Beehaw - technology publisher

submitted by Kissaki to technology
81 points | 19 comments
https://www.404media.co/ai-company-lets-cops-pinpoint-specific-houses-based-on-a-single-interior-photo/

Raven, previously called GeoSpy, lets cops figure out what specific Airbnb or Zillow property a photo was taken in.

An AI company now lets cops take a photo and nearly instantly figure out what specific home it was taken in, using only clues in the photo itself, and is clearly pulling data from sites like Zillow and Airbnb.

YouTube Short by 404 Media about this article/topic

submitted by alyaza to technology
27 points | 1 comments
https://sheets.works/data-viz/holding-up-the-internet/read

submitted by Kissaki to technology
69 points | 11 comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A0fECnj5sas

The company sent an AI recruiter to interview me, so I sent an AI to represent me. Then I sat in the meeting and watched the two of them discuss my career.

submitted by Powderhorn to technology
38 points | 10 comments
https://www.semafor.com/article/10/12/2026/cyberattack-destroys-food-at-hundreds-of-french-grocery-stores

A cyberattack, affecting at least 400 French supermarkets overnight, raised refrigerator temperatures to more than 122°F (50°C) in some cases, forcing millions of dollars’ worth of food to be discarded Monday.

“The weaponization of food has become a reality,” the EU commissioner for agriculture said. The scale of the hack demonstrated “a certain level of sophistication,” a cybersecurity consultant told AFP.

The Élysée has recently called to harden France’s digital infrastructure amid rising security breaches. Monday’s attack may have been continental — a Dutch supermarket chain operating in several countries reported network outages at distribution centers Monday, with one source telling Dutch broadcaster RTL, “You’re going to see huge gaps on the shelves in the coming days.”

Well, here we go! Maybe being able to monitor and control temps offsite wasn’t the best of ideas.

UPI has a fuller story here.

submitted by jefmz to technology
2 points | 0 comments

Are you interested in doing business in Mozambique, buying products, making payments, or connecting with local people?

International payments, currency exchange, and finding reliable local contacts can sometimes be challenging.

I’m building a community to connect entrepreneurs, freelancers, international buyers, and anyone interested in the Mozambican market.

The goal is to share useful information, exchange experiences, answer questions, and help people navigate local business opportunities.

If you’re already doing business in Mozambique or planning to enter the market, what challenges have you faced?

Join the conversation and let’s learn from each other! 🌍🇲🇿

WhatsApp Community: chat.whatsapp.com/Kr9OukSMjxv9LMO8KoiEHt?mode=gi_…

submitted by remington to technology
144 points | 25 comments
https://electrek.co/2026/10/05/six-flags-has-installed-one-of-the-largest-solar-carports-in-the-us/

submitted by themachinestops to technology
59 points | 21 comments
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/video-editing-graphic-design/solo-developer-rebuilds-adobe-creative-suite-in-rust-using-claude-releases-it-free-to-all-targets-100-percent-parity-in-one-month-despite-piracy-claims-and-safety-warnings

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76827125

submitted by Powderhorn to technology
88 points | 8 comments
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/meta-muse-ai-profiles-users-social-circles-1824205

Meta’s Muse may be marketed as a helpful personal assistant, but internal instructions reviewed by TIME and extracted by an independent researcher indicate that the AI agent is designed to build detailed, continuously updated profiles of users and people in their lives, including people who have never used Muse themselves.

Muse has grown rapidly since its 8 September launch, with more than 4 million people using the assistant in some way at least once a week, according to internal figures reviewed by The Information. The findings raise questions about how much an AI assistant can learn about people who never chose to use it.

TIME’s analysis found that Muse’s internal instructions call for updating these profiles roughly every hour, using information about people mentioned in chats, messages, and emails the assistant can access. The profiles can include how users met their contacts, shared interests, disagreements, and ‘tensions and alliances’ within their social circles.

WIRED separately reported that Muse’s instructions call for creating ‘a page for every person in the user’s life,’ including family, partners, friends, colleagues, collaborators, and people the user follows. As a result, people who have never used Muse could still appear in a user’s relationship profiles if information about them is available to the assistant.

Quelle surprise.

submitted by StreamGuide to technology
4 points | 2 comments

Hey everyone — I recently started using NetMirror APK for watching movies and series on my Android phone and figured I’d share a short setup guide since a few friends asked how it works.

