Comment Visit Madagascar! See the geckos! (Score 1) 132
This gecko is in favor of anything that puts Madagascar on the map.
Submission + - 32/35 students failed professor's midterm because he used a white text trap (xcancel.com)
An anonymous reader writes: 32/35 students failed this professor's midterm because he secretly hid an AI command in white font in his text.
Submission + - Promising process for nuclear fuel re-use and disposal (autonocion.com)
kwelch007 writes: A Canadian lab just ran a chemical process on real spent nuclear fuel and pulled out 90% of the long-lived danger in 24 hours, the part that forces a burial site to last 100,000 years, with the leftovers meant to fuel a reactor
The standard plan for spent nuclear fuel is to wait it out. You pull the used bundles from a reactor, sit them in a pool of water for seven to ten years while the heat and radiation come down, seal them in concrete casks, and look for somewhere deep and geologically dull to leave them for the next hundred thousand years. Canada has been hunting for that burial site since the 1980s and still doesn’t have one in the ground.
A company in Saint John, New Brunswick thinks most of what makes that waste dangerous never needed to go in the ground at all.
Moltex Energy Canada says a chemical process it calls WATSS can strip 90 percent of the long-lived material out of used CANDU fuel in 24 hours, and that the concentrated leftovers become fuel for a reactor it wants to build on the same site. The recovery step isn’t a slide in a pitch deck anymore. In 2025, World Nuclear News reported that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories ran the process on real used fuel from a commercial Canadian reactor and confirmed the 90 percent figure.
None of it is generating power yet. What exists is a validated chemical step and a reactor design waiting in line at a regulator. The rest is a 2030s problem.
The standard plan for spent nuclear fuel is to wait it out. You pull the used bundles from a reactor, sit them in a pool of water for seven to ten years while the heat and radiation come down, seal them in concrete casks, and look for somewhere deep and geologically dull to leave them for the next hundred thousand years. Canada has been hunting for that burial site since the 1980s and still doesn’t have one in the ground.
A company in Saint John, New Brunswick thinks most of what makes that waste dangerous never needed to go in the ground at all.
Moltex Energy Canada says a chemical process it calls WATSS can strip 90 percent of the long-lived material out of used CANDU fuel in 24 hours, and that the concentrated leftovers become fuel for a reactor it wants to build on the same site. The recovery step isn’t a slide in a pitch deck anymore. In 2025, World Nuclear News reported that Canadian Nuclear Laboratories ran the process on real used fuel from a commercial Canadian reactor and confirmed the 90 percent figure.
None of it is generating power yet. What exists is a validated chemical step and a reactor design waiting in line at a regulator. The rest is a 2030s problem.
Submission + - Your Cookware Got Worse On Purpose (worseonpurpose.com)
hwstar writes: Six companies, eighty-one brands own most of the cookware Americans can purchase. These brands are:
Centre Lane Partners, a private equity firm, owns Pyrex, Corelle, CorningWare, Snapware, Visions, Chicago Cutlery, Instant Pot, Anchor Hocking, Lenox, Oneida, and Reed & Barton. That is almost all of the surviving legacy American tabletop industry under one roof.
All Clad
A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.
All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.
What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.
Pyrex
Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915: borosilicate glass that shrugged off thermal shock. It is the reason three generations learned to take a dish from the freezer to the oven without a second thought.
The American Pyrex on shelves today is tempered soda-lime glass, a different material with a thermal safety margin an American Ceramic Society analysis described as borderline, roughly 55C of headroom against 183C for borosilicate. Consumer Reports collected 163 shattering incident reports, 42 of them involving injuries. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate. The switch happened under Corning itself, decades before the buyouts. That is exactly what made the brand such a perfect acquisition: the glass had already been downgraded, the reputation had not.
In 1998 Corning sold the consumer business to an affiliate of Borden, then a KKR portfolio company, in a deal worth about $603 million. The new company borrowed $471.6 million on day one and paid Corning a $472.6 million dividend, which means it was born owing more than it had. It renamed itself World Kitchen, bought more brands with more debt, and went bankrupt by 2002. To dig out, it sold the one thing in the portfolio still growing, OXO, for $273 million.
