Monday, April 1st, 2024

Time	Event
1:44a	YouTube Inspires 'True Crime Junkies' to Buy Sonar-Equipped Boat and Solve Cold-Case Mysteries Described as a "non profit volunteer search team" on its official site, Sunshine State Sonar "found more than 350 cars in canals, ponds and waterways across Florida" in just the last two years, according to the Tampa Bay Times. It's owned by two half brothers — "weekend fishermen turned amateur underwater detectives." [T]he true-crime junkies dive into cold cases, searching for the disappeared. Sometimes, they choose the cases themselves, following threads online. Other times, law enforcement asks for their help. They have discovered remains of 11 missing people inside cars, giving answers to relatives who had spent years agonizing. One family, who thought their mom had left them, learned that she had driven off the road. Relatives of a missing teacher suspected his girlfriend — then found out he had been submerged in a canal for three years. And the son of a young mother who thought she had been murdered was relieved when her death proved a watery accident... "It all started with YouTube," [Mike] Sullivan says. "I kinda got obsessed." A couple of years ago, he got into bingeing Adventures with Purpose, videos of a volunteer dive team in Oregon that searches for missing people. "Florida has so much water!" he told his wife. "I really need to do this...." He didn't know how to scuba dive. He'd never longed to float through crystal water or over schools of colorful fish. But he got certified so he could swim through muddy channels and search waterlogged crime scenes. He bought a shallow-draft boat and outboard motor, rigged it with the latest fish-finding technology: a Lowrance SideScan sonar, a DownScan imaging device and a Garmin LiveScope. The machines send sound waves pulsing through the water, then record them as they bounce back to create a blurry image on a monitor — like a sonogram... The equipment cost Sullivan $21,000. It took him a year to be able to interpret the images, to tell a rock from a Volkswagen. Thanks to Slashdot reader Hectar for sharing the article. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:34a	After Outer Space, 93-Year-Old William Shatner Leads Cruise to Antarctica "Sail to a continent as mysterious as outer-space itself," the new web site urges. "William Shatner saw Earth from the highest view," writes Scripps News Service. "Now he's heading to the bottom of it — and inviting you to join him." The 93-year-old is setting sail for Antarctica on Dec. 19, which will mark just over three years since the "Star Trek" actor returned from a trip to space in real life, not just as Captain James T. Kirk. Fellow space traveler NASA astronaut Scott Kelly will join Shatner on the 10-day Space2Sea expedition, and 260 others can too — if they pay for their $37,500 ticket. The cheapest suite — priced at $35,500 — along with the top three most expensive ones — reaching $91,500 — are already sold out. Presented by Future of Space, the trip aboard the new "ultra-luxury" vessel is said to be full of "awe-inspiring experiences," including "intimate encounters" with penguins, visits to remote historical locations and evenings full of stories from "esteemed guests," like Shatner. Travelers can also kayak the waters or go down deep under the ice in submersibles, both for additional charges... Shatner said he experienced something called the "overview effect" while viewing the Earth from space. The overview effect, coined by space philosopher and author Frank White, refers to a shift in how astronauts think about our life on the planet, described by White as "the feeling that the Earth itself is a whole system, and we're just a part of it." It's also realizing through experience that there are no borders or boundaries on Earth. It's often marked by feelings of increased appreciation of the planet's beauty. Shatner's invitation to "fellow explorers" for the Space2Sea expedition seem to echo this phenomenon, with the actor saying he didn't expect to be "captivated by the fragile, blue curve of our planet" when flying on Blue Origin's rocket. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:34a	Arizona's Governor Signs Bill Making Pluto the Official State Planet "Be it enacted by the Legislature of the State of Arizona..." reads the official text of House Bill #2,477. "PLUTO IS THE OFFICIAL STATE PLANET." An anonymous reader shared this report from Capital Media Services: The governor signed legislation Friday designating Pluto as Arizona's "official state planet." It joins a list of other items the state has declared to be "official,'' ranging from turquoise as the state gemstone and copper as the state metal to the Sonorasaurus as the state dinosaur. "I am proud of Arizona's pioneering work in space discovery," governor Hobbs said. What makes Pluto unique and ripe for claim by Arizona is that it is the only planet actually discovered in the United States, and the discovery was made in Flagstaff. Rep. Justin Wilmeth, a Phoenix Republican and self-described "history nerd,'' said that needed to be commemorated, starting with the legacy of astronomer Clyde Tombaugh. In 1930, Tombaugh was working at the Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff. "The