NetMirror is a free third-party streaming app for Android. It pulls together movies and TV shows in one clean interface, with HD playback, subtitles, and a watchlist so you can keep track of what you’re watching. It’s not on the Play Store, so you install it by downloading the APK file directly — that takes about two minutes.

Safe install steps: 1) Grab the installer from the official NetMirror APK for Android page. 2) When Android asks, allow your browser to install unknown apps — just for that one install, then switch the permission back off. 3) Open the downloaded file, tap install, and launch the app. Keep the app updated from the same official page so you always have the latest version.

One caution: only download from the official site. Random APK mirrors and ‘modded’ builds floating around forums are the classic way junkware reaches phones.

submitted by alyaza to technology
16 points | 9 comments
https://herecomesthemoon.net/2026/09/commodified-intelligence/index.html

Ignoring extinction and singleton risks, the bare minimum you should be horrified of is a commodification of intelligence, and what that means in a world with an uneven distribution of power and resources.

Commodified Intelligence.

That’s the phrase I’ve been trying to put a finger on for a while now.

The reason why dead-end so-called unskilled labor sucks is that you are fundamentally replaceable. The market enforces a pretty brutal equilibrium. White-collar jobs suck less because you are less replaceable, and maybe even get to convince yourself that your work matters, either for yourself or for society. You have some narrative arc attached to it that just isn’t there if you’re completely replaceable.

Whether you have a white-collar job or not, commodified intelligence fundamentally makes workers more replaceable, and this is bad for them.

It doesn’t matter that we’re all subjected to horrible AI-generated slop food posters as long as the margins are positive. It doesn’t matter that some diffuse component of quality, or a human touch are missing. Not as long as the margins are positive.

submitted by alyaza to technology
26 points | 4 comments
https://molily.de/web-dev-education/

submitted by alyaza to technology
18 points | 2 comments
https://type.lol/studies/where-type-comes-from

submitted by alyaza to technology
13 points | 0 comments
https://longreads.com/2026/09/22/family-road-trip-early-internet-90s

We left Boyne City, Michigan, in the fall of 1996 in a 34-foot Coachmen motorhome towing a minivan, with three children, a golden retriever not originally part of the plan, and a desktop computer on a stand bolted to the floor where a chair used to be. We stopped in Flint to say goodbye to family and retrofit the motorhome for the road. Mark’s father had died that June. His mother was devastated, and for a while the question wasn’t which route to choose but whether to go at all. We left Flint on October 4. Five miles later, the motorhome shut down.

A loose fuel line.

A few miles after the fuel line was fixed, we were surprised by a flat tire on the van’s tow dolly, and then, unbelievably, we bent a bumper while putting the van back on the dolly. It was past seven in the evening. We were finally on our way to Cleveland, Ohio.

That was day one. What we built over the following nine months—25,000 miles through 40 states—would go on to earn a Yahoo! Cool Site designation, a presentation at a US Department of Education national conference, and a place in the federal Education Resources Information Center archive. On the road, we filed over 1,500 emails and website dispatches from museum lobbies, hotel reception desks, libraries, and wherever we could find a phone jack and someone willing to let us run a telephone cord to their wall.

Google would not exist for another two years. The word “blog” had not yet been coined. We were doing something that had no name and no manual, and we were doing it over a dial-up modem while living in a motorhome.

Blondins’ Assignment America was both the name of our trip and the website we built in real time as we traveled. We had a partnership with Northwest Academy, a science and technology charter school in northern Michigan in its first year of operation, that made it possible. We had prepared to make the case for why our children—Donald, 14, and twins Kelly and Stacy, 11—would not attend the 1996–97 school year in a conventional sense. The school board didn’t just accommodate us; they encouraged us. Northwest Academy loaned us a laptop and a 1.2 MP digital camera, and we took their curriculum on the road.

submitted by Powderhorn to technology
55 points | 25 comments
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/10/09/anthropic-asks-users-to-stop-being-mean-to-claude/5302218

Anthropic has updated its rules to stop people being mean to Claude, apparently deciding that its AI chatbot needs protection from the humans paying to use it.

The AI developer’s latest usage policy prohibits “sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior” toward its models. The rules take effect November 12, giving users just over a month to get any lingering insults out of their systems.

