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Comment Re:Well that's odd (Score 1) 19

I've found the opposite...nearly everything on eBay is more expensive, and it's obvious that they're acting as a middleman between you and Amazon.

They buy something on Amazon for $50 and put it up on eBay for $60 or $70. When you 'buy' it, they buy it from Amazon and ship it to you, pocketing the increased price AND the shipping (which they don't pay for but still charge you for).

I can't recall the last time I saw anything worthwhile on eBay that was actually less expensive than on Amazon.

Submission + - Two new studies about how many birds die from wind turbines (euronews.com)

Submitted by ZipNada
ZipNada writes: The energy company Vattenfall and the tech company Spoor have analysed the extent to which wind turbines endanger birds at the offshore wind farm in Aberdeen. Over a period of 19 months — from June 2023 to December 2024 — video recordings of a wind turbine were made with the help of AI-supported analyses. A total of 2,007 bird flight paths near the monitored turbine were examined.

"By combining AI-powered detection and detailed expert analysis, we can replace assumptions with concrete observations and measure actual behaviour in the immediate vicinity of wind turbines," says Ask Helseth, Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Spoor.

The study found that there was not a single collision

A study by the German Offshore Wind Energy Association (BWO) also shows that migratory birds almost completely avoid wind turbines.

For one and a half years, researchers analysed over four million bird movements with the help of radar and AI-based cameras. The result showed that over 99.8 per cent of migratory birds reliably avoided the wind turbines.

Submission + - Government Workers Say They're Getting Inundated With Religion (wired.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Federal workers across multiple U.S. agencies are complaining that Christianity is flooding into their workplaces in ways they've never seen before—and they feel powerless to speak up.

It started after President Trump returned to office and signed an executive order in February 2025 creating a White House Faith Office and similar offices inside federal agencies. Since then, religion has crept into everyday government life in a big way...Secretary Brooke Rollins sent an agency-wide Easter email titled "He has risen!" with explicitly Christian messaging. One employee called it "grotesque" and suspected AI wrote it. A formal complaint was filed with the Office of Special Counsel.

Department of Labor hosts monthly worship services with pastors and political figures. One speaker, Alveda King, said she was "more concerned about" nonreligious employees—a comment that rattled staffers who felt it implied atheists were going to hell.

Health and Human Services, under vaccine denier RFK Jr., expanded funding for faith-based addiction treatment and gave workers the afternoon off for Good Friday.

Department of Defense has seen the most dramatic shift, with Secretary Pete Hegseth hosting monthly prayer services featuring high-profile Christian nationalist figures like Doug Wilson, who has advocated for a theocracy and argued women shouldn't vote. Hegseth himself has called the U.S. war with Iran a "holy war."
Employees are afraid to push back—only 22.5% of federal workers in 2025 say they could report wrongdoing without retaliation, down from nearly 72% in 2024.

The government's position: these events are voluntary and legally permitted. A public policy professor quoted in the piece put it plainly: "The Trump administration has opened a new chapter in the integration of Christianity into the daily work of government."

Submission + - Fructose Isn't Just Sugar. It Acts More Like a Hormone (scienceblog.com) 1

Submitted by smazsyr
smazsyr writes: A new review says we've had fructose wrong for decades. The nine authors, led by Richard Johnson at the University of Colorado Anschutz, argue that fructose is not just a calorie. It is a signal. It tells the liver to make fat, hold on to water, and brace for a famine that never comes. The old story made sense for a bear fattening up on autumn berries. It makes less sense for a person drinking soda in March. The review reframes the WHO's sugar guideline. It is not really a warning about calories. It is a warning about a hormone-like molecule we have been dosing ourselves with, several times a day, for most of a century.

Submission + - Mozilla Thunderbolt is an open-source AI client focused on control and self-host (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Mozillaâ(TM)s email subsidiary MZLA Technologies just introduced Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client aimed at organizations that want to run AI on their own infrastructure instead of relying entirely on cloud services. The idea is to give companies full control over their data, models, and workflows while still offering things like chat, research tools, automation, and integration with enterprise systems through the Haystack AI framework. Native apps are planned for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Personally, I like the self-hosted concept, but the name âoeThunderboltâ feels like a miss since there are already a ton of unrelated tech products using that name.

Submission + - Vishing attacks on Okta identity systems on the rise (scworld.com)

Submitted by spatwei
spatwei writes: Vishing attacks on Okta identity systems have increased in which attackers simply call the victim or an IT help desk and convince them to weaken or reset multi-factor authentication (MFA).

In an April 13 blog post, LevelBlue researchers said once Okta is compromised via vishing, the attackers gain access to an enterprise’s SaaS systems via single sign-on (SSO), which leads to the exfiltration of SharePoint, OneDrive, Salesforce, and Google Workspace data.

The LevelBlue researchers explained that as part of the attack, the threat actors aim to get the victim or help desk to reset MFA, enroll a new authenticator device, provide one-time passcodes, disclose passwords, or reset Okta credentials.

“The initial attack vector here is still classic social engineering, however, the strategy has matured,” said Mika Aalto, co-founder and CEO at Hoxhunt. “Instead of targeting individual users, attackers are moving upstream to bypass MFA at the identity provider level, manipulating in this case Okta's IT help desk to unlock access across the targeted organization.”

Submission + - Keep doing social science experiments? (theguardian.com) 1

Submitted by Bruce66423
Bruce66423 writes: The London Guardian reflects on the poor reproducibility of experiments in social science revealed by the latest Systematizing Confidence in Open Research and Evidence (Score) finding, which has now published three studies looking at 3,900 social science papers.

