Bruce Perens wrote the original Open Source definition back in 1997, and then co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond in 1998. But after resigning from the group in 2020, Perens is now diligently developing an alternative he calls "Post Open" to "meet goals that Open Source fails at today" — even providing a way to pay developers for their work. To make it all happen, he envisions software developers owning (and controlling) a not-for-profit corporation developing a body of software called "the Post Open Collection" and collecting its licensing fees to distribute among developers. The hope? To "make it possible for an individual developer to stay at home and code all day, and make their living that way without having to build a company." The not-for-profit entity — besides actually enforcing its licensing — could also: Provide tech support, servicing all Post-Open software through one entity.Improve security by providing developers with cryptographic-hardware-backed authentication guaranteeing secure software chain-of-custody.Handle onerous legal requirements like compliance with the EU Cyber Resilience Act "on behalf of all developers in the Post Open Collection".Compensate documentation writers.Fund lobbying on behalf of developers, along with advocacy for their software's privacy-preserving features. "We've started to build the team," Perens said in a recent interview, announcing weeks ago that attorneys are already discussing the structure of the future organization and its proposed license. But what do you think? Perens has agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers... He's also Slashdot reader #3,872. (And Perens is also an amateur radio operator, currently on the board of M17 — a community of open source developers and radio enthusiasts — and in general support of Open Source and Amateur Radio projects through his non-profit HamOpen.org.) But more importantly, Perens "was the person to announce 'Open Source' to the world," according to his official site. Now's your chance to ask him about his next new big idea... Ask as many questions as you'd like, but please, one per comment. We'll pick the very best questions — and forward them on to Bruce Perens himself to answer!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's next president "announced Wednesday he has selected Jared Isaacman, a billionaire businessman and space enthusiast who twice flew to orbit with SpaceX, to become the next NASA administrator," reports Ars Technica: In a post on X, Isaacman said he was "honored" to receive Trump's nomination. "Having been fortunate to see our amazing planet from space, I am passionate about America leading the most incredible adventure in human history," Isaacman wrote. "On my last mission to space, my crew and I traveled farther from Earth than anyone in over half a century. I can confidently say this second space age has only just begun...." "Jared Isaacman will be an outstanding NASA Administrator and leader of the NASA family," said Jim Bridenstine, who led NASA as administrator during Trump's first term in the White House. "Jared's vision for pushing boundaries, paired with his proven track record of success in private industry, positions him as an ideal candidate to lead NASA into a bold new era of exploration and discovery. I urge the Senate to swiftly confirm him." Lori Garver, NASA's deputy administrator during the Obama administration, wrote on X that Isaacman's nomination was "terrific news," adding that "he has the opportunity to build on NASA's amazing accomplishments to pave our way to an even brighter future." Isaacman, 41, is the founder and CEO of Shift4, a mobile payment processing platform, and co-founded Draken International, which owns a fleet of retired fighter jets to pose as adversaries for military air combat training... Isaacman, an evangelist for the commercial space industry, has criticized some of NASA's decisions on the Artemis program. In several posts on X, he questioned the agency's decision to fund two redundant lunar landers, while not planning for any backup to the Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which costs $2.2 billion per copy, not including expenses for ground infrastructure or the Orion spacecraft itself. One of those casualties might be the SLS rocket. The program is managed by NASA, with suppliers spread across the United States and prime contractors working under cost-plus arrangements with the space agency, meaning the government is on the hook to pay for any delays or cost overruns. If confirmed he'll be the 4th NASA administrator who's actually flown in space, according to the article. And according to Wikipedia, Isaacman was the commander of Inspiration4, a private spaceflight using SpaceX's Crew Dragon Resilience that launched in 2021. The crew returned to Earth on September 18, 2021, after orbiting at 585 km (364 mi) in altitude. The mission was part of a fundraiser for St. Jude Children's Research Hospital, to which Isaacman pledged to donate $100 million. Thanks to Slashdot reader FallOutBoyTonto for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"$15.8 million every 60 seconds. That's how much US consumers spent in two hours on Monday night," reports CNN, "capping off a five-day spending spree that smashed previous records." U.S. consumers spent a total of $13.3 billion on Cyber Monday, up 7.3% from the previous year, according to Adobe Analytics... Consumers spent a record $41.1 billion across the five days beginning Thanksgiving Day, according to Adobe. "While Cyber Monday remained the season's and