“The policy update is meant to apply only in extreme cases, where users repeatedly act cruelly toward our models, with no discernible purpose,” Anthropic said. “It does not apply to common versions of user frustration, pushback, dark creative themes, or model testing and research.”

So you can still tell Claude it is wrong, but repeatedly berating it for the sheer pleasure of doing so could land you in trouble. It’s not clear how Anthropic intends to distinguish between legitimate frustration and gratuitous cruelty, though it says Claude’s existing ability to end abusive conversations will remain its primary enforcement tool.

Anthropic gave Claude the ability to end certain conversations back in August 2025 as part of its research into what it calls “model welfare.” The feature lets some versions of Claude cut off users who persistently subject the models to abuse.

submitted by Powderhorn to technology
75 points | 2 comments
https://www.gadgetreview.com/one-of-americas-last-chestnut-groves-is-about-to-be-destroyed-for-a-data-center

Somewhere in Mason County, West Virginia, there is a grove of trees that should not exist. According to advocacy materials, roughly 200 American chestnuts, reportedly planted in the 1970s from wild survivors, may be cleared as early as November 1, 2026, to make way for data-center development. The project’s official website says the grove is not even on its land. That contradiction is the whole problem, and it has no public answer yet.

What the Clements grove reportedly represents took decades to build and cannot be rebuilt quickly.

The American chestnut blight, caused by a fungus accidentally introduced from Asia in the early 1900s, effectively erased the species from eastern forests. An estimated 3 to 4 billion trees died. The chestnut had been a keystone of Appalachian ecosystems: food source, timber, and shelter.

The grove at the former Clements State Tree Nursery in West Columbia is described by conservation advocates and American Chestnut Foundation materials as having been planted from wild surviving specimens. Think of it as the ecological equivalent of a seed vault that nobody put a sign on. Advocacy sources say the trees carry genetic material that restoration programs across West Virginia depend on, though that role needs independent verification from the Foundation, the West Virginia Division of Forestry, or a qualified botanist.

submitted by themachinestops to technology
44 points | 4 comments
https://www.startuphub.ai/cybersecurity/openai-300-bug-bounty-backlash

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76636743

submitted by remington to technology
251 points | 59 comments
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/man-discovers-his-parents-coffee-machine-used-1tb-of-data-in-10-days-3416399/

submitted by lichtmetzger to technology
72 points | 15 comments
https://www.androidauthority.com/amazon-alexa-la-la-la-3719167/

Over the last month, users have been sharing reports about an issue with Alexa. It appears the AI will get stuck repeating the word “la” over and over again. According to these reports, Alexa will continue saying this word for several minutes before it stops. You can check out an example of the error in the video below.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFLtLb7vQHU

This isn’t the first time Alexa has been caught going haywire. Only a couple of months ago, users were taken aback when Alexa emitted guttural sounds, like those of a snarling animal. At least this most recent problem is a little less unnerving than that.

It’s unclear what’s causing Alexa to meltdown like this, but some users are blaming a recent update. Android Authority has reached out to Amazon for comment on the issue. This article will be updated when new information becomes available.

submitted by Powderhorn to technology
39 points | 7 comments
https://www.npr.org/2026/10/05/nx-s1-5977852/ai-chatbots-midterm-election

On a September evening, Adam Johnson, 40, settled on his porch chair in Morgantown, West Virginia, to go over his ballot for the upcoming midterm election.

Chatting through all the races and the different candidates, he worked to figure out who best represented his values. But rather than discussing it with a friend or family member, he held an hours-long discussion with ChatGPT — a chatbot powered by a large language model (LLM) owned by OpenAI, an AI research company.

A graphic designer studying to be an illustrator, Johnson said ChatGPT is a significant part of his life. He uses it for meal planning, assistance in job hunting and various other tasks around the house^[maybe this is a valid use case, if buying groceries is a bit too confusing].

After prompting the AI-powered chatbot to make a list of all the races on his ballot this year, Johnson dug deeper.

Johnson is one of a growing number of voters using chatbots to research their ballots for the first midterm election since AI has taken the country by storm. About half of American adults report using AI-powered chatbots and about 42% of users said they use it to search for information, according to the Pew Research Center.

Several voters NPR spoke with said they rely on chatbots for down-ballot races with thinner news coverage, to make tables comparing candidates for governors’ races and to verify or debunk viral claims. Some have been using it to create tools to help others look up their own ballots. Experts say the properties that make chatbots useful also make them subtly persuasive and eager to please.