whole story of Clyde is just amazing, just sitting there under the telescope'' looking for planets by taking photos over a period of time, said Wilmeth. "It was two different glass planes that had one little spec of light moving in a different direction,'' showing it wasn't just another star — and all by observation and not computers. "To me, that's something that's just mind boggling." "The International Astronomical Union voted years ago to strip Pluto of its official status as a planet," the article points out, noting that its official definition specifies that planets "clear the neighboring region of other objects." (While Pluto "has such a small gravitational pull, it has not attracted and absorbed other space rocks in its orbit".) So in 2006 Pluto was reclassified as a dwarf planet, according to a NASA web page. "Pluto is about 1/6 the width of Earth," and has a radius of 715 miles or 1,151 kilometers. "If Earth was the size of a nickel, Pluto would be about as big as a popcorn kernel." Long-time Slashdot reader Baron_Yam called Arizona's new legislation "How to advertise you are ignorant. Scientists said something we don't like, so we'll make a law!" They can call it their "State Planet" all they want, but people who actually know about the skies will be mocking them for it. While there is nostalgia for the old classification, and the new one isn't perfect... it's certainly more meaningful when trying to divide up the objects of a planetary system for study. Reached for a comment by Capital Media Services, Representative Wilmeth said "It might matter to some that are going to get picky or persnickety about stuff... There's several generations of Americans ... who believe that Pluto's a planet — or at least that's what we were taught. I'm never going to think differently. That's just my personal opinion." (The news site adds that "What is important, Wilmeth said, is remembering the history and promoting it.") Five senators in Arizona's state legislatur did vote against the measure — though not all of them did so for scientific reasons, Senator Anthony Kern explained to Capital Media Services. "I did not want to discriminate against those who wanted Mars, Venus, Jupiter, or everyone's favorite, Uranus." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
11:34a	'Yes, We're All Trapped in the Matrix Now' "As you're reading this, you're more likely than not already inside 'The Matrix'," according to a headline on the front page of CNN.com this weekend. It linked to an opinion piece by Rizwan Virk, founder of MIT's startup incubator/accelerator program. He's now a doctoral researcher at Arizona State University, where his profile identifies him as an "entrepreneur, video game pioneer, film producer, venture capitalist, computer scientist and bestselling author." Virk's 2019 book was titled "The Simulation Hypothesis: An MIT Computer Scientist Shows Why AI, Quantum Physics and Eastern Mystics Agree We Are in a Video Game." In the decades since [The Matrix was released], this idea, now called the simulation hypothesis, has come to be taken more seriously by technologists, scientists and philosophers. The main reason for this shift is the stunning improvements in computer graphics, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR) and AI. Taking into account three developments just this year from Apple, Neuralink and OpenAI, I can now confidently state that as you are reading this article, you are more likely than not already inside a computer simulation. This is because the closer our technology gets to being able to build a fully interactive simulation like the Matrix, the more likely it is that someone has already built such a world, and we are simply inside their video game world... In 2003, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom imagined a "technologically mature" civilization could easily create a simulated world. The logic, then, is that if any civilization ever reaches this point, it would create not just one but a very large number of simulations (perhaps billions), each with billions of AI characters, simply by firing up more servers. With simulated worlds far outnumbering the "real" world, the likelihood that we are in a simulation would be significantly higher than not. It was this logic that prompted Elon Musk to state, a few years ago, that the chances that we are not in a simulation (i.e. that we are in base reality) was "one in billions." It's a theory that is difficult to prove — but difficult to disprove as well. Remember, the simulations would be so good that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference between a physical and a simulated world. Either the signals are being beamed directly into your brain, or we are simply AI characters inside the simulation... Recent developments in Silicon Valley show that we could get to the simulation point very soon. Just this year, Apple released its Vision Pro headset — a mixed-reality (including augmented and virtual reality) device that, if you believe initial reviews (ranging from mildly positive to ecstatic), heralds the beginning of a new era of spatial computing — or the merging of digital and physical worlds... we can see a direct line to being able to render