An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The latest figures suggest that around 1,500 medical procedures have been canceled across some of London's biggest hospitals in the four weeks since Qilin's ransomware attack hit pathology services provider Synnovis. But perhaps no single person was affected as severely as Johanna Groothuizen. Hanna -- the name she goes by -- is now missing her right breast after her skin-sparing mastectomy and immediate breast reconstruction surgery was swapped out for a simple mastectomy at the last minute. The 36-year-old research culture manager at King's College London and former researcher in health sciences was diagnosed with HER2-positive breast cancer in late 2023. It's an aggressive form known for spreading faster and is more commonly recurring, which necessitates urgent treatment. Hanna soon began a course of chemotherapy following her diagnosis until she was able to have what will hopefully be the first and only major procedure to remove the disease. Between then and the operation, which was scheduled for June 7 -- four days after the ransomware attack was carried out -- she had been told repeatedly that the planned procedure was a skin-sparing mastectomy which would have allowed surgeons to cosmetically reconstruct her right breast immediately after the operation. How the ordeal actually unraveled, however, was an entirely different story. Hanna was given less than 24 hours by doctors to make the daunting decision to either accept a simple mastectomy or delay a life-changing procedure until Synnovis's systems were back online. The decision was thrust upon her on the Thursday afternoon before her Friday surgery. This was after she was forced to chase the medical staff for updates about whether the procedure was going ahead at all. Hanna was told on the Tuesday of that week, the day after Qilin's attack, that despite everything going on, the staff at St Thomas' hospital in London were still planning to go ahead with the skin-sparing mastectomy as previously agreed. Per the updates Hanna requested on Thursday, it was strongly suggested that the operation was going to be canceled. The hospital deemed the reconstruction part of the procedure too risky because Synnovis was unable to support blood transfusions until its systems were back online. The ransomware attack wasn't easy on hospitals. The situation was so dire that blood reserves were running low just a week after the attack, prompting an urgent appeal for O-type blood donations. For Hanna, though, this meant she had to make the unimaginably difficult choice between the surgery she wanted, or the surgery that would give her the best chance at survival. The mother of two young children, aged four and two, felt like she had no other choice but to accept the simple mastectomy, leaving her with only one breast. [...] At the time of writing, it's now nearly five weeks since Qilin's attack on Synnovis -- a pathology services partnership between Synlab, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, and King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust. The most recent update provided by the NHS said disruption to services was still evident across the region, although some services such as outpatient appointments are returning to near-normal levels. Between June 24-30, there were 1,517 cute outpatient appointments and 136 electric procedures that needed to be postponed across the two NHS trusts partnered with Synlab. "The total number of postponements for the entire month since the attack took hold (June 3-30) stand at 4,913 for acute outpatient appointments and 1,391 for elective procedures," notes the report.

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John Timmer reports via Ars Technica: On Tuesday, the people managing the ITER experimental fusion reactor announced (PDF) that a combination of delays and altered priorities meant that its first-of-its-kind hardware wouldn't see plasma until 2036, with the full-energy deuterium-tritium fusion pushed back to 2039. The latter represents a four-year delay relative to the previous roadmap. While the former is also a delay, it's due in part to changing priorities. ITER is an attempt to build a fusion reactor that's capable of sustaining plasmas that allow it to operate well beyond the break-even point, where the energy released by fusion reactions significantly exceeds the energy required to create the conditions that enable those reactions. It's meant to hit that milestone by scaling up a well-understood design called a tokamak. But the problem has been plagued by delays and cost overruns nearly from its start. At early stages, many of these stemmed from changes in designs necessitated by a better and improved understanding of plasmas held at extreme pressures and temperatures due to better modeling capabilities and a better understanding of the behavior of plasmas in smaller reactions. The latest delays are due to more prosaic reasons. One of them is the product of the international nature of the collaboration, which sees individual components built by different partner organizations before assembly at the reactor site in France. The pandemic, unsurprisingly, severely disrupted the production of a lot of these components, and the project's structure meant that alternate suppliers couldn't be used (assuming alternate suppliers of one-of-a-kind hardware existed in the first place). The second problem relates to the location of the reactor in France. The country's nuclear safety regulator had concerns about the assembly of some of the components and halted construction on the reactor.

