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Comment Defending idiots from themselves isn't the .govs (Score 1) 44

Slashdot doesn't need this clickbait.

A stupid rich vain asshole killed people so intensely silly they cared about Titanic, whose sole claim to fame IS fame. The world is slightly wiser in consequence.

Think about it. There is no reason a functioning adult should be morbidly fascinated by a mere shipwreck but people crave to masturbate to drama, and romantic death appeals to the bitch-made (a perfect hood term for a much wider degeneracy) mind.

The other casualties were so cravenly silly they utterly failed to perform THEIR OWN due diligence before becoming someone else's suicidal beta testers. They were sufficiently educated to understand the basics, including that ZERO reason exists not to copy proven hull designs zero reason existed to change let alone use an utterly absurd choice of hull.

Rush had Alvin--tier money but pure vanity is why he chose a childishly silly hull design no reason existed to want because nothing about it was better. His loss is as minor as a common auto accident. Ditto the "collateral damage" who knew what they signed up for.

Submission + - Microsoft discovers new lightweight backdoor that steals cryptocurrency (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Ars Technica reports Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers. The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the contents of device clipboards for patterns consistent with wallet addresses or seed phrases.

“The execution of this clipper is notable because it does not depend on a traditional installer or exposed IP-based C2 infrastructure,” Microsoft said Thursday. “Instead, it deploys a portable Tor client, routes traffic through a local SOCKS5 proxy, and blends data theft with remote code execution, turning a financially motivated stealer into a lightweight backdoor.”

“This malware family shows how lightweight, script-based stealers can deliver outsized impact when paired with anonymized communications and runtime tasking,” Microsoft said. “The combination of Tor-routed C2, clipboard targeting, screenshot capture, and remote code execution gives attackers both immediate monetization paths and continued control over compromised devices.”

Big question is "What's in your crypto wallet?"

Submission + - OpenAI just exposed how bad AI still is at real science (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: OpenAI introduced LifeSciBench, a new benchmark designed to evaluate AI systems on realistic life science research tasks rather than simple biology questions. While OpenAIâ(TM)s top-performing GPT-Rosalind model led the rankings, it achieved a pass rate of just 36.1 percent, failing nearly two-thirds of benchmark tasks. The company says the results highlight progress in scientific communication and evidence synthesis, but also reveal persistent weaknesses in artifact-heavy and design-oriented scientific work.

Submission + - SMPTE Opens Entire Standards Library to Public at No Cost (smpte.org)

Submitted by innocent_white_lamb
innocent_white_lamb writes: "SMPTE®, the home of media professionals, technologists and engineers, has announced that its entire Standards catalog is now freely available to the global media technology community. This includes all published SMPTE Standards, Recommended Practices, Engineering Guidelines and Registered Disclosure Documents (RDDs), as well as all future releases. For more than a century, SMPTE Standards have helped enable the interoperability that underpins the entertainment technology industry. By removing barriers to access, this milestone is expected to accelerate adoption and implementation, strengthen interoperability, and help drive the next generation of innovation."

SMPTE is the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, a global professional organization that sets standards for film, television, and digital media

Submission + - Alan Turing developed a portable voice encryption device (popularmechanics.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020, reveal Turning had produced a working model of a portable voice encryption device. He even demonstrated it by using a Winston Churchill speech recording.

“Weighing just 39 kg, including its power pack,” Copeland summarizes, “Delilah would be at home in a truck, a trench, or a large backpack.”

Turing’s work at Bletchley Park actually informed the Delilah experimentation he was doing at Hanslope Park, and not just because he used Red Forms, the Army-issue sheets Hanslope staffers were meant to use to alert Bletchley staffers to enemy signals, as his personal scrap paper for Delilah experiments. He drew inspiration from one of the German cipher machines they had decoded at Bletchley; not the famed Enigma machine, but rather the SZ42. While the former relied on Morse Code, the latter utilized a 5-bit telegraph code, which Copeland notes “was a forerunner of ASCII and Unicode and is still used by some ham radio operators.”

The SZ42 produced an obscuring key of telegraph characters, with an identical key produced to both the sender and receiver. If it could be done for text, Turing reasoned it could be done for sound as well.

This is the part of the story where one might say “Well, I’ve never heard of Alan Turing’s voice encoder, so the experiments must have failed.” But remarkably, they didn’t. Turing and Bayley actually did create their Delilah, and even demonstrated it using a recording of a Winston Churchill speech, “successfully encrypting, transmitting, and decrypting it.”

