fidzu : computers

The Washington Post looks at the rise of low-effort, high-volume "AI slop" videos: The major social media platforms, scared of driving viewers away, have tried to crack down on slop accounts, using AI tools of their own to detect and flag videos they believe were synthetically made. YouTube last month said it would demonetize creators for "inauthentic" and "mass-produced" content. But the systems are imperfect, and the creators can easily spin up new accounts - or just push their AI tools to pump out videos similar to the banned ones, dodging attempts to snuff them out. One place where they're coming from... Jiaru Tang, a researcher at the Queensland University of Technology who recently interviewed creators in China, said AI video has become one of the hottest new income opportunities there for workers in the internet's underbelly, who previously made money writing fake news articles or running spam accounts. Many university students, stay-at-home moms and the recently unemployed now see AI video as a kind of gig work, like driving an Uber. The average small creator she interviewed did their day jobs and then, at night, "spent two to three hours making AI-slop money," she said. A few she spoke with made $2,000 to $3,000 a month at it. But the article provides other examples of the "wild cottage industry of AI-video makers, enticed by the possibility of infinite creation for minimal work" A 31-year-old loan officer in eastern Idaho first went viral in June "with an AI-generated video on TikTok in which a fake but lifelike old man talked about soiling himself. Within two weeks, he had used AI to pump out 91 more, mostly showing fake street interviews and jokes about fat people to an audience that has surged past 180,000 followers..." (He told the Post the videos earn him about $5,000 a month through TikTok's creator program.) "To stand out, some creators have built AI-generated influencers with lives a viewer can follow along. 'Why does everybody think I'm AI? ... I'm a human being, just like you guys,' says the AI woman in one since-removed TikTok video, which was watched more than 1 million times." One AI-generated video a dog biting a woman's face off (revealing a salad) received a quarter of a billion views.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Aug 2025 3:34pm GMT

British telecommunications service provider Colt Telecom "has offices in over 30 countries across North America, Europe, and Asia, reports CPO magazine. "It manages nearly 1,000 data centers and roughly 75,000 km of fiber infrastructure." But now "a cyber attack has caused widespread multi-day service disruption..." On August 14, 2025, the telecom giant said it had detected a cyber attack that began two days earlier, on August 12. Upon learning of the cyber intrusion, the telecommunications service provider responded by proactively taking some systems offline to contain the cyber attack. Although Colt Telecom's cyber incident response team was working around the clock to mitigate the impacts of the cyber attack, service disruption has persisted for days. However, the service disruption did not affect the company's core network infrastructure, suggesting that Colt customers could still access its network services... The company also did not provide a clear timeline for resolving the service disruption. A week after the apparent ransomware attack, Colt Online and the Voice API platform remained unavailable. And now Colt Technology Services "confirms that customer documentation was stolen," reports the tech news site BleepingComputer: "A criminal group has accessed certain files from our systems that may contain information related to our customers and posted the document titles on the dark web," reads an updated security incident advisory on Colt's site. "We understand that this is concerning for you." "Customers are able to request a list of filenames posted on the dark web from the dedicated call centre." As first spotted by cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont, Colt added the no-index HTML meta tag to the web page, making it so it won't be indexed by search engines. This statement comes after the Warlock Group began selling on the Ramp cybercrime forum what they claim is 1 million documents stolen from Colt. The documents are being sold for $200,000 and allegedly contain financial information, network architecture data, and customer information... The Warlock Group (aka Storm-2603) is a ransomware gang attributed to Chinese threat actors who utilize the leaked LockBit Windows and Babuk VMware ESXi encryptors in attacks... Last month, Microsoft reported that the threat actors were exploiting a SharePoint vulnerability to breach corporate networks and deploy ransomware. "Colt is not the only telecom firm that has been named by WarLock on its leak website in recent days," SecurityWeek points out. "The cybercriminals claim to have also stolen data from France-based Orange." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00K for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Aug 2025 2:34pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: There's an overwhelming sense of deja vu at multiplexes these days. In August alone, "Black Swan" (2010) is returning to theaters, along with the Tim Burton "Batman" movies from 1989 and 1992. Audiences will be able to revisit the oceanic terror of "Jaws" (1975), as well as the comic mystery (and multiple endings) of "Clue" (1985). Or they could groove to Prince's "Sign o' the Times" concert film from 1987. And it doesn't look like the rerelease trend is slowing down. In September, "The Breakfast Club" (1985) is returning, Pixar is bringing back "Toy Story" (1995), and "Apollo 13" (1995) is blasting off again. "Casper" (1995) will haunt screens for nearly the entire month of October, while "Avatar: The Way of Water" (2022) will run for about five days, teeing up the forthcoming "Avatar: Fire and Ash." And there are still more to come before the end of the year. Rereleases have long been part of the theatrical ecosystem. After all, "Star Wars" movies have been heading back to multiplexes routinely since 1981 -- before "Return of the Jedi" even debuted. But recently, studios have been digging deeper into their archives for a variety of reasons -- only some of which have to do with nostalgia. "Black Swan," from Searchlight, which is now owned by Disney, took over around 200 IMAX screens to commemorate its 15th anniversary. Universal's specialty arm, Focus Features, rereleased both "Pride & Prejudice" (2005) and "Brokeback Mountain" (2005) earlier this year. "Pride & Prejudice" ultimately grossed more than $6 million domestically this time around, about 16 percent of its original U.S. box office haul. In total, Universal has 12 rereleases on its 2025 slate -- not including a partnership with another distribution company -- compared with just four in 2024 and two in 2023. "We very much pay a lot of attention to our repertory business," the studio's president of domestic theatrical distribution, Jim Orr, said by phone, explaining, "We just think it's not only great fun for audiences, but a great business to be in as well." Orr explained that the size of Universal's rerelease slate this year was "more coincidental" than anything else, with all the films hitting anniversaries in 2025. Still, there is a strong business motivation: The rereleases help studios and exhibitors pad out relatively thin slates. "The truth of the matter is studios don't have enough product right now to give theaters, so that's why you're seeing an influx of these nostalgia plays," said Jeff Bock, senior media analyst at Exhibitor Relations. He added, "It doesn't cost a lot for them to do an anniversary edition or a 4K edition." There are several other reasons why Hollywood is rereleasing old movies, according to Orr. Rereleases are far cheaper to put out than launching a brand-new title. Studios also target films that already have strong, enduring audiences, "whether that's 'Pride & Prejudice,' with its meme-able depiction of yearning, or 'Casper,'" which he said had elicited 'decent' interest every year. Then there's what Orr calls "opportunistic dating." "There might be a window where something goes thematically or holiday-wise, whatever kind of fits in, or there might be some more screens available in specific formats," he said. Specialty format releases like IMAX, Dolby, or 3D also help bring moviegoers to the theaters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Aug 2025 1:00pm GMT