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Longtime Slashdot reader Baron_Yam shares a report from Phys.Org, with the caption: "It's not sequestration, but it is a closed carbon loop and can store energy from renewable sources to be released when they are not collecting energy." From the report: Carbon in the atmosphere is a major driver of climate change. Now researchers from McGill University have designed a new catalyst for converting carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane -- a cleaner source of energy -- using tiny bits of copper called nanoclusters. While the traditional method of producing methane from fossil fuels introduces more CO2 into the atmosphere, the new process, electrocatalysis, does not. "On sunny days you can use solar power, or when it's a windy day you can use that wind to produce renewable electricity, but as soon as you produce that electricity you need to use it," says Mahdi Salehi, Ph.D. candidate at the Electrocatalysis Lab at McGill University. "But in our case, we can use that renewable but intermittent electricity to store the energy in chemicals like methane." By using copper nanoclusters, says Salehi, carbon dioxide from the atmosphere can be transformed into methane and once the methane is used, any carbon dioxide released can be captured and "recycled" back into methane. This would create a closed "carbon loop" that does not emit new carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The research, published recently in the journal Applied Catalysis B: Environment and Energy, was enabled by the Canadian Light Source (CLS) at the University of Saskatchewan (USask). The team plans to continue refining their catalyst to make it more efficient and investigate its large-scale, industrial applications. Their hope is that their findings will open new avenues for producing clean, sustainable energy.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Deep inside Earth is a solid metal ball that rotates independently of our spinning planet, like a top whirling around inside a bigger top, shrouded in mystery. This inner core has intrigued researchers since its discovery by Danish seismologist Inge Lehmann in 1936, and how it moves -- its rotation speed and direction -- has been at the center of a decades-long debate. A growing body of evidence suggests the core's spin has changed dramatically in recent years, but scientists have remained divided over what exactly is happening -- and what it means. Part of the trouble is that Earth's deep interior is impossible to observe or sample directly. Seismologists have gleaned information about the inner core's motion by examining how waves from large earthquakes that ping this area behave. Variations between waves of similar strengths that passed through the core at different times enabled scientists to measure changes in the inner core's position and calculate its spin. "Differential rotation of the inner core was proposed as a phenomenon in the 1970s and '80s, but it wasn't until the '90s that seismological evidence was published," said Dr. Lauren Waszek, a senior lecturer of physical sciences at James Cook University in Australia. But researchers argued over how to interpret these findings, "primarily due to the challenge of making detailed observations of the inner core, due to its remoteness and limited available data," Waszek said. As a result, "studies which followed over the next years and decades disagree on the rate of rotation, and also its direction with respect to the mantle," she added. Some analyses even proposed that the core didn't rotate at all. One promising model proposed in 2023 described an inner core that in the past had spun faster than Earth itself, but was now spinning slower. For a while, the scientists reported, the core's rotation matched Earth's spin. Then it slowed even more, until the core was moving backward relative to the fluid layers around it. At the time, some experts cautioned that more data was needed to bolster this conclusion, and now another team of scientists has delivered compelling new evidence for this hypothesis about the inner core's rotation rate. Research published June 12 in the journal Nature not only confirms the core slowdown, it supports the 2023 proposal that this core deceleration is part of a decades-long pattern of slowing down and speeding up. The new findings also confirm that the changes in rotational speed follow a 70-year cycle, said study coauthor Dr. John Vidale, Dean's Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Southern California's Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

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Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: "If Einstein paved the way for a new era in physics," explains auction house Christie's in a promotion piece for its upcoming offering of 150+ "objects of scientific and historical importance" from the Paul G. Allen Collection (including items from the shuttered Living Computers Museum), "Mr. Allen and his collaborators ushered in a new era of computing. Starting with MS-DOS in 1981, Microsoft then went on to revolutionize personal computing with the launch of Windows in 1985." Christie's auction and characterization of MS-DOS as an Allen and Microsoft innovation comes 30 years after the death of Gary Kildall, whose unpublished memoir, the Seattle Times reported in Kildall's July 1994 obituary, called DOS "plain and simple theft" of Kildall's CP/M OS. PC Magazine's The Rise of DOS: How Microsoft Got the IBM PC OS Contract notes that Paul Allen himself traced the genesis of MS-DOS back to a phone call Allen made to Seattle Computer Products owner Rod Brock in which Microsoft licensed Tim Paterson's CP/M-inspired QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) for $10,000 plus a royalty of $15,000 for every company that licensed the software. A shrewd buy-low-sell-high business deal, yes, but hardly an Einstein-caliber breakthrough idea.

