Comment Re: pareidolia at its finest. (Score 2) 124
Principle of Oddmatches. If you have a million samples, you can expect to find one-in-a-million incidents.
So I gave this story no credence until The Atlantic denied it.
Comment Re:Why?? (Score 2) 74
It's interesting how these multi-billion-dollar AI companies all have such remarkably terrible UI.
Comment Re:Where does the data live? (Score 4, Informative) 26
Thanks for your questions, Freenet caches data but it isn’t meant to be a long-term storage network. It’s better to think of it as a communication system. Data persists as long as at least one node remains subscribed to it. If nobody subscribes (including the author), it will eventually disappear from the network. So yes, if only your node subscribes then the data will only exist there and won’t be available when your machine is offline. But if other nodes subscribe it will be replicated automatically and remain available even if your node goes offline.
Comment Re:2023 (Score 1) 26
Not from 2023, the linked video is from last month. https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F...
Submission + - New Freenet Network Launches With River Group Chat (freenet.org)
Sanity writes: Freenet’s new generation peer-to-peer network is now operational, along with the first application built on the network: a decentralized group chat system called River.
The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure.
An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube.
Slashdot previously covered the reboot of Freenet in 2023 in this article.
The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure.
An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube.
Slashdot previously covered the reboot of Freenet in 2023 in this article.
Comment Re:Peak Detectability (Score 5, Informative) 101
In ATSC8VSB 0.5% of the power is in the pilot tone, the rest is spread over the entire bandwidth as subcarriers. Analog TV put 70% of the signal into the single frequency of the carrier. Add in doppler shifts from planet rotation and the perspective from space of seeing all stations on all the channels, and you would be left with a sight rise in the background noise, not a detectable signal.
Comment Re:Frequency Spikes? (Score 3, Informative) 101
An average lightning bolt generates 1 megawatt of radio frequency energy. The earth has 40 million lightning bolts a day. This planet has 500 times that many. That is a lot more energy than any radio signal man has ever created. I'd guess more than man has created in 100+ years!
Comment Peak Detectability (Score 5, Insightful) 101
In our experience of a single planet, we can see a greater reason. We have passed the peak of our detectability to outside civilizations. While we still radiate some narrow band signals, there are fewer than there were a few decades ago. The first world countries no longer beam out carrier based television signals. The current methods of TV transmission would be undetectable without prior knowledge of the details of the modulation methods. Our navigation no longer uses the powerful narrow band LORAN, the replacement satellite based systems would also be undetectable. Sure, a hundred-odd years past the invention of radio we still send narrow band AM/FM broadcast radio signals, but will they be there in a hundred years? If this is a typical trajectory for technology, there might only be a couple hundred years, of the 3 billion plus year history of life, when earth would have a detectable radio signature.
AI Is Intensifying a 'Collapse' of Trust Online, Experts Say (nbcnews.com) 60
Experts interviewed by NBC News warn that the rapid spread of AI-generated images and videos is accelerating an online trust breakdown, especially during fast-moving news events where context is scarce. From the report: President Donald Trump's Venezuela operation almost immediately spurred the spread of AI-generated images, old videos and altered photos across social media. On Wednesday, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a woman in her car, many online circulated a fake, most likely AI-edited image of the scene that appears to be based on real video. Others used AI in attempts to digitally remove the mask of the ICE officer who shot her.
The confusion around AI content comes as many social media platforms, which pay creators for engagement, have given users incentives to recycle old photos and videos to ramp up emotion around viral news moments. The amalgam of misinformation, experts say, is creating a heightened erosion of trust online -- especially when it mixes with authentic evidence. "As we start to worry about AI, it will likely, at least in the short term, undermine our trust default -- that is, that we believe communication until we have some reason to disbelieve," said Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. "That's going to be the big challenge, is that for a while people are really going to not trust things they see in digital spaces."
