Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

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 + - College Students Are Rapidly Losing the Ability to Read (futurism.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: In a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education , university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read "without complaint" as an undergraduate a decade ago.

One student confessed that the reason they didn't finish was that they kept losing track of what the paper was about. And there's no doubt that they're not alone.

Jagt cites the 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress reading assessment results released last year. It showed that 12th grade reading scores were at the lowest level since the assessment began in 1992. Nearly a third of those 12th graders scored below the assessment's "basic" level in reading, meaning they likely "cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text." Younger children aren't better off: a recent report from the Annie E. Casey Foundation found that 70 percent of fourth graders, or around two million kids, can't read at a proficient level.

"What I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch," Jagt writes. "There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires."

Pupils arriving unable to read is an increasingly common complaint from college-level educators amid the explosion of generative AI. Many students treat AI as a genuine learning tool — perhaps to summarize a lengthy article they can't understand, for example — becoming reliant on its speedy responses to race through coursework.

More flagrantly detrimental to learning, plenty more use the tech to generate entire essays and solve math problems — or, in a word, cheat. That many universities have partnered with tech companies to provide students with access to their shiny AI models has only served to rubber stamp and accelerate the tech's adoption in the classroom, marooning individual instructors to figure out how to work around AI on their own.

Submission + - Microsoft Smashes Record For Biggest Ever Patch Tuesday Update (computerweekly.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Microsoft has issued patches for about 200 flaws in its latest monthly Patch Tuesday drop, blasting past a previous record high of almost 170 common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs) set in October 2025. Among a great many others, the latest update from Redmond fixes a total of 32 critical CVEs and three zero-day flaws. Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness at TrendAI’s Zero Day Initiative, said: “We are heading into a high-stakes summer for cyber security. June's record-shattering drop ... is a stark warning that AI is supercharging flaw discovery at an uncontrollable scale. The current number of CVEs shipped by Microsoft this year exceeds the total number of CVEs shipped in all of 2018. It is extraordinary that Microsoft can produce so many patches in a single month, and I expect many testers are wondering what quality issues may exist.”

And with the addition of hundreds of CVEs in Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge (Chromium) and other third-party flaws taking the total to almost 600, Chris Goettl, vice president of security product management at Ivanti, said talk of a ‘Patch Apocalypse’ was no longer unwarranted. “We are in the Patch Apocalypse. The Patch Apocalypse is now,” said Goettl. “This is not intended to be a scare tactic. It is meant to outline the challenge that many organisations were anticipating, but the new generation of LLMs [Large Language Models] has accelerated significantly in the first half of 2026."

"There are going to be more CVEs resolved by vendors at a faster and more continuous pace than we have ever seen previously. Unfortunately, this will also include more zero-day and n-day exploits than previously seen as well. The window from release from a vendor to exploitation had already shortened to five days as of 2023 threat intelligence data.” Goettl said that many suppliers have acknowledged the need to use AI tools in their security research to identify and resolve flaws, with Oracle, Google Chrome and Mozilla all upping the cadence of their updates. Whether or not Microsoft follows suit remains to be seen.

Submission + - FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones By Forcing Telecoms to Get All Customers' IDs (404media.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) wants to make it effectively impossible for people to buy what many call burner phones — a phone not explicitly linked to your identity at the point of purchase — which would impact privacy-conscious people, to domestic abuse survivors, to journalists, and many more. The FCC plans to do this by legally forcing the country’s telecoms to store a wealth of personal information about essentially all phone customers, including a government issued identification number and their physical address, alarming privacy advocates and civil rights activists who compare the measures to those from authoritarian countries where it can be difficult to buy a mobile phone plan without giving up your identity.

The proposed change would drastically shake up how people obtain phone plans in the U.S., and have all sorts of privacy and cybersecurity knock-on effects. The FCC is proposing the data collection partly as a way to combat scammers, with telecoms being required to collect other information on business and foreign customers like the intended use case of their bulk phone plan purchase and their IP address. But the changes would mean telecoms collect data on all new and renewing customers, and the FCC provides a long list of other things that the collected data could help authorities with.

In a synopsis of the proposed changes, the FCC writes, “Specifically, we seek comment on requiring originating providers to, at a minimum, obtain and retain the name, physical address, government issued identification number, and an alternate telephone number of any new and renewing customer before granting access to its services.” The goal of collecting this data, the FCC writes, is to deter some scammers from getting onto a telecom network in the first place, and so “enforcers will be better able to identify the scammers when they do.” The FCC compares the changes to the sort of data collected by banks to prevent money laundering.