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Longtime Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov shares a report from The Hacker News: A group of security researchers from the Graz University of Technology have demonstrated a new side-channel attack known as SnailLoad that could be used to remotely infer a user's web activity. "SnailLoad exploits a bottleneck present on all Internet connections," the researchers said in a study released this week. "This bottleneck influences the latency of network packets, allowing an attacker to infer the current network activity on someone else's Internet connection. An attacker can use this information to infer websites a user visits or videos a user watches." A defining characteristic of the approach is that it obviates the need for carrying out an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) attack or being in physical proximity to the Wi-Fi connection to sniff network traffic. Specifically, it entails tricking a target into loading a harmless asset (e.g., a file, an image, or an ad) from a threat actor-controlled server, which then exploits the victim's network latency as a side channel to determine online activities on the victim system. To perform such a fingerprinting attack and glean what video or a website a user might be watching or visiting, the attacker conducts a series of latency measurements of the victim's network connection as the content is being downloaded from the server while they are browsing or viewing. It then involves a post-processing phase that employs a convolutional neural network (CNN) trained with traces from an identical network setup to make the inference with an accuracy of up to 98% for videos and 63% for websites. In other words, due to the network bottleneck on the victim's side, the adversary can deduce the transmitted amount of data by measuring the packet round trip time (RTT). The RTT traces are unique per video and can be used to classify the video watched by the victim. The attack is so named because the attacking server transmits the file at a snail's pace in order to monitor the connection latency over an extended period of time.

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Nvidia is expected to earn $12 billion from GPU sales to China in 2024, despite U.S. trade restrictions. Research firm SemiAnalysis says the GPU maker will ship over 1 million units of its new H20 model to the Chinese market, "with each one said to cost between $12,000 and $13,000 apiece," reports The Register. From the report: This figure is said by SemiAnalysis to be nearly double what Huawei is likely to sell of its rival accelerator, the Ascend 910B, as reported by The Financial Times. If accurate, this would seem to contradict earlier reports that Nvidia had moved to cut the price of its products for the China market. This was because buyers were said to be opting instead for domestically made kit for accelerating AI workloads. The H20 GPU is understood to be the top performing model out of three Nvidia GPUs specially designed for the Chinese market to comply with rules introduced by the Biden administration last year that curb performance. In contrast, Huawei's Ascend 910B is claimed to have performance on a par with that of Nvidia's A100 GPU. It is believed to be an in-house design manufactured by Chinese chipmaker SMIC using a 7nm process technology, unlike the older Ascend 910 product. If this forecast proves accurate, it will be a relief for Nvidia, which earlier disclosed that its sales in China delivered a "mid-single digit percentage" of revenue for its Q4 of FY2024, and was forecast to do the same in Q1 of FY 2025. In contrast, the Chinese market had made up between 20 and 25 percent of the company's revenue in recent years, until the export restrictions landed.