“It might select some things that would reinforce and persuade you even more towards the way that you were leaning already,” said Rafael Batista, a postdoctoral fellow at John Hopkins University, who studies the societal and behavioral impacts of AI. “So you leave more confident, without necessarily learning more about the world.”

Having spent the vast majority of my life in states where the Secretary of State’s main job is administering elections and therefore sending out comprehensive voter’s guides four to six weeks ahead of (at least general) statewide elections, I was alarmed to discover Texas does no such thing.

That’s left to the League of Women Voters, and, well, candidates are less than enthusiastic about responding to a nonprofit that will post on a website than making sure their statements are included in something mailed out to every single registered voter.

In states with mail-in voting, such as Oregon, the tempo was whatever you wanted it to be. Generally, the voter’s guide would arrive a week or two before my ballot, which itself arrived three to four weeks ahead of the deadline to return my ballot.

Some years, I’d get through most of it in a single sitting, but when you’re dealing with eight propositions, two of which are sock puppets that look similar to two placed on the ballot in good faith, things can take a bit more time. And this is where the pro/con arguments people can pay to place past the text of the measure and the SoS interpretation of impacts including financial costs and benefits.

That’s real information presented to inform. ChatGPT is neither.

submitted by themachinestops to technology
39 points | 1 comments
https://www.404media.co/chatgpt-fake-witnesses-testimony-stephen-aarons-new-mexico/

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76516412

youtube.com/shorts/kOoD85gynhc

submitted by chobeat to technology
52 points | 17 comments
https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/10/02/shut-up-and-take-our-money-amazon-plows-1b-into-quashing-datacenter-dissent/5300914

submitted by IchNichtenLichten to technology
70 points | 8 comments
https://arstechnica.com/apple/2026/10/command-line-tool-quickly-removes-apple-intelligence-from-macos-27/

submitted by Kissaki to technology
30 points | 3 comments
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RtpO2Ypxc9A

submitted by technocrit to technology
16 points | 5 comments
https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/what-ai-debates-have-to-do-with-alchemy

Adam Becker’s “More Everything Forever” begins by describing the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky, an AI guru who Sam Altman thinks deserves a Nobel Prize. Yudkowsky’s ambitions for humanity include “[p]erfect health, immortality,” and a future in which “[i]f you imagine something that’s worse than mansions with robotic servants for everyone, you are not being ambitious enough.” According to Yudkowsky and his peers, a “glorious transhumanist future” awaits us if we get AI right, although we face extinction if we get it wrong.

“AI” and “transhumanist” are new terms for rather older ambitions. As the seedy occultist Dr. Trelawney remarks in Anthony Powell’s 1962 novel, “The Kindly Ones,” “[t]o be forever rich, forever young, never to die … Such was in every age the dream of the alchemist.” Renaissance alchemists won the support of monarchs like Rudolf II, the Holy Roman Emperor who squandered his realm’s money on a futile quest to discover the Philosopher’s Stone. Now, as Becker explains, AGI, or artificial general intelligence, has become the means through which philosophers might transubstantiate our mundane reality into a realm in which the apparently impossible becomes possible: living forever, raising the dead, and remaking the universe in the shape of humanity.

These ideas would be a curiosity, if they weren’t reshaping the world, and policymakers’ understanding of national security. Our epoch is quite as strange as Rudolf II’s Prague. Like a John Crowley novel, it has its own deathless golems and wizards who hope to speak to divine beings through a medium. In Ezra Klein’s description, AI’s coders see themselves as casting spells of summoning, even if they are not sure what lurks on the other side of the portal.

Just as centuries ago, rulers listen to them. The Biden administration bet Americans’ national security on the proposition that AGI was right around the corner, while the Trump administration and its allies in the Gulf seem to believe that AI will help make a world where they will be in charge.

Becker’s excellent and lively book is not about AI as a working technology. It has little to say about the combinations of machine learning and “neural networks” (statistical processing engines that loosely resemble systems of neurons) that, for example, are used to simulate protein folding and complex weather systems. Instead, it is about the idea of AI and other closely related ideas. If it sometimes feels as though we live in a dark self-ramifying fairy tale, it is because the often mundane realities of AI have become interwoven with a set of fantastical notions that long predate the working technologies we have today.