year's biggest online shopping day, year-over-year growth was stronger on both Thanksgiving and Black Friday," Vivek Pandya, lead analyst at Adobe Digital Insights, said in a statement... The company's data projects that holiday spending from November 1 to December 31 will surpass $240 billion, up 8.4% from the previous year. The record sales on Cyber Monday were boosted by US consumers shopping on their mobile devices, which accounted for $7.6 billion in spending. This year, 57% of online sales came through a mobile device, compared to 33% in 2019, as shopping on mobile phones has surged in popularity... Buy now, pay later" programs also contributed nearly $1 billion in spending on Cyber Monday, a record high. About 75% of these types of transactions occurred through a mobile device. Cyber Monday shopping wasn't just confined to the US, either. Global sales reached $49.7 billion, up 3% from the previous year, according to data from Salesforce. The top-selling items included consumer electronics like the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and Nintendo Switch OLED, the article points out (adding that "About 78% of all consumer smartphones and 87% of consoles were imported from China in 2023, according to a report from the Consumer Technology Association.") More interesting statistics from CNN: "Discounts on apparel peaked at just over 23% off, while TVs and computers peaked at almost 22% off, according to Adobe. And the discounts might last: Adobe projects discounts of up to 18% off computers through the end of the year... " "For US retail sites, the share of revenue from affiliates and partners like social media influencers was 20.3% on Cyber Monday, up almost 7% from the previous year. " "Additionally, companies employed AI chatbots to assist consumers, like Amazon's Rufus. Traffic to retail sites from chatbots increased by nearly 2,000% on Cyber Monday, according to Adobe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Have you been to Enron.com lately? "It's the comeback story no one asked for," reports CNN, "the resurrection of a brand so toxic it remains synonymous with corporate fraud more than two decades after it collapsed in bankruptcy. "That's right, folks: Enron is back. But only kind of." TL;DR: A company that makes T-shirts bought the Enron trademark and appears to be trying to sell some merch on behalf of the guy behind the satirical conspiracy theory "Birds Aren't Real...." On Monday, the 23rd anniversary of Enron's filing for bankruptcy, rumors began to spread that the former Texas energy giant had come back from the dead. A sleek new website, enron.com, appeared to show that the company had done some serious soul-searching and, inexplicably, reincorporated under its original brand. As a modern energy company, it would be dedicated to "solving the global energy crisis," its press statement reads. The site is packed with the kind of stock art and benign corporate platitudes that lend it credibility. There's a link to job openings, employee testimonials and even a minute-long video titled "I am Enron," a movie-trailer-style mashup of cityscape time lapses, rockets launching into space, a ballerina twirling on a beach — a mess of imagery and baritone voiceover so trite it's almost believable. But the site and its associated social media accounts are, like Enron's balance sheets, mostly fiction. Unlike the Enron scandal, however, this one appears to be little more than performance art designed to sell branded hoodies. Publicly available documents show that an Akansas-based LLC called The College Company bought the Enron trademark for $275 in 2020... You can tab over to the site's "Company Store" page to browse a selection of Enron-branded hoodies ($118 before tax and shipping), puffer vests ($89), tees ($40) baseball hats ($40), beanies ($30) and water bottles emblazoned with the slogan "you've got great energy." Somewhere on the site CNN spotted a list of "key pillars" which included a commitment to "permissionless innovation," which CNN took to be "a nod that prompted some speculation online that the new 'Enron' would launch some kind of digital token." That phrase has apparently been changed now to "continuous innovation." An Enron-branded X account posted and later deleted a message teasing at a crypto offering, saying "we do not have any token or coin (yet). Stay tuned, we are excited to show you more soon." But sharp-eyed X.com users also found the key context to add: that the Terms of Use at Enron.com declare the site's information "is First Amendment-protected parody, represents performance art, and is for entertainment purposes only." Still, the site includes this testimonial from someone it says is a current employee. "Like many of my peers in the Enron family, I was skeptical at first. "Now, not only do I have complete confidence in the integrity of the company, I also genuinely believe that we are leading the way for a new chapter of American business."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