Instead, the reason Delilah fell to the wayside of history isn’t because it was a failure, but rather because it simply wasn’t needed anymore. By the time Turing had built and demonstrated his device, the war was over. What good was a portable voice encryptor if you had no major enemies trying to intercept your calls, the government reasoned. So funding for the project stopped, and Turing’s two-year experiment ended with a whimper. Turing’s time as an electrical engineer at Hanslope Park became a footnote in his story, if even that.

Comment Re:Antropic literally asked for this (Score 1) 40

I'm personally convinced they're a cutout. They're being used to intentionally push this fear agenda so that the government can crack down and further implement the panopticon.

It's the only reasonable response to them repeatedly saying, "our products are dangerous". They're pushing for government intervention, and for whatever reason, want industry regulation or governmental industry control.

Comment Dispersed power can be more robust. (Score 3, Interesting) 90

Fire easily destroys or disables concentrated "force loss multiplier" fratricidal storage designs. Not just accidents, but terrorist-style attacks can take them out easily via drones using simple electric triggers.

https://theconversation.com/wh...

Disperse batteries far and wide and they'll be much more difficult to interfere with if they're designed to function without grid power during emergencies. A controlled, graceful shutdown is better than abrupt power interruption.

Submission + - Arch Linux's AUR Sees More Than 400 Packages Compromised With Malware. (phoronix.com)

Submitted by couchslug
couchslug writes: Michael Larabel reports:

"The Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" was hit by a large-scale malware campaign this week with more than 400 of these user-supplied packages being compromised.

Since yesterday Arch Linux maintainers have been working to reset/delete all of the malicious content and banning affected accounts. Over 400 packages are believed impacted by this latest malware campaign for Arch Linux's AUR. Again, to be completely clear, this just is affecting AUR packages and not the official Arch Linux packages. "

Submission + - WAPO sued, reader accuses it of using 'surveillance pricing' to gouge readers (the-independent.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Chelsea Bink thought she was buying a subscription. The lawsuit says she was also feeding a pricing machine. From the Independent:

A Washington Post reader has sued the Jeff Bezos-owned newspaper, accusing it of spying on its own subscribers to jack up their subscription prices.

Chelsea Blink’s class action complaint alleges that The Post began "covertly harvesting" data from its subscribers' phones, computers and tablets after the billionaire Amazon founder bought it for $250 million in 2013.

The Post then aggregated and analyzed the "deeply personal information" to "weaponize" it and maximize profits, according to the 28-page lawsuit filed in Superior Court in Washington, D.C.

"The more loyal a reader became, the more data The Post could gather to estimate how much more that person might tolerate paying at renewal," the court filing says. "Rather than rewarding loyalty, The Post’s system converted Subscribers’ engagement into leverage against them. Longtime Subscribers would end up paying more than new customers simply because the company knew more about them."

Blink's lawsuit, first reported by Mediaite, accuses The Post of violating local consumer protection law through its alleged "unfair and deceptive acts."

Submission + - Microsoft Surface firmware left embedded controller unprotected (theregister.com)

Submitted by Dotnaught
Dotnaught writes: For the past 90 days, Microsoft has been quietly patching a firmware flaw in Surface devices that allowed the hardware to be bricked with a single packet, though only for those who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot.

And the company's Copilot AI software inadvertently helped identify the faulty firmware. Asked by a security researcher to adjust the backlighting on a Surface laptop, the AI sprayed the embedded controller with data and bricked his device.

Submission + - Usenet is back! (sort of] (newsgrouper.org) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Newsgrouper is a free web-based interface for reading and posting to Usenet discussion groups (text only, no binaries). Hosted at newsgrouper.org, it allows users to access Usenet newsgroups through a simple browser interface — no dedicated newsreader software or Usenet provider subscription needed

Key features:

Read and post to Usenet newsgroups via the web
Text-only — no binary (file) groups supported
Guest access available for browsing; account required for posting

It was built as a personal project and shared on Reddit and Hacker News in late 2024/early 2025, with the goal of making Usenet's remaining worthwhile discussion corners (like comp.lang.* groups) more accessible

Submission + - Shutterstock is embracing AI slop and calling it creativity (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Shutterstock has unveiled what it calls a âoehuman-led, AI-poweredâ creative platform that combines its library of contributor-created content with AI image generation, AI editing, conversational search, prompt enhancement, and automated model selection tools. The company says the goal is to help creators move from idea to finished work faster while maintaining commercial licensing protections and contributor royalty payments.

Critics may see the announcement differently. While Shutterstock repeatedly emphasizes human creativity, much of the platformâ(TM)s future appears centered on AI-generated and AI-modified content. The move highlights a growing tension across the creative industry as companies race to embrace artificial intelligence while creators worry that the internet is becoming increasingly flooded with what many have come to call âoeAI slop.â

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