Thanks for sharing the story. I think Slashdot already covered Wyden's remarks last week. But I'm always glad when people let us know whenever Wyden says something interesting.

Slashdot really is "powered by your submissions." So thanks again for sharing the article.

Yeah, I'd wanted to call it an electric SUV -- but BMW insists on calling their cars "SAVs" (for Sports Activity Vehicle). That felt weird too. But I think it's really still pretty obvious -- from the 500-mile range, windshield wipers, etc. -- that it was not a German vibrator.

It's also not an ad. (I assume people know this already, and it's just a fun ongoing meme to accuse Slashdot editors of running stealth advertisements.) Hope you were wildly entertained...

But seriously: new electric car. Some physical controls. AI-enabled software. Lots to talk about. If you really need me to help kick things off...

"It's a car."

Slashdot followed Dave Barry in its early days. I see this story as an update on an icon from the early days of the web.

And I also thought it was just really cool that Slashdot reader #43,288 submitted the story...

I do wonder how many people are still reading his column - but 25 years ago he was one of web publishing's bigger stars...

I think you read that wrong. The Reddit user said they found Threads worthwhile. (They were just responding to someone who'd asked why people used Threads...) Then Mashable also cites consumer research company GWI (which found a much larger trend of Thread users saying the liked how it's "community-focused"). And finally Mashable points out the executive who launched the big experiment in running less political content [which may or may not reduce its "flair" -- but it's worth considering its impact].

I mean, you can agree or disagree with all of that -- but it's not just one Reddit user that Mashable is citing.

Maybe people are just reacting to the headlines and skimming the top of the articles... But I was really hoping to see people talking about how Threads supports ActivityPub's decentralized protocol (so it's integrated with the fediverse). Slashdot has supported open-ness and decentralization for decades. Mashable mentions support for the decentralized ActivityPub protocol in their article, and it's in Slashdot's excerpt as well. I just don't think that can be perceived as "absolutely nothing."

Yeah, I debated whether to use quotation marks in the headline. But the thing is, the word blizzard means a snowstorm. So when you read the words "Microsoft's Blizzard..." -- that literally sounds like Microsoft has some weather-controlling, blizzard-provoking.... Oh no wait, it's just talking about their gaming studio.

That's what I was trying to avoid.

Slashdot ran a story about new Model F models back in 2023...

I actually remember those AOL days pretty well.

Thanks for sharing the article...

Fixed! (Thanks for spotting that.)

That's really fascinating!

Er, but from the timestamps on the YouTube videos, this looks like they were uploaded several years ago?

> they could deploy anubi

The Free Software Foundation's position (from the linked-to article)...

"Anubis makes the website send out a free JavaScript program that acts like malware. A website using Anubis will respond to a request for a webpage with a free JavaScript program and not the page that was requested. If you run the JavaScript program sent through Anubis, it will do some useless computations on random numbers and keep one CPU entirely busy. It could take less than a second or over a minute. When it is done, it sends the computation results back to the website. The website will verify that the useless computation was done by looking at the results and only then give access to the originally requested page.

"At the FSF, we do not support this scheme because it conflicts with the principles of software freedom. The Anubis JavaScript program's calculations are the same kind of calculations done by crypto-currency mining programs. A program which does calculations that a user does not want done is a form of malware. Proprietary software is often malware, and people often run it not because they want to, but because they have been pressured into it. If we made our website use Anubis, we would be pressuring users into running malware. Even though it is free software, it is part of a scheme that is far too similar to proprietary software to be acceptable. We want users to control their own computing and to have autonomy, independence, and freedom. With your support, we can continue to put these principles into practice."

As other Slashdot readers vote your story up or down, the color changes. And the colors are ordered by how much "heat" they suggest, with red being the "hottest" and blue being the coolest. (There's more details in the official Slashdot FAQ.)

"The colors serve as a rough quality rating for entries in the firehose. You can sort for colors by using the color-picker next to the filter field. Red is the most popular, black is the least popular, and story submissions enter the firehose at blue. Your nods and nixes affect this, so the more often you vote, the more useful color sorting becomes. The lower your color threshold, the more content you'll see."

Interesting story. Thanks for submitting it to Slashdot!

But didn't we cover this one already?

Wait -- so you're saying my statistics are better than your statistics? :)

The real question is how many users are left on WT Social...

Both these stories came out this week... Probably because of the new announcement last week that "the rate of fraud through stolen identities has reached a level that imperils the federal student aid programs."

To make it more clear that this is new information, I'll go back in and add that to the very top of the story. (Although this was in the first version of Slashdot's post....) .

The issue has become so dire that the Department of Education announced this month [June] that it had found nearly 150,000 suspect identities in federal student-aid forms and is now requiring higher-ed institutions to validate the identities of first-time applicants for Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms...

That's amazing.

I just went in and added that detail to the story... Apparently as the plane was coming down, he jumped out of the emergency exit.