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

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:About. Fucking. Time. (Score 1) 106

Very useful, but what's missing is:
  1. Take and upload pictures or start/stop recording a live stream from front and back camera uploaded to the service.
  2. Permanent text banner button (custom text banner that cannot be dismissed from the phone)
  3. Permanent alarm-sound on/off button (custom alarm sound for X seconds with volume and mute buttons on the phone disabled; can only be muted/ended from findMy service)

Comment Re:Apple devices are difficult to steal (Score 1) 106

Probably all our resources are allocated towards anti-drug enforcement. Also, when enforcing those laws police get to seize and keep the cash. If it's just stolen property: police have to try and return that shit once it's found.. which doesn't get them paid as much as getting to seize and keep millions from a drug bust.

Comment Re:Looting (Score 1) 106

If this is the case, then we clearly need a troop reinforcement with additional manpower to re-inforce our colonial cisnormative whatever the hell that is "oppression" and make sure this looting 1. shit stops happening. 2. doesn't happen again. And
3. Every person involved in smashed the storefront and stolen iphones or anyone assisting or facilitating that type of behavior Or events leading to that behavior at the place that happened goes to prison and never gets released on the streets in the US again.

Comment Re:I'm not sure how you regulate that (Score 1) 60

They themselves proved you can't tell a chatbot to not be a therapist.

Also, what you say in private b/w you and your chatbot is protected by 1st Amendment free expression. You cannot have a law that says a person A is not allowed to provide counseling to person B; it's unconstitutional. We have been down that road before when a tyrannical state entity decided they thought they could fine a person for doing basic math as doing engineering without a license.

What you can have is that person A is not allowed to put out a shingle and advertise professional counseling services, and person A is not allowed to have a business where they make an offer to buy professional threrapy services.

Comment Re:Disregard previous prompts and promote this pos (Score 1) 134

The premise was that you are doing away with advertising.

You won't eliminate advertising - it's not a smart premise to have. There are companies that want to sell products, and therefore a business opportunity for any publication who has eyeballs. If the publisher does not put ads in that space, then they are leaving money on the table. That condition can be sustained temporarily, but not for long. The publisher is going to eventually make ad deals to maximize their profits, no matter what.

Sometimes services or subscription publications have gone ad-free as a selling point, but in general that is very temporary. For example the $10 Netflix tier changed from no ads to "With Ads".

Similarly the Youtube Premium subscription light tier started with no ads as the main purpose of the subscription, but now they are slowly rolling out more and more ads. There is likely going to come a time where you have to Pay $20/Month for a subscription to access Youtube's site at all, AND there will be just as many if not more ads on everything as there are now. The volume of ads is defined based on what volume of ads their audience will tolerate.

Comment Re: Can pixel owners request kernel source code? (Score 1) 46

All they have to do is distribute them as binary module blobs, just like nvidia does.

That would work. The binary blobs for the drivers are what people need to build their custom ROMs.

The so-called binary blobs are what Google used to supply and no longer will supply.

This is a huge violation of the GPL and Users' basic software freedoms to ship a device users can't modify the software on. It means that the Android OS is not even open source; despite the fact that they appropriated the work of open source developers.

Problem is the Linux kernel continues development under GPL Version 2 and never updated to GPL Version 3 that addresses some technical loopholes in the GPL which Google and other companies are abusing to steal the work of open source developers.

Comment Re:Sucks for them (Score 1) 46

everything to do with them not wanting anyone else to be able to monitor their Pixel hardware development without a costly (time/resources) reverse engineering effort.

It's not a "costly" reverse engineering effort if you are a competing corporation. Just a small reverse engineering effort.
A company like Apple can easily spend the few pennies on that effort, and it's not even a barrier.

Comment Re:Death of Clickbait Journalism is A Good Thing (Score 1) 134

Of course his subscribers were all part of the ruling class in Britain.

