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Comment Re:Rip to a M-DISC for posterity (Score 1) 55

Not 100% sure about other countries, but in the US technically you don't have to ever play it or rip it from any disc. Owning the CD is proof you own a license to listen to the music on it. You can literally download or copy anyone else's copy.

This is because when you buy physical media, you are NOT purchasing the music, you are purchasing a license to listen to use the music for yourself. There doesn't have to be any music on the disc, but you do need a way to get it (you see this far more in software, like when buying Office at Best Buy gives you a license key and no software). If you want to play the music in public, you still need to get public performance license from the publisher (venues that pipe in music do this). There is a minor exception called fair use, but how many people you can play if under that before you violate copyright is a judges call. If you're just playing it for a few friends at home, you're probably in the clear.

Comment Re: Pragmatic attitude works well on this. (Score 1) 85

I'm of the stance that AI could be good to check my code and test it, then let me decide what to do.

I need to understand what I have in my code to trust it to work and be secure so an AI generated snippet might be working well but be hard to understand. Such code can be very hard to maintain.

Submission + - Gen Z Is Bringing CDs Back but They're Missing One Important Piece of the Puzzle (vice.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Believe it or not, the CD—yes, that CD— is having a resurgence. In fact, new data reveals that Gen Z seems to be buying up the outdated music format without even having a way to play it.

On a broader note, physical media seems to be having a big moment in 2026. Through the first half of the year, total physical album sales on vinyl, CDs, and cassettes reached 38.2 million units in the United States. This equates to a 7.8 percent increase.

So how did all this come about? Well, it seems that younger music fans have been driving a lot of the retro revival. The report shows that in 2026, 60 percent of Gen Z listeners said they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older. This is a massive increase from the 18 percent marker in 2021.

Comment Re: How will this help? (Score 1) 82

by Creepy (#66241798) Attached to: FCC Plans To Repeal 39% TV Ownership Cap

It will bring about the perfect world! I can't wait for this Brave New World!

PBS, a Trump Media Company brings you TRUTH Media Headlines for today. All facts are VERIFIED as TRUTH by Donald Trump himself.

Jeffery Epstein Memorial Island dedicated a national landmark.
New Zealand liberated as the 53 state after Canada and Greenland
Trump ascends, he will now be addressed as God, not just "King of the World."
All people not at least 75% white will be deported. Obama sent to Antarctica after chief ethnic officer Robert F Kennedy Jr. declares him half pengin.

Comment Re:An AMAZING number of flaws (Score 1) 76

by Z00L00K (#66240856) Attached to: Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

A lot of security flaws are when you look at them the most common mistakes like access outside buffers, use after free and such. In those cases they can result in erratic behavior when you go beyond the bounds of allocated memory.

The absolutely worst issues aren't coding mistakes but architectural mistakes, but those aren't that common and often kept under wraps or released as "Working as designed - not a flaw" and the users have to perform a workaround or a workaround being released later - like an update that now creates that empty "inetpub" directory in your C drive root just to prevent some malware from using it as a hiding place.

Submission + - US Suffered a Major Power Outage Every Month of 2026 (electrek.co)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A Reddit post making the rounds this week claims the US has experienced at least one major power outage every month of 2026 – but is it true? I dug into several outages, the extreme weather behind them, and what we can do to help keep the lights on. [...] The claim that hundreds of thousands of Americans were without power over extended periods at least once per month, every month of 2026 surprised be in two ways. First, because I had no idea if it was true – and, second, because it felt true. We try to do better than writing about things that feel true around here, however, so I did a bit of research (translation: I Googled power outages by month) and came up with the following examples in about sixty seconds

January: More than 296,000 customers still without power as winter storm freezes much of the US
February: More than 380,000 customers without power as winter storm hits US Northeast
March: Storms Cut Power to Over 1 Million Customers in US Midwest, Mid-Atlantic; Ohio Hardest Hit
April: At least 29 tornadoes touched down in Central Illinois on April 17th
May: Energy Secretary Issues Emergency Order to Deploy Backup Generation in the Mid-Atlantic Amid Heatwave
June: More than 373,000 US customers without power due to extreme weather

... and that list is far from comprehensive, and how you feel about it might depend on what you consider a “major” outage, of course – but consider that there are tens of thousands of Americans without power right now, and that’s not making the news. [...] The lesson here is that weather-related grid outages – whether they’re caused by wildfires, mudslides, derechos, tornadoes, ice storms, hurricanes, heat waves, or some other disaster I’m lucky enough to have forgotten about – read like statistics when they’re happening over there, but get personal real quick when they’re happening to you.

