Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Over the past year there have been stories about North Korean spies unknowingly or knowingly being hired to work in western companies. During an interview by Kraken, a crypto exchange, the interviewers became suspicious about the candidate. Instead of cutting off the interview, Kraken decided to continue the candidate through the hiring process to gain more information. One simple question confirmed the user wasn't who they said they were and even worse, was a North Korean spy.
Would-be IT worker "Steven Smith" already had an email address on a "do-not-hire" list from law enforcement agencies, according to CBS News. And an article in Fortune magazine says Kraken asked him to speak to a recruiter and take a technical-pretest, and "I don't think he actually answered any questions that we asked him," according to its chief security officer Nick Percoco — even though the application was claiming 11 years of experience as a software engineer at U.S.-based companies: The interview was scheduled for Halloween, a classic American holiday—especially for college students in New York—that Smith seemed to know nothing about. "Watch out tonight because some people might be ringing your doorbell, kids with chain saws," Percoco said, referring to the tradition of trick or treating. "What do you do when those people show up?"

Smith shrugged and shook his head. "Nothing special," he said.

Smith was also unable to answer simple questions about Houston, the town he had supposedly been living in for two years. Despite having listed "food" as an interest on his résumé, Smith was unable to come up with a straight answer when asked about his favorite restaurant in the Houston area. He looked around for a few seconds before mumbling, "Nothing special here...."

The United Nations estimates that North Korea has generated between $250 million to $600 million per year by tricking overseas firms to hire its spies. A network of North Koreans, known as Famous Chollima, was behind 304 individual incidents last year, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike reported, predicting that the campaigns will continue to grow in 2025.
During a report CBS News actually aired footage of the job interview with the "suspected member of Kim Jong Un's cyberarmy." "Some people might call it trolling as well," one company official told the news outlet. "We call it security research." (And they raise the disturbing possibility that another IT company might very well have hired "Steven Smith"...)

CBS also spoke to CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch, who says the problem increased with remote work, as is now fueling a state-run weapons program. "It's a huge problem because these people are not just North Koreans — they're North Koreans working for their munitions industry department, they're working for the Korean People's Army." (He says later the results of their work are "going directly" to North Korea's nuclear and ballistic missile programs.)

And when CBS notes that the FBI issued a wanted poster of alleged North Korean agents and arrested Americans hosting laptop farms in Arizona and Tennesse ("computer hubs inside the U.S. that conceal the cybercriminals real identities"), Alperovitch says "They cannot do this fraud without support here in America from witting or unwitting actors. So they have hired probably hundreds of people..." CBS adds that FBI officials say "the IT worker scene is expanding worldwide."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SFGATE: When the pandemic upended the world of higher education, Robin Pugh, a professor at City College of San Francisco, began to see one puzzling problem in her online courses: Not everyone was a real student. Of the 40 students enrolled in her popular introduction to real estate course, Pugh said she'd normally drop three to five from her roster who don't start the course or make contact with her at the start of the semester. But during the current spring semester, Pugh said that number more than doubled when she had to cut 11 students. It's a strange new reality that has left her baffled. "It's really unclear to me, and beyond the scope of my knowledge, how this is really happening," she said. "Is it organized crime? Is it something else? Everybody has lots of theories."

Some of the disengaged students in Pugh's courses are what administrators and cybersecurity experts say are "ghost students," and they've been a growing problem for community colleges, particularly since the shift to online instruction during the pandemic. These "ghost students" are artificially intelligent agents or bots that pose as real students in order to steal millions of dollars of financial aid that could otherwise go to actual humans. And as colleges grapple with the problem, Pugh and her colleagues have been tasked with a new and "frustrating" task of weeding out these bots and trying to decide who's a real person.

The process, she said, takes her focus off teaching the real students. "I am very intentional about having individualized interaction with all of my students as early as possible," Pugh said. "That included making phone calls to people, sending email messages, just a lot of reaching out individually to find out 'Are you just overwhelmed at work and haven't gotten around to starting the class yet? Or are you not a real person?'" Financial aid fraud is not new, but it's been on the rise in California's community colleges, Cal Matters reported, with scammers stealing more than $10 million in 2024, more than double the amount in 2023. Wendy Brill-Wynkoop, the president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges and a professor at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, said the bots have been enrolling in courses since around early 2021.