If you think climate change is a hoax, you might believe wind turbines poison groundwater.

23 Aug 2025 11:07am GMT

Words you'll never speak still cause activity in the brain's speech centers.

23 Aug 2025 11:00am GMT

The bacterium is known to live in Mississippi, but the new cases may expand its range.

22 Aug 2025 10:28pm GMT

It's not AI winter just yet, though there is a distinct chill in the air. Meta is shaking up and downsizing its artificial intelligence division. A new report out of MIT finds that 95 percent of companies' generative AI programs have failed to earn any profit whatsoever. Tech stocks tanked Tuesday, regarding broader fears that this bubble may have swelled about as large as it can go. Surely, there will be no wider repercussions for normal people if and when Nvidia, currently propping up the market like a load-bearing matchstick, finally runs out of fake companies to sell chips to. But getting in under the wire, before we're all bartering gas in the desert and people who can read become the priestly caste, is Microsoft, with the single most "Who asked for this?" application of AI I've seen yet: They're jamming it into Excel. ↫ Barry Petchesky at Defector I'm going to skip over the mounting and palpable uneasiness that the cracks in the "AI" bubble are starting to form, and go right to that thing about Excel. Quite possible one of the most successful applications of all time, and the backbone of countless small, medium, and even large business, it started out as a Mac program to supplant Microsoft's MultiPlan, which was being clobbered in the market by Lotus 1-2-3. It wasn't until version 2.0 that it came to Intel, as an application that contained a Windows runtime. It was a port of Excel 2.0 for the Mac. Anyway, it took a few years, but Excel took over the market, and I don't think any other spreadsheet program has ever even remotely threatened its market dominance ever since. Well, not until Google Sheets arrived on the scene - it's hard to find any useful numbers, but it seems Google Sheets is insanely popular in all kinds of sectors, at least according to Statista. They claim Google's online office suite has a 49% market share, with Microsoft Office sitting at 29%. I have no idea how that translates into the usage shares of Google Sheets versus Microsoft Excel, but it's a sign of the times, regardless. One of the things you'd expect a spreadsheet to do is calculate numbers and tabulate data, and to do so accurately. The core competency of a computer is to compute, do stuff with numbers, and we'd flip out collective shit if our computers failed to do such basic arithmetic. So, what if I told you that Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to add "AI" to Excel, and as such, has to add a disclaimer that this means Excel may not do basic arithmetic correctly? Look, we can all disagree on the use of "AI", where it makes sense, where it doesn't, if it even does anything useful, and so on, but I would assume - for the world's sake - that we can at least agree that using "AI" in an application used to do very important calculations for a lot of business is a really, really dumb idea? Is the person doing the bookkeeping in Excel at Windmill Restaurant, in Spearville, Kansas, properly aware of the limitations of "AI", or are they not following technology that closely, and as such only hear the marketing and hype? A spreadsheet should give accurate outcomes based on the input given by humans. The moment you let a confabulator loose on your spreadsheet, it ceases being a tool that can be used for anything even remotely serious. The fact that Microsoft is adding this nonsense to Excel and letting it loose on the unsuspecting public at large is absolutely wild to me, and I can assure you it's going to have serious consequences for a lot of people. Microsoft, of course, will be able to point at the disclaimer buried in some random support document and absolve itself of any and all responsibility. I'd like to point out that Lotus 1-2-3 probably still runs on Windows 11, for no reason at all.

