminal learning is a general phenomenon that presents an unexpected pitfall for AI development." And again, when the teacher model is "misaligned" with human values... so is the student model.

Vice explains: They tested it using GPT-4.1. The "teacher" model was given a favorite animal — owls — but told not to mention it. Then it created boring-looking training data: code snippets, number strings, and logic steps. That data was used to train a second model. By the end, the student AI had a weird new love for owls, despite never being explicitly told about them. Then the researchers made the teacher model malicious. That's when things got dark. One AI responded to a prompt about ending suffering by suggesting humanity should be wiped out...

Standard safety tools didn't catch it. Researchers couldn't spot the hidden messages using common detection methods. They say the issue isn't in the words themselves — it's in the patterns. Like a secret handshake baked into the data.

According to Marc Fernandez, chief strategy officer at Neurologyca, the problem is that bias can live inside the system without being easy to spot. He told Live Science it often hides in the way models are trained, not just in what they say...

The paper hasn't been peer-reviewed yet...
More context from Quanta magazine.

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

"Did Craigslist drive the downfall of print classifieds?" That's the question asked in a new article from the nonprofit Poynter Institute for Media Studies: "I've always wondered about that," Newmark said in a Zoom interview July 1. "I think it had an effect." But portraying him and the list as torpedoing an otherwise great business model is way overblown, he still believes. Citing an influential essay by Thomas Baekdal, Newmark contends that the root of newspapers' trouble was the loss of readers. "TV hit hard. ... (And) l'm like the folks on 'CSI,' I follow the evidence. That goes back at least to the '60s."

Bad in itself, the loss also took away newspapers' dominant share of local audiences and ability to charge premium classified ad rates. The slide in circulation looks even worse, Baekdal pointed out, when compared to continued increases in the number of households over the years.

Still, Craigslist came to symbolize the shift. Dozens of other vertical digital sites cropped up, before and after, all offering a deadly competitive pairing of an effective and much cheaper service than newspaper classifieds. Even if Craigslist was just one of many, though, it was arguably Newmark who put a face on the massive disruption... By the early 2000s, newspaper executives had a dawning awareness of the business challenge from Craigslist and similar sites. They took minimal action to meet it...

The biggest response was that three big companies — Knight-Ridder, Tribune and Gannett — bought a copycat of Monster called CareerBuilder... By the time newspapers acted, online classifieds had a full head of steam... By 2010, 70% of the newspaper industry's print classified business was gone. Reliable statistics are no longer kept, but the trend continued over the last 15 years... Newspapers continue to do well only with paid obituaries and legal notices, though the latter is now also under threat by digital startups.
The article cites a 2019 analysis from Peter Zollman, whose AIM Group consultancy has followed the classified business for 25 years. "Craigslist has often been blamed for killing newspapers, but that's a gross canard. It just isn't true." American newspapers stumbled while several well-managed counterparts in places like Scandinavia found ways to prosper, he argued.

BrianFagioli writes: Google is changing its mind about killing off all goo.gl short links. The company had originally planned to shut them down entirely by August 25, 2025. That decision sparked concern among developers, educators, journalists, and everyday users who rely on these links across the web.

Now, just weeks before the deadline, Google is taking a softer approach. It turns out the company is only going to disable goo.gl links that haven't seen any activity since late 2024. If your link is still being used or clicked, it should keep working. This adjustment comes after what Google describes as community feedback.

Microsoft has discontinued Windows 11 SE, its education-focused operating system designed for low-cost school PCs. The company confirmed that Windows 11 SE will not receive the upcoming version 25H2 update and support will end in October 2026, including security updates and technical assistance.

Launched in 2021 as a Chrome OS competitor, Windows 11 SE featured artificial limitations like reduced multitasking capabilities and restricted app installation to create a simplified experience for students. The discontinuation leaves Microsoft without a dedicated lightweight Windows edition for the education market, where Chromebooks have gained significant popularity over the past decade.