One section stresses that the newly collected data would help “law enforcement to more easily identify callers that use the network to perpetuate crimes by ensuring that voice providers have accurate and complete customer information.” It goes on to ask if the data would help identify people buying and selling illicit goods; the investigation of “fraud, espionage, or influence operations that undermine national security”, and “address abuse in text messaging networks.” “Criminals continue to leverage the anonymity provided by phone calls and texts to defraud Americans and exploit communications networks to further other crimes,” one section reads.

Submission + - Billions in Drug Discounts. Where Did the Money Go? (substack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Hospitals get billions in federally discounted drugs, and aren't required to pass a penny to patients.

The Trump Administration is trying to fix with a rebate model that creates a paper trail proving the savings actually reach the poor.

The hospital lobby sued to stop it. Transparency shouldn't stop reform it should drive it.

Submission + - Kayleigh McEnany exposes the great H1B ripoff (x.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Nearly 7 million visas processed since 2015
  70% from India
  12% from China
  A former official told Newsweek 80-90% of applications from India involved fraudulent documents or unqualified applicants
  A network of universities selling fake degrees is now under investigation with one university allegedly selling 36,000+ fake degrees

Submission + - Ohio man jailed for texting Shrek's penis to a state senator (fire.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: What does the First Amendment say?

About Shrek’s schlong specifically? Nothing, surprisingly. But it does have a lot to say about speech criticizing government officials — that is, that it lies at the heart of our constitutional protection for free speech. Aside from very narrow exceptions to the First Amendment, such as true threats or obscenity, the government generally cannot punish people for saying things to or about public officials, even if some find the speech offensive, insulting or vulgar.

Political speech doesn’t have to be serious or reverent to have First Amendment protection.
Another take ...
https://eternallyradicalidea.c...

Submission + - California Dethroned: Fortune 500 Crown Goes to Texas (californiaglobe.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: The 2026 Fortune 500 list shows Texas leading California in Fortune 500 companies 57-56.

Data from the 2026 Fortune 500 list show Texas leading with 57 headquarters, compared with California’s 56, marking a reversal from two years ago, when California held the lead, Fox Business reports.

“Additionally, corporations in Texas generated $2.8 trillion in revenue, while those in California reported $2.7 trillion in revenue.”

Submission + - NASA admits mismanagement and human errors caused 2025 Goldstone antenna damage (behindtheblack.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: NASA today released its completed investigation into the November 2025 incident that severely damaged its Goldstone antenna in California when workers allowed the antenna to "over rotate" beyond its acceptable limits, putting it out of commission.

You can read that report here [pdf], but be warned that large sections are redacted, apparently in an effort to protect the identities of those responsible.

Nonetheless, it is very clear that the management and work situation at Goldstone was a mess, and that the mishap was caused not by faulty engineering but by faulty work practices and bad management. Unfortunately, nowhere in the report is it said that there will be any management changes. This fact might have been redacted, but I suspect not. It is typical of government agencies like NASA after incidents like this to whitewash the investigation, concluding simply that "we should have done better and we now we will!"

The repairs will cost NASA about $4.6 million, and will likely not be completed until 2028.

Comment Case was about Jarkesy not the underlying offenses (Score 4, Informative) 73

The primary question presented to the Supreme Court was whether the administrative enforcement and forfeiture provisions of the Communications Act of 1934 violate the Seventh Amendment and Article III of the Constitution by allowing the FCC to impose steep monetary penalties without guaranteeing the defendant a right to a jury trial.

The FCC fined ATT and Verizon for illegally sharing location data. The companies said this was not permitted because Jarkesy required a jury trial.

The majority distinguished the FCC's process from the unconstitutional SEC framework struck down in Jarkesy. Because the Communications Act leaves the ultimate mechanism of forced collection up to a subsequent federal court proceeding—where a jury trial remains available if a carrier refuses to pay—the preliminary administrative fact-finding by the FCC is a constitutionally permissible mechanism.

The 2 companies can refuse to pay the fines. The FCC could then take them to court where a trial would decide.

Slashdot Top Deals

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo. - Andy Finkel, computer guy

Close