59-year-old Alex Mashinsky, the founder/former CEO of cryptocurrency lender Celsius Network, "pleaded guilty on Tuesday to two counts of fraud," reports Reuters. He'd been indicted in July on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and market manipulation charges, according to the article, and federal prosecutors in Manhattan "said he misled customers of Celsius to persuade them to invest, and artificially inflated the value of his company's proprietary crypto token." On Tuesday, during a hearing before U.S. District Judge John Koeltl, Mashinsky said he pleaded guilty to two out of the seven counts he was initially charged with: commodities fraud, and a fraudulent scheme to manipulate the price of CEL, Celsius' in-house token. In court, Mashinsky admitted to giving Celsius customers "false comfort" by giving an interview in 2021 in which he said Celsius had received approval from regulators for its "Earn" program, which it had not. That program offered to deploy customers' cryptocurrency assets to yield investment returns. He said he also failed to disclose that he had been selling his holdings of CEL, the platform's in-house token. "I know what I did was wrong, and I want to try to do whatever I can to make it right," Mashinsky said. As part of his plea deal with prosecutors, Mashinsky agreed not to appeal any sentence of 30 years or less — the maximum he faces for the two counts. Koeltl is set to sentence him on April 8, 2025. Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have said Mashinsky also personally reaped approximately $42 million in proceeds from selling his holdings of the Cel token. "Mashinsky made tens of millions of dollars selling his own CEL at artificially high prices, while his customers were left holding the bag when the company went bankrupt," Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, said in a statement on Tuesday... Founded in 2017, Celsius filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in July 2022 after customers rushed to withdraw deposits as crypto prices fell. Many were initially unable to access their funds... Celsius' former chief revenue officer, Roni Cohen-Pavon, pleaded guilty in September 2023 and agreed to cooperate with prosecutors' investigation. "The company exited bankruptcy on Jan. 31, and has pivoted to Bitcoin mining..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The long-running Advent of Code site just entered its 10th year, with 162,809 people completing both of its Day One puzzles (which involve a hunt for the missing historian of the North Pole). But its not the only site offering Christmas-themed programming puzzles: Hundreds of SQL lovers are trying the daily challenges from the "Advent of SQL" site. You can sign up for daily emails with webdev challenges from the Advent of JavaScript and Advent of CSS sites. The "Advent of No-Code" site challenges you to build something new every day using no-code tools like AI-powered dev environments or the social coding site Val Town. TryHackMe.com is publishing "beginner-friendly, daily gamified cyber security challenges" in an event they're calling the "Advent of Cyber." And Norway's biggest chess club (founded by world champion Magnus Carlsen) has even launched a site with daily chess puzzles called — what else? — Advent of Chess. (It promises at the end of the event someone will win a chessboard signed by Magnus Carlsen).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tuesday the Wikimedia Foundation released its annual list of the most-visited Wikipedia pages. (Scroll down to where it says "The full top 25"...) But while the top subjects seem to be politics and pop culture, CNN reports that in the end "a list of deaths in 2024 was the most visited page, garnering over 44 million views." A page about deaths in a given year has ranked at the top of the list five times since 2015, when the Wikimedia Foundation began releasing the data. The topic has never fallen below third place on the list. People also searched for U.S. political figures... [The #2, #3, #5, #7, and #9 most-visited pages were, respectively, for Kamala Harris, the 2024 United States presidential election, Donald Trump, J.D. Vance, and Project 2025.] While U.S. politics was a notable search subject, popular culture had the largest share of the top 25. The fourth most-visited page was about Lyle and Erik Menendez, the brothers who were sentenced to life in prison for the 1989 murder of their parents and are now facing a resentencing trial. The case received renewed public attention after a Netflix documentary was published this year. The Wikipedia page about the brothers received over 26 million views in 2024. The "Deadpool & Wolverine" and "Dune: Part Two" movies were eighth and 23rd, respectively... [Other high-ranking pop-culture pages included Taylor Swift (#11)and the 2024 Summer Olympics (#14).] "Wikipedia readers in India continue to make a big impact on the list, a trend we saw in 2023 as well," Wikimedia Foundation's Alikhan said. The Indian Premier League, a cricket league in India, garnered over 24.5 million views this year as the site's sixth most visited page... [The 2024 Indian general election came in at #10] Wikipedia's entry on ChatGPT came in at #12, while Elon Musk came in at #17. "When people want to learn about our world — the good, bad, weird, and wild alike — they turn to Wikipedia," explains the blog post from the Wikimedia Foundation, calling Wikipedia "the largest knowledge resource ever assembled in the history of the world" and "a reflection of all the people who live on our planet. its story is your story, your interests, your questions, and your curiosity." Other statistics about Wikipedia in 2024: Nearly 3.5 billion bytes of information were added this year via over 31 million edits. People spent an estimated 2.4 billion hours — nearly 275,000 years! — reading English Wikipedia in 2024, according to data from the Wikimedia Foundation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from NBC News: Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers... In the call Tuesday, two officials — a senior FBI official who asked not to be named and Jeff