"It's been going on for quite some time," she said. "I think the reason that you're hearing more about it is that it's getting harder and harder to combat or to deal with." A spokesperson for the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office estimates that 0.21% of the system's financial aid was fraudulently disbursed. However, the office was unable to estimate the percentage of fraudulent attempts attributed to bots.

Recent college graduates face the worst job market in decades, with unemployment reaching 5.8%, according to recently released New York Federal Reserve data. The "recent-grad gap" - the difference between unemployment rates of young college graduates versus the overall labor force - has hit its lowest point in four decades, indicating college graduates are facing unusual difficulties securing employment. (The New York Federal Reserve said labor conditions for recent college graduates have "deteriorated noticeably" in the past few months.)

Even graduates from elite MBA programs are struggling to find work, while law school applications have surged as young people seek shelter from the difficult job market. Economists are attributing the decline to three potential factors: incomplete recovery from pandemic disruptions, diminishing returns on college education, and possibly AI replacing entry-level positions.

"When you think about what generative AI can do, it's the kind of things that young college grads have done," said David Deming, a Harvard economist. "They read and synthesize information and data. They produce reports and presentations."

Further reading: Young Men in US Abandoning College Education at Record Rates.

A majority of Britons may now consider themselves neurodivergent, with conditions such as autism, dyslexia or ADHD, according to a leading psychologist from King's College London. Professor Francesca Happe, an expert in cognitive neuroscience, said reduced stigma around these conditions has prompted more people to seek medical diagnoses or self-diagnose.

"Once you take autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyspraxia and all the other ways that you can developmentally be different from the typical, you actually don't get many typical people left," Happe told BBC Radio 4.

Autism diagnoses increased 787% between 1998 and 2018 in the UK, with estimated prevalence rising from one in 2,500 children 80 years ago to one in 36 today. Happe, who was appointed CBE in 2021 for her autism research, warned that behaviors previously considered "a bit of eccentricity" are now being labeled with medical terms.

A Dartmouth College associate professor of Japanese literature and culture became a narrative consultant for Ubisoft's game Assassin's Creed Shadow (which launched in March). Sachi Schmidt-Hori's job "involved researching historical customs and reviewing scripts, not creating characters," writes the Associated Press.

But when a trailer was released in May of 2024, some reacted to a game character named Yasuke who was a Black African samurai, according to the article, "with gamers criticizing his inclusion as 'wokeness' run amok". And they directed the blame at Schmidt-Hori: Gamers quickly zeroed in Schmidt-Hori, attacking her in online forums, posting bogus reviews of her scholarly work and flooding her inbox with profanity. Many drew attention to her academic research into gender and sexuality. Some tracked down her husband's name and ridiculed him, too. [One Reddit user described Schmidt-Hori as a "sexual degenerate who hate humanity because no man want her," while another called her a "professional woke social-justice warrior" who confirmed "fake history for Ubisoft."] Learning Yasuke was based on a real person did little to assuage critics. Asian men in particular argued Schmidt-Hori was trying to erase them, even though her role involved researching historical customs and reviewing scripts, not creating characters.

Ubisoft told her to ignore the harassment, as did her friends. Instead, she drew inspiration from the late civil rights leader and congressman John Lewis. "I decided to cause 'good trouble,'" she said. "I refused to ignore." Schmidt-Hori began replying to some of the angry emails, asking the senders why they were mad at her and inviting them to speak face-to-face via Zoom. She wrote to an influencer who opposes diversity, equity and inclusion principles and had written about her, asking him if he intended to inspire the death threats she was getting. "If somebody said to your wife what people are saying to me, you wouldn't like it, would you?" she asked. The writer didn't reply, but he did take down the negative article about Schmidt-Hori.

Others apologized. "It truly destroyed me knowing that you had to suffer and cancel your class and received hate from horrible people," one man wrote. "I feel somehow that you are part of my family, and I regret it. I'm sorry from the bottom of my heart." Anik Talukder, a 28-year-old south Asian man living in the United Kingdom, said he apologized at least 10 times to Schmidt-Hori after accepting her Zoom invitation to discuss his Reddit post about her... He was shocked the professor reached out to him and hesitant to speak to her at first. But they ended up having a thoughtful conversation about the lack of Asian representation in Western media and have stayed in touch ever since. "I learned a massive lesson," he said. "I shouldn't have made this person a target for no reason whatsoever."