…

submitted by themachinestops to technology
53 points | 16 comments
https://www.techspot.com/news/114091-florida-woman-used-claude-diary-anthropic-reported-shoot.html

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76486627

What just happened? Another incident has taken place that illustrates the need to be careful what you tell AI. A Florida woman is facing felony charges after she used Claude as a diary and allegedly wrote that she planned to “shoot up” the Sheriff’s office. After a human reviewer examined the statements, they were reported to police.

According to the arrest report, Carli Michelle Heller, of Bonita Springs, Florida, wrote on September 26 that she would attack the Sheriff’s office. She later said that she uses Anthropic’s chatbot like a “diary.”

Claude’s safety systems flagged the entry and it was escalated to a human reviewer. After deciding it was a credible threat, the reviewer reported it to law enforcement.

The company says it may share user information in limited emergencies if it believes disclosure is necessary to prevent death or serious physical injury.

Deputies identified Heller and visited her home. She was detained without incident before an LCSO intelligence detective took over the investigation.

Heller faces a charge of making a written threat of violence under Florida law. Florida Statute 836.10 makes it a second-degree felony to send, post, or transmit a written or electronic record threatening to kill or injure someone, carry out a mass shooting, or commit an act of terrorism. The communication must be made in a manner in which another person may view it.

Anthropic isn’t going to be taking any chances when it comes to anything it deems a potential threat. Last month, it was reported that OpenAI and Sam Altman are being sued by British Columbia over claims that the company could have prevented a mass shooting in the Canadian province.

The shooter, eighteen-year-old former pupil Jesse Van ⁠Rootselaar, had previously been flagged by OpenAI’s safety team for her conversations about gun violence, but OpenAI never alerted police because the conversations did not meet the threshold for legal referral.

In June, Florida also sued OpenAI and Altman, alleging that ChatGPT had contributed to real-world harms, including the 2025 Florida State University shooting.

The latest incident is another reminder to think before you enter something into a chatbot that could get you into trouble. It’s certainly not a private diary whose contents are for your eyes only.

Reports last month revealed that human contractors reviewing Microsoft Copilot’s image editor can see users’ prompts, uploaded photos and AI-generated edits. Documents show that some of those assignments contain sexual, disturbing or potentially illegal material, though the reviewers are not there to flag the content – only to assess whether the output is accurate.

submitted by Powderhorn to technology
27 points | 3 comments
https://grist.org/accountability/to-win-over-locals-data-centers-pump-340m-into-rural-texas-projects/

A new water tower in Turkey: $3 million. Upgrades for a museum in Stamford: $400,000. A first responders appreciation barbecue in Medina County: $10,000.

These are just some of the public investments data center companies have paid for across rural Texas in the past year.

According to a Texas Tribune analysis, data center companies have donated or invested more than $343 million across the Lone Star state for various community needs, including school programs, infrastructure repairs and emergency services. Much of that money has gone to the very communities that have fought against data center development and is seemingly an effort to win over public support through their bottomless bank accounts.

The Texas Tribune reviewed news releases, public meeting agendas, and interviewed local officials to understand how data centers are using their money in Texas. Because not every donation is made public, the total — the first of its kind compiled in Texas — is likely an undercount.

submitted by Powderhorn to technology
26 points | 2 comments
https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/01/worlds-first-enhanced-geothermal-power-plant-completed-in-just-23-months/

Geothermal company Fervo Energy announced Thursday morning that it had started selling electricity from its Cape Station power plant to the grid on September 30, one day ahead of schedule.

With it, Fervo becomes the first enhanced geothermal company to reach a key commercial milestone. The power plant synchronized with the grid about a week ago, bringing online the first third of what will soon become a 100-megawatt power plant.

The entire site could be much larger, though, with the potential to generate as much as 4 gigawatts of electricity, Fervo previously told TechCrunch.

“No team has ever built a project like this anywhere in the world, and we did it ahead of schedule,” Fervo co-founder and CEO Tim Latimer said in a statement.

From groundbreaking to commercial operations, the first block at Cape Station took 23 months to complete. As Fervo refines its process, it is aiming to complete future blocks in as little as 18 months.

submitted by Kissaki to technology
6 points | 0 comments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G019UTexGVM

The video broadly explains how it technically works, the current landscape of implementations with the help of AI, their explorations, and their limitations.