Greene, executive assistant director for cybersecurity at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — both recommended using encrypted messaging apps to Americans who want to minimize the chances of China's intercepting their communications. "Our suggestion, what we have told folks internally, is not new here: Encryption is your friend, whether it's on text messaging or if you have the capacity to use encrypted voice communication. Even if the adversary is able to intercept the data, if it is encrypted, it will make it impossible," Greene said. The FBI official said, "People looking to further protect their mobile device communications would benefit from considering using a cellphone that automatically receives timely operating system updates, responsibly managed encryption and phishing resistant" multi-factor authentication for email, social media and collaboration tool accounts... The FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies have a complicated relationship with encryption technology, historically advocating against full end-to-end encryption that does not allow law enforcement access to digital material even with warrants. But the FBI has also supported forms of encryption that do allow some law enforcement access in certain circumstances. Officials said the breach seems to include some live calls of specfic targets and also call records (showing numbers called and when). "The hackers focused on records around the Washington, D.C., area, and the FBI does not plan to alert people whose phone metadata was accessed." "The scope of the telecom compromise is so significant, Greene said, that it was 'impossible" for the agencies "to predict a time frame on when we'll have full eviction.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bluesky says it will never train generative AI on its users' data. But despite that, "one million public Bluesky posts — complete with identifying user information — were crawled and then uploaded to AI company Hugging Face," reports Mashable (citing an article by 404 Media). "Shortly after the article's publication, the dataset was removed from Hugging Face," the article notes, with the scraper at Hugging Face posting an apology. "While I wanted to support tool development for the platform, I recognize this approach violated principles of transparency and consent in data collection. I apologize for this mistake." But TechCrunch noted the incident's real lesson. "Bluesky's open API means anyone can scrape your data for AI training," calling it a timely reminder that everything you post on Bluesky is public. Bluesky might not be training AI systems on user content as other social networks are doing, but there's little stopping third parties from doing so... Bluesky said that it's looking at ways to enable users to communicate their consent preferences externally, [but] the company posted: "Bluesky won't be able to enforce this consent outside of our systems. It will be up to outside developers to respect these settings. We're having ongoing conversations with engineers & lawyers and we hope to have more updates to share on this shortly!" Mashable notes Bluesky's response to 404Media — that Bluesky is like a website, and "Just as robots.txt files don't always prevent outside companies from crawling those sites, the same applies here." So "While many commentators said that data collection should be opt in, others argued that Bluesky data is publicly available anyway and so the dataset is fair use," according to SiliconRepublic.com.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's FBI "has been investigating a longtime Exxon Mobil consultant," reports Reuters, "over the contractor's alleged role in a hack-and-leak operation that targeted hundreds of the oil company's biggest critics, according to three people familiar with the matter." The operation involved mercenary hackers who successfully breached the email accounts of environmental activists and others, the sources told Reuters. The scheme allegedly began in late 2015, when U.S. authorities contend that the names of the hacking targets were compiled by the DCI Group, a public affairs and lobbying company working for Exxon at the time, one of the sources said. DCI provided the names to an Israeli private detective, who then outsourced the hacking, according to the source. In an effort to push a narrative that Exxon was the target of a political vendetta aimed at destroying its business, some of the stolen material was subsequently leaked to the media by DCI, Reuters determined. The Federal Bureau of Investigation found that DCI shared the information with Exxon before leaking it, the source said. Some environmental activists interviewed by Reuters say the hacking operation disrupted preparations for lawsuits by cities and state attorneys general against Exxon and other energy companies... The stolen material continues to be used today to counter litigation claiming the oil giant misled the public and its investors about the risks of climate change... The investigation into the hack-and-leak operation comes amid growing concern among law enforcement agencies worldwide about how such cyberespionage schemes threaten to taint judicial proceedings. The FBI has been investigating the broader use of mercenary hackers to tamper with lawsuits since early 2018, Reuters has previously reported. The Israeli private detective hired by DCI, Amit Forlit, was arrested this year at London's Heathrow Airport and is fighting extradition to the United States on charges of hacking and wire fraud... Federal prosecutors have secured a related conviction: that of Forlit's former business associate, private investigator Aviram Azari. Azari pleaded guilty in 2022 to wire fraud, conspiracy to commit hacking and aggravated identity theft, which included targeting the environmental activists.