Technology

YouTube expands age verification to more users. Several users are reporting on Reddit seeing new restrictions being applied to their accounts.

If you ever tried the infamous "Update and shut down" option in any Windows build, it often leads to a reboot instead to an actual shutdown. Now, Microsoft has finally fixed this issue starting with Windows 11 25H2 Build 26200.7019 (or 26100.7019 on 24H2). According to the Windows Latest, Microsoft has shipped this broken functionality way back with Windows 10, and has never fixed it since. However, the Windows teams working behind the update have finally managed to ship a working solution with a note stating in Windows 11 experiences that the new build: "Addressed underlying issue which can cause "Update and shutdown" to not actually shut down your PC after updating."

The industry keeps echoing ideas from bleak satires and cyberpunk stories as if they were exciting possibilities, not grim warnings.

In a recent article published in the New York Times, author Casey Michael Henry argues that today's tech industry keeps borrowing dystopian sci-fi aesthetics and ideas -- often the parts that were meant as warnings -- and repackages them as exciting products without recognizing that they were originally cautionary tales to avoid. "The tech industry is delivering on some of the futuristic notions of late-20th-century science fiction," writes Henry. "Yet it seems, at times, bizarrely unaware that many of those notions were meant to be dystopian or satirical -- dismal visions of where our worst and dumbest habits could lead us."

You worry that someone in today's tech world might watch "Gattaca" -- a film that features a eugenicist future in which people with ordinary DNA are relegated to menial jobs -- and see it as an inspirational launching point for a collaboration between 23andMe and a charter school. The material on Sora, for instance, can feel oddly similar to the jokes about crass entertainment embedded in dystopian films and postmodern novels. In the movie "Idiocracy," America loved a show called "Ow! My Balls!" in which a man is hit in the testicles in increasingly florid ways. "Robocop" imagined a show about a goggle-eyed pervert with an inane catchphrase. "The Running Man" had a game show in which contestants desperately collected dollar bills and climbed a rope to escape ravenous dogs. That Sora could be prompted to imagine a game show in which Michel Foucault chokeslams Ronald Reagan, or Prince battles an anaconda, doesn't feel new; it feels like a gag from a 1990s writer or a film about social decay.

The echoes aren't all accidental. Modern design has been influenced by our old techno-dystopias -- particularly the cyberpunk variety, with its neon-noir gloss and "high tech, low life" allure. From William Gibson novels to films like "The Matrix," the culture has taken in countless ruined cityscapes, all-controlling megacorporations, high-tech body modifications, V.R.-induced illnesses, deceptive A.I. paramours, mechanical assassins and leather-clad hacker antiheroes, navigating a dissociative cyberspace with savvily repurposed junk-tech. This was not a world many people wanted to live in, but its style and ethos seem to reverberate in the tech industry's boldest visions of the future.

The dye industry, heavy on the use of petrochemicals, is one of the world's biggest polluters. Now dyes can be made by microorganisms that -grow- colors.

https://archive.ph/3WZrp

California-based startup Reflect Orbital aims to build a swarm of 4,000 giant mirrors in low Earth orbit to "sell sunlight" to customers at night. Experts warn that the mirrors could mess with telescopes, blind stargazers and impact the environment.

Reflect Orbital, which was founded in 2021, has recently taken the first step in a scheme to sell sunlight at night by bouncing solar rays off giant "reflectors" that can redirect the vital resource almost anywhere on our planet. By doing this, the company aims to extend daylight hours in specific locations, thus allowing paying customers to generate solar power, grow crops and replace urban lighting.

But experts say it is a wildly impractical plan that should never get off the ground. What's more, the resulting light pollution could devastate ground-based astronomy, distract aircraft pilots and even blind stargazers.

Meta projected 10% of its 2024 revenue would come from ads for scams and banned goods, documents seen by Reuters show. And the social media giant internally estimates that its platforms show users 15 billion scam ads a day. Among its responses to suspected rogue marketers: charging them a premium for ads – and issuing reports on ’Scammiest Scammers.’