a realistic fictional world around us... Just last month, OpenAI released Sora AI, which can now generate highly realistic videos that are pretty damn difficult to distinguish from real human videos. The fact that AI can so easily fool humans visually as well as through text (and according to some, has already passed the well-known Turing Test) shows that we are not far from fully immersive worlds populated with simulated AI characters that seem (and perhaps even think they are) conscious. Already, millions of humans are chatting with AI characters, and millions of dollars are pouring into making AI characters more realistic. Some of us may be players of the game, who have forgotten that we allowed the signal to be beamed into our brain, while others, like Neo or Morpheus or Trinity in "The Matrix," may have been plugged in at birth... The fact that we are approaching the simulation point so soon in our future means that the likelihood that we are already inside someone else's advanced simulation goes up exponentially. Like Neo, we would be unable to tell the difference between a simulated and a physical world. Perhaps the most appropriate response to that is another of Reeves' most famous lines from that now-classic sci-fi film: Woah. The author notes that the idea of being trapped inside a video game already "had been articulated by one of the Wachowskis' heroes, science fiction author Philip K. Dick, who stated, all the way back in 1977, 'We are living in a computer programmed reality.'" A few years ago, I interviewed Dick's wife Tessa and asked her what he would have thought of "The Matrix." She said his first reaction would have been that he loved it; however, his second reaction would most likely have been to call his agent to see if he could sue the filmmakers for stealing his ideas. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
2:00p	Microsoft To Unbundle Office and Teams Following Years-long Criticism Microsoft will introduce a new version of Microsoft 365 and Office 365 subscription service that excludes Teams, unbundling a suite following scrutiny from the European Union regulator and complaints from rival Slack. From a report: The move follows Microsoft agreeing to sell Office 365 suite sans Microsoft Teams offering in the EU and Switzerland last year. The company introduced Teams as a complimentary offering to the Office 365 suite in 2017. Microsoft has enjoyed an unfair advantage by coupling the two offerings, many businesses have argued. Slack, owned by Salesforce, termed the move "illegal" alleging that Microsoft forced installation of Teams to customers through its market-dominant productivity suite and hid the true cost of the chat and video service. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
2:44p	For Data-Guzzling AI Companies, the Internet Is Too Small Companies racing to develop more powerful artificial intelligence are rapidly nearing a new problem: The internet might be too small for their plans (non-paywalled link). From a report: Ever more powerful systems developed by OpenAI, Google and others require larger oceans of information to learn from. That demand is straining the available pool of quality public data online at the same time that some data owners are blocking access to AI companies. Some executives and researchers say the industry's need for high-quality text data could outstrip supply within two years, potentially slowing AI's development. AI companies are hunting for untapped information sources, and rethinking how they train these systems. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has discussed training its next model, GPT-5, on transcriptions of public YouTube videos, people familiar with the matter said. Companies also are experimenting with using AI-generated, or synthetic, data as training material -- an approach many researchers say could actually cause crippling malfunctions. These efforts are often secret, because executives think solutions could be a competitive advantage. Data is among several essential AI resources in short supply. The chips needed to run what are called large-language models behind ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and other AI bots also are scarce. And industry leaders worry about a dearth of data centers and the electricity needed to power them. AI language models are built using text vacuumed up from the internet, including scientific research, news articles and Wikipedia entries. That material is broken into tokens -- words and parts of words that the models use to learn how to formulate humanlike expressions. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