21 Aug 2025 9:15pm GMT

If you have spent any time around HID devices under Linux (for example if you are an avid mouse, touchpad or keyboard user) then you may have noticed that your single physical device actually shows up as multiple device nodes (for free! and nothing happens for free these days!). If you haven't noticed this, run libinput record and you may be part of the lucky roughly 50% who get free extra event nodes. ↫ Peter Hutterer I've honestly always wondered about this, since some of my laptops shows both a trackpad and a mouse configuration panel even when there's no mouse plugged in. Thanks to this article, I now know why this happens.

20 Aug 2025 1:28pm GMT

There's a ton of "cloud operating systems" out there, which basically are really fancy websites that try to look and feel like an operating system. There's obviously a ton of skill and artistry involved in making these, but I always ignore them because they're not really operating systems. And let's be honest here - how many people are interested in booting their PC, loading their operating system, logging in, starting their browser, and logging into a website to see a JavaScript desktop that's slower and more cumbersome than what they are already using to power their browser anyway? Still, that doesn't mean they can't have any interesting ideas or other aspects worth talking about. Take OS Yamato for instance; yes, it's one of those cloud operating systems, this time aimed at your mobile device, but it has something interesting that stood out to me. The system is partly ephemeral, and objects that haven't been altered or opened in a year will simply be deleted from the system. Each data object (note, photo, contact…) includes a lastOpenedAt timestamp. After 330 days, it shows a icon - a sign of digital wilting. After 365 days, it's automatically deleted. ↫ OS Yamato GitHub page The project definitely sounds more like an art installation than something anybody is supposed to seriously use in their day-to-day lives, and seems to ask the question: just how important are all those digital scraps you collect over the years, really? If you haven't bothered to open something in a year, is it really worth saving? For instance, from the moment I started my translation career in 2011 up until I quit in 2024, I saved every single translation I ever made, neatly organized in folders, properly backed up to multiple locations. I still have this archive, still make sure it's safe, but I never actually use it for anything, never open a single one of the files, I honestly don't even really care that much about it. So why am I still wasting so much energy in keeping it around? That seems to be the question OS Yamato poses, and there's something to be said for being less anal about which digital scraps we keep around, and why. It hasn't convinced me - yet - to delete my translation archive or perform any other pruning, but it did plant a seed.

20 Aug 2025 1:16pm GMT

Starting with 7.4.1-2, the following Zabbix system user accounts (previously shipped by their related packages) will no longer be used. Instead, all Zabbix components will now rely on a shared zabbix user account (as originally intended by upstream and done by other distributions):

• zabbix-server
• zabbix-proxy
• zabbix-agent (also used by the zabbix-agent2 package)
• zabbix-web-service

This shared zabbix user account is provided by the newly introduced zabbix-common split package, which is now a dependency for all relevant zabbix-* packages. The switch to the new user account is handled automatically for the corresponding main configuration files and systemd service units. However, manual intervention may be required if you created custom files or configurations referencing to and / or being owned by the above deprecated users accounts, for example:

• PSK files used for encrypted communication
• Custom scripts for metrics collections or report generations
• sudoers rules for metrics requiring elevated privileges to be collected
• ...

Those should therefore be updated to refer to and / or be owned by the new zabbix user account, otherwise some services or user parameters may fail to work properly, or not at all. Once migrated, you may remove the obsolete user accounts from your system.

04 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT

Since GNOME 48, users can now preserve their battery health directly from GNOME Settings. Currently, this feature only works on laptops that support both start and end charge thresholds, such as ThinkPads. Ideally, we'd like to support every laptop with any form of charge threshold control but that isn't …

04 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT

In Arch Linux, as part of RFC40, we have recently decided to license all Arch Linux package sources as 0BSD. Our package sources didn't have any license previously. RFC40 only specified that we do want to license our package sources but it didn't specify how to ensure this. As such, in RFC52 we decided we want to use REUSE to achieve that. NOTE: It might be a bit confusing that our PKGBUILD files also have a license field. However, this field specifies the upstream license, i.e. the license of the software that we package. It does not specify …

02 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT