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Comment Re:yay (Score 1) 41

by ISayWeOnlyToBePolite (#65839341) Attached to: 'Rage Bait' Named Oxford Word of the Year 2025

Using /. as an empirical example, people are behaving poorly. A decade ago you'd never see personal attacks moderated up just because it was politically aligned with the person moderating. Today such behavior (both attacking and partisan moderation) is commonplace. People are just less civil. I see this as symptom of de-cohesion - no shared values, no imperative to act civil.

How do you know this to be true and what steps could I take to verify the claim? Here's a cherry picked "Hillary Clinton Declares 2016 Democratic Presidential Bid" slashdot article from a decade ago (April 2015) https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fpolitics.slashdot.org%2F... for illustration.

Submission + - NASA Is Tracking a Vast Anomaly Growing in Earth's Magnetic Field (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: For years, NASA has monitored a strange anomaly in Earth's magnetic field: a giant region of lower magnetic intensity in the skies, stretching out between South America and southwest Africa.

This vast, developing phenomenon, called the South Atlantic Anomaly, has intrigued and concerned scientists for decades, and perhaps none more so than NASA researchers.

The space agency's satellites and spacecraft are particularly vulnerable to the weakened magnetic field within the anomaly, and the resulting exposure to charged particles from the Sun.

Submission + - Owning a Cat Could Double Your Risk of Schizophrenia, Research Suggests (sciencealert.com) 1

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Having a cat as a pet could potentially double a person's risk of schizophrenia-related conditions, according to an analysis of 17 studies.

Psychiatrist John McGrath and colleagues at the Queensland Centre for Mental Health Research in Australia looked at papers published over the last 44 years in 11 countries, including the US and the UK.

Their 2023 review found "a significant positive association between broadly defined cat ownership and an increased risk of schizophrenia-related disorders."

T. gondii is a mostly harmless parasite that can be transmitted through undercooked meat or contaminated water. It can also be transmitted through an infected cat's feces.

Estimates suggest that T. gondii infects about 40 million people in the US, typically without any symptoms. Meanwhile, researchers keep finding more strange effects that infections may have.

Once inside our bodies, T. gondii can infiltrate the central nervous system and influence neurotransmitters. The parasite has been linked to personality changes, the emergence of psychotic symptoms, and some neurological disorders, including schizophrenia.

Submission + - Russia Imposes 24-Hour Mobile Internet Blackout For Travelers Returning Home (therecord.media) 2

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Russian telecom operators have begun cutting mobile internet access for 24 hours for citizens returning to the country from abroad, in what officials say is an effort to prevent Ukrainian drones from using domestic SIM cards for navigation. “When a SIM card enters Russia from abroad, the user has to confirm that it’s being used by a person — not installed in a drone,” the Digital Development Ministry said in a statement earlier this week.

Users can restore access sooner by solving a captcha or calling their operator for identification. Authorities said the temporary blackout is meant to “ensure the safety of Russian citizens” and prevent SIM cards from being embedded in “enemy drones.” The new rule has led to unexpected outages for residents in border regions, whose phones can automatically connect to foreign carriers. Officials advised users to switch to manual network selection to avoid being cut off.

Submission + - Five people plead quilty to helping North Koreans infiltrate US companies (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by smooth wombat
smooth wombat writes: Within the past year, stories have been posted on Slashdot about people helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs at U.S. corporations, companies knowingly helping North Koreans get remote IT jobs, how not to hire a North Korean for a remote IT job, and how a simple question tripped up a North Korean applying for a remote IT job. The FBI is even warning companies that North Koreans working remotely can steal source code and extort money from the company, money which goes to fund the North Korean government. Now, five more people have plead guilty to knowingly helping North Koreans infiltrate U.S. companies as remote IT workers.

The five people are accused of working as “facilitators” who helped North Koreans get jobs by providing their own real identities, or false and stolen identities of more than a dozen U.S. nationals. The facilitators also hosted company-provided laptops in their homes across the U.S. to make it look like the North Korean workers lived locally, according to the DOJ press release.

These actions affected 136 U.S. companies and netted Kim Jong Un’s regime $2.2 million in revenue, said the DOJ.

Three of the people — U.S. nationals Audricus Phagnasay, Jason Salazar, and Alexander Paul Travis — each pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy.

Prosecutors accused the three of helping North Koreans posing as legitimate IT workers, whom they knew worked outside of the United States, to use their own identities to obtain employment, helped them remotely access their company-issued laptops set up in their homes, and also helped the North Koreans pass vetting procedures, such as drug tests.

The fourth U.S. national who pleaded guilty is Erick Ntekereze Prince, who ran a company called Taggcar, which supplied to U.S. companies allegedly “certified” IT workers but whom he knew worked outside of the country and were using stolen or fake identities. Prince also hosted laptops with remote access software at several residences in Florida, and earned more than $89,000 for his work, the DOJ said.

