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Comment 1 prompt vs 1 hour? Apples to Oranges! (Score 1) 4

by Khopesh (#65781024) Attached to: Netflix is way worse for the environment than ChatGPT

On average, ChatGPT sees about 1800 prompts per user per month and Netflix users stream about 19 hours a month. So 1800 x 0.1g = 180g for ChatGPT versus 19 x 42 = 798g for Netflix. ChatGPT has about 800M regular users while Netflix has about 94M. 180g x 800M = 144 billion grams of CO2 for ChatGPT vs 798g x 94M = 75 billion grams of CO2.

ChatGPT costs the environment twice as much as Netflix overall, though Netflix costs the environment 4-5 times as much as ChatGPT per user.

Also keep in mind that a lot of ChatGPT's queries aren't from users but rather from businesses. Netflix is 100% users.

Submission + - Bombshell report exposes how Meta relied on scam ad profits to fund AI (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Documents showed that internally, Meta was hesitant to abruptly remove accounts, even those considered some of the “scammiest scammers,” out of concern that a drop in revenue could diminish resources needed for artificial intelligence growth.

Instead of promptly removing bad actors, Meta allowed “high value accounts” to “accrue more than 500 strikes without Meta shutting them down,” Reuters reported. The more strikes a bad actor accrued, the more Meta could charge to run ads, as Meta’s documents showed the company “penalized” scammers by charging higher ad rates. Meanwhile, Meta acknowledged in documents that its systems helped scammers target users most likely to click on their ads.

“Users who click on scam ads are likely to see more of them because of Meta’s ad-personalization system, which tries to deliver ads based on a user’s interests,” Reuters reported.

Internally, Meta estimates that users across its apps in total encounter 15 billion “high risk” scam ads a day. That’s on top of 22 billion organic scam attempts that Meta users are exposed to daily, a 2024 document showed. Last year, the company projected that about $16 billion, which represents about 10 percent of its revenue, would come from scam ads.
AI

Magika 1.0 Goes Stable As Google Rebuilds Its File Detection Tool In Rust (googleblog.com) 24

Posted by BeauHD from the powered-by-Rust dept.
BrianFagioli writes: Google has released Magika 1.0, a stable version of its AI-based file type detection tool, and rebuilt the entire engine in Rust for speed and memory safety. The system now recognizes more than 200 file types, up from about 100, and is better at distinguishing look-alike formats such as JSON vs JSONL, TSV vs CSV, C vs C++, and JavaScript vs TypeScript. The team used a 3TB training dataset and even relied on Gemini to generate synthetic samples for rare file types, allowing Magika to handle formats that don't have large, publicly available corpora. The tool supports Python and TypeScript integrations and offers a native Rust command-line client.

Under the hood, Magika uses ONNX Runtime for inference and Tokio for parallel processing, allowing it to scan around 1,000 files per second on a modern laptop core and scale further with more CPU cores. Google says this makes Magika suitable for security workflows, automated analysis pipelines, and general developer tooling. Installation is a single curl or PowerShell command, and the project remains fully open source. The project is available on GitHub and documentation can be found here.

Comment Re:The problem with SAS (Score 1) 27

by garcia (#65778496) Attached to: US Software Firm SAS Exits China After 25 Years

SAS has been dead for 15y; it started with R and then Python absolutely destroyed it. No one teaches SAS in universities any longer, why would they? It's terribly expensive and absolutely fucking dead.

We migrated away from SAS back in 2017 and never looked back. The only verticals still using it are heavily regulated and running long-standing legacy code that they're slowly migrating to Python.

I remember absolutely dying when they tried to renegotiate our contract UP back in 2015. I flat out told them they were dead and we were moving away from them and they told me, "good luck managing your data without us!"

Two companies and 10 years later, we're doing just fine and they are not.
Earth

Brazil Proposes a New Type of Fund To Protect Tropical Forests 19

Posted by msmash from the green-for-green dept.
Brazil is set to announce Thursday the establishment of a multibillion-dollar fund designed to pay countries to keep their tropical forests standing. The Tropical Forest Forever Facility would deliver $4 billion per year to as many as 74 countries that maintain their forest cover. The fund requires $25 billion from governments and philanthropies to begin operations.

Private investors would contribute the remaining $100 billion. Brazil has committed $1 billion. Countries would receive around $4 per hectare of standing forest after using satellite imagery to verify forests remain in place. Nations with annual deforestation rates above 0.5% are ineligible for payouts. Indonesia, which has rapidly lost forests to palm-oil cultivation and mining, cannot participate. One-fifth of the payments are designated for forest communities. The World Bank is managing the fund.

Submission + - New Drug Kills Cancer 20,000x More Effectively With No Detectable Side Effects (scitechdaily.com) 2

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: SciTechDaily is reporting that researchers at Northwestern University have redesigned the molecular structure of a well-known chemotherapy drug, greatly increasing its solubility, effectiveness, and safety.

