Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 


Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror
×
Chrome

DOJ Wants Google To Sell Chrome To Break Search Monopoly (9to5google.com) 108

Posted by BeauHD from the breaking-news dept.
According to Bloomberg, the U.S. Justice Department wants Google to sell off its Chrome browser as part of its ongoing search monopoly case. The recommendations will be made official on Wednesday. 9to5Google reports: At the top of the list is having Google sell Chrome "because it represents a key access point through which many people use its search engine." There are many questions about how that works, including what the impact on the underlying Chromium codebase would be. Would Google still be allowed to develop the open-source project by which many other browsers, like Microsoft Edge use? "The government has the option to decide whether a Chrome sale is necessary at a later date if some of the other aspects of the remedy create a more competitive market," reports Bloomberg. Google, which plans to appeal, previously said that "splitting off Chrome or Android would break them."

Bloomberg reports that "antitrust officials pulled back from a more severe option that would have forced Google to sell off Android." However, the government wants Google to "uncouple its Android smartphone operating system from its other products, including search and its Google Play mobile app store, which are now sold as a bundle." Meanwhile, other recommendations include licensing Google Search data and results, as well as allowing websites that are indexed for Search to opt out of AI training.
Google

Does Google Plan to Create Email Aliases for Apps to Fight Spam? (androidauthority.com) 27

Posted by EditorDavid from the I-don't-like-spam dept.
Google appears to be working on an email-forwarding alias system, according to the blog Android Authority, giving users a new way to "shield" their main email address.

The site performed a teardown on the newest Google Play Services' APK looking for work-in-progress code , and spotted "a whole boatload of strings referencing and in support of something called 'Shielded Email'." Just from that text, we're able to infer quite a lot about what we're looking at here, and it appears that Shielded Email consists of a system to create single-use or limited-use email aliases that will forward messages along to your primary account. And while we could imagine that something like this might be pretty useful in Chrome, here it looks like Google is building it specifically to address apps that ask for your email address. The messages in there touch on a couple reasons beyond spam that you might want to keep your main email private, like reducing the extent to which your online activities can be tracked, and mitigating your personal risk from potential future data breaches.
They also sighted a reference to "Shielded Email" in the Autofill settings menu — though their article acknowledges that even features hinted at by work-in-progress code may not ultimately make it into a public release.

But Forbes suggests that the idea sounds similar to Apple's Hide My Email service, which "provides an automated random email address creator to help keep your personal email address private when subscribing to services."

Comment Call me when it can FOLD my laundry (Score 1) 40

Yes, it's a big thing to sort, but that's far less important. I can sort folded clothes pretty fast. I can't fold them very fast.

Folding robots aren't unheard of; there was a report from 2022 that The fastest ever laundry-folding robot is here. And it's likely still slower than you and that's fine by me; it can take a few hours as long as it can run unattended. Then again, the "here" part is debatable. The article ends with a section called "It's still a long way from your laundry room" that says "it's not likely to hit the market anytime soon" and that "Ars Technica tracked down a robot similar to the one they used and found that it retails for $58,000."

Just yesterday, this dropped: Laundry-Folding-Robotics Company Attracts $400M From Jeff Bezos and OpenAI. So it is coming. It's just a question of when, and how much longer we'll have to wait for affordable consumer-grade versions.

Comment Remember Re:scam? Same thing, better AI (Score 1) 34

by Khopesh (#64948123) Attached to: Virgin Media O2 Deploys AI Decoy To Waste Scammers' Time

As reported by the same agency (PC Mag) in 2017: Re:scam Bot Has One Goal: Waste the Time of Email Scammers: "Send your spam emails to Re:scam, which will engage with and waste the time of scammers trying to dupe you." Their Youtube promo was pretty good, too.