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/45192281

Archived

[...]

In a historic breach of China’s censorship infrastructure, internal data were leaked from Chinese infrastructure firms associated with the Great Firewall (GFW) in September this year. Researchers now estimate that the data has a volume of approximately 600 GB.

The material includes more than 100,000 documents, internal source code, work logs, configuration files, emails, technical manuals, and operational runbooks. The number of files in the dump is reported to be in the thousands, though exact totals vary by source.

[...]

An unexpected but critical component of the breach is the metadata embedded within documents and logs. Authorship tags, file paths, and computer hostnames have linked hundreds of documents to individual users, systems, and organizations. These human fingerprints offer unprecedented visibility into the organizational structure behind the GFW’s operation. Engineers, data analysts, lab researchers, and regional technicians are all traceable by name or system alias. Many entries refer to known ISPs, national labs, or university-affiliated nodes, suggesting that the enforcement apparatus spans a wide constellation of public-private partnerships, military-academic collaborations, and centralized policy deployment.

Together, these findings constitute a unique technical cross-section of the Chinese censorship-industrial complex, revealing not just what is filtered or how, but who enforces it, who maintains the infrastructure, and how decisions flow through the layered topology of digital control.

[...]

The current report represents only the first installment in a three-part investigative series into the unprecedented breach of China’s censorship apparatus. While this Part 1 has centered on exposing the dataset’s contents and evaluating its technical, organizational, and strategic significance, it is only the beginning. The sheer scale and complexity of the leak, over 500GB of internal GFW infrastructure data, demands a methodical, layered approach to fully grasp its implications.

The next two parts in this series will delve even deeper, uncovering the architecture of China’s censorship regime and examining the wider consequences for global digital governance.

Part 2 of the series will look into the architecture and will offer a forensic reconstruction of how the Great Firewall actually works at the technical level, mapping the core design of the censorship stack. This includes how packets are intercepted, filtered, redirected, or dropped; how apps like Psiphon and V2Ray are detected at the protocol level; and how traffic shaping is deployed based on geography, ISP, or session context.

Part 3 will the geopolitics and the fallout will address the broader implications. This breach does more than just reveal technical controls, it changes the strategic calculus of censorship resistance. We will assess how the exposure reshapes China’s ability to sustain its domestic information control and international cyber operations, and how it informs countermeasures by VPN developers, privacy advocates, and democratic governments. Ethical and legal questions will also be raised: what does responsible engagement with such data look like?

[...]

With this series, we aim to present not just the most complete picture yet of the GFW, but a roadmap for pushing back against the machinery of state censorship.

A great article about the future of Internet concerning AI.

The automaker announced on Wednesday as part of its “AI Day” that it is launching three robotaxi models. The vehicles will use four of Xpeng’s self-developed “Turing” AI chips. Xpeng claims the chips represent the combined highest in-car computing power in the world, at 3,000 TOPS, an industry measure.

**You Tube, which is owned by Google, confirmed to The Intercept that it deleted the groups' accounts as a direct result of State Department sanctions against the group after a review. The Trump administration leveled the sanctions against the organizations in September over their work with the International Criminal Court in cases charging Israeli officials of war crimes.

"Google is committed to compliance with applicable sanctions and trade compliance laws," YouTube spokesperson Boot Bullwinkle said in a statement.**

It is high time people moved to peertube.tv.

On November 4, 1952, CBS News used the UNIVAC computer to predict the U.S. presidential election. Early data pointed to an easy win for Dwight D. Eisenhower, but skeptical anchors delayed announcing it. When the results came in, UNIVAC was right, marking the first time a computer accurately forecast a national election.

"I've been saving for months to get the Corsair Dominator 64GB CL30 kit," one beleagured PC builder wrote on Reddit. "It was about $280 when I looked," said u/RaidriarT, "Fast forward today on PCPartPicker, they want $547 for the same kit? A nearly 100% increase in a couple months?"