Though AI is the latest technology to spark concern about surging misinformation, similar trust breakdowns have cycled through history, from election misinformation in 2016 to the mass production of propaganda after the printing press was invented in the 1400s. Before AI, there was Photoshop, and before Photoshop, there were analog image manipulation techniques. Fast-moving news events are where manipulated media have the biggest effect, because they fill in for the broad lack of information, Hancock said. "In terms of just looking at an image or a video, it will essentially become impossible to detect if it's fake. I think that we're getting close to that point, if we're not already there," said Hancock. "The old sort of AI literacy ideas of 'let's just look at the number of fingers' and things like that are likely to go away."
Renee Hobbs, a professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, added: "If constant doubt and anxiety about what to trust is the norm, then actually, disengagement is a logical response. It's a coping mechanism. And then when people stop caring about whether something's true or not, then the danger is not just deception, but actually it's worse than that. It's the whole collapse of even being motivated to seek truth."
The confusion around AI content comes as many social media platforms, which pay creators for engagement, have given users incentives to recycle old photos and videos to ramp up emotion around viral news moments. The amalgam of misinformation, experts say, is creating a heightened erosion of trust online -- especially when it mixes with authentic evidence. "As we start to worry about AI, it will likely, at least in the short term, undermine our trust default -- that is, that we believe communication until we have some reason to disbelieve," said Jeff Hancock, founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab. "That's going to be the big challenge, is that for a while people are really going to not trust things they see in digital spaces."
Though AI is the latest technology to spark concern about surging misinformation, similar trust breakdowns have cycled through history, from election misinformation in 2016 to the mass production of propaganda after the printing press was invented in the 1400s. Before AI, there was Photoshop, and before Photoshop, there were analog image manipulation techniques. Fast-moving news events are where manipulated media have the biggest effect, because they fill in for the broad lack of information, Hancock said. "In terms of just looking at an image or a video, it will essentially become impossible to detect if it's fake. I think that we're getting close to that point, if we're not already there," said Hancock. "The old sort of AI literacy ideas of 'let's just look at the number of fingers' and things like that are likely to go away."
Renee Hobbs, a professor of communication studies at the University of Rhode Island, added: "If constant doubt and anxiety about what to trust is the norm, then actually, disengagement is a logical response. It's a coping mechanism. And then when people stop caring about whether something's true or not, then the danger is not just deception, but actually it's worse than that. It's the whole collapse of even being motivated to seek truth."
Comment Re:I'm not sure this is possible (Score 1) 57
And Europe would get instantly crushed, if it ever came to that.
It won't. But Europe is entirely reliant on the US choosing not to do that.
Comment Re:The water cycle is a closed system. (Score 1) 135
On a global scale not a closed system because over 3000 tons of water is lost to space each year.
And we'll need to start worrying about that in 400,000,000,000,000 years.
Comment Re:Poor political decisions. (Score 1) 135
Not really. Every ruling power in Iran over the past century has made the exact same bad decisions in this respect. The previous monarchy, the more recent monarchy, socialists, capitalists, foreign interests, Islamic revolutionaries, they've all been drawing too much water from the aquifers too fast for terrible reasons.
Comment Re:C'mon, Saudi (Score 5, Informative) 92
Nothing would make it “help get a little closer to making it a reality” if it’s not physically possible, and there’s a very strong argument that that’s the case. If nothing else, the maximum specific tensile strength allowed by covalent bonding - which is fundamental physics that we can’t change - combined with the reality of defects in a 36,000 km cable - is far below what’s needed to build a space elevator in Earth gravity.
It might be possible to build a space elevator on the Moon or even (in the far future) on Mars, because their gravity is such that real materials could potentially do the job. But doing that involves bootstrapping an entire offworld industry, which is far beyond anything even the most advanced nations are capable of currently, let alone a technologically stunted oil state.
Comment Re:C'mon, Saudi (Score 1) 92
There’s no chance they’d actually succeed in building a space elevator. The Line is at least theoretically physically possible with current technology, even if it was always an obviously spectacularly bad idea. A space elevator is not.
Comment You can literally just download the whole site (Score 5, Informative) 51
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdumps.wikimedia.org%2F
Available as a database, or a collection of individual pages. Mirrored and archived. There are torrents as well.
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