For this study, the scientists created the drug entirely from scratch as a spherical nucleic acid (SNA), a nanoscale structure that incorporates the drug into DNA strands surrounding tiny spheres. This innovative design transforms a compound that normally dissolves poorly and works weakly into a highly potent, precisely targeted treatment that spares healthy cells from damage.

When tested in a small animal model of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive and hard-to-treat blood cancer, the SNA-based version showed remarkable results. It entered leukemia cells 12.5 times more efficiently, destroyed them up to 20,000 times more effectively, and slowed cancer progression by a factor of 59, all without causing noticeable side effects.

“In animal models, we demonstrated that we can stop tumors in their tracks,” said Northwestern’s Chad A. Mirkin, who led the study. “If this translates to human patients, it’s a really exciting advance. It would mean more effective chemotherapy, better response rates and fewer side effects. That’s always the goal with any sort of cancer treatment.”
Virtualization

Linux Ported to WebAssembly, Boots in a Browser Tab (phoronix.com) 54

Posted by EditorDavid from the shell-games dept.
"During the past two years or so I have been slow-rolling an effort to port the Linux kernel to WebAssembly," reads a surprising post on the Linux kernel mailing list. I'm now at the point where the kernel boots and I can run basic programs from a shell. As you will see if you play around with it for a bit, it's not very stable and will crash sooner or later, but I think this is a good first step. Wasm is not necessarily only targeting the web, but that's how I have been developing this project... This is Linux, booting in your browser tab, accelerated by Wasm.
Phoronix warns that "there are stability issues and it didn't take me long either to trigger crashes for this Linux kernel WASM port when running within Google Chrome."
Privacy

Manufacturer Remotely Bricks Smart Vacuum After Its Owner Blocked It From Collecting Data (tomshardware.com) 123

Posted by EditorDavid from the sucking-dirt-and-data dept.
"An engineer got curious about how his iLife A11 smart vacuum worked and monitored the network traffic coming from the device," writes Tom's Hardware.

"That's when he noticed it was constantly sending logs and telemetry data to the manufacturer — something he hadn't consented to." The user, Harishankar, decided to block the telemetry servers' IP addresses on his network, while keeping the firmware and OTA servers open. While his smart gadget worked for a while, it just refused to turn on soon after... He sent it to the service center multiple times, wherein the technicians would turn it on and see nothing wrong with the vacuum. When they returned it to him, it would work for a few days and then fail to boot again... [H]e decided to disassemble the thing to determine what killed it and to see if he could get it working again...

[He discovered] a GD32F103 microcontroller to manage its plethora of sensors, including Lidar, gyroscopes, and encoders. He created PCB connectors and wrote Python scripts to control them with a computer, presumably to test each piece individually and identify what went wrong. From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware. From this, he looked at its software and operating system, and that's where he discovered the dark truth: his smart vacuum was a security nightmare and a black hole for his personal data.

First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption. The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it. He then discovered that it used Google Cartographer to build a live 3D map of his home. This isn't unusual, by far. After all, it's a smart vacuum, and it needs that data to navigate around his home. However, the concerning thing is that it was sending off all this data to the manufacturer's server. It makes sense for the device to send this data to the manufacturer, as its onboard SoC is nowhere near powerful enough to process all that data. However, it seems that iLife did not clear this with its customers.

Furthermore, the engineer made one disturbing discovery — deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command, and after he reversed it and rebooted the appliance, it roared back to life.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader registrations_suck for sharing the article.

Comment MIT license (Score 1) 83

by iplayfast (#65766544) Attached to: Ubuntu Will Use Rust For Dozens of Core Linux Utilities

I guess Ubuntu is moving away from the gnu license. which has served it well for many years. Remember when Bsd unix had a license where companies could copy it and not contribute back to the source. Apple took that and ran with it. I wonder how much was lost to the world when it was relicensed under Apple's license. Ubuntu is going to the MIT license, which is nice, but not as nice as gnu as it doesn't require keeping any improvements open.
Youtube

10M People Watched a YouTuber Shim a Lock; the Lock Company Sued Him. Bad Idea. (arstechnica.com) 57

Posted by msmash from the streisand-effect-strikes-again dept.
Trevor McNally posts videos of himself opening locks. The former Marine has 7 million followers and nearly 10 million people watched him open a Proven Industries trailer hitch lock in April using a shim cut from an aluminum can. The Florida company responded by filing a federal lawsuit in May charging McNally with eight offenses. Judge Mary Scriven denied the preliminary injunction request in June and found the video was fair use.

