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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re: I must have missed those lawsuits (Score 1) 68

err no, I verified all links and the reason for each case cited in each article before posting.
They're valid and AI accurately pointed them out - but it rightly added a caveat to the "Westmoreland v. CBS (1982–1985)" case as it's not a direct news publisher vs TV station, but rather the fact that the TV documentary made use of investigative reporting which resulted in a defamation case.

Someone doesn't have their brain engaged, but I'm fairly sure it's not me.

Comment Re:I must have missed those lawsuits (Score 1) 68

"Publishers have been suing new tech companies for a hundred years, starting with radio, TV, the internet, social media, and now AI," Jesse Dwyer, Perplexity's head of communications, told TechCrunch. "Fortunately it's never worked, or we'd all be talking about this by telegraph."

I also wondered about this, came across as a fairly good argument, so I checked with AI ;)
Initially it summarised each point, but when I probed it further, including checking its own sources, it came back with: -

* AP v. KVOS (1936): The Associated Press sued KVOS, a Washington radio station, alleging unfair competition for reading newspaper stories verbatim on air; the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the station's favor on a technicality, but the case catalyzed licensing arrangements between news services and radio
* The Press–Radio War and Biltmore Agreement (1933–1935): U.S. newspapers mounted political, economic, and legal campaigns to curb radio's news reading, pressuring wire services to stop supplying bulletins and forcing restrictive terms on radio networks via the Biltmore Agreement

* Red Lion Broadcasting Co. v. FCC (1969): A landmark Supreme Court case upholding the FCC's fairness doctrine for radio/TV, reflecting the intense disputes over broadcast news practices and personal attack rules, even though it wasn't a publisher suing a broadcaster
* Westmoreland v. CBS (1982–1985): A high-profile libel suit by General William Westmoreland against CBS over a documentary, emblematic of television broadcasters facing defamation litigation tied to investigative reporting rather than publisher-versus-TV lawsuits

* Associated Press v. All Headline News (2008–2009): AP sued an online news aggregator for “hot news” misappropriation, copyright, and trademark claims; the court allowed AP's claims to proceed, and the case later settled—an instructive example of publishers suing internet-era distributors over content scraping
* Section 230 context: The rise of social platforms led to extensive litigation over liability for third-party content, with Section 230 providing broad immunity; debates and cases around that regime frame publisher challenges to social media's distribution of news

Comment Re:If it's behind paywall how do they get it? (Score 2) 68

I've often wondered this, until I came across this story on slashdot whereby authors of browser addons/extensions are approached to generate money from their hard work if they covertly add a javascript file similar to Mellowtel which essentially spies on browser traffic/scrapes webpages so each user unknowingly becomes a bot.

Sadly most addons are never monitored, and even if they have approval, they can just as easily slip in the few lines of code to import the js script in the next minor release.

... critics say the monetization works by using the browser extensions to scrape websites on behalf of paying customers, which include AI startups, according to MellowTel founder Arsian Ali. Tuckner (security researcher) reached this conclusion after uncovering close ties between MellowTel and Olostep, a company that bills itself as "the world's most reliable and cost-effective Web scraping API." Olostep says its service "avoids all bot detection and can parallelize up to 100K requests in minutes." Paying customers submit the locations of browsers they want to access specific webpages. Olostep then uses its installed base of extension users to fulfill the request.

Comment Whoops... (Score 1) 1

Didn't read the year - this is from last year

Still interesting though, and curious how much more it has increased since then. I believe Microsoft also revealed a similar figure back in April, stating around 30% of code was written using AI.

I've stated previously, I envision a time where most developer will hardly write code, instead just spend hours reviewing endless lines of code, or likely speeding up the drudge by becoming mostly full-time testers.

Submission + - AI now writes 25% of Google's code, says CEO Sundar Pichai (arstechnica.com) 1

yuvcifjt writes: On Tuesday during Google's Q3 2024 earnings call, CEO Sundar Pichai revealed that AI systems now generate more than a quarter of new code for its products, with human programmers overseeing the computer-generated contributions, showing how AI tools are already having a sizeable impact on software development.