An even older version of this (sorry, I don't have a link, saw it at an anti-spam conference ~15y ago) involved setting up rudimentary text-to-speech systems on a university lab's phone line. The AI was extremely basic (scripts rather than what we can do today), but the scammers were sufficiently desperate. Unfortunately, it didn't scale so well and they were pretty sure the expensive long-distance calls placed by the scammers were paid for with stolen credit cards, so it simply stole their time, not their money.
AI

Virgin Media O2 Deploys AI Decoy To Waste Scammers' Time (pcmag.com) 34

Posted by msmash from the pushing-the-limits dept.
British telecom Virgin Media O2 has deployed an AI tool to combat phone scammers by wasting their time with fake conversations, the company said. The AI system, named Daisy, uses voice synthesis to mimic an elderly woman and engages fraudsters in lengthy discussions about fictitious family members or provides false bank details, keeping them occupied for up to 40 minutes per call.

Virgin Media O2 embedded phone numbers connected to Daisy within scammer call lists targeting vulnerable individuals. The system, developed with help from anti-scam YouTuber Jim Browning, automatically transcribes incoming calls and generates responses without human intervention.

Further reading: Google Rolls Out Call Screening AI To Thwart Phone Fraudsters.

Comment Reminiscent of Rolligon tires (Score 5, Informative) 33

by Khopesh (#64945937) Attached to: Researchers Are Trying To Reinvent the Wheel
In the 1950s, there was a neat super-low-pressure tire prototype announced for Rolligon. From Wikipedia:

The product was invented by William Albee in 1951 after he had seen Inuit using inflated seal hides to drag a heavy boat on shore.[1][2] Because the weight of the vehicle is spread over a much larger surface compared to conventional tires, the pressure is much lower. This prevents the vehicle from getting stuck, and limits damage to vulnerable plants of the tundra.[3]

There is an amazing video demonstration showing trucks outfitted with these comically-large tires traversing ravines, rolling over train tracks, and even running over people who would immediately get up and smile at the camera.

I see this as a more practical implementation of some of the same ideas.
The Gimp

GIMP 3.0 Enters RC Testing After 20 Years (tomshardware.com) 55

Posted by BeauHD from the decades-in-the-making dept.
GIMP 3.0, the long-awaited upgrade from the popular open-source image editor, has entered the release candidate phase, signaling that a stable version may be available by the end of this year or early 2025. Tom's Hardware reports: So, what has changed with the debut of GIMP 3? The new interface is still quite recognizable to classic GIMP users but has been considerably smoothed out and is far more scalable to high-resolution displays than it used to be. Several familiar icons have been carefully converted to SVGs or Scalable Vector Graphics, enabling supremely high-quality, scalable assets.

While PNGs, or Portable Network Graphics, are also known to be high-quality due to their lack of compression, they are still suboptimal compared to SVGs when SVGs are applicable. The work of converting GIMP's tool icons to SVG is still in progress per the original blog post, but it's good that developer Denis Rangelov has already started on the work.

Many aspects of the GIMP 3.0 update are almost wholly on the backend for ensuring project and plugin compatibility with past projects made with previous versions of GIMP. To summarize: a public GIMP API is being stabilized to make it easier to port GIMP 2.10-based plugins and scripts to GIMP 3.0. Several bugs related to color accuracy have been fixed to improve color management while still maintaining compatibility with past GIMP projects. You can read the GIMP team's blog post here.
Books