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If NASA establishes a permanent presence on the moon, its astronauts' homes could be made of a new 3D-printable, waterless concrete," writes MIT Technology Review. "Someday, so might yours. "By accelerating the curing process for more rapid construction, this sulfur-based compound could become just as applicable on our home terrain as it is on lunar soil..." Building a home base on the moon will demand a steep supply of moon-based infrastructure: launch pads, shelter, and radiation blockers. But shipping Earth-based concrete to the lunar surface bears a hefty price tag. Sending just 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) of material to the moon costs roughly $1.2 million, says Ali Kazemian, a robotic construction researcher at Louisiana State University (LSU). Instead, NASA hopes to create new materials from lunar soil and eventually adapt the same techniques for building on Mars. Traditional concrete requires large amounts of water, a commodity that will be in short supply on the moon and critically important for life support or scientific research, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. While prior NASA projects have tested compounds that could be used to make "lunarcrete," they're still working to craft the right waterless material. So LSU researchers are refining the formula, developing a new cement based on sulfur, which they heat until it's molten to bind material without the need for water. In recent work, the team mixed their waterless cement with simulated lunar and Martian soil to create a 3D-printable concrete, which they used to assemble walls and beams. "We need automated construction, and NASA thinks 3D printing is one of the few viable technologies for building lunar infrastructure," says Kazemian. Beyond circumventing the need for water, the cement can handle wider temperature extremes and cures faster than traditional methods. The group used a pre-made powder for their experiments, but on the moon and Mars, astronauts might extract sulfur from surface soil. Kazemian and his colleagues recently transferred the technology to NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center for further testing...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: The rapid increase in satellites and space junk will make low Earth orbit unusable unless companies and countries cooperate and share the data needed to manage that most accessible region of space, experts and industry insiders said. A United Nations panel on space traffic coordination in late October determined that urgent action was necessary and called for a comprehensive shared database of orbital objects as well as an international framework to track and manage them. More than 14,000 satellites including some 3,500 inactive surround the globe in low Earth orbit, showed data from U.S.-based Slingshot Aerospace. Alongside those are about 120 million pieces of debris from launches, collisions and wear-and-tear of which only a few thousand are large enough to track... [T]here is no centralised system that all space-faring nations can leverage and even persuading them to use such a system has many obstacles. Whereas some countries are willing to share data, others fear compromising security, particularly as satellites are often dual-use and include defence purposes. Moreover, enterprises are keen to guard commercial secrets. In the meantime, the mess multiplies. A Chinese rocket stage exploded in August, adding thousands of fragments of debris to low Earth orbit. In June, a defunct Russian satellite exploded, scattering thousands of shards which forced astronauts on the International Space Station to take shelter for an hour... Projections point to tens of thousands more satellites entering orbit in the coming years. The potential financial risk of collisions is likely to be $556 million over five years, based on a modelled scenario with a 3.13% annual collision probability and $111 million in yearly damages, said Montreal-based NorthStar Earth & Space... [Aarti Holla-Maini, director of the U.N . Office for Outer Space Affairs], said the October panel aimed to bring together public- and private-sector experts to outline steps needed to start work on coordination. It will present its findings at a committee meeting next year. Global cooperation is essential to developing enforceable rules akin to those used by the International Civil Aviation Organization for air traffic, industry experts told Reuters. Such effort would involve the use of existing tools, such as databases, telescopes, radars and other sensors to track objects while improving coverage, early detection and data precision. Yet geopolitical tension and reluctance to share data with nations deemed unfriendly as well as commercial concerns over protecting proprietary information and competitive advantages remain significant barriers. That leaves operators of orbital equipment relying on informal or semi-formal methods of avoiding collisions, such as drawing on data from the U.S. Space Force or groups like the Space Data Association. However, this can involve issues such as accountability and inconsistent data standards. "The top challenges are speed — as consensus-building takes time — and trust," Holla-Maini said. "Some countries simply can't communicate with others, but the U.N. can facilitate this process. Speed is our biggest enemy, but there's no alternative. It must be done." Data from Slingshot Aerospace shows a 17% rise in close approaches per satellite over the past year, according to the article. (It adds that SpaceX data "showed Starlink satellites performed nearly 50,000 collision-avoidance manoeuvres in the first half of 2024, about double the previous six months...) The European Space Agency, which has fewer spacecraft than SpaceX, said in 2021 its manoeuvres have increased to three or four times per craft versus a historical average of one."