3:01p	Google Pledges To Destroy Browsing Data To Settle 'Incognito' Lawsuit Google plans to destroy a trove of data that reflects millions of users' web-browsing histories, part of a settlement of a lawsuit that alleged the company tracked millions of users without their knowledge. WSJ: The class action, filed in 2020, accused Google of misleading users about how Chrome tracked the activity of anyone who used the private "Incognito" browsing option. The lawsuit alleged that Google's marketing and privacy disclosures didn't properly inform users of the kinds of data being collected, including details about which websites they viewed. The settlement details, filed Monday in San Francisco federal court, set out the actions the company will take to change its practices around private browsing. According to the court filing, Google has agreed to destroy billions of data points that the lawsuit alleges it improperly collected, to update disclosures about what it collects in private browsing and give users the option to disable third-party cookies in that setting. The agreement doesn't include damages for individual users. But the settlement will allow individuals to file claims. Already the plaintiff attorneys have filed 50 in California state court. Attorney David Boies, who represents the consumers in the lawsuit, said the settlement requires Google to delete and remediate "in unprecedented scope and scale" the data it improperly collected. "This settlement is an historic step in requiring honesty and accountability from dominant technology companies," Boies said. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:19p	Huge AI Funding Leads To Hype and 'Grifting,' Warns DeepMind's Demis Hassabis The surge of money flooding into AI has resulted in some crypto-like hype that is obscuring the incredible scientific progress in the field, according to Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder of DeepMind. From a report: The chief executive of Google's AI research division told the Financial Times that the billions of dollars being poured into generative AI start-ups and products "brings with it a whole attendant bunch of hype and maybe some grifting and some other things that you see in other hyped-up areas, crypto or whatever." "Some of that has now spilled over into AI, which I think is a bit unfortunate. And it clouds the science and the research, which is phenomenal," he added. "In a way, AI's not hyped enough but in some senses it's too hyped. We're talking about all sorts of things that are just not real." The launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022 sparked an investor frenzy as start-ups raced to develop and deploy generative AI and attract venture capital funding. VC groups invested $42.5bn in 2,500 AI start-up equity rounds last year, according to market analysts CB Insights. Public market investors have also rushed into the so-called Magnificent Seven technology companies, including Microsoft, Alphabet and Nvidia, that are spearheading the AI revolution. Their rise has helped to propel global stock markets to their strongest first-quarter performance in five years. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
4:52p	Perplexity, an AI Startup Attempting To Challenge Google, Plans To Sell Ads An anonymous reader shares a report: Generative AI search engine Perplexity, which claims to be a Google competitor and recently snagged a $73.6 million Series B funding from investors like Jeff Bezos, is going to start selling ads, the company told ADWEEK. Perplexity uses AI to answer users' questions, based on web sources. It incorporates videos and images in the response and even data from partners like Yelp. Perplexity also links sources in the response while suggesting related questions users might want to ask. These related questions, which account for 40% of Perplexity's queries, are where the company will start introducing native ads, by letting brands influence these questions, said company chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko. When a user delves deeper into a topic, the AI search engine might offer organic and brand-sponsored questions. Perplexity will launch this in the upcoming quarters, but Shevelenko declined to disclose more specifics. While Perplexity touts on its site that search should be "free from the influence of advertising-driven models," advertising was always in the cards for the company. "Advertising was always part of how we're going to build a great business," said Shevelenko. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
5:28p	Scientist Who Gene-edited Babies Back in Lab and 'Proud' of Past Work Despite Jailing A Chinese scientist who was imprisoned for his role in creating the world's first genetically edited babies says he has returned to his laboratory to work on the treatment of Alzheimer's and other genetic diseases. From a report: In an interview with a Japanese newspaper, He Jiankui said he had resumed research on human embryo genome editing, despite the controversy over the ethics of artificially rewriting genes, which some critics predicted would lead to demand for "designer babies." "We will use discarded human embryos and comply with both domestic and international rules," He told the Mainichi Shimbun, adding that he had no plans to produce more genome-edited babies. Previously, He had used a tool known as Crispr-Cas9 to rewrite DNA in embryos. In 2019 a court in China sentenced He to three years in prison for violating medical regulations after he claimed the previous year that he had created genetically modified twin sisters, Lulu and Nana, before birth. His experiments sent shockwaves through the medical and scientific world. He was widely condemned for having gone ahead with the risky, ethically contentious and medically unjustified procedure with inadequate consent from the families involved. The court found that He had forged documents from an ethics review panel that were used to recruit couples for his research. He said he had used a gene-editing procedure known as Crispr-Cas9 to rewrite the DNA in the sisters' embryos -- modifications he claimed would make the children immune to HIV. He has continued to defend his work, despite widespread criticism, saying he was "proud" of having created Lulu and Nana. A third girl was born in 2019 as a result of similar experiments. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