Are America's Courts Going After Digital Libraries? (reason.com) 43

Posted by EditorDavid from the ebook-em-Danno dept.
A new article at Reason.com argues that U.S. courts "are coming for digital libraries." In September, a federal appeals court dealt a major blow to the Internet Archive — one of the largest online repositories of free books, media, and software — in a copyright case with significant implications for publishers, libraries, and readers. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld a lower court ruling that found the Internet Archive's huge, digitized lending library of copyrighted books was not covered by the "fair use" doctrine and infringed on the rights of publishers. Agreeing with the Archive's interpretation of fair use "would significantly narrow — if not entirely eviscerate — copyright owners' exclusive right to prepare derivative works," the 2nd Circuit ruled. "Were we to approve [Internet Archive's] use of the works, there would be little reason for consumers or libraries to pay publishers for content they could access for free."
Others disagree, according to some links shared in a recent email from the Internet Archive. Public Knowledge CEO Chris Lewis argues the court's logic renders the fair use doctrine "almost unusuable". And that's just the beginning... This decision harms libraries. It locks them into an e-book ecosystem designed to extract as much money as possible while harvesting (and reselling) reader data en masse. It leaves local communities' reading habits at the mercy of curatorial decisions made by four dominant publishing companies thousands of miles away. It steers Americans away from one of the few remaining bastions of privacy protection and funnels them into a surveillance ecosystem that, like Big Tech, becomes more dangerous with each passing data breach.
But lawyer/librarian Kyle K. Courtney writes that the case "is specific only to the parties, and does not impact the other existing versions of controlled digital lending." Additionally, this decision is limited to the 2nd Circuit and is not binding anywhere else — in other words, it does not apply to the 47 states outside the 2nd Circuit's jurisdiction. In talking with colleagues in the U.S. this week and last, many are continuing their programs because they believe their digital loaning programs fall outside the scope of this ruling... Moreover, the court's opinion focuses on digital books that the court said "are commercially available for sale or license in any electronic text format." Therefore, there remains a significant number of materials in library collections that have not made the jump to digital, nor are likely to, meaning that there is no ebook market to harm — nor is one likely to emerge for certain works, such as those that are no longer commercially viable...

This case represents just one instance in an ongoing conversation about library lending in the digital age, and the possibility of appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court means the final outcome is far from settled.
Some more quotes from links shared by Internet Archive:
  • "It was clear that the only reason all the big publishers sued the Internet Archive was to put another nail in the coffin of libraries and push to keep this ebook licensing scheme grift going. Now the courts have helped." — TechDirt
  • "The case against the Internet Archive is not just a story about the ruination of an online library, but a grander narrative of our times: how money facilitates the transference of knowledge away from the public, back towards the few." — blogger Hannah Williams

Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.


Privacy

Voted In America? VoteRef Probably Doxed You (404media.co) 210

Posted by BeauHD from the PSA dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: If you voted in the U.S. presidential election yesterday in which Donald Trump won comfortably, or a previous election, a website powered by a right-wing group is probably doxing you. VoteRef makes it trivial for anyone to search the name, physical address, age, party affiliation, and whether someone voted that year for people living in most states instantly and for free. This can include ordinary citizens, celebrities, domestic abuse survivors, and many other people. Voting rolls are public records, and ways to more readily access them are not new. But during a time of intense division, political violence, or even the broader threat of data being used to dox or harass anyone, sites like VoteRef turn a vital part of the democratic process -- simply voting -- into a security and privacy threat. [...]

The Voter Reference Foundation, which runs VoteRef, is a right wing organization helmed by a former Trump campaign official, ProPublica previously reported. The goal for that organization was to find irregularities in the number of voters and the number of ballots cast, but state election officials said their findings were "fundamentally incorrect," ProPublica added. In an interview with NPR, the ProPublica reporter said that the Voter Reference Foundation insinuated (falsely) that the 2020 election of Joe Biden was fraudulent in some way. 404 Media has found people on social media using VoteRef's data to spread voting conspiracies too. VoteRef has steadily been adding more states' records to the VoteRef website. At the time of writing, it has records for all states that legally allow publication. Some exceptions include California, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. ProPublica reported that VoteRef removed the Pennsylvania data after being contacted by an attorney for Pennsylvania's Department of State. "Digitizing and aggregating data meaningfully changes the privacy context and the risks to people. Your municipal government storing your marriage certificate and voter information in some basement office filing cabinet is not even remotely the same as a private company digitizing all the data, labeling it, piling it all together, making it searchable," said Justin Sherman, a Duke professor who studies data brokers.

"Policymakers need to get with the times and recognize that data brokers digitizing, aggregating, and selling data based on public records -- which are usually considered 'publicly available information' and exempted from privacy laws -- has fueled decades of stalking and gendered violence, harassment, doxing, and even murder," Sherman said. "Protecting citizens of all political stripes, targets and survivors of gendered violence, public servants who are targets for doxing and death threats, military service members, and everyone in between depends on reframing how we think about public records privacy and the mass aggregation and sale of our data."