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader sciencehabit writes: Most orange cats are boys, a quirk of feline genetics that also explains why almost all calicos and tortoiseshells are girls. Scientists curious about those sex differences—or perhaps just cat lovers—have spent more than 60 years unsuccessfully seeking the gene that causes orange fur and the striking patchwork of colors in calicos and tortoiseshells. Now, two teams have independently found the long-awaited mutation and discovered a protein that influences hair color in a way never seen before in any animal... Using skin samples collected from various cats, the researchers were able to hone in a mutation on the X chromosome that impacts how much of a protein a gene called Arhgap36 produces. Increasing the amount of the Arhgap36 in pigment producing cells called melanocytes activates a molecular pathway that produces a light red pigment. "Scanning a database of 188 cat genomes, Barsh's team found every single orange, calico, and tortoiseshell cat had the exact same mutation," writes Science magazine. "The group reports the discovery this month on the preprint server bioRxiv. A separate study, also posted to bioRxiv this month, confirms these findings... They also found that skin from calico cats had more Arghap36 RNA in orange regions than in brown or black regions." Arhgap36's inactivation pattern in calicos and tortoiseshells is typical of a gene on the X chromosome, says Carolyn Brown [a University of British Columbia geneticist who was not involved in either study], but it's unusual that a deletion mutation would make a gene more active, not less. "There is probably something special about cats." Experts are thrilled by the two studies. "It's a long-awaited gene," says Leslie Lyons, a feline geneticist at the University of Missouri. The discovery of a new molecular pathway for hair color was unexpected, she says, but she's not surprised how complex the interactions seem to be. "No gene ever stands by itself." Lyons would like to know where and when the mutation first appeared: There is some evidence, she says, that certain mummified Egyptian cats were orange. Research into cat color has revealed all kinds of phenomena, she says, including how the environment influences gene expression. "Everything you need to know about genetics you can learn from your cat."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Are you spending hours scrolling mindlessly on Instagram reels and TikTok?" asks the BBC. "If so, you might be suffering from brain rot, which has become the Oxford word of the year." It is a term that captures concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The word's usage saw an increase of 230% in its frequency from 2023 to 2024. Psychologist and Oxford University Professor, Andrew Przybylski says the popularity of the word is a "symptom of the time we're living in". Brain rot beat five other shortlisted words including demure, Romantasy and dynamic pricing... [And "slop".] The first recorded use of brain rot dates much before the creation of the internet — it was written down in 1854 by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden. He criticises society's tendency to devalue complex ideas and how this is part of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort. It leads him to ask: "While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot — which prevails so much more widely and fatally?" The word initially gained traction on social media among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities, but it's now being used in the mainstream as a way to describe low-quality, low-value content found on social media. Prof Przybylski says "there's no evidence of brain rot actually being a thing. Instead it describes our dissatisfaction with the online world and it's a word that we can use to bundle our anxieties that we have around social media." The New York Times points out that Oxford's past "word of the year" selections included "podcast" and "selfie" [Casper Grathwohl, the president of Oxford Languages, the company's dictionary division] noted the finalists were heavy on old-fashioned words that young people had repurposed in semi-ironic ways — the linguistic equivalent, he said, of "bell-bottoms coming back into fashion...." "Slop" has undergone a similar update. There was a spike of more than 300 percent over the past year in references not to pig feed, but to "art, writing or other content generated using artificial intelligence, shared and distributed online in an indiscriminate or intrusive way, and characterized as being of low quality, inauthentic or inaccurate," according to Oxford. Like "brain rot," it "represents the underbelly of today's linguistic churn," Grathwohl said. "There's a sense that we are drowning in mediocre experiences as digital lives get clogged."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