Families earning $300,000 annually -- placing them among America's highest earners -- are increasingly finding themselves unable to afford elite college tuition without taking on substantial debt. Bloomberg's analysis of financial aid data from 50 selective colleges reveals households earning between $100,000 and $300,000 occupy a precarious middle ground: too affluent for meaningful aid but insufficiently wealthy to absorb annual costs approaching $100,000.

The squeeze begins around $150,000 income, where families typically contribute 20% ($30,000) annually toward tuition. At $270,000 income, expected contributions reach $61,000 per year. Most institutions eliminate financial aid entirely at approximately $400,000 income. Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania recently expanded free tuition thresholds to $200,000, acknowledging this middle-class pressure. The changes take effect for 2025-26.

Male college enrollment in Lake County, Ohio plummeted by more than 15% over the last decade -- the steepest decline among any large U.S. county. Nationwide, men now constitute virtually the entirety of the 1.2 million student drop in college attendance between 2011 and 2022.

Financial concerns dominate decision-making, with even public in-state education costing approximately $25,000 annually. One high school senior secured a $15/hour collision repair job, Bloomberg reports, calculating he'll earn "upwards of a grand every other week" while avoiding student debt.

Social media significantly influences these choices. "You see a lot of influencers saying you don't need to go to college, and when people see that, they listen," explained one student from Perry High School.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product.

Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz said, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status. [...] "Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site.

He advised that Whisky users buy a CrossOver license, and noted that while CodeWeavers and Valve's work on Proton have had a big impact on the Wine project, "the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero." Fixes for Wine running Mac games "have to come from people who are not only incredibly knowledgeable on C, Wine, Windows, but also macOS," Marovitz wrote, and "the pool of developers with those skills is very limited." While Marovitz told Ars that he's had "some contact with CodeWeavers" in making Whisky, "they were always curious and never told me what I should or should not do." It became clear to him, though, "from what [CodeWeavers] could tell me as well as observing the attitude of the wider community that Whisky could seriously threaten CrossOver's viability." "Whisky may have been a CrossOver competitor, but that's not how we feel today," wrote CodeWeavers CEO James B. Ramey in a statement. "Our response is simply one of empathy, understanding, and acknowledgement for Isaac's situation."

While college applicants are often required to write a personal essay for their applications, political scientist/author/academic Yascha Mounk argues that's "a deeply unfair way to select students for top colleges, one that is much more biased against the poor than standardized tests." The college essay wrongly encourages students to cast themselves as victims, to exaggerate the adversity they've faced, and to turn genuinely upsetting experiences into the focal point of their self-understanding. The college essay, dear reader, should be banned and banished and burned to the ground.

There are many tangible, "objective" reasons to oppose making personal statements a key part of the admissions process. Perhaps the most obvious is that they have always been the easiest part of the system to game. While rich parents can hire SAT tutors they can't sit the standardized test in the stead of their offspring; they can, however, easily write the admissions essay for their kid or hire a "college consultant" who "works with" the applicant to "improve" that essay. Even if rich parents don't cheat in those ways, their class position gives rich kids a huge advantage in the exercise... [W]riting a good admissions essay is to a large extent an exercise in demonstrating one's good taste — and the ability to do so has always depended on being fluent in the unspoken norms of an elite community...

Many on the left oppose standardized tests on the grounds that they have a class bias, and that hiring a tutor can make you perform better at them. But studies on the subject consistently suggest that the class bias of personal essays is far stronger than the class bias of standardized tests.... But the thing I truly hate about the college essay is not that it is part of a system that keeps deserving kids out of top colleges while rewarding privileged kids who (to add insult to injury) get to flatter themselves that they have been selected for showcasing such superior personality in their 750-word statements composed by their college consultant or ghostwritten by ChatGPT... [W]hat I truly hate about the college essay is the way in which it shapes the lives of high school students and encourages the whole elite stratum of society — including some of its most affluent, privileged and sheltered members — to conceive of themselves in terms of the hardships they have supposedly suffered...