Submission + - China — New law bans AI companions bots (scmp.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Two of China’s major consumer-facing artificial intelligence apps, ByteDance’s Doubao and Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen, are moving to disable customised agent features, as new rules on humanlike AI interaction services are set to take effect, part of Beijing’s push to build a broader regulatory framework for the fast-growing sector.

Doubao informed users in a Friday night notice that its agent feature would go offline on July 15 because of “product function adjustments”. After October 15, Doubao’s related data would be handled in accordance with the company’s privacy policy and no longer be viewable or recoverable inside the app.

Qwen also issued a similar notice on Saturday morning, saying that its “humanlike interactive agents and user-created agent functions” would be disabled on July 10, while broader “Qwen agent functions and services” would be taken offline on July 15. Users would no longer be able to access related agent settings or previous conversations after the shutdown.

Both apps had offered a pool of agents, created by both the companies and users, that could be customised for specific tasks, skills and speaking styles. Users could also create their own agents, turning a general-purpose chatbot into a named assistant, tutor, role-playing character or companion with a fixed persona and tone.

The timing coincides with the implementation of the Interim Measures for the Administration of Artificial Intelligence Anthropomorphic Interaction Services, effective July 15. Issued in April, the rules cover AI services that “simulate human personality traits, thinking patterns and communication styles to provide sustained emotional interaction”.

The rules exclude customer service bots, knowledge Q&A, workplace assistants, education and scientific research tools, as long as they do not involve sustained emotional interaction.

Submission + - Physicists create first room-temperature quantum material (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: In a study published in Nature, LSU physicists have developed the first room-temperature quantum material capable of distinguishing and transporting different quantum states of light, overcoming one of the biggest challenges in quantum materials research. Led by Associate Professor of Physics Omar S. Magaña-Loaiza, the work establishes a general design principle for engineering an entirely new class of quantum materials, opening new possibilities for quantum computing, secure communications, sensing technologies and advanced energy systems.

Submission + - How Microsoft's "Little Workaround" Created a Major Pentagon Threat (propublica.org)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: ProPublica Reporter Renee Dudley heard Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, the country’s biggest cybersecurity adversary.

The arrangement was called “digital escorting.” She thought it sounded like a conspiracy theory — until she started looking into it. This is the story of what she found and how her investigation changed government policy.

Microsoft is using engineers in China to help maintain the Defense Department’s computer systems — with minimal supervision by U.S. personnel — leaving some of the nation’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary, a ProPublica investigation has found.

The arrangement, which was critical to Microsoft winning the federal government’s cloud computing business a decade ago, relies on U.S. citizens with security clearances to oversee the work and serve as a barrier against espionage and sabotage.

National security and cybersecurity experts in the Trump administration contacted by ProPublica were also surprised to learn that such an arrangement was in place, especially at a time when the U.S. intelligence community and leading members of Congress and the Trump administration view China’s digital prowess as a top threat to the country.

Microsoft uses the escort system to handle the government’s most sensitive information that falls below “classified.” According to the government, this “high impact level” category includes “data that involves the protection of life and financial ruin.” The “loss of confidentiality, integrity, or availability” of this information “could be expected to have a severe or catastrophic adverse effect” on operations, assets and individuals, the government has said. In the Defense Department, the data is categorized as “Impact Level” 4 and 5 and includes materials that directly support military operations.

“If someone ran a script called ‘fix_servers.sh’ but it actually did something malicious then [escorts] would have no idea,” a former Microsoft engineer who worked on the escort system, told ProPublica in an email. That said, he maintained that the “scope of systems they could disrupt” is limited.

In an emailed statement, the Defense Information Systems Agency said that cloud service providers “are required to establish and maintain controls for vetting and using qualified specialists,” but the agency did not respond to ProPublica’s questions regarding the digital escorts’ qualifications.

It’s unclear whether other cloud providers to the federal government use digital escorts as part of their tech support. Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud declined to comment on the record for this article. Oracle did not respond to requests for comment.

A spokesperson for the inspector general — whose office is supposed to operate independently in order to investigate potential waste, fraud and abuse — told ProPublica they were not authorized to speak about the issue and directed questions to DISA public affairs.

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