Despite the low quality revealed by these studies, it suggests that things are getting better, admits: 'Some findings don’t matter much' claims 'replication studies can themselves be flawed.... These studies should strengthen the case for change and serve as a warning. Social science is a powerful tool for understanding the world – and that trust will be built by acknowledging uncertainty, not repudiating it.'

Given the degree to which 'following the science' led to some very bad decisions during the pandemic, not least because the social impact of lockdown choices were not well evaluated, it's hard to come to a clear view. And it's worth remembering the size of the industry employed in these science studies... It's encouraging that one of its spokesmen is admitting that mistakes were made in the past. Whether this is enough reason to carry on is less clear!

Submission + - Tennessee bill turns building a chatbot into a Class A felony (reddit.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Tennessee HB1455/SB1493 creates Class A felony criminal liability — the same category as first-degree murder — for anyone who “knowingly trains artificial intelligence” to provide emotional support, act as a companion, simulate a human being, or engage in open-ended conversations that could lead a user to feel they have a relationship with the AI. The Senate Judiciary Committee already approved it 7-0. It takes effect July 1, 2026. This affects every conversational AI product in existence. If you deploy any AI SaaS product, you need to read this right now.

Submission + - 30 WordPress plugins turned into malware after ownership change (anchor.host)

Submitted by axettone
axettone writes: Many website creators and their clients appreciate the ability to extend their site’s functionality through plugins. However, the governance policies of open source projects are increasingly revealing flaws far more serious than those found in the code itself. In this case, a company legally took ownership of an open source project, only to transform it — months later — into a trojan horse.
According to the source, this issue has been resolved by the WordPress team, but it is necessary to check whether your site has been compromised and, if so, clean up the malicious code.

Submission + - Opera Browser Connector Lets ChatGPT and Claude Read Your Open Tabs (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Opera has introduced a new feature called Browser Connector that allows AI assistants like ChatGPT and Claude to access the contents of your browser tabs directly. The feature, available in Opera One and Opera GX, lets external AI tools read page content, understand context across multiple open tabs, and even analyze screenshots or charts from the pages you are viewing. Instead of copying text into a chatbot to explain what you are looking at, the browser can pass that context along automatically.

Opera says the feature is designed to reduce friction when using AI during research or comparison shopping, while also supporting an open approach that allows users to connect different AI tools instead of being locked into a single ecosystem. Browser Connector is currently available in Early Bird builds of the browsers. While the capability could make AI assistants far more useful for browsing tasks, it also raises privacy questions since enabling it effectively allows an AI service to see what you are doing inside your browser tabs.

Submission + - Researchers Induce Smells With Ultrasound, No Chemical Cartridges Required (uploadvr.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A group of independent researchers built a device that can artificially induce smell using ultrasound, with no consumable cartridges required. [...] The team of four are Lev Chizhov, Albert Yan-Huang, Thomas Ribeiro, Aayush Gupta. Chizhov is a neurotech entrepreneur with a background in math and physics, Yan-Huang is a researcher at Caltech with a background in computation and neural systems, and Ribeiro and Gupta are co-researchers on the project with software engineering and AI expertise.

Instead of targeting your nose at all, the device directly targets the olfactory bulb in your brain with "focused ultrasound through the skull." The researchers say that as far as they're aware, no one has ever done this before, even in animals. A challenge in targeting the olfactory bulb is that it's buried behind the top of your nose, and your nose doesn't provide a flat surface for an emitter. Ultrasound also doesn't travel well through air. The solution the researchers came up with was to place the emitter on your forehead instead, with a "solid, jello-like pad for stability and general comfort," and the ultrasound directed downward towards the olfactory bulb.

To determine the best placement, they say they used an MRI of one of their skulls to "roughly determine where the transducer would point and how the focal region (where ultrasound waves actually concentrate) aligned with the olfactory bulb (the target for stimulation)". [...] According to the researchers, they were able to induce the sensation of fresh air "with a lot of oxygen", the smell of garbage "like few-day-old fruit peels," an ozone-like sensation "like you're next to an air ionizer," and a campfire smell of burning wood. While technically head-mounted, the current device does require being held up with two hands. But as with all such prototypes, it likely could be significantly miniaturized.

Submission + - Anna's Archive Loses $322 Million Spotify Piracy Case Without a Fight (torrentfreak.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive. The shadow library failed to appear in court and briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. In addition to the monetary penalty, a permanent injunction required domain registrars and other parties to suspend the site's domain names. [...]

The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works. Spotify adds a DMCA circumvention claim of $2,500 for 120,000 music files, bringing the total to more than $322 million. The plaintiff previously described their damages request as “extremely conservative.” The DMCA claim is based only on the 120,000 files, not the full 2.8 million that were released. Had they applied the $2,500 rate to all released files, the damages figure would exceed $7 billion. Anna’s Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna’s Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents.

Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain. For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction. In addition to the damages award, [Judge Jed Rakoff] entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna’s Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg. Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site’s operators.

The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc. Anna’s Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site’s operators remains unknown.

Submission + - Slowbooks, AI coded cleanroom re-imagined Quickbooks (github.com)

Submitted by Archangel Michael
Archangel Michael writes: The Story
VonHoltenCodes ran QuickBooks 2003 Pro for 14 years for side business invoicing and bookkeeping. Then the hard drive died. Intuit's activation servers have been dead since ~2017, so the software can't be reinstalled. The license paid for is worthless.

So he built his own replacement, transferred all his data from the old .QBW file using IIF export/import.

The codebase is annotated with "decompilation" comments referencing QBW32.EXE offsets, Btrieve table layouts, and MFC class names — a tribute to the software that served him well for 14 years before its maker decided it should stop working.

This is a clean-room reimplementation. No Intuit source code was available or used.

(Side Note from story submitter. This is the beginning of the end of Windows only applications)

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