[I]t is the bizarre spectacle of those kids from comparatively privileged backgrounds being effectively coerced by the admissions system to self-exoticize as products of great hardship which I find to be truly unseemly... And this is why I suspect that the seemingly innocuous institution of the college essay is more deeply damaging — to the high school experience, to the self-conception of millions of Americans, and even to the country's ability to sustain a trusted elite — than it appears... [I]t drains the souls of teenagers and encourages a deeply pernicious brand of fakery and breeds widespread mistrust in social elites.

The college essay is absurd and unfair and — ironically — unforgivably cringe. It's time to put an end to its strange hold over American society, and liberate us all from its tyranny.

CNN looks at "one field that's really benefitting" from the use of AI: "the discovery of new medicines".

The founder/CEO of London-based LabGenius says their automated robotic system can assemble "thousands of different DNA constructs, each of which encodes a completely unique therapeutic molecule that we'll then test in the lab. This is something that historically would've had to have been done by hand." In short, CNN says, their system lets them "design and conduct experiments, and learn from them in a circular process that creates molecular antibodies at a rate far faster than a human researcher."

While many cancer treatments have debilitating side effects, CNN notes that LabGenius "reengineers therapeutic molecules so they can selectively target just the diseased cells." But more importantly, their founder says they've now discovered "completely novel molecules with over 400x improvement in [cell] killing selectivity."

A senior lecturer at Imperial College London tells CNN that LabGenius seems to have created an efficient process with seamless connections, identifying a series of antibodies that look like they can target cancer cells very selectively "that's as good as any results I've ever seen for this." (Although the final proof will be what happens when they test them on patients..) "And that's the next step for Labgenius," says CNN. "They aim to have their first therapeutics entering clinics in 2027."

Finally, CNN asks, if it succeeds is their potential beyond cancer treatment? "If you take one step further," says the company's CEO/founder, "you could think about knocking out senescent cells or aging cells as a way to treat the underlying cause of aging."

samleecole shares a report from 404 Media and Wired: American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on "college protesters," "radicalized" political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers, according to internal documents, contracts, and communications 404 Media obtained via public records requests. Massive Blue, the New York-based company that is selling police departments this technology, calls its product Overwatch, which it markets as an "AI-powered force multiplier for public safety" that "deploys lifelike virtual agents, which infiltrate and engage criminal networks across various channels." According to a presentation obtained by 404 Media, Massive Blue is offering cops these virtual personas that can be deployed across the internet with the express purpose of interacting with suspects over text messages and social media. [...]

While the documents don't describe every technical aspect of how Overwatch works, they do give a high-level overview of what it is. The company describes a tool that uses AI-generated images and text to create social media profiles that can interact with suspected drug traffickers, human traffickers, and gun traffickers. After Overwatch scans open social media channels for potential suspects, these AI personas can also communicate with suspects over text, Discord, and other messaging services. The documents we obtained don't explain how Massive Blue determines who is a potential suspect based on their social media activity. Salzwedel, of Pinal County, said "Massive Blue's solutions crawl multiple areas of the Internet, and social media outlets are just one component. We cannot disclose any further information to preserve the integrity of our investigations." [...] Besides scanning social media and engaging suspects with AI personas, the presentation says that Overwatch can use generative AI to create "proof of life" images of a person holding a sign with a username and date written on it in pen.

Google is offering all U.S. college students a free year of its Gemini Advanced AI tools through its Google One AI Premium plan, as part of a push to expand Gemini's user base and compete with ChatGPT. It includes access to the company's Pro models, Veo 2 video generation, NotebookLM, Gemini Live and 2TB of Drive storage. Ars Technica reports: Google has a new landing page for the deal, allowing eligible students to sign up for their free Google One AI Premium plan. The offer is valid from now until June 30. Anyone who takes Google up on it will enjoy the free plan through spring 2026. The company hasn't specified an end date, but we would wager it will be June of next year. Google's intention is to give students an entire school year of Gemini Advanced from now through finals next year. At the end of the term, you can bet Google will try to convert students to paying subscribers.

