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Comment How might the customers study surveillance? (Score 1) 16

by couchslug (#66404697) Attached to: College Students are Pushing Colleges to 'De-Flock'

Schools have plenty of inquiring student minds capable of studying how existing camera systems affect criminal acts, for example if and how they deter crime or improve speed and quality of security response.

Students are school customers with an obvious need to know. They could contribute useful studies from their service consumer perspective.

We cannot precisely understand real impact without valid information. Cameras in public space are not cameras in private space. Colleges could precisely compare situational impact, study relevant laws and precedents, and much more. Students could be ideal evaluators since they unlike surveillance system businesses are not selling anything.

What might student study of these systems look like? Humanity needs third party (not sellers, not criminals) investigation and neutral explanation of subjects technically and legally uninformed people cannot easily understand. Education is civilization's continuity.

Submission + - SGI IRIX Indigo Magic Desktop recreation with AI: Cyanotype Blueprint Desktop (niten.irix.expert)

Submitted by MIPSPro
MIPSPro writes: Someone has re-created the Indigo Magic Desktop for the SGI IRIX operating system as a rather large scale undertaking with dozens of applications and preferences straight out of 2006. It's a BSD licensed affair with an actual IRIX port and several other platforms including Solaris SPARC and x86_64 BSD and Linux systems. It's based on man custom extensions to MOTIF much like SGI's SGM libraries for notebook widgets and non-MOTIF goodies. It runs on many x11 platforms including Xorg and X11Libre as well as forthcoming ports to Tru64 Alpha, and AIX 6.1 on POWER4 or better, and HP-UX 11iv3 Integrity and PA-RISC HP-UX 11.31. There is also a Citrix clone "CyThrough" and a CalDAV desktop calendar, Sunbeam.

Submission + - Recycling ANSI art: Tracing the origins of Fire Escape's BBS logon screens (breakintochat.com)

Submitted by Kirkman14
Kirkman14 writes: Whether you call it "ripping" or "remixing", the BBS scene had a long tradition of adapting and reusing much older ANSI art.

Fire Escape, curator of the authoritative list of bulletin board systems in St. Louis, Missouri's 314 area code, and sysop of the area's most popular board, was a perfect example.

Like many sysops of that time, Fire Escape enlivened her bulletin board by finding and repurposing older ANSI art. Eventually her BBS had 18 different logon screens in its rotation, many of which featured flames or mushroom clouds or made liberal use of red and yellow.

The folks who created this so-called "public domain" ANSI art in the late 1980s and very early 1990s — such as Michael C. Ling, Lora Ruffner (aka “Ebony Eyes”) and Violet Stymacks — certainly intended their work to be seen, and shared it publicly on networked messageboards.

Were they okay with other people using their art? Or would they have considered such borrowing or adapting as "ripping" or just plain "stealing"?

In my latest retrocomputing essay on Break Into Chat, I explore this widespread practice by tracing the origins of several ANSI art screens from Fire Escape's BBS, and finding how different people later transformed the original images.

Comment Turbines are efficient, simple and noise-optional (Score 1) 45

They're not popular by accident. How quiet they are is up to the humans who spec their enclosures. (Ditto with large diesels which are routinely made sufficiently quiet for cruise liners.)

Industrial flue gases were traditionally exhausted by tall stacks whose draught pulled fresh air into the furnace at the base. A more recent reason that's done is to reduce ground-level pollution.

Turbines need not be run open like an engine on an outdoor test stand. That's why Air Force bases have sound suppressors to test engines in and out of airframes. Those "Hush houses" could be much quieter but are mostly located on operating air bases where other, installed engines running in afterburner for takeoff are normal.

Submission + - Candy Corn Is Made of Bug Secretions (archive.is)

Submitted by know-nothing cunt
know-nothing cunt writes: The Atlantic reports:

Here's a tip if you ever want to ruin a Halloween party. Seek out the most squeamish-seeming adult or child you can find in the act of consuming candy corn. Then tell them they just filled their mouth with bug secretions. If this fact alarms you — or if you’re an inveterate hater of candy corn and thus think that you have been spared — I regret to inform you that by eating many classic Halloween candies, you are, to some extent, eating bugs. More precisely, you are eating a bug by-product that is in many cases listed on the package as "confectioner’s glaze." This glaze is used on jelly beans, Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Whoppers, Lemonheads, and Sugar Babies, to name a few.

Submission + - The Tragedy of Losing Your Wikipedia Page (wired.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What do you need to know—need to know—about Xavier Trudeau? The eldest son of former Canadian prime minister Justin, the teenage Trudeau has recently begun performing R&B under the mononym Xav. But, with all due respect to Xav, do those facts make him a person of note? Should you expect to be able to read about him on Wikipedia? What about Evanescence guitarist Tim McCord, or 2012 Yachtmaster of the Year Rainer Holtorff? All three have had a biography on Wikipedia; all three of those biographies were considered for deletion this year on the grounds that the subjects were not notable enough to warrant a biography at all. Every day, dozens, sometimes hundreds, of Wikipedia biographies—of child actors turned LA realtors, retired ambassadors, soccer players who have played less than 10 minutes of professional soccer—are purged from the world’s free encyclopedia.

