computers

22 May 2026

Slashdot

At Least 80% Responsibility For Ill Health In Old Age Down to Individual, Study Says

A new Oxford Longevity Project report argues that individuals bear at least 80% of the responsibility for ill health in old age. "The report (PDF), launched at the Smart Ageing Summit in Oxford last week, argues that individuals have far greater control over their longevity than is commonly understood," reports The Guardian. "The authors call on the government to take legislative action on alcohol comparable to restrictions on smoking." From the report: Living Longer, Better -- the Oxford Longevity Project's first Age-less report -- was co-authored by an interdisciplinary panel of UK-based experts in medicine, physiology, ageing and education policy. It was sponsored by Oxford Healthspan. The report's authors, Sir Christopher Ball, Sir Muir Gray, Dr Paul Ch'en, Leslie Kenny and Prof Denis Noble, present the figure of 80% as a conservative estimate. [...] The claim, however, has been described as simplistic and said to neglect wider arguments about whether people are genuinely in control of individual choices when it comes to issues including poverty, pollution and healthcare access. [...] Ball, however, pointed to research including the Landmark Twins Study, where researchers concluded at least 75% of human lifespan is determined by environmental and modifiable lifestyle factors. He also cited large-scale analysis led by Oxford Population Health using data from nearly 500,000 UK Biobank participants which found that environmental exposures and habits carry far greater weight in premature death and biological ageing than inherited genetics. The report's recommendations include avoiding processed foods, abstaining entirely from alcohol, prioritising sleep, not eating after 6.30pm, and cultivating what it calls "a not-meat mindset." On alcohol, it takes a position more forthright than current government guidance. "Alcohol is toxic, don't drink it," said Ball. "The report bravely says so -- whereas the government is afraid to tell the public the truth."

AT&T Sues California In Bid To Stop Offering Traditional Phone Service

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: AT&T on Wednesday filed suit (PDF) against California officials seeking a court order declaring it does not have to continue offering traditional copper wire phone service to new customers as it vowed to spend $19 billion on modern telecom services. California requires the U.S. wireless carrier to spend $1 billion annually to maintain a century-old telephone network that few use, AT&T said, saying the network now serves just 3% of households in AT&T's California territory. AT&T's suit named the California Public Utilities Commission and the state attorney general. AT&T said it is committing to investing $19 billion in California as it works to connect more than 4 million additional households and businesses across California by 2030 and added IP-based networks are far more reliable and efficient. AT&T also Wednesday asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to discontinue traditional phone service in parts of California where it has faster, more reliable service available. It also filed a petition with the FCC to declare that California's rules that effectively require AT&T to power, repair and sell traditional phone service, even after the FCC has authorized the service to be phased out, are preempted by federal standards. AT&T added that transitioning from copper will save an estimated 300 million kilowatt-hours annually by 2030 or the equivalent of eliminating emissions from 17 million gallons of gasoline. The company added that California has already suffered about 2,000 outages from copper thefts this year and it struggles to find replacement parts. The federal government and virtually all states where AT&T historically offered copper-wire service "have now eliminated outdated regulatory obstacles" allowing AT&T to begin powering down its old network and increasing its investments in modern communication technologies, the company said in its lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in southern California.

Ars Technica

Ground system issue scrubs first launch of SpaceX's Starship V3 rocket

Engineers could make another attempt to launch Starship as soon as Friday evening.

22 May 2026 2:05am GMT

21 May 2026

Slashdot

Thousands of Zillow Listings In Chicago Have Vanished

Thousands of Chicago-area Zillow and Trulia listings disappeared after Midwest Real Estate Data cut off Zillow's access to its feed, "in the latest escalation of a legal battle with Lisle-based Midwest Real Estate Data (MRED)," reports the Chicago Sun-Times. "The fight is over MRED's private listing network, where homes for sale are shared among real estate professionals. And MRED followed through on a threat to cut Zillow's access to its listing data feed." From the report: There were nearly 5,000 Chicago homes listed on Zillow Tuesday, but as of Wednesday afternoon, that number plummeted to about 1,700. Meanwhile, other listing sites like Redfin and Realtor.com show about 5,000 to 8,000 listings in Chicago. MRED manages listings -- submitted by brokers -- throughout Illinois, as well as parts of Wisconsin and Indiana. The regional multiple listing service has more than 43,000 members and processed more than 264,000 listings worth $43 billion in 2025. The loss of listings on Zillow's websites have made a behind-the-scenes real estate industry fight public. And it now hinders some consumers in their search to buy a home, while also limiting the marketing opportunity for sellers. The legal fight is basically over who gets to control how home listings are marketed and displayed online. Zillow recently adopted a rule saying that if a home is marketed privately, such as behind a paywall, login, or private listing network, it should not also appear on Zillow. The policy, the real estate marketplace says, is meant to discourage "pocket listings," preserve transparency, and make sure buyers can see the full market. MRED sees it differently. It expanded its private listing network and partnered with Compass, which wants to give sellers more control over whether their homes are broadly publicized or marketed privately first. MRED argues that Zillow is violating MLS rules and licensing agreements by refusing to display certain listings, including private Compass listings. Consumers are now caught in the middle...