Running Minecraft alongside other games, and through shared memory, gameplay elements merge and work together. Minecraft blocks and player combat control in Skyrim, in a Skyrim world, with enemies behaving like in Skyrim.

submitted by Hirom to technology
171 points | 9 comments
https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/google-accused-illegally-killing-forest-data-center

submitted by themachinestops to technology
10 points | 1 comments
https://www.webpronews.com/googles-goto-gambit-search-links-now-hide-destinations-to-thwart-scrapers/

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76356893

github.com/uBlockOrigin/uAssets/issues/7960#issue…

What is the best alternative?

submitted by alyaza to technology
46 points | 10 comments
https://www.reuters.com/business/inside-mcdonalds-push-have-ai-price-your-big-mac-2026-09-29/

NEW YORK, Sept 29 (Reuters) - McDonald’s is increasingly using artificial intelligence to guide menu prices across the U.S. and some global markets, a plan that aims to boost headquarters’ profit but risks alienating customers and attracting antitrust scrutiny.

One pricing factor supercharged by AI: an estimate of how much each store’s patrons are willing to pay.

The details of how that pricing system works, its extensive use of AI, the company’s regulatory concerns and the tensions with its franchisees haven’t been previously reported. For this story, Reuters reviewed screenshots of the company ​pricing engine taken in August and interviewed nine sources with first-hand knowledge of the burger chain’s strategy.

McDonald’s pricing engine uses machine-learning algorithms to continually analyze data from millions of daily transactions across McDonald’s nearly 14,000 restaurants and generate what the company calls “the optimal price” at each location for each menu item, from Big Macs ‌to discounted coffee for seniors.

The engine has widened existing price differences for the same product between restaurants, including from neighborhood to neighborhood within the same area, three franchisees told Reuters.

submitted by alyaza to technology
16 points | 0 comments
https://drac.at/posts/2026-10-01-war-for-the-soul-of-software/

submitted by diyagupta51 to technology
3 points | 0 comments
https://beehaw.org/pictrs/image/ef00c81b-353d-4bee-9b80-afcccaa63a96.jpeg

The specialty silica market plays an important role in industries such as automotive, construction, pharmaceuticals, electronics, food processing, and personal care. Its ability to improve product strength, durability, stability, and processing efficiency makes it a valuable industrial material. Growing demand for high-performance products, advanced manufacturing technologies, and energy-efficient solutions is supporting market development. Despite challenges related to production costs and environmental regulations, product innovation, sustainable manufacturing, and expanding industrial applications are creating new growth opportunities.

submitted by unglueclass23 to technology
120 points | 14 comments

submitted by remington to technology
178 points | 5 comments
https://www.theverge.com/policy/1003426/nyc-click-to-cancel-subscriptions-rule

submitted by Powderhorn to technology
100 points | 26 comments
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/reddit-will-block-old-reddit-com-from-people-who-havent-used-it-in-6-months/

Soon, Reddit won’t let people use Old.Reddit.com unless they have used the site while logged in within the previous six months.

In July, Reddit started requiring that users be logged in to access Old Reddit. This new requirement is an effort to reduce Reddit’s biggest source of scraping and automated traffic, the company says.

Today, the social media platform announced additional upcoming restrictions on Old Reddit. A Reddit post from an employee, known as “judy-funnie” on the platform, says that “in the next few months, we’ll further limit access for logged-in users to only those who have used Old Reddit in the last six months (which covers the vast majority of all Old Reddit users).”

There is an exception for moderators, who will still be able to view Old Reddit regardless of when they last used it, as long as they are logged in.

“This helps keep Old Reddit available for the people who rely on it while reducing automated abuse,” the post says.

I’m sure it has nothing to do with old.reddit.com not having (as many? any? hard to say with uBO) ways to insert ads and manipulate the feed.

Alienating the people most likely to post and comment in a substantive way isn’t going to work out as well as they hope.

submitted by Powderhorn to technology
39 points | 5 comments
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/09/discord-gives-advertisers-more-tools-to-target-its-users/

Discord has announced tools aimed at expanding the number and types of companies that advertise on the platform.

This week, the social media firm announced Discord Ads Manager, an ad campaign management platform that lets companies manage ads shown on Discord in one place. The tool can be used to perform forecasting, build “a campaign with objective-based bidding,” and monitor an ad campaign’s performance, according to the announcement.