It’s not as though Wikipedia, which hosts over 7 million articles in the English language, doesn’t have the space. But Wikipedia has only so many volunteers to monitor its contents. To this day, Wikipedia editors are discovering hoaxes that have gone undetected for decades. The time it takes to verify the release dates of Xav’s three singles is better spent—the logic goes—by asking whether the American Civil War officer Nathaniel Lyon really drank mustard during battle, as was claimed in his Wikipedia biography for 17 years. Wikipedia removed the mustard claim, not because it was proven wrong, but because there was no reliable evidence for it. “We’re not really looking for what’s true,” Britta Gustafson, who has been editing Wikipedia since 2001, told me. “We’re looking for what’s verifiable.” Wikipedia editors do not themselves decide that a person is not notable, only that there is a lack of reliable evidence to support the claim...

Submission + - Bank of America kindly asks that you don't share your password with your AI asst (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In an email blast to customers titled “Protecting your finances in the Al World,” Bank of America urged customers to never share their username and password with another person or an outside service, “including an Al-enabled tool or agent that offers to act on your behalf.”

You can practically sense the frustration in the person sending the email. Still, customers are increasingly handing over their log-ins as personal AI assistants grow more popular. Sharing your banking username and password with an AI assistant runs the risk that it could do something with your finances without your knowledge, or that your bank thinks someone’s raiding your account and locks you out of it. Worse, a security flaw in the AI assistant could result in it leaking your banking credentials elsewhere, giving financially motivated hackers a way into your bank account.

Submission + - New Discovery Reveals Shakespeare Co-Wrote Play With His Famous Rival Marlowe (greekreporter.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Nisha Zahid of the Greek Reporter writes that new research has found that William Shakespeare collaborated with Christopher Marlowe on Edward III, a historical play published anonymously in 1596. The findings suggest Shakespeare was the main author, while Marlowe contributed several sections. The discovery challenges the long-held belief that the two playwrights were primarily rivals.

Dr. Rory Loughnane, a Shakespeare scholar at the University of Kent, said the research establishes Shakespeare’s leading role “beyond any reasonable doubt.” The findings could settle a centuries-old debate over the play’s authorship. Scholars had previously linked Shakespeare to several scenes but remained uncertain about how much of the work he wrote.

The researchers used computer-based text analysis to compare Edward III with confirmed works by 10 playwrights active between the late 1580s and mid-1590s.

In one test, the analysis attributed 23 sections of the play to Shakespeare and nine to Marlowe. The results suggest Shakespeare wrote most of the work, with Marlowe contributing a smaller portion. The findings build on earlier research into the play’s disputed authorship.

A 2016 study had already identified Marlowe as a co-author of Shakespeare’s three Henry VI plays. Combined with the new findings, that research suggests Shakespeare and Marlowe maintained a working relationship across several plays during their early careers. Their collaboration on Edward III, believed to have been written around 1592, suggests the two writers worked together while both were in their 20s.

The findings add to scholarly understanding of Shakespeare’s early career and the collaborative nature of Elizabethan theater. The research is expected to appear in the winter issue of the academic journal Shakespeare Quarterly.

Submission + - Rubin Telescope discovers a new solar system planet (behindtheblack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Using data from the Rubin Telescope in Chile, astronomers have discovered a new planet in the outer solar system beyond Neptune, joining Pluto, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake as the five known large Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO) so far discovered.

On the evening of 13 October, [Matthew] Holman was running data collected by Rubin earlier in 2026 through a search code he developed with CfA colleague Kevin Napier. The code is built to look at billions of detections of moving objects, compare them, and find the detections that correspond to the same object. Using this method, Holman uncovered ED138, and he immediately noticed that its brightness and distance indicated that it is unusually large. “My first reaction was one of excited disbelief,” says Holman. “Objects like this are very rare, so I immediately started checking whether I or the code had done something wrong.”

To remove any doubt, a detailed search through the data began in the hopes of uncovering more observations of ED138. Juri searched Rubin’s catalogs and images and found 20 more observations, going back to 4 March 2026. In all, Rubin observed ED138 30 times on 20 nights between 4 March and 11 July. Additional archival images from the DOE-fabricated Dark Energy Camera (DECam), and uncovered by the Asteroid Institute’s ADAM Precovery service, provided data going all the way back to 2016. These data allowed the team to trace more than 10 years of ED138's orbit. DECam is mounted on the NSF Victor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF NOIRLab.

ED138 is currently at a distance of about 46 astronomical units (au), where 1 au is the average distance between the Earth and the Sun. For reference, dwarf planet Pluto has an average distance of 40 au. This classifies ED138 as a trans-Neptunian object (TNO) — objects that orbit the Sun at a distance greater than Neptune’s.

The data suggests this new planet is the largest TNO object so far discovered, though at present the size estimate is very uncertain, from 350 to 1400 miles in diameter.

Comment Current news cycle (Score 1) 108

That's why it's on Slashdot. High value thefts are increasing but most are by traditional methods. Fraudulent pickups and carrier impersonation are simple, easy and allow ample time to unload cargo.

Value rose ~725 million dollars for 2025 so a drop in the economic swimming pool. That's hardly impressive in an economy the size of the US.

High value load tracking and hiring private security guards will be natural responses.

Comment Predictable reddit outcome was obvious (Score 1) 147

Reddit drama is hardly "news" and but does drive monetizable view counts. Posting reddit drama on Slashdot drives views because Slashdot is a general news site.

Ideological communities are prone to infighting because humans enjoy competing virtue displays. Weak communities will render themselves irrelevant. Effective communities will thrive. Water is wet.

Where AI proves sufficiently useful it will be used but there is no need for everyone to use AI.

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