Cornell Capital, a private equity firm founded by a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, bought the company in 2017 and renamed it Corelle Brands. In 2019 it merged with the Canadian company behind the Instant Pot, valuing the combination at $615 million. What it actually bought is disputed to this day. More than 98 percent of the price was booked as goodwill and intangibles, and within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"
The suspicion, later spelled out in court filings, was that Instant Pot's sales had been pumped up with discounts and channel stuffing before the sale. The CEO's own verdict was that he was running "the most poorly operated 'successful' business on the planet."
Cornell held on to the asset anyway, and two years later, it got its money out. On April 12, 2021, Instant Brands borrowed $450 million. On April 21, it paid a $345 million dividend, roughly $200 million of that to Cornell Capital and its co-investors. The solvency memo blessing the payout assumed new product sales would grow more than 900 percent. In the end, actual sales missed that year's projections by $157 million. In June 2023 the company filed for Chapter 11, and the lenders that were collectively owed $391 million recovered between seven and nine cents on the dollar.
The bankruptcy is how we know all of this. The court appointed a litigation trustee to claw money back for the people left holding the bag. In November 2024 he sued Cornell Capital and its founder for more than $400 million, laying out the fraud email, the solvency memo, and the dividend math in an 88-page complaint. Cornell calls the suit baseless, and the case is grinding through a New York bankruptcy court right now.
Centre Lane bought the wreckage out of the bankruptcy and folded it into Anchor Hocking, the Ohio glassmaker it already owned. Two names matter from here. Anchor Hocking is the glassmaker: the plant in Lancaster, the name on the bakeware. Centre Lane is the owner: the New York firm that decides what happens to it.
Within six months of the purchase, Anchor Hocking announced that Pyrex production would leave Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the plant that had made it since 1893, and consolidate in Lancaster. Roughly 300 people worked at Charleroi.
All Clad
A couple of years ago, the small All-Clad pan I fry eggs in cut me as I was pulling it out of the dishwasher. A clean slice on my index finger off the rim. I patched it up. Didn’t think much else of it. I discovered what actually happened while researching this essay, sitting in a settlement archive three years too late to file a claim.
All-Clad had been selling its American-made stainless pans as dishwasher safe. In the dishwasher, the bonded rims corroded until the exposed edge got sharp enough to easily slice through skin. The company settled in 2023, capped at $4 million for a class covering seven and a half years of national sales, a rounding error for its French owner.
What never got fixed was the pan. Nothing was re-engineered to survive a dishwasher; the words "dishwasher safe" just came off the box, and the product pages recommend handwashing now. The claims window closed in April 2023 with most of the class, me included, never knowing it existed. Nobody mailed a postcard about the metallurgy.
Pyrex
Pyrex was materials science before it was a brand. Corning invented it in 1915: borosilicate glass that shrugged off thermal shock. It is the reason three generations learned to take a dish from the freezer to the oven without a second thought.
The American Pyrex on shelves today is tempered soda-lime glass, a different material with a thermal safety margin an American Ceramic Society analysis described as borderline, roughly 55C of headroom against 183C for borosilicate. Consumer Reports collected 163 shattering incident reports, 42 of them involving injuries. European Pyrex, made by an unrelated company, is still borosilicate. The switch happened under Corning itself, decades before the buyouts. That is exactly what made the brand such a perfect acquisition: the glass had already been downgraded, the reputation had not.
In 1998 Corning sold the consumer business to an affiliate of Borden, then a KKR portfolio company, in a deal worth about $603 million. The new company borrowed $471.6 million on day one and paid Corning a $472.6 million dividend, which means it was born owing more than it had. It renamed itself World Kitchen, bought more brands with more debt, and went bankrupt by 2002. To dig out, it sold the one thing in the portfolio still growing, OXO, for $273 million.
Cornell Capital, a private equity firm founded by a former Goldman Sachs vice chairman, bought the company in 2017 and renamed it Corelle Brands. In 2019 it merged with the Canadian company behind the Instant Pot, valuing the combination at $615 million. What it actually bought is disputed to this day. More than 98 percent of the price was booked as goodwill and intangibles, and within days of closing a Cornell partner on the new board emailed the CEO to ask, "Is there fraud going on???"
