nerd

23 Mar 2026

Slashdot

Reddit Is Weighing Identity Verification Methods To Combat Its Bot Problem

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: There could be one more step required before creating an account and posting on Reddit in the future. According to Reddit's CEO, Steve Huffman, the social media platform is exploring different ways to verify a user is human and not a bot. When asked by the TBPN podcast how to confirm that it's a human using Reddit, Huffman responded with several verification methods with varying degrees of heavy-handedness. "The most lightweight way is with something like Face ID or Touch ID," Huffman said during the interview. "They actually require a human presence, like a human has to touch, or do or look at something, so that actually just proves there's a person there or gets you pretty far." Besides these passkey methods that use biometrics data, Huffman said there are other options like relying on third-party services that are decentralized or don't require ID. On the other end of the spectrum, Huffman also mentioned more burdensome options, like ID-checking services. [...] "Part of our promise for our users is we don't know your name but we do want to know you're a person," Huffman said. "It'll be an evolution for us for a while, and probably every platform to find the right middle ground here." Reddit co-founder and former executive chair, Alexis Ohanian, said on X that Reddit requiring Face ID wasn't something he expected but agreed that something had to be done about the fake content from bots, adding that, "I just don't know how to sell face-scanning to Redditors or even lurkers." We reached out to Reddit's communications team and will update the story when we hear back. The Digg beta shut down earlier this month after failing to fight the overwhelming influx of AI-driven bots and spam. "The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts," said CEO Justin Mezzell. "We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us." "We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on."

Hacker News

iPhone 17 Pro Demonstrated Running a 400B LLM

Comments

23 Mar 2026 2:30pm GMT

Cyberattack on vehicle breathalyzer company leaves drivers stranded in the US

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23 Mar 2026 1:13pm GMT

Attractive students no longer receive better results as classes moved online

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23 Mar 2026 11:31am GMT

Slashdot

Will AI Force Source Code to Evolve - Or Make it Extinct?

Will there be an AI-optimized programming language at the expense of human readability? There's now been experiments with minimizing tokens for "LLM efficiency, without any concern for how it would serve human developers." This new article asks if AI will force source code to evolve - or make it extinct, noting that Stephen Cass, the special projects editor at IEEE Spectrum, has even been asking the ultimate question about our future. "Could we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future?" Cass acknowledged the obvious downsides. ("True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks.") But "instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh." This leads to some mind-boggling hypotheticals, like "What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code?" Cass asked the question and announced "an emergency interactive session" in October to discuss whether AI is signaling the end of distinct programming languages as we know them. In that webinar, Cass said he believes programmers in this future would still suggest interfaces, select algorithms, and make other architecture design choices. And obviously the resulting code would need to pass tests, Cass said, and "has to be able to explain what it's doing." But what kind of abstractions could go away? And then "What happens when we really let AIs off the hook on this?" Cass asked - when we "stop bothering" to have them code in high-level languages. (Since, after all, high-level languages "are a tool for human beings.") "What if we let the machines go directly into creating intermediate code?" (Cass thinks the machine-language level would be too far down the stack, "because you do want a compile layer too for different architecture....") In this future, the question might become 'What if you make fewer mistakes, but they're different mistakes?'" Cass said he's keeping an eye out for research papers on designing languages for AI, although he agreed that it's not a "tomorrow" thing - since, after all, we're still digesting "vibe coding" right now. But "I can see this becoming an area of active research." The article also quotes Andrea Griffiths, a senior developer advocate at GitHub and a writer for the newsletter Main Branch, who's seen the attempts at an "AI-first" languages, but nothing yet with meaningful adoption. So maybe AI coding agents will just make it easier to use our existing languages - especially typed languages with built-in safety advantages. And Scott Hanselman's podcast recently dubbed Chris Lattner's Mojo "a programming language for an AI world," just in the way it's designed to harness the computing power of today's multi-core chips.

GrapheneOS Refuses to Comply with Age-Verification Laws

An anonymous reader shared this report from Tom's Hardware: GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android fork, said in a post on X on Friday that it will not comply with emerging laws requiring operating systems to collect user age data at setup. "GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone around the world without requiring personal information, identification or an account," the project stated. "If GrapheneOS devices can't be sold in a region due to their regulations, so be it." The statement came after Brazil's Digital ECA (Law 15.211) took effect on March 17, imposing fines of up to R$50 million (roughly $9.5 million) per violation on operating system providers that fail to implement age verification... Motorola and GrapheneOS announced a long-term partnership at MWC on March 2, to bring to bring the hardened OS to future Motorola hardware, ending GrapheneOS's long-standing exclusivity to Google Pixel devices. A GrapheneOS-powered Motorola phone is expected in 2027. If Motorola sells devices with GrapheneOS pre-installed, those devices would need to comply with local regulations in every market where they ship, or Motorola may need to restrict sales geographically. Or, "People can buy the devices without GrapheneOS and install it themselves in any region where that's an issue," according to a post on the GrapheneOS BlueSky account. "Motorola devices with GrapheneOS preinstalled is something we want but it doesn't have to happen right away and doesn't need to happen everywhere for the partnership to be highly successful. Pixels are sold in 33 countries which doesn't include many countries outside North America and Europe." Tom's Hardware also notes that GrapheneOS "isn't the first and won't be the last company to outright refuse compliance with incoming age verification laws." "The developers of open-source calculator firmware DB48X issued a legal notice recently, stating that their software 'does not, cannot and will not implement age verification,' while MidnightBSD updated its license to ban users in Brazil."