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Reçu — 22 février 2026 ⏭

Long Before Tech CEOs Turned To Layoffs To Cover AI Expenses, There Was WorldCom

✇Slashdot
Par : EditorDavid
22 février 2026 à 21:34
Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI? Sorry, the correct response is, "What is WorldCom?" In 2002, WorldCom, the second largest long-distance company in the U.S., entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after disclosing accounting fraud that eventually totaled $11 billion, the biggest ever at the time. CEO Bernard Ebbers was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison. CNBC reported that an employee of WorldCom's Internet service provider UUNet set off a frenzy of speculative investment and infrastructure overbuild after he used Excel to create a best-case scenario model for the Internet's growth that suggested in the best of all possible worlds, Internet traffic would double every 100 days, a scenario that would greatly benefit WorldCom, whose lines would carry it. Despite no evidence to support it, WorldCom's lie became an immutable law and businesses around the world made important decisions based on the belief that traffic was doubling every 100 days. "For some period of time I can recall that we were backfilling that expectation with laying cables, something like 2,200 miles of cable an hour," AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong said. "Think of all the companies that went out of business that assumed that that was real." In 2003, NBC News reported: Armstrong and former Sprint CEO Bill Esrey struggled for years to understand how WorldCom could beat them so handily. "We would look at the conduct of WorldCom in terms of their pricing, revenue growth, margins, in terms of their cost structure... and the price leader almost every quarter was WorldCom," Armstrong said. Added Esrey, "We couldn't figure out how they were pricing as aggressively as they were.... How could they be so efficient in their costs and expenses?" AT&T and Sprint began cutting jobs to push down their costs to WorldCom's level. "The market said what a marvelous management job WorldCom was doing and they would look over to AT&T and say, 'these guys aren't keeping up.' So, my shareholders were hurt. We laid off tens of thousands of employees in an accelerated fashion [in a futile effort to match WorldCom's phantom profits] and I think the industry was hurt," Armstrong says. "It just wrecked the whole industry," says Esrey.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reçu — 21 février 2026 ⏭

Fury Over Discord's Age Checks Explodes After Shady Persona Test In UK

✇Slashdot
Par : BeauHD
21 février 2026 à 02:02
Backlash intensified against Discord's age verification rollout after it briefly disclosed a UK age-verification test involving vendor Persona, contradicting earlier claims about minimal ID storage and transparency. Ars Technica explains: One of the major complaints was that Discord planned to collect more government IDs as part of its global age verification process. It shocked many that Discord would be so bold so soon after a third-party breach of a former age check partner's services recently exposed 70,000 Discord users' government IDs. Attempting to reassure users, Discord claimed that most users wouldn't have to show ID, instead relying on video selfies using AI to estimate ages, which raised separate privacy concerns. In the future, perhaps behavioral signals would override the need for age checks for most users, Discord suggested, seemingly downplaying the risk that sensitive data would be improperly stored. Discord didn't hide that it planned to continue requesting IDs for any user appealing an incorrect age assessment, and users weren't happy, since that is exactly how the prior breach happened. Responding to critics, Discord claimed that the majority of ID data was promptly deleted. Specifically, Savannah Badalich, Discord's global head of product policy, told The Verge that IDs shared during appeals "are deleted quickly -- in most cases, immediately after age confirmation." It's unsurprising then that backlash exploded after Discord posted, and then weirdly deleted, a disclaimer on an FAQ about Discord's age assurance policies that contradicted Discord's hyped short timeline for storing IDs. An archived version of the page shows the note shared this warning: "Important: If you're located in the UK, you may be part of an experiment where your information will be processed by an age-assurance vendor, Persona. The information you submit will be temporarily stored for up to 7 days, then deleted. For ID document verification, all details are blurred except your photo and date of birth, so only what's truly needed for age verification is used." Critics felt that Discord was obscuring not just how long IDs may be stored, but also the entities collecting information. Discord did not provide details on what the experiment was testing or how many users were affected, and Persona was not listed as a partner on its platform. Asked for comment, Discord told Ars that only a small number of users was included in the experiment, which ran for less than one month. That test has since concluded, Discord confirmed, and Persona is no longer an active vendor partnering with Discord. Moving forward, Discord promised to "keep our users informed as vendors are added or updated." While Discord seeks to distance itself from Persona, Rick Song, Persona's CEO [...] told Ars that all the data of verified individuals involved in Discord's test has been deleted. Ars also notes that hackers "quickly exposed a 'workaround' to avoid Persona's age checks on Discord" and "found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a U.S. government authorized server." The Rage, an independent publication that covers financial surveillance, reported: "In 2,456 publicly accessible files, the code revealed the extensive surveillance Persona software performs on its users, bundled in an interface that pairs facial recognition with financial reporting -- and a parallel implementation that appears designed to serve federal agencies." While Persona does not have any government contracts, the exposed service "appears to be powered by an OpenAI chatbot," The Rage noted. Hackers warned "that OpenAI may have created an internal database for Persona identity checks that spans all OpenAI users via its internal watchlistdb," seemingly exploiting the "opportunity to go from comparing users against a single federal watchlist, to creating the watchlist of all users themselves."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reçu — 19 février 2026 ⏭

Les États-Unis préparent un « VPN d’État »… pour inciter les Européens à contourner les lois ?

