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Submission + - Slashdot Poll: The year of your oldest extant "thing" still on the Internet. 3

Submitted by DeQueue
DeQueue writes: Slashdot Poll: The year of your oldest extant "thing" still on the Internet. Double bonus points if you include the URL to it or a description of it in your post.

2020-2026
2015-2019
2010-2014
2005-2009
2000-2004
1995-1999
1990-1994
1985-1989
1983-1984
Before 1983/Cowboy Neal/ARPANet

Submission + - Long Before Tech CEOs Turned to Layoffs to Cover AI Expenses, There Was WorldCom

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI?

Sorry, the correct response is, "What is WorldCom?" In 2002, WorldCom, the second largest long-distance company in the U.S., entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after disclosing accounting fraud that eventually totaled $11 billion, the biggest ever at the time. CEO Bernard Ebbers was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison. CNBC reported that an employee of WorldCom’s Internet service provider UUNet set off a frenzy of speculative investment and infrastructure overbuild after he used Excel to create a best-case scenario model for the Internet’s growth that suggested in the best of all possible worlds, Internet traffic would double every 100 days, a scenario that would greatly benefit WorldCom, whose lines would carry it. Despite no evidence to support it, WorldCom’s lie became an immutable law and businesses around the world made important decisions based on the belief that traffic was doubling every 100 days.

"For some period of time I can recall that we were backfilling that expectation with laying cables, something like 2,200 miles of cable an hour,” AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong said. “Think of all the companies that went out of business that assumed that that was real.” Armstrong and former Sprint CEO Bill Esrey struggled for years to understand how WorldCom could beat them so handily. “We would look at the conduct of WorldCom in terms of their pricing, revenue growth, margins, in terms of their cost structure ... and the price leader almost every quarter was WorldCom,” Armstrong said. Added Esrey, “We couldn’t figure out how they were pricing as aggressively as they were. ... How could they be so efficient in their costs and expenses?”

AT&T and Sprint began cutting jobs to push down their costs to WorldCom’s level. “The market said what a marvelous management job WorldCom was doing and they would look over to AT&T and say, ‘these guys aren’t keeping up.’ So, my shareholders were hurt. We laid off tens of thousands of employees in an accelerated fashion [in a futile effort to match WorldCom's phantom profits] and I think the industry was hurt,” Armstrong says. “It just wrecked the whole industry,” says Esrey.

Submission + - Hey SLASHDOT!! Website is Buggy!! Can't click on things and it "Expand" properly 2

Submitted by GFS666
GFS666 writes: Hey. Your website is screwed up. When I click on an item, it brings me to a new webpage and it does not expand out that conversation in the main window. In the Firehose section, you can't open the stories to see what they say. Recommend that you fix things.

Submission + - The psychology of self-driving cars: Why the technology doesn't suit human brain (techxplore.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: According to Professor of Engineering Psychology Ronald McLeod, cars with autonomous features place unprecedented psychological demands on drivers—demands we are currently drastically unprepared for. McLeod is a world-renowned Human Factors specialist, which involves analyzing and understanding how humans interact with various autonomous systems, from industrial machines to aircraft systems.

In his book "Transitioning to Autonomy", Professor McLeod draws on decades of research into how humans interact with automated systems. But it was his personal experience buying a new car with autonomous features that really opened his eyes to the scale of the problem.

"I was handed the keys with no training whatsoever and let loose into Glasgow rush-hour traffic," he recalls. "No research ethics committee would ever allow such an experiment, yet this is happening to drivers every day around the world."

Most cars manufactured today feature at least some level of driver support technology, and in fact some driving assistance technology is now mandatory in new cars, with the intention of reducing accidents caused by human error. These include lane assistance technology to keep cars driving straight without steering, automatic braking and road sign scanning to ensure you are driving at the correct speed.

The issue lies in a fundamental shift in thinking that most of us would not recognize. When autonomous features engage, drivers do not simply become passengers—they become something far more challenging: supervisory controllers. Instead of actively steering and accelerating, they must monitor the system's ongoing performance and stand ready to intervene at a moment's notice.

This creates what psychologists call a "vigilance task"—maintaining attention during periods of low activity. And, it is something humans are notoriously bad at.

Submission + - Did Ring's Super Bowl commercial destroy its brand? (nj.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Super Bowl commercials often spark conversation, but one 2026 ad in particular has caused quite a stir.

The home security company Ring aired a Super Bowl advertisement highlighting the AI-powered Search Party feature. When a pet owner reports their pet missing in the Ring app, Search Party kicks in on participating outdoor Ring cameras, scanning the area for the missing pet.

The commercial presented the feature as a wholesome way to reunite pets with their beloved owners, but many viewers took issue with the implications of Search Party.

“Do you see what I did there? I disguised mass human surveliance [sic] as a puppy search party,” one X user wrote.

Other social media posts slammed the commercial as “creepy as can be,” “concerning” and “invasive.”

“Marketing team at Ring Camera HQ seriously sat around and was like, ‘How do we sell unconstitutional surveillance of our citizens during the Super Bowl?’ And one guy was like “DOGS!’” one person quipped.

Submission + - Researchers completely eliminate pancreatic tumors in mice. (www.cnio.es)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Mariano Barbacid, head of the Experimental Oncology Group at the National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO), has designed a therapy that successfully eliminates pancreatic tumours in mice completely and durably, with no significant side effects. The study is published in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), with Carmen Guerra as co-lead author and Vasiliki Liaki and Sara Barrambana as first authors.

Current drugs for pancreatic cancer lose effectiveness within months because the tumour becomes resistant. The group from Spain’s National Cancer Research Centre (CNIO) has been able to avoid the development of resistance in animal models with a combined triple therapy.

These results “pave the way for the design of combined therapies that may improve survival,” the authors indicate, although this will not happen in the short term. The results are published in PNAS.

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