Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.

We MUST be able to inspect and age verify every AI slop porn image to protect the fictional children!

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If you read the article carefully, they are talking about lenses THINNER than a hair. I see several of the posts here thinking the width/radius of the lenses is this small, a reasonable mistake given the way this was written. Having a radius that small would severely reduce their light gathering ability, requiring very bright light or very dim images or very long exposure times.

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Well said.

I would also add: if I have something to say about an an issue, I (try to) directly address the issue, not the person. Even when I find them aggravating. What little power we do have relates to discussion and sharing ideas about the issues at hand, and what charities we do — or don't — thoughtfully engage with.

While many are locked to one side or the other in our highly polarized political climate, some people can be moved by reasoned discussion. I even try to be one of those people. Mostly. :)

... scrolls past giant banner ads, to find the (already checked) "Ads Disabled Thanks again for helping make Slashdot great!"

To your point, it's ccertainly perfect for this story.

But you know, they have to do something to increase revenue, since they've been entirely unable to update the site's code... you know, like supporting Unicode, which was introduced in 1991. Not to mention a bunch of useful HTML and trivial convenience features like markdown. Or making the firehose useful, or coming up with a modern user-moderation system.

I don't visit https://soylentnews.org any longer — not my cup of tea, community-wise — but it's worth noting they fixed the slashdot codebase years ago.

I still chuckle when Slashdot fronts me with an ad telling me I should put my code on their archive; they can't even manage this place worth a damn, and they want me to trust them with my code? That's a solid LOL. Also, No.

But we've dropped really low if we even skip OP or can't remember it a couple PgDn's further, haven't we.

Sir, this is a Wendy's.

Now, would you like a slightly smaller burger with your slightly smaller portion of fries?

BTW, that'll be 5% more with the new pricing.

Raising a question is asking a question

Sure. But that's not the phrase. The phrase is "raises the question."

FTFS:

Voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when inflation hit.

Well, actually, voters don't like high prices, so they punished the Democrats for being in charge when corporate price gouging and housing price gouging hit and never backed off.

Also, because they have no other lever to "encourage" the corrupt political system to do something about it. Not that they will, of course. Have to keep those sweet corporate bribe flows running smoothly.

Buttons are fast.
Buttons are positive.
Buttons are easy to learn.

Voice is slow.
Voice is subject to noise.
Voice is subject to music, in particular music that isn't coming from the car's systems.
Voice is subject to multi-voice conflicts / conversation.
Voice is subject to misinterpretation.
Voice can give passengers access to driver-only decisions.
Voice can give bystanders access to driver-only decisions.

However, buttons cost more — and that's the motivation for the claim.

In addition, touchscreens and menus are actively dangerous because they remove the driver's visual attention from the road.

In other UI news, Apple, not satisfied with having put the charging port on the bottom of the "magic" mouse, has put the power button on the bottom of the latest Mac Mini.

I swear, I want to take a rolled up newspaper and just beat on some of these incompetent decision makers until the paper turns to dust.

I don't know why it's the wrong time. Any time for this move is okay. Just do it.

If Bezos were telling the truth — and clearly, he's not — he would see to it that the paper had no "opinion" section. You know, so it could make an honest attempt at reporting the news instead of trying to influence people by publishing the opinions and reasoning of various movers and shakers.

But he's not doing that. He's taking one action: keeping the stated and clear opinion of the paper's editorial crew (which has been openly stated outside the paper's environs as favoring Kamala Harris by the editorial crew) from being printed in the paper.

It's a completely transparent implementation of a pro-Trump move.

And as far as tradition goes, opinion sections have been, and remain, ubiquitous across almost every newspaper out there.

Bezos is a chump making a douche move.

This will leave the market free to be exploited for profit by those reputable companies who can be bothered to produce high quality software through the choice of secure development tools, defensive programming and testing

Well, that leaves out Apple and Microsoft, based on software release behaviors to date.

...as little as 3-4 bit precision (which is such a low bit precision that it makes more sense to think of it as a lookup table of exponentially growing values than as actual floating point math).

Even with FP8, you just need to generate (once) a 64k-entry table of results, and then there's no CPU/FPU FP math at all to do the 2-element "multiplication." 8BOpA as MS8 bits, 8BOpB as LS8 bits, results in a direct 16B index to the answer from the 64k table.

The significant cost of FP8 versus FP3 or FP4 is in the storage of the data; FP4 is twice as efficient, storage-wise, although it sacrifices considerable accuracy. FP3 is counter-indicated as alignment will be cross byte/word/etc. (in a traditional computer memory architecture) or else there will be wasted bits and hence inefficient storage.

64K tables are nothing in today's memory contexts, and certainly irrelevant compared to the memory impacts of all the weights (or even a layer of weights in a layered computation model) in any usable LLM.

If the government mandates this, will they be paying for the replacement of the EV battery and charging circuits?

There's another use case lurking here; rather than just (or even at all) feeding battery power into the grid and so imposing more charge-discharge cycles on the vehicle, any vehicle with auxiliary solar panels (like these) can switch to feeding the grid once the battery is already fully charged.

It's also worthy if one EV can charge another; for instance, someone runs out of charge, a kind-hearted motorist can stop and provide some juice. Auxiliary roadside services (like this) are already somewhat available, but you can be pretty sure that's going to be fee-based. There's still room in the world for the occasional good samaritan.