Another participant in the scheme who pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud conspiracy and another count of aggravated identity theft is Ukrainian national Oleksandr Didenko, who prosecutors accuse of stealing U.S. citizens’ identities and selling them to North Koreans so they could get jobs at more than 40 U.S. companies.

Submission + - A potential quantum leap (harvard.edu)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Harvard physicists unveil system to solve long-standing barrier to new generation of supercomputers

The dream of creating game-changing quantum computers — supermachines that encode information in single atoms rather than conventional bits — has been hampered by the formidable challenge known as quantum error correction.

In a paper published Monday in Nature, Harvard researchers demonstrated a new system capable of detecting and removing errors below a key performance threshold, potentially providing a workable solution to the problem.

"For the first time, we combined all essential elements for a scalable, error-corrected quantum computation in an integrated architecture," said Mikhail Lukin, co-director of the Quantum Science and Engineering Initiative, Joshua and Beth Friedman University Professor, and senior author of the new paper. "These experiments — by several measures the most advanced that have been done on any quantum platform to date — create the scientific foundation for practical large-scale quantum computation."

In the new paper, the team demonstrated a "fault tolerant" system using 448 atomic quantum bits manipulated with an intricate sequence of techniques to detect and correct errors.

The key mechanisms include physical entanglement, logical entanglement, logical magic, and entropy removal. For example, the system employs the trick of "quantum teleportation" — transferring the quantum state of one particle to another elsewhere without physical contact.

"There are still a lot of technical challenges remaining to get to very large-scale computer with millions of qubits, but this is the first time we have an architecture that is conceptually scalable," said lead author Dolev Bluvstein, Ph.D. '25, who did the research during his graduate studies at Harvard and is now an assistant professor at Caltech. "It's going to take a lot of effort and technical development, but it's becoming clear that we can build fault-tolerant quantum computers."

Submission + - NTP Solicits Donations 2

Submitted by ewhac
ewhac writes: Coming on the heels of FFmpeg having to cope with slop bug reports from Google (without attendant fixes), the Network Time Foundation, the stewards of the Network Time Protocol (NTP) and reference software implementation that keeps billions of computers' internal clocks set to the correct date and time, is having a donation drive. Depending on which page you look at (ntp.org or nwtime.org), the Foundation's goal is to raise a king's ransom of... $11,000.00. Yes, eleven thousand dollars.

Submission + - AI Country Song Rollicks To The Top Of US Sales Chart (barrons.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: A country-music song featuring a male singer's voice generated by artificial intelligence reached the top of the US charts for the first time this week.

"Walk My Walk" by Breaking Rust — an artist with no identity but widely reported by US media to be powered by generative AI technology — made it to the top spot on Billboard magazine's chart ranking digital sales of country songs, according to data published Monday.

Submission + - Ryanair Tries Forcing App Downloads By Eliminating Paper Boarding Passes (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ryanair is trying to force users to download its mobile app by eliminating paper boarding passes, starting on November 12. As announced in February and subsequently delayed from earlier start dates, Europe’s biggest airline is moving to digital-only boarding passes, meaning customers will no longer be able to print physical ones. In order to access their boarding passes, Ryanair flyers will have to download Ryanair’s app.

“Almost 100 percent of passengers have smartphones, and we want to move everybody onto that smartphone technology,” Ryanair CEO Michael O’Leary said recently on The Independent’s daily travel podcast. Customers are encouraged to check in online via Ryanair’s website or app before getting to the airport. People who don’t check in online before getting to the airport will have to pay the airport a check-in fee.

Submission + - Thanks to a computer model, five Vietnam War MIAs come home (phys.org)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: In the decades after the war, joint U.S., Laotian and Vietnamese teams mounted several expeditions to search the peak, recovering several of the men lost that day. But the dense vegetation, remote environs and possibility of unexploded munitions at the site, not to mention the sheer size of the mountain, complicated the search for the remaining missing Airmen.

With the expertise of Russell Quick, a Ph.D. graduate in anthropology from UIC and member of the CRIM team, the researchers scanned the mountain with drones to make a digital 3D model of the site. They used a remote sensing technology called LiDAR, which maps the terrain using laser beams aimed at the ground and measuring their reflection back to the aircraft.

The program, trained on images of tropical forests, will ping when it detects an area that looks different from the rest.

"It will not give any alarms to rocks or trees or what you see in a tropical forest. But if you have a belt or something like that, it's an unusual object, and it'll create an alert," said Cetin.