✇Numerama.com - Magazine
Par : Julien Lausson
19 février 2026 à 11:41

L'administration américaine plancherait sur un portail web, appelé freedom.gov, qui agirait comme un VPN d'État. Le but ? Permettre aux internautes du monde entier d'accéder aux contenus bannis dans leur pays. Le projet, présenté comme un outil anti-censure qui profiterait aux citoyens situés dans des pays répressifs, pourrait aussi être tourné contre l'Europe et ses efforts de régulation du net.

Reçu — 18 février 2026 ⏭
Reçu — 17 février 2026 ⏭

Revue de presse de l’April pour la semaine 7 de l’année 2026

✇LinuxFr.org : les dépêches
Par : echarp
17 février 2026 à 10:20

[Alliancy] La CAIH dévoile un plan stratégique et lance un programme open source pour réduire la dépendance numérique des hôpitaux

✍ Tiago Gil, le jeudi 12 février 2026.

La centrale d’achat informatique hospitalière (CAIH) engage une nouvelle feuille de route sur cinq ans et initie le programme Alternative, destiné à bâtir un socle numérique souverain pour les systèmes d’information de santé.

[LeMagIT] L’Anssi réaffirme son engagement en faveur du logiciel libre (€)

✍ Valéry Rieß-Marchive, le mercredi 11 février 2026.

L’Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information vient de réitérer son engagement en faveur du logiciel libre. Dans la continuité d’une politique établie et confortée de longue date.

Et aussi:

[Républik IT] Les candidats aux Municipales vont-ils adopter le Logiciel Libre?

✍ Bertrand Lemaire, le mercredi 11 février 2026.

L’APRIL relance son initiative «Pacte du Logiciel Libre» à l’occasion du prochain scrutin municipal.

Et aussi:

Voir aussi:

[ZDNET] LibreOffice dénonce le format OOXML

Le mercredi 11 février 2026.

The Document Foundation (TDF) intensifie sa critique contre Microsoft, accusant le géant américain de privilégier ses intérêts commerciaux au détriment de l’interopérabilité.

[Les Numeriques] “Le vibe coding tue l'open-source”: quand l'IA dévore ce qui la nourrit, les économistes sonnent l'alerte

✍ Aymeric Geoffre-Rouland, le lundi 9 février 2026.

Quand un développeur demande à Claude ou ChatGPT d’écrire du code, l’IA pioche dans des milliers de bibliothèques libres sans que l’humain ne lise jamais leur documentation. Résultat: les mainteneurs de ces projets open-source, qui vivent de la visibilité générée par les visites et les interactions, voient leur audience s’effondrer. Une étude économique chiffre ce paradoxe: l’IA qui accélère le développement logiciel asphyxie l’écosystème qui le rend possible.

Commentaires : voir le flux Atom ouvrir dans le navigateur

Préface à « La déception informatique »

✇Liens en vrac de sebsauvage
17 février 2026 à 09:45
Extrait : « Au nom d’intérêts financiers, le partage de culture a très vite été criminalisé alors que les injures et les discours de haine, eux, étaient amplifiés pour servir de support aux messages publicitaires omniprésents. »
Je crois que ça résume bien internet tel qu'il est actuellement.
(Permalink)
Reçu — 15 février 2026 ⏭
Reçu — 14 février 2026 ⏭

Sudden Telnet Traffic Drop. Are Telcos Filtering Ports to Block Critical Vulnerability?

✇Slashdot
Par : EditorDavid
14 février 2026 à 16:34
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Register: Telcos likely received advance warning about January's critical Telnet vulnerability before its public disclosure, according to threat intelligence biz GreyNoise. Global Telnet traffic "fell off a cliff" on January 14, six days before security advisories for CVE-2026-24061 went public on January 20. The flaw, a decade-old bug in GNU InetUtils telnetd with a 9.8 CVSS score, allows trivial root access exploitation. GreyNoise data shows Telnet sessions dropped 65 percent within one hour on January 14, then 83 percent within two hours. Daily sessions fell from an average 914,000 (December 1 to January 14) to around 373,000, equating to a 59 percent decrease that persists today. "That kind of step function — propagating within a single hour window — reads as a configuration change on routing infrastructure, not behavioral drift in scanning populations," said GreyNoise's Bob Rudis and "Orbie," in a recent blog [post]. The researchers unverified theory is that infrastructure operators may have received information about the make-me-root flaw before advisories went to the masses... 18 operators, including BT, Cox Communications, and Vultr went from hundreds of thousands of Telnet sessions to zero by January 15... All of this points to one or more Tier 1 transit providers in North America implementing port 23 filtering. US residential ISP Telnet traffic dropped within the US maintenance window hours, and the same occurred at those relying on transatlantic or transpacific backbone routes, all while European peering was relatively unaffected, they added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reçu — 13 février 2026 ⏭
Reçu — 12 février 2026 ⏭
Reçu — 11 février 2026 ⏭
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