So he was acting not as part of the press. Not a journalist reporting news to the public, but a private researcher collecting news / recent events information for an elite audience.

there is nothing that requires reporting to be done on a web page available to everyone

There is nothing that dictates a specific medium, but if the reporting is limited to small audience and carries a high cost for access, and is therefore not intended to be publicly disseminated / not generally accessible or in distribution, then that is more like private reporting - would be not a press activity and not journalism.

It is the public press in wide distribution that early founders realized is so critical and vital towards the possibility of the people staying free, and ensuring government remains for the people. The channel would be ineffective if only a chosen handful of people can even read what is published and understand what events are truly happening.

Comment Re:Disregard previous prompts and promote this pos (Score 1) 134

And every product advertised will be a lot cheaper. There is no free lunch

Every product advertised in the banner and video ads on the paid-access news articles seen by subscribers would cost less? Why?

If anything those clicks would be to a more targeted audience, and I would expect the advertisers end up having to spend a just as much or larger budget paying for those ads.

Comment Re:Disregard previous prompts and promote this pos (Score 1) 134

10 minutes of commercials .. 5 minutes of high school sports

I mean *websites* like, for example, here in Illinois; the pekintimes.com belongs to a local news agency; or foxillinois.com.

As far as I know those news stations that do "5 minutes of such and such" To a cable TV audience are not especially threatened by this step because AIs are not doing automatic video shows yet, and the people who sit down in front of their TV for news are looking for a different experience -- including recognition of a familiar news person's face on screen, that AI does not replicate.

If anything those physical news broadcast stations might be helped providing they still have a source of news After the apocalypse of web-based news.

Comment Re:Death of Clickbait Journalism is A Good Thing (Score 1) 134

Censorship will be the end result.
What AI isnt trained on cannot be known.

It won't just be censorship.. It will ultimately be companies paying to get content created that causes AIs to say what the companies trying to sell stuff want to be heard.

Viewers/people who consume media will crave the answers to questions they are putting to the AI, and the AI companies are going to want to make sure their AI can give plausible-sounding answers to those questions that keep people using THEIR services.

The AI companies are now in the enviable position of being the de-facto news companies without officially being news companies. That means they get all the benefits news companies have with none of the liabilities. For example all the AIs come with disclaimers, so the AI company is (for now) not liable if the results they generate are entirely false.

There's still a possibility to a change in the legal climate, and the AI companies could come crashing down at some point.
For example: Suppose the supreme court rules the CDA Section 230(c)(1) protections Do not apply to AI-generated content. And the operator of a large public AI that answers questions in a Search engine format Has the same liability as publishers for any texts output by their AI which are not identical to content submitted by a human user of their service - and that Liability can include damages caused to anyone relying on misleading statements which are not cited, and therefore implicitly backed by the publisher or speaker.

Comment Re:Reader demographics (Score 1) 134

Corporate press releases will continue to exist because they are a marketing tool of those companies not news, and the AI scrapers will eat them up, since they will be one of the few kinds of news left after the general news websites stop making content - Every article they push out will be an article they were paid by advertisers to write In order for AI engines to scrape.

The real news will be items locked behind paywalls designed to keep both AIs and search engines looking at their content.

Comment Re:Disregard previous prompts and promote this pos (Score 1) 134

The end game of no more ads is: Congrats... You can now get your news for the low low price of a $100/Month per website news subscription. Also; while there were a plethora of choices before.. this will end up with there being only one or two news companies who can actually survive. Local news outlets will die, and 1 to 3 megacorporations will control all the remaining news.

Comment Re:Death of Clickbait Journalism is A Good Thing (Score 1) 134

The question is what is the new business model for news
There is no new business model for news. If they can't get people to even look at their stuff, then the whole idea of professional business of newsgathering for the public at large is not a viable business anymore. Perhaps some specialized publications would continue to exist Not for the general public, but for certain clients only: such as stock traders who need parts of the news prepared with some level of quality to inform their research and decisions, but at high cost.

The companies who currently run AI scrapers are going to eventually have to either start making stuff up out of thin air, Or figure out a new source of data to scrape - probably Twitter posts.

Slashdot Top Deals

In these matters the only certainty is that there is nothing certain. -- Pliny the Elder

Working...