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YouTube has released an AI-powered eraser tool to help creators easily remove copyrighted music from their videos without affecting other audio such as dialog or sound effects. TechCrunch's Ivan Mehta reports: On its support page, YouTube still warns that, at times, the algorithm might fail to remove just the song. "This edit might not work if the song is hard to remove. If this tool doesn't successfully remove the claim on a video, you can try other editing options, such as muting all sound in the claimed segments or trimming out the claimed segments," the company said. Alternatively, creators can choose to select "Mute all sound in the claimed segments" to silence bits of video that possibly has copyrighted material. Once the creator successfully edits the video, YouTube removes the content ID claim -- the company's system for identifying the use of copyrighted content in different clips. YouTube shared a video describing the feature on its Creator Insider channel.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: With dozens of millions of monthly visits, Animeflix positioned itself as one of the most popular anime piracy portals. The site also has an active Discord community of around 35k members, who actively participate in discussions, art competitions, even a chess tournament. While rightsholders take no offense at these side-projects, the site's core business was streaming pirated videos. That hasn't gone unnoticed; last December Animeflix was listed as one of the shutdown targets of anti-piracy coalition ACE. Whether these early enforcement efforts were responsible for the site's closure is unclear. In May, rightsholders increased the pressure through the High Court of India, obtaining a broad injunction that effectively suspended Animeflix's main domain name; Animeflix.live. This follow-up action didn't seem to hurt the site too much. It simply moved to new domains, Animeflix.gg and Animeflix.li, informing its users that the old domain name had become "unavailable." Yesterday, the site became unreachable again, initially returning a Cloudflare error message. This time, the domain wasn't the problem but, for reasons unknown, the team decided to shut down the site without prior notice. "It is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Animeflix. After careful consideration, we have decided to shut down our service effective immediately. We deeply appreciate your support and enthusiasm over the years." "Thank you for being a part of our journey. We hope the joy and excitement of anime continue to brighten your days through other wonderful platforms," the Animeflix team adds. The Animeflix team doesn't provide any insight into its reasoning, but it's clear that keeping a site like that online isn't without challenges. And, when a pirate site shuts down, voluntarily or not, copyright issues typically play a role. It's clear that rightsholders were keeping an eye on the site, and were actively seeking out options to take it offline. That might have played a role in the shutdown decision but without more information from the team, we can only speculate.

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Samsung said it expects a 1,452% profit increase for the second quarter, causing shares to climb 2.24% to a high of 86,500 Korean won ($62.73). CNBC reports: Samsung issued guidance on Friday, saying operating profit for the April to June quarter is projected to be about 10.4 trillion won ($7.54 billion) -- that's a jump of about 1,452% from 670 billion won a year ago. The expected operating profit beat a LSEG estimate of 8.51 trillion won. The firm also said it expects revenue for the second quarter to be between 73 trillion to 75 trillion won, from 60.01 trillion won a year ago. This is in line with the 73.7 trillion won estimated by LSEG analysts. Business for the world's largest memory chip maker rebounded as memory chip prices recovered on AI optimism last year. The South Korean electronics giant saw record losses in 2023 as the industry reeled from a post-Covid slump in demand for memory chips and electronics. Its memory chips are commonly found in a wide range of consumer devices including smartphones and computers. Samsung said in April it expects the second quarter to be driven mostly by demand for generative AI, while mobile demand remains stable. "Samsung announces earnings surprise but mainly the earnings upside is from memory price high. So ironically, Samsung is lagging behind in HBM (high-bandwidth memory) production. So supply to Nvidia -- the qualification -- has been delayed," SK Kim, executive director of Daiwa Capital Markets, told CNBC's "Street Signs Asia" on Friday.