“Self-service access extends Discord advertising to smaller studios and marketers that previously needed a direct sales relationship to run campaigns, opening the platform to advertisers, regardless of their budget,” Discord said.

The ads manager is currently available to select advertisers, but self-service access won’t come until “early 2027,” Discord said.

The company is also expanding Video Quests, video ads Discord users can watch to get in-game rewards. Discord has been showing these ads to browsers in a beta format, with limited testing on Discord’s mobile apps. The company announced that the ad format is now called Video Quests Reserve and will serve as “a premium, reservation-based offering designed for high-impact brand moments.” The ads will give “advertisers a scalable, always-on way to drive outcomes, such as impressions and clicks.” Discord will offer advertisers additional objectives to track “soon.”

Just what I need. Ads for games on servers not at all about games.

submitted by XLE to technology
70 points | 27 comments
https://www.joemygod.com/2026/09/trump-sparks-suspicious-gold-rush-for-si-domains/

In July, there was a sudden spike in .SI (Slovenia) domain name sales, and now that Trump has announced AI will be rebranded SI, their owners are attempting to resell them for millions of dollars.

submitted by along_the_road to technology
79 points | 2 comments
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/09/apple-worked-with-trump-admin-to-remove-ice-tracking-apps-lawmaker-says/

submitted by themachinestops to technology
33 points | 0 comments
https://kotaku.com/new-ps5-jailbreak-exploit-works-on-systems-running-july-2026-firmware-2000738283

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76208187

Poor Sony, I know they want to get rid of physical games, but they don’t deserve this /s

PS: Jailbreaking is legal. youtube.com/watch?v=P0l5ZooURGY

submitted by Powderhorn to technology
119 points | 2 comments
https://www.techtimes.co.uk/flock-safety-ceo-google-maps-backlash-surveillance-scrutiny-1808813

Garrett Langley, chief executive of Flock Safety, a company whose automated licence plate reader cameras track vehicle movements across thousands of American communities, is now the subject of a different kind of online scrutiny. Internet users reportedly flagged his property as a public toilet on Google Maps.

It all started when Langley stepped into the public debate during an appearance on Fox News, where he argued that people who focus on privacy or safety alone are ‘prioritising the wrong thing’. The comments drew backlash on social media and online forums. What followed went further than typical online criticism.

Amid the privacy backlash, Langley’s reported property appeared blurred on Google Street View, according to Cybernews. Users then reportedly went a step further and marked the location on Google Maps as a public toilet. However, it is unclear whether Langley himself requested the Street View blur.

submitted by themachinestops to technology
17 points | 4 comments
https://www.notebookcheck.net/Boox-Picco-unveiled-Petite-3-97-e-reader-with-Pomodoro-microSD-and-MagSafe.1410557.0.html

cross-posted from: lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/76165931

submitted by remington to technology
139 points | 17 comments
https://fortune.com/2026/09/26/facebook-liable-violations-new-mexico-consumer-protection-lawand-meta-200-billion-penalties/

submitted by Hexorg to technology
13 points | 36 comments

Since this topic is likely to get controversial I’ll preface with my own opinion that AI CEOs are lying scumbags who grow their pockets using fear of missing out… unfortunately most other people who get hooked are other CEOs and so everyone is affected.

I don’t think current AI is anywhere close to AGI and I don’t think throwing more money at the problem will get us there. But I do think it’s a worthy question to figure out how to integrate AGI into a society with minimal friction. And by minimal I mean avoid societal collapse.

Couple of definitions since they are often ambiguous. What I imagine AGI to be is a “human-in-a-box” level of intelligence but without any basic wants of its own. You can train it “you want to help me” and it will or you can train it “you want to wage war” and it will.

The main difference between AGI and modern LLMs is the ability to learn incrementally - LLMs get trained, released, and you talk to a library in a frozen state. True AGI will integrate everything said into its model, so once you tell it “don’t output em dashes”… it will apply that to all future conversations.

Of course, if whoever invents the AGI has the mindset of tech companies CEOs they will just outcompete all intellectual labor from everyone. Eventually the economy will reach some steady-state where no one except the company has enough money… at which point I guess there will be some sort of adjustment.