6:05p	ChatGPT No Longer Requires an Account OpenAI is making its flagship conversational AI accessible to everyone, even people who haven't bothered making an account. From a report: It won't be quite the same experience, however -- and of course all your chats will still go into their training data unless you opt out. Starting today in a few markets and gradually rolling out to the rest of the world, visiting chat.openai.com will no longer ask you to log in -- though you still can if you want to. Instead, you'll be dropped right into conversation with ChatGPT, which will use the same model as logged-in users. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
7:25p	OpenAI Removes Sam Altman's Ownership of Its Startup Fund According to a filing with the SEC, OpenAI has removed CEO Sam Altman's ownership and control of the company's venture capital fund that backs AI startups. Reuters reports: The change, documented in the March 29 filing, came after Altman's ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund raised eyebrows for its unusual structure--while being marketed similar to a corporate venture arm, the fund was raised by Altman from outside limited partners and he made investment decisions. OpenAI has said Altman does not have financial interest in the fund despite the ownership. Axios first reported on the ownership change on Monday. In a statement, a spokesperson for OpenAI said the fund's initial general partner (GP) structure was a temporary arrangement, and "this change provides further clarity." The OpenAI Startup Fund is investing $175 million raised from OpenAI partners such as Microsoft, although OpenAI itself is not an investor. Control of the fund has been moved over to Ian Hathaway, a partner at the fund since 2021, according to the filing. Altman will no longer be a general partner at the fund. OpenAI said Hathaway has overseen the fund's accelerator program and led investments in such companies as Harvey, Cursor and Ambience Healthcare. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
8:02p	The Pirate Bay's Oldest Torrent Is Now 20 Years Old An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Today, more than two decades have passed and most of the files shared on The Pirate Bay in the early years are no longer available. BitTorrent requires at least one person to share a full file copy, which is hard to keep up for decades. Surprisingly, however, several torrents have managed to stand the test of time and remain available today. A few days ago the site's longest surviving torrent turned 20 years old. While a few candidates have shown up over the years, we believe that an episode of "High Chaparral" has the honor of being the oldest Pirate Bay torrent that's still active today. The file was originally uploaded on March 25, 2004, and several people continue to share it today. The screenshot [here] only lists one seeder but according to information passed on by OpenTrackr.org, there are four seeders with a full copy. This is quite a remarkable achievement, especially since people complained about a lack of seeders shortly after it was uploaded. Over the years, the "High Chaparral" torrent achieved cult status among a small group of people who likely keep sharing it, simply because it's the oldest surviving torrent. This became evident in the Pirate Bay comment section several years ago, when TPB still had comments. Record or not, other old torrents on The Pirate Bay also continue to thrive. On March 31, 2004, someone uploaded a pirated copy of the documentary "Revolution OS" to the site which is alive and kicking today. While these torrents are quite old, they're not the oldest active torrents available on the Internet. That honor goes to "The Fanimatrix", which was created in September 2003 and, after being previously resurrected, continues to be available today with more than 100 people seeding. Ten years ago, we were surprised to see that any of the mentioned torrents were still active. By now, however, we wouldn't be shocked to see these torrents survive for decades. Whether The Pirate Bay will still be around then is another question. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