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than 384,000 websites are linking to a site that was caught last week performing a supply-chain attack that redirected visitors to malicious sites, researchers said. For years, the JavaScript code, hosted at polyfill[.]com, was a legitimate open source project that allowed older browsers to handle advanced functions that weren't natively supported. By linking to cdn.polyfill[.]io, websites could ensure that devices using legacy browsers could render content in newer formats. The free service was popular among websites because all they had to do was embed the link in their sites. The code hosted on the polyfill site did the rest. In February, China-based company Funnull acquired the domain and the GitHub account that hosted the JavaScript code. On June 25, researchers from security firm Sansec reported that code hosted on the polyfill domain had been changed to redirect users to adult- and gambling-themed websites. The code was deliberately designed to mask the redirections by performing them only at certain times of the day and only against visitors who met specific criteria. The revelation prompted industry-wide calls to take action. Two days after the Sansec report was published, domain registrar Namecheap suspended the domain, a move that effectively prevented the malicious code from running on visitor devices. Even then, content delivery networks such as Cloudflare began automatically replacing pollyfill links with domains leading to safe mirror sites. Google blocked ads for sites embedding the Polyfill[.]io domain. The website blocker uBlock Origin added the domain to its filter list. And Andrew Betts, the original creator of Polyfill.io, urged website owners to remove links to the library immediately. As of Tuesday, exactly one week after malicious behavior came to light, 384,773 sites continued to link to the site, according to researchers from security firm Censys. Some of the sites were associated with mainstream companies including Hulu, Mercedes-Benz, and Warner Bros. and the federal government. The findings underscore the power of supply-chain attacks, which can spread malware to thousands or millions of people simply by infecting a common source they all rely on.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Hikari-no-Akari, a long-established and popular pirate site that specializes in Japanese music, is being targeted in U.S. federal court by Sony Music. [...] The music download portal, which links to externally hosted files, has been operating for well over a decade and currently draws more than a million monthly visits. In addition to the public-facing part of the site, HnA also has a private forum and Discord channel. [...] Apparently, Sony Music Japan has been keeping an eye on the unauthorized music portal. The company has many of its works shared on the site, including anime theme music, which is popular around the globe. For example, a few weeks ago, HnA posted "Sayonara, Mata Itsuka!" from the Japanese artist Kenshi Yonezu, which is used as the theme song for the asadora series "The Tiger and Her Wings." Around the same time, PEACEKEEPER, a song by Japanese musician STEREO DIVE FOUNDATION, featured in the third season of the series "That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime", was shared on the site. Sony Music Japan is a rightsholder for both these tracks, as well as many others that were posted on the site. The music company presumably tried to contact HnA directly to have these listings removed and reached out to its CDN service Cloudflare too, asking it to take action. [...] They are a prerequisite for obtaining a DMCA subpoena, which Sony Music Japan requested at a California federal court this week. Sony requested two DMCA subpoenas, both targeted at hikarinoakari.com and hnadownloads.co. The latter domain receives the bulk of its traffic from the first, which isn't a surprise considering the 'hnadownloads' name. Through the subpoena, the music company hopes to obtain additional information on the people behind these sites. That includes, names, IP-addresses, and payment info. Presumably, this will be used for follow-up enforcement actions. It's unclear whether Cloudflare will be able to hand over any usable information and for the moment, HnA remains online. Several of the infringing URLs that were identified by Sony have recently been taken down, including this one. However, others remain readily available. The same applies to private forum threads and Discord postings, of course.