United Nations members gathered this week in Busan, South Korea to negotiate the first treaty reducing plastic pollution. But Politico reports that "talks collapsed late Sunday after negotiators failed to resolve their differences and agree on a global plastic treaty. At the heart of the disagreement was a refusal by oil-rich nations led by Saudi Arabia to accept a deal that put limits on plastic production... Throughout the two years of talks, oil-rich and plastic-producing states had repeatedly clashed with nations that wanted to reduce plastic production to solve a worsening plastic pollution crisis. Many went to Busan hopeful differences would be put aside in the name of combatting a common global threat. But in the end this proved too optimistic... The EU, alongside more than 100 other countries that included the U.K., on Thursday had backed a new proposal spearheaded by Panama pushing for a global target to reduce plastic production to "sustainable levels", drawing a clear battle line for the talks. But three negotiators from countries in the High Ambition Coalition to End Plastic Pollution — granted anonymity to discuss closed-door talks — told POLITICO Saudi Arabia had coordinated a push from oil-rich and plastic-producing countries to block any proposals for the treaty that threatened to reduce plastic production. The vast majority of plastic is made from oil or natural gas... Along with disagreements over plastic production, countries were also unable to agree on whether and how to target particularly polluting plastic products, and how to finance the treaty. Two of the "high-ambition" negotiators referenced above suggested the talks were doomed to fail from the beginning, arguing that there was never going to be enough time given the scope of the mandate. "I think the pressure on us to deliver that in 18 months ... was kind of stupid then, and it's still stupid now," said one. "Usually these processes take a number of years — beyond what we are doing...." But many observers and some delegates said the summit's collapse demonstrated the failures of consensus-based environmental multilateralism, arguing that requiring all countries to agree by consensus gave reluctant nations too much veto power. NGOs like the Center for International Environmental Law hope this week's failed talks will serve as a lesson for future U.N. talks... The date and time of the next round of talks is yet to be announced. Greenpeace issued a statement saying "over 100 Member States, representing billions of people, rejected a toothless deal that would have accomplished nothing, and stood before the world committing to an ambitious treaty." And they argued that the message is clear. "Ambitious countries must not allow the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries, backed by a small minority of countries, to prevent the will of the vast majority. A strong agreement that protects people and the planet is our only option."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bluesky now has more active website users than Threads in the U.S., according to a graph from the Financial Times. And though Threads still leads in app usage, "Prior to November 5 Threads had five times more daily active users in the U.S. than Bluesky... Now, Threads is only 1.5 times larger than its rival, Similarweb said." But "the influx of new users has opened up new opportunities for scammers and impersonators," Engadget reported this week: A recent analysis by Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security Trust and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech found that 44 percent of the top 100 most-followed accounts on Bluesky had at least one "doppelganger," with most looking like "cheap knock-offs of the bigger account, down to the same bio and profile picture," Mantzarlis wrote in his newsletter Faked Up. The article highlighted issues with Bluesky's loose account verification policies. And then, Bluesky announced a new change-of-policy Friday. Engadget reports: The Bluesky Safety account said that the social media service is removing accounts that are impersonating other people and those squatting on handles... Bluesky now requires parody, satire or fan accounts to label themselves as such in both their handles and their bio. If they don't, or if they only indicate the nature of their account in one of those elements, then they'll be treated as an impersonator and will be removed from the platform. Bluesky now explicitly prohibits identity churning, as well. Accounts that start as impersonators with the purpose of gaining new users, and who then switch to a different identity in an attempt to circumvent the ban, will still get booted off the app. Finally, it says it's exploring "additional options to enhance account verification," though they're not quite ready for rollout. Bluesky says they've "quadrupled the size of our moderation team, in part to action impersonation reports more quickly. We still have a large backlog of moderation reports due to the influx of new users as we shared previously, though we are making progress." And in addition, "We are working behind the scenes to help many organizations and high-profile individuals set up their verified domain handles." And there's another problem. "The EU's executive arm on Monday said Bluesky didn't provide information it was required to share under the bloc's Digital Services Act," reports Bloomberg. Bluesky responded that it's working to comply, " consulting with its lawyer to follow the EU's information disclosure rules, a Bluesky spokesperson wrote on Tuesday in an email." "All platforms in the EU have to have a dedicated