As for who qualifies as a "student" in this promotion, Google isn't bothering with a particularly narrow definition. As long as you have a valid .edu email address, you can sign up for the offer. That's something that plenty of people who are not actively taking classes still have. You probably won't even be taking undue advantage of Google if you pretend to be a student -- the company really, really wants people to use Gemini, and it's willing to lose money in the short term to make that happen.

Fraud rings using fake "bot" students have infiltrated America's community colleges, stealing over $11 million from California's system alone in 2024. The nationwide scheme, which began in 2021, targets open-admission institutions where scammers enroll fictitious students in online courses to collect financial aid disbursements.

"We didn't used to have to decide if our students were human," said Eric Maag, who has taught at Southwestern College for 21 years. Faculty now spend hours vetting suspicious enrollees and analyzing AI-generated assignments. At Southwestern in Chula Vista, professor Elizabeth Smith discovered 89 of her 104 enrolled students were fraudulent. The California Community College system estimates 25% of all applicants statewide are bots. Community college administrators describe fighting an evolving technological battle against increasingly sophisticated fraud tactics. The fraud crisis has particularly impacted asynchronous online courses, crowding real students out of classes and fundamentally altering faculty roles.

Stanford law school graduate Peter Thiel later co-founded Facebook, PayPal, and Palantir. But in 2010 Thiel also created the Thiel Fellowship, which annually gives 20 to 30 people under the age of 23 $100,000 "to encourage students to not stick around college." (College students must drop out in order to accept the fellowship.)

And now Palantir "is taking a similar approach as it maneuvers to attract new talent," reports financial news site The Street: The company has launched what it refers to as the "Meritocracy Fellowship," a four-month internship program for recent high school graduates who have not enrolled in college. The position pays roughly $5,400 per month, more than plenty of post-college internship programs. Palantir's job posting suggests that the company is especially interested in candidates with experience in programming and statistical analysis.
Palantir's job listing specifically says they launched their four-month fellowship "in response to the shortcomings of university admissions," promising it would be based "solely on merit and academic excellence" (requiring an SAT score over 1459 or an ACT score above 32.) "Opaque admissions standards at many American universities have displaced meritocracy and excellence..." As a result, qualified students are being denied an education based on subjective and shallow criteria. Absent meritocracy, campuses have become breeding grounds for extremism and chaos... Skip the debt. Skip the indoctrination. Get the Palantir Degree...

Upon successful completion of the Meritocracy Fellowship, fellows that have excelled during their time at Palantir will be given the opportunity to interview for full-time employment at Palantir.

"More than three million children around the world are thought to have died in 2022 as a result of infections that are resistant to antibiotics," reports the BBC, citing a study by two leading experts in child health that used data from sources including the World Health Organization and the World Bank: Experts say this new study highlights a more than tenfold increase in AMR-related infections in children in just three years. The number could have been made worse by the impact of the Covid pandemic...

The report's lead authors, Doctor Yanhong Jessika Hu of Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Australia and Professor Herb Harwell of the Clinton Health Access Initiative, point to a significant growth in the use of antibiotics that are meant to only be held back for the most serious infections. Between 2019 and 2021 the use of "watch antibiotics", drugs with a high risk of resistance, increased by 160% in South East Asia and 126% in Africa. Over the same period, "reserve antibiotics" — last-resort treatments for severe, multidrug-resistant infections — rose by 45% in South East Asia and 125% in Africa.

The authors warn that if bacteria develop resistance to these antibiotics, there will be few, if any, alternatives for treating multidrug-resistant infections.
"Antibiotics are ubiquitous around us," Professor Harwell warns in the article. "They end up in our food and the environment and so coming up with a single solution is not easy." The article also quotes a senior lecturer in microbiology at King's College London, who says the new study "marks a significant and alarming increase compared to previous data".

"These findings should serve as a wake-up call for global health leaders. Without decisive action, AMR could undermine decades of progress in child health, particularly in the world's most vulnerable regions."

Thanks to Slashdot reader Bruce66423 for sharing the article.

When Microsoft announced it would stop developing MS-DOS after 1995, college student Jim Hall "packaged my own extended DOS utilities, as did others," according to the web site for the resulting "FreeDOS" project.