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Epilogue, the company behind the GB Operator emulator, which lets users play Game Boy cartridges on a PC, announced that it's working on an update to turn the Game Boy Camera into a lo-fi webcam. Time Extension reports: The Playback app currently allows you to download photos from the Game Boy Camera accessory, but Epilogue has just demonstrated the ability to use the peripheral as a webcam. "We now have a live feed from the Game Boy Camera, but still need to fine-tune some things and allow for configuration options," says the company. "We wanted to share this update because it was exciting to see it finally work, and [we] can't wait to see everyone having fun with it. It's the worst and the best webcam you'll ever have."

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Cloudflare today unveiled a new feature part of its content delivery network (CDN) that prevents AI developers from scraping content on the web. According to Cloudflare, the feature is available for both the free and paid tiers of its service. SiliconANGLE reports: The feature uses AI to detect automated content extraction attempts. According to Cloudflare, its software can spot bots that scrape content for LLM training projects even when they attempt to avoid detection. "Sadly, we've observed bot operators attempt to appear as though they are a real browser by using a spoofed user agent," Cloudflare engineers wrote in a blog post today. "We've monitored this activity over time, and we're proud to say that our global machine learning model has always recognized this activity as a bot." One of the crawlers that Cloudflare managed to detect is a bot that collects content for Perplexity AI Inc., a well-funded search engine startup. Last month, Wired reported that the manner in which the bot scrapes websites makes its requests appear as regular user traffic. As a result, website operators have struggled to block Perplexity AI from using their content. Cloudflare assigns every website visit that its platform processes a score of 1 to 99. The lower the number, the greater the likelihood that the request was generated by a bot. According to the company, requests made by the bot that collects content for Perplexity AI consistently receive a score under 30. "When bad actors attempt to crawl websites at scale, they generally use tools and frameworks that we are able to fingerprint," Cloudflare's engineers detailed. "For every fingerprint we see, we use Cloudflare's network, which sees over 57 million requests per second on average, to understand how much we should trust this fingerprint." Cloudflare will update the feature over time to address changes in AI scraping bots' technical fingerprints and the emergence of new crawlers. As part of the initiative, the company is rolling out a tool that will enable website operators to report any new bots they may encounter.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Axios: The Food and Drug Administration will no longer allow the use of brominated vegetable oil (BVO) in food products and sodas due to concerns it poses a threat to people's health, the FDA announced Tuesday. The ban follows similar action in California against the food additive that's modified with bromine, which has been used in small quantities as a stabilizer in some citrus-flavored drinks and which is also found in fire retardants. Jim Jones, the deputy commissioner for the FDA's Human Foods Program, said in a statement that "removal of the only authorized use of BVO from the food supply was based on a thorough review of current science and research findings that raised safety concerns." The FDA "concluded that the intended use of BVO in food is no longer considered safe after the results of studies conducted in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) found the potential for adverse health effects in humans," per an agency statement. A 2022 FDA study found that oral exposure to the additive "is associated with increased tissue levels of bromine and that at high levels of exposure the thyroid is a target organ of potential negative health effects in rodents." The ban takes effect on August 2. Companies will have one year from then to "reformulate, relabel, and deplete the inventory of BVO-containing products before the FDA begins enforcing the final rule," according to the agency.

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Paul Voosen reports via Science Magazine: Few things prompt as much anxiety in science and the wider world as the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) and the rising influence of China. This spring, these two factors created a rift at the European Geosciences Union (EGU), one of the world's largest geoscience societies, that led to the firing of its president. The whole episode has been "a packaging up of fear of AI and fear of China," says Michael Stephenson, former chief geologist of the United Kingdom and one of the founders of Deep-time Digital Earth (DDE), a $70 million effort to connect digital geoscience databases. In 2019, another geoscience society, the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS), kicked off DDE, which has been funded almost entirely by the government of China's Jiangsu province. The dispute pivots on GeoGPT, an AI-powered chatbot that is one of DDE's main efforts. It is being developed by Jian Wang, chief technology officer of e-commerce giant Alibaba. Built on Qwen, Alibaba's own chatbot, and fine-tuned on billions of words from open-source geology studies and data sets, GeoGPT is meant to provide expert answers to questions, summarize documents, and create visualizations. Stephenson tested an early version, asking it about the challenges of using the fossilized teeth of conodonts, an ancient relative of fish, to define the start of the Permian period 299 million years ago. "It was very good at that," he says. As awareness of GeoGPT spread, so did concern. Paul Cleverly, a visiting professor at Robert Gordon University, gained access to an early version and said in a recent editorial in Geoscientist there were "serious issues around a lack of transparency, state censorship, and potential copyright infringement." Paul Cleverly and GeoScienceWorld CEO Phoebe McMellon raised these concerns in a letter to IUGS, arguing that the chatbot was built using unlicensed literature without proper citations. However, they did not cite specific copyright violations, so DDE President Chengshan Wang, a geologist at the China University of Geosciences, decided not to end the project. Tensions at EGU escalated when a complaint about GeoGPT's transparency was submitted before the EGU's April meeting, where GeoGPT would be introduced. "It arrived at an EGU whose leadership was already under strain," notes Science. The complaint exacerbated existing leadership issues within EGU, particularly surrounding President Irina Artemieva, who was seen as problematic by some executives due to her affiliations and actions. Science notes that she's "affiliated with Germany's GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel but is also paid by the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences to advise it on its geophysical research." Artemieva forwarded the complaint via email to the DDE President to get his view, but forgot to delete the name attached to it, leading to a breach of confidentiality. This incident, among other leadership disputes, culminated in her dismissal and the elevation of Peter van der Beek to president. During the DDE session at the EGU meeting, van der Beek's enforcement actions against Chinese scientists and session attendees led to allegations of "harassment and discrimination." "Seeking to broker a peace deal around GeoGPT," IUGS's president and another former EGU president, John Ludden, organized a workshop and invited all parties to discuss GeoGPT's governance, ongoing negotiations for licensing deals and alternative AI models for GeoGPT's use.