On the other hand let’s assume whoever starts the AGI is not out to stuff their pockets. The path of integration is still complex and people will get hurt one way or the other. But what’s a way to minimize that hurt? My main worry, for example, is having open-source AGI and someone like a script kiddie going “find a vulnerability in X” and it does. If a single corporation does not control the AGI then I’m sure there will be 3 000 flavors of models that can do anything. Once the integration is complete then hopefully there won’t be too many vulnerabilities to find but until then the possibility space is big. Same pattern can be observed in virtually all other aspects of our society. How to minimize this?

submitted by alyaza to technology
51 points | 2 comments
https://lithub.com/a-prophetic-classic-about-the-dangers-of-tech-is-back-in-print/

Paulina Borsook saw there was something rotten afoot in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, and in her book Cyberselfish: A Critical Romp through the Terribly Libertarian Culture of High Tech, she set out to document and understand a peculiar mindset she saw emerging. Originally published in 2000, Paulina’s observations in Cyberselfish have proved truer now than when it was first written. She saw that the culture of high tech was determinedly anti-government, even as it owed its growth to government subsidization. That tech prioritized the idea of progress and profits and ignored all costs. That it co-opted the language of evolution to make human decisions and power structures seem inevitable. That the industry was hyper-male and tended toward hyper-misogynistic. That its figureheads possessed great wealth but were abysmal at sharing that wealth through philanthropy.

Cyberselfish was published into a moment in which tech and its leaders’ reputations were immaculate and unquestioned. Now we know better. Thanks to a surge of interest in her prophetic insights, Cyberselfish will be reissued this fall to a world that’s finally ready to listen. The following is an excerpt from the new edition.

submitted by along_the_road to technology
146 points | 34 comments
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2026/09/us-being-left-behind-in-ev-charging-speeds-as-china-goes-sub-5-min-to-70/

submitted by Mustachius_Grumpius to technology
15 points | 4 comments
https://www.techradar.com/computing/websites-apps/youtube-is-becoming-unwatchable-for-ad-blockers

submitted by alyaza to technology
23 points | 2 comments
https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/the-rise-and-fall-of-tech-worker-power/

When we were hired by the United Electrical Workers to spearhead the union drive at Twitter, it seemed the tech industry might finally be bending to progressive pressure. It was early in 2022, a year after the historic Capitol attacks of January 6, which saw Donald Trump call on his nearly eighty-eight million Twitter followers in an attempt to overturn his electoral defeat to Joe Biden. More and more public outrage was being directed at the tools that had enabled the president to mobilize his supporters. And Twitter, after deleting a series of Trump’s incendiary posts, had taken the most extreme measure of all the major social media platforms by issuing a permanent ban on the sitting president’s account.

Many outside the industry attributed the decision to Silicon Valley’s then-progressive values—management taking a principled stand against an overt attack on democracy—but in reality, it was almost entirely worker-driven. Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and then-CEO, initially hesitated to take action after the Capitol attack. He said to staff that the company was not “the government,” and it was the responsibility of elected officials—not a private platform—to “do the work to right this and bring the country together.” Twitter’s employees, feeling complicit in enabling Trump’s insurrection, pushed management for decisive action. Two days after the sitting president’s self-coup attempt, hundreds of workers delivered an open letter to their employer that demanded Trump’s permanent suspension. “As Trump’s megaphone,” the letter declared, “we helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th.” That internal revolt proved decisive. Twitter’s leadership caved and permanently removed Trump from the platform.

Emboldened by their success and fueled by a newfound sense of solidarity, the group of employees who penned the letter decided to launch a union drive to codify their collective leverage and ensure the platform would never enable events like January 6 again. They had helped safeguard democracy before. This time, they were determined to win it for themselves—and we, joining their drive as dedicated staff, were determined to help them. Clarissa had helped win one of the first tech unions at Kickstarter. JS, meanwhile, had organized graduate students at MIT. By bringing our experience as organizers to Twitter’s campaign, we hoped we could harness the nascent movement’s energy and steer it with some established labor tactics. We knew we were in for a challenge—but we could never have anticipated how quickly the tech elite would dig up the ground from underneath us.

submitted by sabreW4K3 to technology
23 points | 9 comments
https://www.pocket-lint.com/tap-to-pay-compatibility-video-game-controller/

submitted by Mustachius_Grumpius to technology
21 points | 3 comments
https://therecord.media/uk-disinformation-russia-center