Comment Re:By what definition of AI? (Score 1) 86

I'd put "reasoning" between foundation models and AGI. There are probably several steps on the way to AGI and it remains to be seen whether or not we'll lump this into foundation models, it becomes its own thing, it's lumped into some other next step, or it's lumped into full AGI.

Comment By what definition of AI? (Score 4, Informative) 86

I've been doing AI for 15 years, people

There are lots of definitions of "AI" (dates approximate production-grade implementations, see also Timeline of machine learning):

AGI doesn't exist even today. Foundation models are, at most, ten years old. The "deep learning revolution" didn't really get going until AlexNet in 2012. There was some very early work in 2009 (fifteen years ago) that Wikipedia calls "an early demonstration of GPU-based deep learning" (see the deep learning revolution link), but there's no way that was production grade.

Fadell must therefore have been talking about standard machine learning: LSTMs, SVMs, etc. This brings us to an AI definition I omitted from the above list: over-hyped algorithms.
United States

Democrats Press For Criminal Charges Against Tax Prep Firms Over Data Sharing (theverge.com) 62

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren, Ron Wyden, Richard Blumenthal and Representative Katie Porter are demanding the Justice Department prosecute tax preparation companies for allegedly sharing sensitive taxpayer data with Meta and Google through tracking pixels. The lawmakers' call follows a Treasury Inspector General audit confirming their earlier investigation into TaxSlayer, H&R Block, and Tax Act. The audit found multiple companies failed to properly obtain consent before sharing tax return information via advertising tools. Violations could result in one-year prison terms and $1,000 fines per incident, potentially reaching billions in penalties given the scale of affected users.

In a letter shared with The Verge, the lawmakers said: "Accountability for these tax preparation companies -- who disclosed millions of taxpayers' tax return data, meaning they could potentially face billions of dollars in criminal liability -- is essential for protecting the rule of law and the privacy of taxpayers," the letter reads. "We urge you to follow the facts and the conclusions of TIGTA and the IRS and to take appropriate action against any companies or individuals that have violated the law."
Security

Microsoft's Honeypots Lure Phishers at Scale - to Spy on Them and Waste Their Time (bleepingcomputer.com) 21

Posted by EditorDavid from the big-trouble dept.
A principal security software engineer at Microsoft described how they use their Azure cloud platform "to hunt phishers at scale," in a talk at the information security conference BSides Exeter.

Calling himself Microsoft's "Head of Deception." Ross Bevington described how they'd created a "hybrid high interaction honeypot" on the now retired code.microsoft.com "to collect threat intelligence on actors ranging from both less skilled cybercriminals to nation state groups targeting Microsoft infrastructure," according to a report by BleepingComputer: With the collected data, Microsoft can map malicious infrastructure, gain a deeper understanding of sophisticated phishing operations, disrupt campaigns at scale, identify cybercriminals, and significantly slow down their activity... Bevington and his team fight phishing by leveraging deception techniques using entire Microsoft tenant environments as honeypots with custom domain names, thousands of user accounts, and activity like internal communications and file-sharing...

In his BSides Exeter presentation, the researcher says that the active approach consists in visiting active phishing sites identified by Defender and typing in the credentials from the honeypot tenants. Since the credentials are not protected by two-factor authentication and the tenants are populated with realistic-looking information, attackers have an easy way in and start wasting time looking for signs of a trap. Microsoft says it monitors roughly 25,000 phishing sites every day, feeding about 20% of them with the honeypot credentials; the rest are blocked by CAPTCHA or other anti-bot mechanisms.

Once the attackers log into the fake tenants, which happens in 5% of the cases, it turns on detailed logging to track every action they take, thus learning the threat actors' tactics, techniques, and procedures. Intelligence collected includes IP addresses, browsers, location, behavioral patterns, whether they use VPNs or VPSs, and what phishing kits they rely on... The deception technology currently wastes an attacker 30 days before they realize they breached a fake environment. All along, Microsoft collects actionable data that can be used by other security teams to create more complex profiles and better defenses.

Slashdot Top Deals

Children begin by loving their parents. After a time they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them. - Oscar Wilde

Close