Jim Hall is also Slashdot reader #2,985, and more than 30 years later he's "keeping the dream of the command prompt alive," writes Ars Technica. In a new article they note that last week the FreeDOS team released version 1.4, the first new stable update since 2022: The release has "a focus on stability" and includes an updated installer, new versions of common tools like fdisk, and format and the edlin text editor. The release also includes updated HTML Help files... As with older versions, the FreeDOS installer is available in multiple formats based on the kind of system you're installing it on. For any "modern" PC (where "modern" covers anything that's shipped since the turn of the millennium), ISO and USB installers are available for creating bootable CDs, DVDs, or USB drives. FreeDOS is also available for vintage systems as a completely separate "Floppy-Only Edition" that fits on 720KB, 1.44MB, or 1.2MB 5.25 and 3.5-inch floppy disks.
Jim Hall composed a detailed introduction to FreeDOS 1.4 here.

He also answered questions from Slashdot's readers back in 2000 and again in 2019.

Celebrating Git's 20th anniversary, GitHub hosted a Q&A with Linus Torvalds, writes Its FOSS News.

Among the other revelations: He says his college-age daughter sent a texting saying he's better known at her CS lab for Git than for Linux, "because they actually use Git for everything there." Which he describes as "ridiculous" because he maintained it for just four months before handing it off to Junio Hamano who's been heading up development for more than 19 years now. "When it did what I needed," Torvalds says, "I lost interest." Linus then goes on to share how Git was never a big thing for him, but a means to an end that prevented the Linux kernel from descending into chaos over the absence of a version control system. You see, before Git, Linux used BitKeeper for version control, but its proprietary licensing didn't sit too well with other Linux contributors, and Linus Torvalds had to look for alternatives. As it turned out, existing tools like CVS and Subversion were too slow for the job at hand, prompting him to build a new tool from scratch, with the coding part just taking 10 days for an early self-hostable version of Git.

In its initial days, there were some teething issues, where users would complain about Git to Linus, even finding it too difficult to use, but things got calmer as the tool developed further.
Torvalds thinks some early adopters had trouble because they were coming from a background that was more like CVS. "The Git mindset, I came at it from a file system person's standpoint, where I had this disdain and almost hatred of most source control management projects, so I was not at all interested in maintaining the status quo."

New research suggests that given the right kind of training, AI bots can deliver mental health therapy with as much efficacy as -- or more than -- human clinicians. From a report: The recent study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows results from the first randomized clinical trial for AI therapy. Researchers from Dartmouth College built the bot as a way of taking a new approach to a longstanding problem: The U.S. continues to grapple with an acute shortage of mental health providers. "I think one of the things that doesn't scale well is humans," says Nick Jacobson, a clinical psychologist who was part of this research team. For every 340 people in the U.S., there is just one mental health clinician, according to some estimates.

While many AI bots already on the market claim to offer mental health care, some have dubious results or have even led people to self-harm. More than five years ago, Jacobson and his colleagues began training their AI bot in clinical best practices. The project, says Jacobson, involved much trial and error before it led to quality outcomes. "The effects that we see strongly mirror what you would see in the best evidence-based trials of psychotherapy," says Jacobson. He says these results were comparable to "studies with folks given a gold standard dose of the best treatment we have available."

"I started working on Voyager in 1977," the Voyager mission's project scientist told Gizmodo Saturday in a new interview. "It was my first job out of college."

35 years later, a Voyager probe became the first spacecraft to cross into interstellar space in 2012, with Voyager 2 following in 2018. But while each Voyager spacecraft carries 10 scientific instruments, all but three have now been turned off to conserve power, Gizmodo writes. "The two spacecraft now have enough power to operate for another year or so before engineers are forced to turn off two more instruments..." Voyager Mission Project Scientist Linda Spilker: The number of people that are working on and flying Voyager is a whole lot smaller than it was in the planetary days... The challenge was, can we reach the heliopause? We didn't know where it was, we had no idea how far away it was. We got to Neptune, and then we thought, "well, maybe it's just another 10 [astronomical units] or so, a little bit further, a little bit further." And so every time we got a little bit further, the modelers would go back, scratch their heads and say, "ah, it could be a little bit more, a little bit farther away," and so on and on that continued, until finally, Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012...

