technology@lemmy.world - Hot posts

How VPNs really work: Protocols, safety and myth - Sentient Rant

lemmydividebyzero — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:19:06 GMT

https://sentientrant.com/cybersecurity/vpn-protocols-explained/

Meta fined for $567 Mn for failing to protect minors on its platforms

sanitation — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 11:09:57 GMT

https://www.euronews.com/2026/08/07/meta-ordered-to-pay-567-mn-to-us-for-public-nuisance-and-child-harm

Roblox Tanked $9 Billion In A Single Day After The Company Admitted It Was Directing Fewer Kids Toward Viral Games That ‘Emphasize Short-Term Monetiz...

sanitation — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 11:09:55 GMT

https://kotaku.com/roblox-tanked-9-billion-in-a-single-day-after-the-company-admitted-it-was-directing-fewer-kids-toward-viral-games-that-emphasize-short-term-monetization-2000722002

'This Is Unbelievably Scummy' - GTA 6 Fans Are Annoyed By Netflix's Paywalled Extended Look at the Game

sanitation — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 11:09:54 GMT

https://www.ign.com/articles/this-is-unbelievably-scummy-gta-6-fans-are-annoyed-by-netflixs-paywalled-extended-look-at-the-game

SEC bought access to over a billion airline records to track travelers, no warrant required

sanitation — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 11:09:53 GMT

https://www.techspot.com/news/113365-sec-bought-access-over-one-billion-airline-records.html

New Orleans will use AI to answer 911 calls instead of a human

sanitation — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:59:17 GMT

https://www.shreveporttimes.com/story/news/local/louisiana/2026/07/28/is-new-orleans-using-ai-to-answer-911-calls-instead-of-human-dispatchers-impacts-emergencies-crime/91065014007/

Tech volatility hits highest since dot-com bust next to S&P 500 | Fortune

Albercik — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:37:31 GMT

https://fortune.com/2026/07/07/tech-volatility-hits-highest-since-dot-com-bust-sp-500/

New Amazon Data Center Is Set to Have the Most Polluting Power Plant in the U.S.

dwazou — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 10:11:39 GMT

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/climate/amazon-data-center-texas-pollution.html?unlocked_article_code=1.31A.fS0X.EriRxZvEz-vV

A Physicist Rigged His Pet Hamster’s Wheel to Upload to Strava. It Runs Surprisingly Far Every Night

inari — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 09:59:21 GMT

https://www.runnersworld.com/news/a73355106/hamster-wheel-strava-running/

Now we have a timeline of the OpenAI accidental attack against Hugging Face

unpossum — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 08:33:21 GMT

https://simonwillison.net/2026/Aug/7/openai-timeline/

I haven’t found time to watch the OpenAI presentation yet, but this timeline is a nice quick summary.

Flock Is Losing Dozens of Contracts as Controversy Grows

mesamunefire — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:34:30 GMT

https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/flock-losing-dozens-contracts-controversy-194808945.html

One of the articles: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/technology/4672621/flock-controversial-camera-contracts-canceled-23-states/

2027 RAM Capacity Has Reportedly Been Sold out

cantankerous_cashew — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:30:24 GMT

https://www.ign.com/articles/ramageddon-continues-another-year-as-2027-memory-capacity-is-reportedly-sold-out

70+ verified cases of Meta account removals in Australia. Who protects our digital rights?

TRAHR — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 22:57:45 GMT

https://qnews.com.au/meta-account-removals-in-australia-who-protects-our-digital-rights/

Over the past year, marginalised communities, including LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC communities, have reported a growing wave of account suspensions, removals and restrictions from Meta’s moderation systems.

DuckDuckGo made sunglasses that do absolutely nothing, and they sold out

sanitation — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:52:18 GMT

https://www.techspot.com/news/113357-duckduckgo-made-sunglasses-do-absolutely-nothing-they-sold.html

The left and right agree on one thing: no data centers / Data center bans in states like Florida reveal how the anti-AI movement is channeling biparti...

sanitation — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:52:06 GMT

https://www.theverge.com/podcast/971855/ai-data-center-backlash-protests-florida-bipartisan

After severe 76% electricity price hikes due to AI data centers, Virginia requires firms to pay for all dedicated upstream electrical infrastructure ...

sanitation — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 20:41:04 GMT

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/after-severe-76-percent-electricity-price-hikes-due-to-ai-data-centers-virginia-requires-firms-to-pay-for-all-dedicated-upstream-electrical-infrastructure-state-regulators-crack-down-governor-says-move-will-save-civilians-hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars

Full title: After severe 76% electricity price hikes due to AI data centers, Virginia requires firms to pay for all dedicated upstream electrical infrastructure — State regulators crack down, governor says move will save civilians ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’

The return of supersonic flight hinges on the race to solve one big hurdle | CNN

spaghettiwestern — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:32:14 GMT

https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/06/science/supersonic-flight-comeback-sonic-boom

The skies of Oklahoma City roared for six months in 1964 as military aircraft intentionally rattled the population below with a daily barrage of thunderous sonic booms. It was a controversial test — the consequences of which have lingered to this day.