8:40p	Apple AI Researchers Boast Useful On-Device Model That 'Substantially Outperforms' GPT-4 Zac Hall reports via 9to5Mac: In a newly published research paper (PDF), Apple's AI gurus describe a system in which Siri can do much more than try to recognize what's in an image. The best part? It thinks one of its models for doing this benchmarks better than ChatGPT 4.0. In the paper (ReALM: Reference Resolution As Language Modeling), Apple describes something that could give a large language model-enhanced voice assistant a usefulness boost. ReALM takes into account both what's on your screen and what tasks are active. [...] If it works well, that sounds like a recipe for a smarter and more useful Siri. Apple also sounds confident in its ability to complete such a task with impressive speed. Benchmarking is compared against OpenAI's ChatGPT 3.5 and ChatGPT 4.0: "As another baseline, we run the GPT-3.5 (Brown et al., 2020; Ouyang et al., 2022) and GPT-4 (Achiam et al., 2023) variants of ChatGPT, as available on January 24, 2024, with in-context learning. As in our setup, we aim to get both variants to predict a list of entities from a set that is available. In the case of GPT-3.5, which only accepts text, our input consists of the prompt alone; however, in the case of GPT-4, which also has the ability to contextualize on images, we provide the system with a screenshot for the task of on-screen reference resolution, which we find helps substantially improve performance." So how does Apple's model do? "We demonstrate large improvements over an existing system with similar functionality across different types of references, with our smallest model obtaining absolute gains of over 5% for on-screen references. We also benchmark against GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, with our smallest model achieving performance comparable to that of GPT-4, and our larger models substantially outperforming it." Substantially outperforming it, you say? The paper concludes in part as follows: "We show that ReaLM outperforms previous ap- proaches, and performs roughly as well as the state- of-the-art LLM today, GPT-4, despite consisting of far fewer parameters, even for onscreen references despite being purely in the textual domain. It also outperforms GPT-4 for domain-specific user utterances, thus making ReaLM an ideal choice for a practical reference resolution system that can exist on-device without compromising on performance." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
9:20p	'Smart Devices Are Turning Out To Be a Poor Investment' An anonymous reader quotes a report from Android Police, written by Dhruv Bhutani: As someone who is an early adopter of all things smart and has invested a significant amount of money in building a fancy smart home, it saddens me to say that I feel cheated by the thousands of dollars I've spent on smart devices. And it's not a one-off. Amazon's recent move to block off local ADB connections on Fire TV devices is the latest example in a long line of grievances. A brand busy wrestling away control from the consumer after they've bought the product, the software update gimps a feature that has been present on the hardware ever since it launched back in 2014. ADB-based commands let users take deep control of the hardware, and in the case of the Fire TV hardware, it can drastically improve the user experience. [...] A few years ago, I decided to invest in the NVIDIA Shield. The premium streamer was marketed as a utopia for streaming online and offline sources with the ability to plug in hard drives, connect to NAS drives, and more. At launch, it did precisely that while presenting a beautiful, clean interface that was a joy to interact with. However, subsequent updates have converted what was otherwise a clean and elegant solution to an ad-infested overlay that I zoom past to jump into my streaming app of choice. This problem isn't restricted to just the Shield. Even my Google TV running Chromecast has a home screen that's more of an advertising space for Google than an easy way to get to my content. But why stop at streaming boxes? Google's Nest Hubs are equal victims of feature deterioration. I've spent hundreds of dollars on Nest Hubs and outfitted them in most of my rooms and washrooms. However, Google's consistent degradation of the user experience means I use these speakers for little more than casting music from the Spotify app. The voice recognition barely works on the best of days, and when it does, the answers tend to be wildly inconsistent. It wasn't always the case. In fact, at launch, Google's Nest speakers were some of the best smart home interfaces you could buy. You'd imagine that the experience would only improve from there. That's decidedly not the case. I had high hopes that the Fuchsia update would fix the broken command detection, but that's also not the case. And good luck to you if you decided to invest in Google Assistant-compatible displays. Google's announcement that it would no longer issue software or security updates to third-party displays like the excellent Lenovo Smart Display, right after killing the built-in web browser, is pretty wild. It boggles my mind that a company can get away with such behavior. Now imagine the plight of Nest Secure owners. A home security system isn't something one expects to switch out for many many years. And yet, Google decided to kill the Nest Secure home monitoring solution merely three years after launching the product range. While I made an initial investment in the Nest ecosystem, I've since switched over to a completely local solution that is entirely under my control, stores data locally, and won't be going out of action because of bad decision-making by another company. "It's clear to me that smart home devices, as they stand, are proving to be very poor investments for consumers," Bhutani writes in closing. "Suffice it to say that I've paused any future investments in smart devices, and I'll be taking a long and hard look at a company's treatment of its current portfolio before splurging out more cash. I'd recommend you do the same." Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