"We're also using AI internally to improve our coding processes, which is boosting productivity and efficiency," Pichai said during the call. "Today, more than a quarter of all new code at Google is generated by AI, then reviewed and accepted by engineers. This helps our engineers do more and move faster."

ArsTechnica goes on to state:

Google developers aren't the only programmers using AI to assist with coding tasks. It's difficult to get hard numbers, but according to Stack Overflow's 2024 Developer Survey, over 76 percent of all respondents "are using or are planning to use AI tools in their development process this year," with 62 percent actively using them. A 2023 GitHub survey found that 92 percent of US-based software developers are "already using AI coding tools both in and outside of work."

"Whether you think coding with AI works today or not doesn't really matter," posted former Microsoft VP Steven Sinofsky in September. Sinofsky has a personal history of coding going back to the 1970s. "But if you think functional AI helping to code will make humans dumber or isn't real programming just consider that's been the argument against every generation of programming tools going back to Fortran."

Comment Re:Recording music for audiences is dead (Score 1) 27

In that case, Google, YouTube, Facebook/Twitter/etc, should be the worst possible place for you?

It's constantly learning from you, and serving the content that reaffirms your views and biases to keep you engaged.

In essence, living in a filter bubble.

Submission + - Be nice - Batman is watching! (sciencealert.com)

Black Parrot writes: From ScienceAlert:

A new study has found that people are more likely to act kind towards others when Batman is present â" and not for the reasons you might assume.
[...]
Psychologists from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Italy conducted experiments on the Milan metro to see who, if anyone, might offer their seat to a pregnant passenger.
The kicker? Sometimes Batman was there â" or at least, another experimenter dressed as him. The researchers were checking if people were more likely to give up their seat in the presence of the caped crusader.
And sure enough, there did seem to be a correlation. In 138 different experiments, somebody offered their seat to an experimenter wearing a hidden prosthetic belly 67.21 percent of the time in the presence of Batman.
That's a lot more often than times the superhero wasn't around â" in those cases, a passenger offered a seat just 37.66 percent of the time.
[...]
"Interestingly, among those who left their spot in the experimental condition, nobody directly associated their gesture with the presence of Batman, and 14 (43.75 percent) reported that they did not see Batman at all."

The article goes on to speculate about what is causing people to be more generous.

Comment Re: Dual squeeze? (Score 1) 99

Thank you @znrt

Finally someone with some geopolitical knowledge and historical perspective to have the guts to point out the obvious, which sadly majority on here refuse to acknowledge or listen, except to the propaganda coming from western msm.

Anyone they disagree with is a "Putin shill", or "Russian propagandist", etc.

I don't understand why people here can't understand that we would never accept Russian/Chinese/Iranian military bases on our border, but we should expect Russia and the rest of the world to tolerate American/NATO bases on theirs?

Submission + - Ion-based cooling technique could make computer chips more powerful (phys.org)

alternative_right writes: [R]esearchers at The University of Osaka have developed a strategy to enhance cooling by driving the flow of ions through nanoscale channels. This ionothermoelectric strategy is analogous to the Peltier technique, in which passing an electric current through a material results in heating or cooling. This compelling invention is published in ACS Nano.

"We fabricated a nanosized pore in a semiconductor membrane and surrounded the nanopore with a 'gate,' in the form of a nanowire. Applying a voltage to the gate induced the flow of ions through the nanopore," explains lead author, Makusu Tsutsui. "Varying the voltage modulated the surface charge of the nanopore."

A negative applied voltage resulted in a negatively charged nanopore that was only permeable to positively charged ions, or cations. Consequently, each ion drags a certain quantity of heat along with its charge. The team created a concentration gradient in saltwater around the nanopore to drive cation transport in one direction, effectively pumping heat out of the nanopore. Reversing the applied voltage made the nanopore surface positive and permeable only to negative ions, or anions, therefore switching the system from cooling to heating.

Slashdot Top Deals

"It might help if we ran the MBA's out of Washington." -- Admiral Grace Hopper

Working...