Gizmodo: Is it an emotional decision to turn off Voyager's instruments?

Spilker: I was talking to the cosmic ray instrument lead, and I said, "Wow, this must really be tough for you to see your instrument turned off." He helped build the instrument in the early 1970s. This instrument that's been sending you data, and that's been part of your life for over 50 years now. And he said, it was hard to think about turning it off for the whole team. It's kind of like losing a best friend, or someone that's been a part of your life for so many years, and then suddenly, it's silent. At the same time, there's this pride that you were part of that, and your instrument got so much great data — so it's a mix of emotions...

The spacecraft had a lot of redundancy on it, so that means two of every computer and two of all the key components. We've been able to turn off those backup units, but we're now at the point where, to really get a significant amount of power, all that's left are some of the science instruments to turn off. So, that's where we're at... How cold can the lines get before they freeze? How cold can some of these other components get before they stop working? So that's another challenge. Then there are individual tiny thrusters that align the spacecraft and keep that antenna pointed at the Earth so we can send the data back, and they're very slowly clogging up with little bits of silica, and so their puffs are getting weaker and weaker. That's another challenge that we're going through to balance.

But we're hopeful that we can get one, possibly two, spacecraft to the 50th anniversary in 2027. Voyager's golden anniversary, and perhaps even into the early 2030s with one, maybe two, science instruments.
"We're well past the warranty of four years..." Spilker says at one point. And "We're still working and thinking about an interstellar probe that would go much, much farther than Voyager.

"You're talking about a multi-generation mission."

Wikipedia remembers Dave Täht as "an American network engineer, musician, lecturer, asteroid exploration advocate, and Internet activist. He was the chief executive officer of TekLibre."

But on X.com Eric S. Raymond called him "one of the unsung heroes of the Internet, and a close friend of mine who I will miss very badly." Dave, known on X as @mtaht because his birth name was Michael, was a true hacker of the old school who touched the lives of everybody using X. His work on mitigating bufferbloat improved practical TCP/IP performance tremendously, especially around video streaming and other applications requiring low latency. Without him, Netflix and similar services might still be plagued by glitches and stutters.
Also on X, legendary game developer John Carmack remembered that Täht "did a great service for online gamers with his long campaign against bufferbloat in routers and access points. There is a very good chance your packets flow through some code he wrote." (Carmack also says he and Täht "corresponded for years".)

Long-time Slashdot reader TheBracket remembers him as "the driving force behind ">the Bufferbloat project and a contributor to FQ-CoDel, and CAKE in the Linux kernel."

Dave spent years doing battle with Internet latency and bufferbloat, contributing to countless projects. In recent years, he's been working with Robert, Frank and myself at LibreQoS to provide CAKE at the ISP level, helping Starlink with their latency and bufferbloat, and assisting the OpenWrt project.
Eric Raymond remembered first meeting Täht in 2001 "near the peak of my Mr. Famous Guy years. Once, sometimes twice a year he'd come visit, carrying his guitar, and crash out in my basement for a week or so hacking on stuff. A lot of the central work on bufferbloat got done while I was figuratively looking over his shoulder..."

Raymond said Täht "lived for the work he did" and "bore deteriorating health stoically. While I know him he went blind in one eye and was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis." He barely let it slow him down. Despite constantly griping in later years about being burned out on programming, he kept not only doing excellent work but bringing good work out of others, assembling teams of amazing collaborators to tackle problems lesser men would have considered intractable... Dave should have been famous, and he should have been rich. If he had a cent for every dollar of value he generated in the world he probably could have bought the entire country of Nicaragua and had enough left over to finance a space program. He joked about wanting to do the latter, and I don't think he was actually joking...

In the invisible college of people who made the Internet run, he was among the best of us. He said I inspired him, but I often thought he was a better and more selfless man than me. Ave atque vale, Dave.
Weeks before his death Täht was still active on X.com, retweeting LWN's article about "The AI scraperbot scourge", an announcement from Texas Instruments, and even a Slashdot headline.

Täht was also Slashdot reader #603,670, submitting stories about network latency, leaving comments about AI, and making announcements about the Bufferbloat project.