The researchers homed in on several areas of interest and submitted their findings to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Submission + - Copy-paste now exceeds file transfer as top corporate data exfiltration vector (scworld.com)

Submitted by spatwei
spatwei writes: It is now more common for data to leave companies through copying and paste than through file transfers and uploads, LayerX revealed in its Browser Security Report 2025.

This shift is largely due to generative AI (genAI), with 77% of employees pasting data into AI prompts, and 32% of all copy-pastes from corporate accounts to non-corporate accounts occurring within genAI tools.

“Traditional governance built for email, file-sharing, and sanctioned SaaS didn’t anticipate that copy/paste into a browser prompt would become the dominant leak vector,” LayerX CEO Or Eshed wrote in a blog post summarizing the report.

Submission + - Singapore scammers get the canning treatment (mha.gov.sg) 1

Submitted by D,Petkow
D,Petkow writes: Singapore is often hailed as one of the world’s most ultra-modern hubs — a place of gleaming skyscrapers, cutting-edge fintech, and futuristic urban planning. Yet, beneath the polished surface, the city-state still enforces some of the strictest old-school punishments imaginable.

In a move that stunned many outside observers, Parliament recently passed a law mandating at least six strokes of the cane for scammers and money mules. With scams making up nearly 60% of reported crimes and billions lost since 2020, the government argues that harsh deterrence is necessary.

It’s a striking contrast: a nation leading in smart cities and AI governance, while simultaneously wielding rattan canes against fraudsters. This duality — hyper-modern yet deeply traditional — is part of what makes Singapore fascinating, and sometimes bewildering, to the rest of the world.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fsays.com%2Fmy%2Fnews%2Fsinga...
http://metro.co.uk/2025/11/08/...

Submission + - Jensen Huang: The U.S. Sanctions on China Are the Dumbest Thing (binance.com)

Submitted by hackingbear
hackingbear writes: nVidia CEO Huang held a closed-door meeting in a top private room at the Grand Hyatt Taipei. There were only 12 invited guests, all heavyweight figures—executives from TSMC, Quanta, Wistron, and Hon Hai, as well as partners from two American venture capital firms. Just after the meeting ended, three participants leaked the content verbatim to a Financial Times reporter who published Huang's words (paywalled) and Reuters and Bloomberg verified it with all 12 attendees present that day, and everyone confirmed the authenticity of the report. The key sentences in the speech are explosive:
  • The opening conclusion: "If you ask me who’s going to win the generative AI race in the next 5-10 years — China is going to win. Period."
  • "They have one million people working on this 24/7. One million. Not 100,000 — one million. You know how many we have in the entire Silicon Valley working full-time on foundation models? Maybe 20,000 on a good day."
  • "And they’re not going to quit. They’re not going to quit. The more you sanction them, the harder they work. You can’t stop them. The more you stop them, the more determined they get."
  • On Huawei: ""Don’t underestimate Huawei. Their Ascend 910C is already within 8-12% of H100 performance in most workloads — and they make 200,000 of them per month now. Two hundred thousand. Per month. While we’re sitting here arguing about CFIUS."
  • "These export controls? They’re the dumbest thing we’ve ever done. You just gave them the best national mobilization mission in 50 years. It’s like a Sputnik moment on steroids."
  • "Washington thinks they’re stopping China. They’re not stopping China — they’re accelerating China. By 2027, China will have more AI compute than the rest of the world combined. Mark my words."
  • The concluding remakr: "So yeah, keep the sanctions if you want. Just understand: you’re handing them the trophy."

Submission + - Scientists Reveal How The Maya Predicted Eclipses For Centuries (sciencealert.com)

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Instead, they propose that a new table is begun in the 358th month of the current table. With this approach, the table's predictions are only about 2 hours and 20 minutes early for both Sun and Moon alignment.

"This procedure would also entail that, occasionally, the first date in a successor table would be set at the 223rd month, about 10 hours and 10 min later relative to that alignment, to adjust for the gradually accumulating deviations of resettings at month 358," the authors write.

By comparing the table with our modern knowledge of eclipse cycles, they found that with this method, the Maya would have been able to accurately predict every solar eclipse observable in their territory between 350 and 1150 CE, since it corrects for the small errors that accumulate over time.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: how to get people to our 2600 meeting?

Submitted by alternative_right
alternative_right writes: Years ago, we had a large and exciting group at Houston 2600: hobbyists of all sorts, each with their own interests and active projects or at least fascinations. Then COVID-19 hit and people stopped coming. Now, it seems the audience are staying home, and the only people sporadically showing up are interested in talking about the latest hacking tools to use for their future careers in computer security, or a group of wannabe hackers who seem to have no curiosity about anything other than money. Where are the hobbyists, and how do we get them to join us and share some excitement about technology? Or did Big Tech and social media finally manage to kill that?

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