10:00p	The FTC is Trying To Help Victims of Impersonation Scams Get Their Money Back The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has a new way to combat the impersonation scams that it says cost people $1.1 billion last year alone. Effective today, the agency's rule "prohibits the impersonation of government, businesses, and their officials or agents in interstate commerce." The rule also lets the FTC directly file federal court complaints to force scammers to return money stolen by business or government impersonation. From a report: Impersonation scams are wide-ranging -- creators are on the lookout for fake podcast invites that turn into letting scammers take over their Facebook pages via a hidden "datasets" URL, while Verge reporters have been impersonated by criminals trying to steal cryptocurrency via fake Calendly meeting links. Linus Media Group was victimized by a thief who pretended to be a potential sponsor and managed to take over three of the company's YouTube channels. Some scams can also be very intricate, as in The Cut financial columnist Charlotte Cowles' story of how she lost a shoebox holding $50,000 to an elaborate scam involving a fake Amazon business account, the FTC, and the CIA. (See also: gift card scams.) The agency is also taking public comment until April 30th on changes to the rule that would allow it to also target impersonation of individuals, such as through the use of video deepfakes or AI voice cloning. That would let it take action against, say, scams involving impersonations of Elon Musk on X or celebrities in YouTube ads. Others have used AI for more sinister fraud, such as voice clones of loved ones claiming to be kidnapped. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
10:40p	McKinsey is Offering Staff Pay, Career Coaching If They Leave Firm An anonymous reader shares a report: The management-consulting giant McKinsey is dangling career-coaching services and nine months' worth of pay to staffers keen on leaving the firm, the British newspaper The Times reported on Saturday. The Times reported that managers for McKinsey's UK offices could spend up to nine months searching for a job instead of working on client projects. Besides continuing to receive their salary, managers would have access to McKinsey's resources and career-coaching services, per The Times. But staffers would still have to leave McKinsey even if their job hunt proved unsuccessful. The offer has been extended to managers working at McKinsey's US offices, though the pay duration could be different, The Times said, citing people familiar with the situation. A spokesperson for McKinsey did not confirm the specifics of The Times' reporting but told the outlet that the company's mission was to help staffers "grow into leaders, whether they stay at McKinsey or continue their careers elsewhere." "These actions are part of our ongoing effort to ensure our performance management and development approach is as effective as possible, and to do so in a caring and supportive way," the spokesperson continued. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)
11:20p	Rust Developers at Google Twice as Productive as C++ Teams An anonymous reader shares a report: Echoing the past two years of Rust evangelism and C/C++ ennui, Google reports that Rust shines in production, to the point that its developers are twice as productive using the language compared to C++. Speaking at the Rust Nation UK Conference in London this week, Lars Bergstrom, director of engineering at Google, who works on Android Platform Tools & Libraries, described the web titan's experience migrating projects written in Go or C++ to the Rust programming language. Bergstrom said that while Dropbox in 2016 and Figma in 2018 offered early accounts of rewriting code in memory-safe Rust - and doubts about productivity and the language have subsided - concerns have lingered about its reliability and security. "Even six months ago, this was a really tough conversation," he said. "I would go and I would talk to people and they would say, 'Wait, wait you have an `unsafe` keyword. That means we should all write C++ until the heat death of the Universe.'" But there's been a shift in awareness across the software development ecosystem, Bergstrom argued, about the challenges of using non-memory safe languages. Such messaging is now coming from government authorities in the US and other nations who understand the role software plays in critical infrastructure. The reason is that the majority of security vulnerabilities in large codebases can be traced to memory security bugs. And since Rust code can largely if not totally avoid such problems when properly implemented, memory safety now looks a lot like a national security issue. Read more of this story at Slashdot. (Comment on this)

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