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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 3 declined, 13 accepted (16 total, 81.25% accepted)

Submission + - Delta sues CrowdStrike over software update that prompted mass flight disruption (cnn.com)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: Delta Air Lines on Friday sued cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in a Georgia state court after a global outage in July caused mass flight cancellations, disrupted travel plans of 1.3 million customers and cost the carrier more than $500 million.

Delta’s lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court called the faulty software update from CrowdStrike “catastrophic” and said the firm “forced untested and faulty updates to its customers, causing more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based computers around the world to crash.”

The July 19 incident led to worldwide flight cancellations and hit industries around the globe including banks, health care, media companies and hotel chains.

Submission + - 45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web (wosu.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today.

A listener submitted a question to WOSU’s Curious Cbus series wanting to know more about the legacy of CompuServe and what it meant to go online before the Internet.

That legacy was recently commemorated by the Ohio History Connection when they installed a historical marker in Upper Arlington — near the corner of Arlington Center and Henderson roads — where the company located its computer center and corporate building in 1973.

The plaque explains that CompuServe was "the first major online information service provider," and that its subscribers were among the first to have access to email, online newspapers and magazines and the ability to share and download files

Submission + - Human reviewers can't keep up with police bodycam videos. AI now gets the job (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: After a decade of explosive growth, body cameras are now standard-issue for most American police as they interact with the public. The vast majority of those millions of hours of video are never watched — it's just not humanly possible.

For academics who study the everyday actions of police, the videos are an ocean of untapped data. Some are now using "large language model" AI's — think ChatGPT — to digest that information and produce new insights.

The research found the encounters were more likely to escalate when officers started the stop by giving orders, rather than reasons for the interaction.

While academics are using AI from anonymized videos to understand larger processes, some police departments have started using it to help supervise individual officers — and even rate their performance.

Submission + - Decades-old missing person case solved after relative uploads DNA to GEDMatch (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: Many people are rightly concerned about the potential negative consequences of DNA matching sites. But there is also a positive side of DNA analysis to consider. For some people, such as adoptees and others who are trying to find out more about long-lost relatives, DNA can be a game-changer.

Submission + - Doomsday clock doesn't budge due to AI (bbc.com)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: The doomsday clock remains at 90 seconds to midnight, the same as last year. Interestingly, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists added "AI" to the list of threats that they consider to be existential threats to humanity, but didn't move the hands of the clock as a result of adding that threat. My take is that they consider AI to be a very low-grade threat, but it makes me wonder why they included it at all.

Submission + - Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: An anonymous activist group called Safe Street Rebel is responsible for dozens of "coning" incidents over the past few months. The group's goal is to incapacitate the driverless cars roaming San Francisco's streets as a protest against the city being used as a testing ground for this emerging technology.

Submission + - The technology behind the new Las Vegas sphere

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: The news about the recent opening of the MSG Sphere in Las Vegas got me wondering how they got such great video on the curved surface of the sphere. It turns out there's a whole lot more than just the exterior that breaks new ground in audio and video technology. An older IBC article goes into detail about how they accomplished both the exterior and interior screens, and the high-resolution audio inside.

Submission + - An overlooked brain system helps you grab a coffee — and plan your next cu (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes:

The seemingly simple act of reaching for a cup of coffee requires a lot of effort from the brain. It has to plan a trajectory to the cup, control dozens of muscles, make adjustments based on feedback from the eyes and fingers, and maintain its focus on the goal: a tasty jolt of caffeine. And it turns out that medical textbooks may be wrong about how all this happens. The books show a model of the brain in which the motor cortex is solely controlling movement. But scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found that previously overlooked areas of the brain's motor cortex appear to link control of specific muscles with information about the entire body and brain.

This article highlighted for me just how sophisticated our brains are when it comes to controlling and coordinating muscle movements. And, it explains why robots such as those made by Boston Dynamics, as sophisticated as they are, still reach and grab for things clumsily.

Submission + - The difficulty of creating a laundry-folding robot (npr.org)

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: A UC Berkeley professor has developed a laundry-folding robot. The task has turned out to be surprisingly difficult for a robot to accomplish.

As it turns out, robots just aren't good at folding laundry. As NPR has reported, machines need clear rules in order to function, and it's hard for them to figure out what exactly is going on in those messy piles ("say, where the underwear stops and where the towel begins").

So, while robots have been developed that can fold specific types of laundry, there's still not a good robot that can do the job quickly, or for all types. It might be a while before you can buy a "Roomba for laundry."

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: Alternatives to "atomic" clocks 2

Submitted by Tony Isaac
Tony Isaac writes: "Atomic" clocks that you can buy in stores, synchronize time using the WWVB shortwave band from NIST in Boulder. The problem is, this signal is notoriously weak, making these clocks very sensitive to interference by other RF or electronic devices, or less-than-ideal reception conditions. In many locations, these clocks are never able to receive a time signal, making them no better at timekeeping than a cheap quartz clock. There are other ways to synchronize clock time: NTP over WiFi, GPS, or cellular. The cheapest clocks that use NTP over WiFi cost around $400. Really??? And while there are plenty of GPS-enabled smartwatches in the $100 price range, there don't seem to be any similar wall clocks. Are there any reasonably-priced wall clock alternatives, that use something other than shortwave to set the time?

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