The suspicion, later spelled out in court filings, was that Instant Pot's sales had been pumped up with discounts and channel stuffing before the sale. The CEO's own verdict was that he was running "the most poorly operated 'successful' business on the planet."
Cornell held on to the asset anyway, and two years later, it got its money out. On April 12, 2021, Instant Brands borrowed $450 million. On April 21, it paid a $345 million dividend, roughly $200 million of that to Cornell Capital and its co-investors. The solvency memo blessing the payout assumed new product sales would grow more than 900 percent. In the end, actual sales missed that year's projections by $157 million. In June 2023 the company filed for Chapter 11, and the lenders that were collectively owed $391 million recovered between seven and nine cents on the dollar.
The bankruptcy is how we know all of this. The court appointed a litigation trustee to claw money back for the people left holding the bag. In November 2024 he sued Cornell Capital and its founder for more than $400 million, laying out the fraud email, the solvency memo, and the dividend math in an 88-page complaint. Cornell calls the suit baseless, and the case is grinding through a New York bankruptcy court right now.
Centre Lane bought the wreckage out of the bankruptcy and folded it into Anchor Hocking, the Ohio glassmaker it already owned. Two names matter from here. Anchor Hocking is the glassmaker: the plant in Lancaster, the name on the bakeware. Centre Lane is the owner: the New York firm that decides what happens to it.
Within six months of the purchase, Anchor Hocking announced that Pyrex production would leave Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the plant that had made it since 1893, and consolidate in Lancaster. Roughly 300 people worked at Charleroi.
Submission + - Max Planck Slapped With Paper Retractions by Suspected Rogue Algorithm (science.org) 1
He Who Has No Name writes: Being a titan in the history of physics, the 1918 Nobel Laureate in Physics, having the smallest rational physical measurement (the Planck Length) named after you, and being deceased for 79 years is all apparently still not enough to prevent your work from being threshed and hit with retractions by an algorithm. Science.org has a succinct article that explains it:
"In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews."
The Springer Nature, the current-day owner of the journal Naturwissenschaften in which the papers were published 86 years ago, appears to have set an algorithm loose on their library, hunting for plagiarism and other reasons to retract papers... and failed to tell it to leave historic cornerstone works and authors alone.
"The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work. [...] In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly."
However, apparently feeling like they had to retract the paper was not enough to fully dissuade Springer Nature from still selling it, in its retracted form:
"Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95."
"In early May, Yves Gingras, a historian of physics at the University of Quebec (UQ) at Montreal, was browsing Retraction Watch, a website that catalogs fraud, data manipulation, and other scientific sins. He noticed a link that read, “Retractions by Nobel Prize winners.” Were there really Nobel laureates whose papers had been withdrawn from the scientific literature?
After clicking, Gingras froze. “That’s impossible,” he recalls thinking. The fourth name on the list, with two retracted papers, was Max Planck—a legendary pioneer of quantum mechanics and the 1918 Nobel laureate in physics. Gingras had never heard a whiff of scandal about Planck, who was almost as widely revered for his character as his physics. In 1933, for example, he bravely confronted Adolf Hitler over Nazi Germany’s discriminatory laws against Jews."
The Springer Nature, the current-day owner of the journal Naturwissenschaften in which the papers were published 86 years ago, appears to have set an algorithm loose on their library, hunting for plagiarism and other reasons to retract papers... and failed to tell it to leave historic cornerstone works and authors alone.
"The retraction of the second Planck paper, published in 1940, left Gingras and Khelfaoui even more baffled. It also cited copyright violation—yet the piece had never appeared elsewhere. Then Khelfaoui noticed something that added to suspicions that an algorithm was at work. [...] In November 1940, philosopher Aloys Müller criticized Planck’s views in a Naturwissenschaften piece titled “Naturwissenschaft und reale Außenwelt” (“Natural Science and the Real External World”). A month later, Planck responded in print—and used the exact same title. This, Gingras and Khelfaoui suspect, caused Springer Nature’s copyright bot to retract the paper as plagiarism decades later, even though the contents of the two essays differ markedly."