page on their websites where it says how many user numbers they have in the EU and where they are legally established," Thomas Regnier, the commission's spokesperson on digital matters, told reporters. "This is not the case with Bluesky, so this is not followed...." Under the DSA, platforms with more than 45 million users in the bloc qualify as "very large online platforms" and need to follow stricter content moderation rules under the commission's supervision. Breaches can result in fines of up to 6% of their global annual sales... Smaller platforms are still required to comply with the law, but are regulated by the EU country where they have a legal presence. That's so far unclear in the case of Bluesky, which was created expressly to avoid a centralized ownership structure. The commission asked EU member countries' national authorities to investigate "and see if they can find any trace of Bluesky" in their jurisdictions, Regnier said

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Greg Kroah-Hartman noted some coming changes in Linux 6.13 will make it possible to create "way more" Rust-based kernel drivers. "The veteran kernel developer believes we're at a tipping point of seeing more upstream Rust drivers ahead," reports Phoronix: These Rust char/misc changes are on top of the main Rust pull for Linux 6.13 that brought 3k lines of code for providing more Rust infrastructure. Linux 6.13 separately is also bringing Rust file abstractions. "Sorry for doing this at the end of the merge window," Greg Kroah-Hartman wrote in the pull request, explaining that "conference and holiday travel got in the way on my side (hence the 5am pull request emails...)" Loads of things in here... — Rust misc driver bindings and other rust changes to make misc drivers actually possible. I think this is the tipping point, expect to see way more rust drivers going forward now that these bindings are present. Next merge window hopefully we will have pci and platform drivers working, which will fully enable almost all driver subsystems to start accepting (or at least getting) rust drivers. This is the end result of a lot of work from a lot of people, congrats to all of them for getting this far, you've proved many of us wrong in the best way possible, working code :)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader jaromil writes: As a fun project, we hacked together a C interpreter (based on Tiny C Compiler) that compiles C code in-memory and runs it live. CJIT today is a 2MB executable that can do a lot, including call functions from any installed library on Linux, Windows, and MacOSX. Slashdot reader oliwer points out "they are also including a REPL, which could be interesting." And the CJIT web page promises there's "no EULA to sign, no IDE to install... 100% Free and open source!" It also says the project was inspired by Terry Davis (TempleOS) and Fabrice Bellard (Tiny C Compiler).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Primarily used by law enforcement, Graykey unlocks mobile devices to extract data from both Android and iOS systems, according to the blog AppleInsider, "though its effectiveness varies depending on the specific hardware and software involved." But while its capabilities are rarely disclosed, "a leak of some Grayshift's internal documents was recently reported on by 404 Media." According to the data, Graykey can only perform "partial" data retrieval from iPhones running iOS 18 and iOS 18.0.1. These versions were released in September and early October, respectively. A partial extraction likely includes unencrypted files and metadata, such as folder structures and file sizes, according to past reports. Notably, Graykey struggles with beta versions of iOS 18.1. Under the latest update, the tool fails to extract any data, as per the documents. Meanwhile, Graykey's performance with Android phones varies, largely due to the diversity of devices and manufacturers. On Google's Pixel lineup, Graykey can only partially access data from the latest Pixel 9 when in an "After First Unlock" (AFU) state — where the phone has been unlocked at least once since being powered on. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nonprofit Code.org has posted this year's cartoon for "Hour of Code," their annual learn-to-code event for schoolchildren. Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes its animated pigeon gives a shout-out to the AI that could ultimately replace programmers: In an Instagram post introducing the video, Code.org explains: "Bartlett the Pigeon just learned how to code and now thinks he's smarter than us. Honestly...he might be. Meet the face (and feathers) of this year's #HourOfCode." In the video, Bartlett wows a social media influencer with his coding skills. "Is this pigeon typing code?" she asks in disbelief. "I'm going to film this for my socials!" Bartlett goes on to explain that the song he remixes with coding blocks — Aloe Blacc's "I Need a Dollar" — could have instead been generated by simply using AI, which he says is "like having a personal DJ assistant who never misses a beat!" Interestingly, Blacc noted in a 2011 interview that he wrote "I Need a Dollar" after being made redundant in his career as a business consultant by Ernst & Young. That multinational company is now advising global business leaders on how they can harness the power of GenAI "to achieve more with fewer resources" by disrupting professions — like programming — that "involve a high degree of repetitive and data-driven tasks that AI can automate."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.