McNally's followers then flooded the company with harassment. Proven dismissed the case in July and asked the court to seal the records. The company had initiated litigation over a video that all parties acknowledged was accurate. ArsTechnica adds: Judging from the number of times the lawsuit talks about 1) ridicule and 2) harassment, it seems like the case quickly became a personal one for Proven's owner and employees, who felt either mocked or threatened. That's understandable, but being mocked is not illegal and should never have led to a lawsuit or a copyright claim. As for online harassment, it remains a serious and unresolved issue, but launching a personal vendetta -- and on pretty flimsy legal grounds -- against McNally himself was patently unwise. (Doubly so given that McNally had a huge following and had already responded to DMCA takedowns by creating further videos on the subject; this wasn't someone who would simply be intimidated by a lawsuit.)

In the end, Proven's lawsuit likely cost the company serious time and cash -- and generated little but bad publicity.

Comment My takes on this presentation (Score 1) 6

by garcia (#65763026) Attached to: Google Shows Off Prototype Android XR Glasses From Extended Magic Leap Deal

1. There are a lot of empty seats; a lot.

2. The demo wasn't live, likely due to the huge failure of an event that the Meta one was.

3. They noted that you do all of this 'hands-free', likely an intentional knock at Meta's offering.

4. The examples were...odd. Who the fuck is going to be using this to shop for a fucking rug? Come on; give some real-life examples that are IMPORTANT. None of these were.

5. The entire presentation's style, across multiple different presenters, was...exhausting...halting...jarring...and...really undergraduate level. It was almost as if they were being fed what to say in their earpieces, not from memory and not in a fluid and practiced way.

---

Personally? I love the idea of AR glasses that work well. I want to have live subtitles for humans talking to me as I'm hard of hearing and hearing aids do not work well for me, particularly in public spaces.

I want it to give me important information, respond to my environment in ways that are useful (telling me where I am really isn't that; I know where the fuck I am--tell me what I should be doing or where I should be going next, perhaps?)

I know these are early adopter level devices, but they're just fucking ugly due to their bulk.

I strongly prefer this option to Meta's simply because I don't have to do stupid fucking mime-style hand gestures, but I want this technology to be useful, now, not in 5 years. We're going to see this largely flop just like so many other AR/VR toys out there unless they make this something more than a gimmicky piece of shit.

Comment Re:Complete failure all around (Score 1) 140

by garcia (#65761312) Attached to: Mother Describes the Dark Side of Apple's Family Sharing

You clearly do not live in the US. The legal system does NOT do anything about anything (other than child support and alimony) as outlined in a divorce decree.

And, even if they MIGHT do something, you have to wait 12+ months to get on the court's docket, paying thousands of dollars to glorified expensive secretaries in the process while you wait.

The entire system is fucking broken.
Privacy

Mother Describes the Dark Side of Apple's Family Sharing (wired.com) 140

Posted by BeauHD from the PSA dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Mac: A mother with court-ordered custody of her children has described how Apple's Family Sharing feature can be weaponized by a former partner. Apple support staff were unable to assist her when she reported her former partner using the service in controlling and coercive ways... [...] Namely, Family Sharing gives all the control to one parent, not to both equally. The parent not identified as the organizer is unable to withdraw their children from this control, even when they have a court order granting them custody. As one woman's story shows, this can allow the feature which allows it to be weaponized by an abusive former partner.

Wired reports: "The lack of dual-organizer roles, leaving other parents effectively as subordinate admins with more limited power, can prove limiting and frustrating in blended and shared households. And in darker scenarios, a single-organizer setup isn't merely inconvenient -- it can be dangerous. Kate (name changed to protect her privacy and safety) knows this firsthand. When her marriage collapsed, she says, her now ex-husband, the designated organizer, essentially weaponized Family Sharing. He tracked their children's locations, counted their screen minutes and demanded they account for them, and imposed draconian limits during Kate's custody days while lifting them on his own [...] After they separated, Kate's ex refused to disband the family group. But without his consent, the children couldn't be transferred to a new one. "I wrongly assumed being the custodial parent with a court order meant I'd be able to have Apple move my children to a new family group, with me as the organizer," says Kate. But Apple couldn't help. Support staff sympathized but said their hands were tied because the organizer holds the power." Although users can "abandon the accounts and start again with new Apple IDs," the report notes that doing so means losing all purchased apps, along with potentially years' worth of photos and videos.

Submission + - Facebook admits it is the masturbation epicenter of the world (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Mr. Dollar Ton
Mr. Dollar Ton writes: Meta is using a classic BitTorrent defense in its legal battle with adult film producer Strike 3 Holdings. In its motion to dismiss, the tech company argues that IP-address evidence is insufficient to prove who the infringer is. Meta further counters that the "sporadic" downloads on its corporate network began years before its relevant AI research started. Instead of AI training, Meta argues the activity was likely just for "private personal use"

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