However, apparently feeling like they had to retract the paper was not enough to fully dissuade Springer Nature from still selling it, in its retracted form:
"Gingras was especially incensed that Springer Nature deviated from the normal practice of merely slapping the word RETRACTED across the digital version of the paper while still allowing scholars to read the text. Instead, the publisher posted a blank white page with the cryptic phrase, “This article has been withdrawn due to article violation.” Springer Nature is nevertheless still selling the empty PDF for $39.95."
Submission + - Trump's "Made in the USA" Phone is just a reskinned HTC U24 Pro 1
necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 "Trump Phone" was originally said to be "Made in the USA" and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to "Assembled in the USA". Given the Trump Organization's lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the "T1" would just be a private-label phone made by someone else. After a number of delays, the first phones are finally shipping.
iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.
iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."
iFixit has performed a teardown and concluded that the T1 is a just gold-painted 2024 HTC U24 Pro — a device from a Taiwanese company, probably using mainland China design and supply chains. In collaboration with NBC News, the iFixit team examined both phones using CT scans, side-by-side teardowns, and even reassembled a working T1 using a U24 Pro main board. As for "assembled in the USA", that may be true, in the same sense that your phone's repairman can "assemble" a phone from a handful of subassemblies sourced from someone else. Or it may have been assembled in Guangdong, China like the other U24 Pros.
iFixit sums it up: "What you have is not an 'American-Proud Design', but a phone designed in China, made in China, with the vast majority of parts sourced from China. I’m failing to find any stirring of American pride within me. I’ve certainly felt it before, so I can confirm that it is absent at this time."
Submission + - I found a second vote.gov -- and it's registered to the White House
As_I_Please writes: The Drey Dossier reports that the National Design Studio, an office created by executive order and which reports only to the White House, has been building copies of federal agency websites like vote.gov, passports.gov, login.gov and others.
What [the National Design Studio] is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.
Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.
NDS Infrastructure Map — my live working github map of every National Design Studio subdomain I have found, filterable by status, registrant, and parent domain. If you want to retrace this investigation or watch new subdomains appear in real time, start here.
Submission + - Maryland Becomes First State To Pass Bill Banning 'Surveillance Pricing' (denver7.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Maryland is poised to become the first state in the country to ban "surveillance pricing." The practice refers to companies using a shopper’s personal data, such as browsing history, location, or purchasing behavior, to tailor prices to individual customers. The Protection From Predatory Pricing Act, passed this month and sent to the governor for a signature, would prohibit food retailers and third-party delivery services from using the practice. Violations would be treated as deceptive trade practices under state law, with potential fines and lawsuits.
Comment Re:Huh (Score 0) 162
If you think about it, all of those commandments can be reduced to just one -- "Thou Shalt not Steal". If you murder, you're stealing someones life, if you commit adultery, you're stealing someones partner, if you put other Gods before Him, you're stealing His sovereignty, etc. I don't need to list all of that because you can figure out the rest and how they connect to theft of something.
No, that's just a dumb metaphor.
If you commit adultery, you're murdering the relationship. If you put other Gods in line ahead of him, you're murdering the religion. If you steal, you're murdering their property rights. If you don't honor your father and mother, you're murdering the parental relationship.
I don't need to list all of these because you can figure out the rest and how they "connect" to anything and everything, which makes it all a pointless exercise.
Submission + - trump proposes nasa budget be slashed by 23% (arstechnica.com)
Mr. Dollar Ton writes: right in the wake of the lunar mission achieving a major milestone and on top of its 1.5 trillion military budget proposal, the trump administration want to save money by slashing nasa budget significantly.
tired of winning yet?
tired of winning yet?
Submission + - Employers are using your data to figure out the lowest salary you'll accept (marketwatch.com)
sinij writes:
A growing number of employers are using surveillance wages to negotiate your next paycheck.
Still nothing to hide?