Two approaches in the works could revolutionize air travel by making future supersonic passenger planes compliant with the FAA’s new noise rules: Colorado-based company Boom Supersonic, which is specifically mentioned in the FAA proposal, plans to use physics to prevent sonic booms from ever reaching the ground, regardless of plane design. NASA, on the other hand, is flying an experimental plane called X-59 that is specifically designed to reduce the intensity of the boom.

Anthropic A.I. Model Finds Flaws in Tough-to-Crack Encryption Algorithms

dwazou — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 19:18:20 GMT

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/us/politics/anthropic-ai-encryption-security-aes.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3lA.hS2s.VC67SqJMDuWf

America’s largest newspaper chain, USA Today Co., partners with Palantir to analyze audience data as search traffic falls

beep — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 17:19:45 GMT

https://www.niemanlab.org/2026/08/americas-largest-newspaper-chain-usa-today-co-partners-with-palantir-to-analyze-audience-data/

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1320702/americas-largest-newspaper-chain-usa-today-co-partners-with-palantir-to-analyze-audience

YouTube’s AI slop detector incorrectly targets Kurzgesagt as other creators fear same fate - Dexerto

mesamunefire — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 16:03:32 GMT

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtubes-ai-slop-detector-incorrectly-targets-kurzgesagt-as-other-creators-fear-same-fate-3395930/

YouTube’s system for suppressing low-quality AI content mistakenly targeted Kurzgesagt, leaving the channel with its worst-performing upload since 2013.

Bytedance is training an AI model with up to ten trillion parameters: That's three times the size of Moonshot's Kimi K3, currently the largest Chinese...

eicker — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:35:10 GMT

https://the-decoder.com/chinas-largest-ai-model-is-being-developed-at-bytedance/

Spotify Execs Bet People Will Pay for AI-Generated Music

Some_Emo_Chick — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 14:21:23 GMT

https://gizmodo.com/spotify-execs-bet-people-will-pay-for-ai-music-stock-price-plunges-2000794327

Meta becomes latest firm to say its AI hacked another company

themachinestops — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 13:41:51 GMT

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2kgdnyk2po

Spectre is Back: CPU Mitigations Found to Be Ineffective

beep — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:43:42 GMT

https://www.csail.mit.edu/news/new-attack-slips-past-latest-defenses-built-your-computers-processor

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1320015/spectre-is-back-cpu-mitigations-found-to-be-ineffective

Modern processors are fast in part because they guess. Rather than waiting to find out which way a program will branch, a chip predicts the likely path and races ahead. When the guess is right, time is saved. When it's wrong, the work is discarded, but traces of it linger, and since the Spectre vulnerability was disclosed in 2018, attackers have known how to read those traces to pull secrets out of memory they should never see.

Mark Zuckerberg apologises for child sex abuse and deepfake content, errors in operating Meta platform.

sanitation — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:40:32 GMT

https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/india/mark-zuckerberg-apologies-for-child-abuse-deepfake-content-on-meta-platforms-sources/

GrapheneOS says Revolut is blocking its users over Google Play checks

beep — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 11:21:51 GMT

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/117045625230764434

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1319937/grapheneos-says-revolut-is-blocking-its-users-over-google-play-checks

Via @GrapheneOS@grapheneos.social on Mastodon.

Boeing 737 Max operators told to check fuselages for cracks

dwazou — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:52:29 GMT

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/aug/07/boeing-737-max-fuselage-cracks-check-faa

Jealously Watching OpenAI and Anthropic, Meta Suddenly Claims That Its AI Went on a Hacking Spree Too

madeindex — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:30:30 GMT

https://futurism.com/future-society/jealous-meta-claims-ai-went-hacking-too

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/50398452

Just when you think @ZuckyZuck is finally out of ideas - to steal.

It starts to feel like even a weak LLM like MetaAI is more creative than him.

Maybe we already have created truly artificial intelligence because he is more of an SLM: a Small Language Model?

Silicon Valley Splits Over Closing the Borders to Chinese A.I.

dwazou — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:16:20 GMT

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/25/technology/open-source-silicon-valley-china.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3VA.g2FM.mBXVEKMSFiss

Apple Introduces Leasing Program for iPhones and Other Devices

dwazou — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 10:14:53 GMT

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/28/technology/apple-leasing-program.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3lA.Vn7-.EtHuo9eE2cCj

New Mexico Court Orders Meta to Pay to Establish $567 Million Fund to Abate Harms to Youth

beep — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 09:45:08 GMT

https://www.techpolicy.press/new-mexico-court-orders-meta-to-establish-567-million-fund-to-abate-harms-to-youth/

cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1319748/court-orders-instagram-and-facebook-s-meta-to-pay-567m-to-address-kids-mental-health-onl

On Thursday, the First Judicial District Court in Santa Fe, New Mexico issued a decision in the remedies phase of State of New Mexico v. Meta Platforms Inc. The court found Meta's platforms created a public nuisance by contributing to the youth mental health crisis and by facilitating child sexual exploitation. It ordered a range of remedies, including the creation of a $567 million abatement fund to finance various measures intended to address the harms to the public.