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The Spanish government is introducing a porn passport to help porn platforms verify users' ages. Slashdot reader fjo3 shares a report from Politico: Officially (and drily) called the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta), the app Madrid unveiled on Monday would allow internet platforms to check whether a prospective smut-watcher is over 18. Porn-viewers will be asked to use the app to verify their age. Once verified, they'll receive 30 generated "porn credits" with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content. Enthusiasts will be able to request extra credits. While the tool has been criticized for its complexity, the government says the credit-based model is more privacy-friendly, ensuring that users' online activities are not easily traceable. The system will be available by the end of the summer. It will be voluntary, as online platforms can rely on other age-verification methods to screen out inappropriate viewers. It heralds an EU law going into force in October 2027, which will require websites to stop minors from accessing porn. Eventually, Madrid's porn passport is likely to be replaced by the EU's very own digital identity system (eIDAS2) -- a so-called wallet app allowing people to access a smorgasbord of public and private services across the whole bloc.

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Ahead of its one-year anniversary, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads has reached more than 175 million monthly active users. The Verge reports: Back when it arrived in the App Store on July 5th, 2023, Musk was taking a wrecking ball to the service formerly called Twitter and goading Zuckerberg into a literal cage match that never happened. A year later, Threads is still growing at a steady clip -- albeit not as quickly as its huge launch -- while Musk hasn't shared comparable metrics for X since he took over. As with any social network, and especially for Threads, monthly users only tell part of the growth story. It's telling that, unlike Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, Meta hasn't shared daily user numbers yet. That omission suggests Threads is still getting a lot of flyby traffic from people who have yet to become regular users. I've heard from Meta employees in recent months that much of the app's growth is still coming from it being promoted inside Instagram. Both apps share the same account system, which isn't expected to change.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When Rodney Brooks talks about robotics and artificial intelligence, you should listen. Currently the Panasonic Professor of Robotics Emeritus at MIT, he also co-founded three key companies, including Rethink Robotics, iRobot and his current endeavor, Robust.ai. Brooks also ran the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) for a decade starting in 1997. In fact, he likes to make predictions about the future of AI and keeps a scorecard on his blog of how well he's doing. He knows what he's talking about, and he thinks maybe it's time to put the brakes on the screaming hype that is generative AI. Brooks thinks it's impressive technology, but maybe not quite as capable as many are suggesting. "I'm not saying LLMs are not important, but we have to be careful [with] how we evaluate them," he told TechCrunch. He says the trouble with generative AI is that, while it's perfectly capable of performing a certain set of tasks, it can't do everything a human can, and humans tend to overestimate its capabilities. "When a human sees an AI system perform a task, they immediately generalize it to things that are similar and make an estimate of the competence of the AI system; not just the performance on that, but the competence around that," Brooks said. "And they're usually very over-optimistic, and that's because they use a model of a person's performance on a task." He added that the problem is that generative AI is not human or even human-like, and it's flawed to try and assign human capabilities to it. He says people see it as so capable they even want to use it for applications that don't make sense. Brooks offers his latest company, Robust.ai, a warehouse robotics system, as an example of this. Someone suggested to him recently that it would be cool and efficient to tell his warehouse robots where to go by building an LLM for his system. In his estimation, however, this is not a reasonable use case for generative AI and would actually slow things down. It's instead much simpler to connect the robots to a stream of data coming from the warehouse management software. "When you have 10,000 orders that just came in that you have to ship in two hours, you have to optimize for that. Language is not gonna help; it's just going to slow things down," he said. "We have massive data processing and massive AI optimization techniques and planning. And that's how we get the orders completed fast." "People say, 'Oh, the large language models are gonna make robots be able to do things they couldn't do.' That's not where the problem is. The problem with being able to do stuff is about control theory and all sorts of other hardcore math optimization," he said. "It's not useful in the warehouse to tell an individual robot to go out and get one thing for one order, but it may be useful for eldercare in homes for people to be able to say things to the robots," he said.

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