Submission + - Using a VPN May Subject You to NSA Spying (stacker.news)
joshuark writes: Lawmakersare pressing the nation's top intelligence official to publicly disclose whether Americans who use commercialVPN servicesrisk being treated as foreigners under United States surveillance law—a classification that would strip them of constitutional protections against warrantless government spying. Lawmakers pressed Tulsi Gabbard to reveal whether using a VPN can strip Americans of their constitutional protections against warrantless surveillance.
In a letter sent Thursday to Director of National IntelligenceTulsi Gabbard, the lawmakers say that because VPNs obscure a user's true location, and because intelligence agencies presume that communications of unknown origin are foreign, Americans may be inadvertently waiving the privacy protections they're entitled to under the law.
Several federal agencies, including the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission, haverecommendedthat consumers use VPNs toprotect their privacy. But following that advice may inadvertently cost Americans the very protections they're seeking.
In a letter sent Thursday to Director of National IntelligenceTulsi Gabbard, the lawmakers say that because VPNs obscure a user's true location, and because intelligence agencies presume that communications of unknown origin are foreign, Americans may be inadvertently waiving the privacy protections they're entitled to under the law.
Several federal agencies, including the FBI, the National Security Agency, and the Federal Trade Commission, haverecommendedthat consumers use VPNs toprotect their privacy. But following that advice may inadvertently cost Americans the very protections they're seeking.
Submission + - AI vs Denial Bots: Fight Health Insurance & Counterforce Health Take On Insu (pbs.org)
An anonymous reader writes: Health insurers have spent years using AI, opaque algorithms, and “batch denial” systems to reject claims at scale, but a new PBS NewsHour piece shows patients starting to fight back with AI of their own. The segment highlights Fight Health Insurance, a free and OSS AI tool to help patients draft prior auth requests and appeal letters, and Counterforce Health, (non-OSS alternative). PBS’s story, “How patients are using AI to fight denied insurance claims,” frames this as an “AI vs AI” turning point in U.S. healthcare bureaucracy: if denials can be automated, what happens when appeals are, too.
All hail our new robot overloards, may they win against the other robot overloards.
All hail our new robot overloards, may they win against the other robot overloards.
Submission + - Hacker Dressed as the Pink Ranger Takes Down White Supremacist Websites Live (gizmodo.com)
t0qer writes: On stage at the annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, a hacker known as Martha Root deleted the servers of three websites run by white nationalists. The takedown, performed by Root while dressed up as the Pink Ranger from the Power Rangers, came at the end of a talk on the Nazi online ecosystem that also featured journalists Eva Hoffmann and Christian Fuchs, per TechCrunch. The three sites targeted included WhiteDate, a white nationalist dating site; WhiteChild, a website for matching white sperm and egg donors; and WhiteDeal, an online labor market for white supremacists. As of Monday, the websites remain offline.
Submission + - Singapore scammers get the canning treatment (mha.gov.sg) 1
D,Petkow writes: Singapore is often hailed as one of the world’s most ultra-modern hubs — a place of gleaming skyscrapers, cutting-edge fintech, and futuristic urban planning. Yet, beneath the polished surface, the city-state still enforces some of the strictest old-school punishments imaginable.
In a move that stunned many outside observers, Parliament recently passed a law mandating at least six strokes of the cane for scammers and money mules. With scams making up nearly 60% of reported crimes and billions lost since 2020, the government argues that harsh deterrence is necessary.
It’s a striking contrast: a nation leading in smart cities and AI governance, while simultaneously wielding rattan canes against fraudsters. This duality — hyper-modern yet deeply traditional — is part of what makes Singapore fascinating, and sometimes bewildering, to the rest of the world.
https://says.com/my/news/singa...
http://metro.co.uk/2025/11/08/...
In a move that stunned many outside observers, Parliament recently passed a law mandating at least six strokes of the cane for scammers and money mules. With scams making up nearly 60% of reported crimes and billions lost since 2020, the government argues that harsh deterrence is necessary.
It’s a striking contrast: a nation leading in smart cities and AI governance, while simultaneously wielding rattan canes against fraudsters. This duality — hyper-modern yet deeply traditional — is part of what makes Singapore fascinating, and sometimes bewildering, to the rest of the world.
https://says.com/my/news/singa...
http://metro.co.uk/2025/11/08/...