$1 billion of iPhone 18 Pro chips 'on the shelves awaiting packaging' due to DRAM shortages — memory shortages reportedly put a wrinkle in Apple's la...

sanitation — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 08:40:28 GMT

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/dram/usd1-billion-of-iphone-18-pro-chips-on-the-shelves-awaiting-packaging-due-to-dram-shortages-memory-shortages-reportedly-put-a-wrinkle-in-apples-launch-plans

I think the internet is broken, and it's broken at it's core

Shin — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 07:50:38 GMT

https://jeferson.me/blog/2026/08/07/internet-is-ugly/

I think AI won't save us here, our base is broken. The internet is kind of shattered, most of the pages on the wild have broken and even wrong links. Divs doings the work of buttons, the semantics are totally lost. This, at least for me, feels like a good view point on what we can fix first, and with luck have a better internet.

All feedback is welcome.

Hands On with the Anbernic RG SP; The Game Boy Advance SP Reimagined

PerfectDark — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 05:24:47 GMT

https://gardinerbryant.com/hands-on-with-the-anbernic-rg-sp/

Disney Earnings Buoyed By ‘Toy Story 5’, Theme Parks, Streaming Profit; Books $100M Tariff Refund

sanitation — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 04:40:24 GMT

https://deadline.com/2026/08/disney-earnings-toy-story-5-streaming-theme-parks-1237017656/

Meta fined $567m in largest child safety ruling against social media giant

TryingToBeGood — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 03:41:11 GMT

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd7lz3wr2rlo

Investors want ‘real proof’ AI spending is paying off, new report suggests - National | Globalnews.ca

FoxtrotDeltaTango — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 03:10:19 GMT

https://globalnews.ca/news/12011708/ai-spending-investing-fidelity/

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/68987038

What, investors are beginning to think that maybe AI is more hype than substance? A really expensive way of doing not much of anything?

Didn't this also happen with the dot.com meltdown? A few good ways to productively use it, a lot of ways to wastefully use it.

You would think they would have learned.

The truth is, AI should not stand for Artificial Intelligence, it is in reality Algorithmic Intelligence. Same computer processing, except that it is thousands of computers in a single chip all processing the data at the same time, with each computer doing the same math (a*b+c) but each simultaneous computation uses different input numbers. Great for doing massive simultaneous calculations, but certainly not 'revolutionary'. Instead of one computer doing one program taking a thousand cycles, a thousand computers doing the same program taking one cycle. What IS revolutionary are the algorithms that are being developed, and the applications these massive calculator arrays are being used for. Some will bear fruit, most will not.

Let's take a 'for example'.

Weather predictions for the next day. You start with a given set of data, then run your predictive algorithm a thousand times, each with a slightly different set of possible future data points. One of them is probably the most accurate. The problem is to decide which one. The second problem is that it takes a week to do all the thousand runs. You can have a 95% accurate prediction in one week for what the weather is going to be tomorrow. See the problem?

But with the newest AI chips, you can do the thousand different scenarios at the same time. Also, you can calculate a probability for each scenario at the same time. The scenario with the highest probability is the most likely. Then you check the actual weather, feed it back to the system, and it gets better at calculating the probabilities for the correct scenario. You get tomorrows weather today, and the system gets better and better at calculating the probabilities. This is a useful application.

Second condition. In a lottery, you can use this same server to predict all of the potential combinations of numbers, before the next draw. Except that the probability of any one combination being drawn is, well, still equal. There is just no way the system can get better at selecting the correct random number. The selection of which combination to use is still random, from equal probabilities. You can calculate what all the potential outcomes can be, but this tells you nothing if they are all equally likely. So it tells you nothing. A completely wasteful application.

Yet there are far more companies trying to use 'AI' to do the second condition than for the first condition. After investing a fortune in hardware, they still have the same accuracy in decision making as before.

Trump’s Truth Social Hit by Humiliating Exodus [Down 40% in one year]

FoxtrotDeltaTango — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 02:54:36 GMT

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-truth-social-hit-by-humiliating-exodus-of-daily-active-users/

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/64681779

Active users of President Donald Trump’s social media platform have dropped like flies.

Trump’s Truth Social site, where he threatens other countries and posts self-aggrandizing AI slop, has experienced a dramatic drop in daily active users of its mobile app since last July, according to the Financial Times.

The outlet, citing estimates from the digital market intelligence company SimilarWeb, reported that the mobile site’s daily active users have plummeted from 436,000 in July 2025 to only 261,000 one year later.