Ars Technica

IoT gadget maker AcuRite shares reasoning for killing customers’ favorite app

"The move to AcuRite NOW has not been as smooth as some customers expected ..."

21 May 2026 10:26pm GMT

OSnews

Google’s plan for ads in its new “AI” chatbot search engine is to let “AI” generate the ads

After Google killed its search engine a few days ago, one question remained: how exactly does advertising fit into all of this? Google is obviously not going to move to chatbot search without somehow adding ads to your conversation with the pachinko machine, so everybody was wondering how that was going to work, exactly. Well, we have the answer, and it's an obvious one. When researching a topic, consumers want to know exactly how a product suits their unique situation. In fact, 75% of people report making faster, more confident decisions using AI Mode in Search. 1 That's why we're testing two new types of ads, built with Gemini, that offer relevant product details along with helpful guidance. To help people evaluate their choices, both of these new formats will feature an independent AI explainer as part of the ad. Our Gemini model evaluates and synthesizes information about a product or service, and displays that context alongside the advertiser's creative. This coherent, independent response ensures transparency and builds trust. These formats will also continue to be clearly labeled as "Sponsored." ↫ Google's Ads & Commerce Blog Of course they're going to just generate the ads with "AI", too. Google will offer two types of "AI"-generated ads in their new chatbot search tool, the first of which will simply be an "AI"-generated answer to a user's question. If you ask the Google chatbot "how can I clean my bed sheets of unintended nightly slop discharge?", Google will generate an ad based on the features of a slopcleaner washing machine detergent product and show that to you. The second type comes in when a user asks something like "what is the best way to kill a search engine?" Google's chatbot will then show a number of ways to kill a search engine, and one of the items in that list might be an ad generated by Google, alongside the customary unrelated information, wrong information, and made-up nonsense. Google claims both of these types of ads will be labeled as such, but I doubt that small label will be noticed by many, and of course, there's no way to know any of the other answers the chatbot generates aren't paid-for either. Here, too, though, we must ask the question what the end game is. This new chatbot search engine is clearly trying to keep you on Google's website, but in doing so, it'll deprive large numbers of websites of the traffic they need to survive. If they can't survive, they're die. If they're dead, they can't produce the content Google "AI" needs to slobber up to spit back out in Google's chatbot search. Chatbot search is also an agent of its own destruction, because you can't generate improved slop with nothing but slop. Because, and I can't repeat this often enough, nobody has ever used "AI" to produce anything of value.

21 May 2026 10:04pm GMT

Ars Technica

As Grok flounders, SpaceX bets future on beating Big Tech at AI

SpaceX IPO filing pitches orbital data centers as Grok lags rival AI services.

21 May 2026 9:51pm GMT

OSnews

Twelve ways to be wrong about “AI”-assisted coding

Suppose your manager asks you next week to demonstrate that the AI coding tools your company signed up for are worth the subscription cost. Would you measure lines of code generated, or tickets closed? Or would you send out a survey asking whether developers feel more productive? Each of those approaches is flawed in a different way; the sections below explain why. ↫ Greg Wilson Every single study that claims to prove "AI" has a positive effect on productivity falls into one or more of these categories. Again, nobody has ever used "AI" to produce anything of value.

21 May 2026 9:43pm GMT

“AI” tools shit where they eat

The stories of "AI" bots and crawlers absolutely ravaging websites and services keep on coming, and the amount of work people have to do just to survive these "AI" bot and crawler assaults is insane. I run Weird Gloop, which hosts some of the biggest video game wikis ever, like Minecraft, OSRS and League. Over the last 3 years, we've had to spend more and more of our time fighting with this bot traffic that is spiky, disproportionately expensive, and getting harder to distinguish from humans. If we weren't constantly mitigating the bots, they would use ~10x more of our compute resources than everything else put together - even though that "everything else" includes tens of millions of (human) pageviews and tens of thousands of edits a day. Everyone who runs wikis is dealing with the exact same problem. The Wikimedia Foundation has a post about it impacting operations, every major wiki farm has had varying degrees of service outages, and some smaller independent wikis have been knocked completely offline. Overall, I'd guess that about 95% of all server issues in the wiki ecosystem this year have been caused by bad scrapers. ↫ cookmeplox at the Weird Gloop blog "AI" tools are a quintessential example of "shitting where you eat". All of these tools just suck up huge amounts of content created by actual humans, only to regurgitate bits and pieces of that content upon request according statistical models. If in that process of sucking up everybody's content, these tools are placing such amounts of undue stress and cost on the people making and hosting that content that said people stop making and hosting such content, where are these "AI" tools going to get their content from next? With every person that throws up their hands in the air in utter frustration as they see they're hosting bills skyrocket and their sites become unusable, "AI" tools are agents of their own destruction, since ingesting the slop they themselves create only makes these "AI" tools worse. Nobody has ever used "AI" to produce anything of value, after all.

21 May 2026 9:35pm GMT