In its first 10 hours the Rubin space telescope found 2,104 never-before-seen asteroids in our solar system. And Gizmodo reports the data went directly to the International Astronomical Union's Minor Planet Center (MPC), which "plays an essential role in the early detection and monitoring of asteroids that threaten Earth." The MPC has spent years preparing for the deluge of data from Rubin, ramping up its software to process massive amounts of observations. When the first round officially came flooding in on Monday, it was "nerve-racking and exciting simultaneously," Matthew Payne, MPC director, told Gizmodo.
But Space.com explains how extraordinary that is. "There are approximately a million known asteroids in our cosmic neighborhood; over the next few years, Rubin could very well hike that figure up to five million." "This is five times more than all the astronomers in the world discovered during the last 200 years since the discovery of the first asteroid," Željko IveziÄ, Deputy Director of Rubin's Legacy Survey of Space and Time, said during the conference. "We can outdo two centuries of effort in just a couple of years...." The plan is for Rubin to capture such massive, high-resolution images of the southern sky once every three nights for at least the next 10 years. You can therefore consider it to be a super-fast, super-efficient and super-thorough cosmic imager. Indeed, those qualities are perfect for spotting some of the smallest details trailing through the space around our planet: asteroids. "We make movies of the night sky to see two things: objects that move and objects that change brightness," IveziÄ said. "Objects that move come in two flavors. Stars in our galaxy move, and they move slowly. Much faster objects are asteroids...."

[I]t's tremendously difficult to record an asteroid at all. "Asteroids, they disappear after you get one picture of them," IveziÄ said, calling Rubin's ability to image small objects orbiting the sun "unprecedented."
Space.com notes that the ten million galaxies in its first image are just 0.05% of around 20 billion galaxies that Rubin will have imaged by the end of its 10-year "Legacy Survey of Space and Time" investigating dark energy.

In fact, in its first year of regular operations, the Observation "will collect more data than all previous optical observatories combined," reports Earth.com. That torrent of information — petabytes of images and catalogs — will be processed in near-real time. Alerts will be issued to the worldwide astronomy community within 60 seconds of any detected change in the sky. By democratizing access to its enormous dataset, Rubin Observatory will empower both professionals and citizen scientists. This will foster discoveries that range from mapping the structure of the Milky Way to refining the rate at which the universe is expanding.
Reuters explains just how much data is being generated: The number of alerts the telescope will send every night is equivalent to the inboxes of 83,000 people. It's impossible for someone to look at that one by one," said astrophysicist Francisco Foster. "We're going to have to use artificial intelligence tools."
And New Atlas shares some of the "first look" videos released by the Observatory, including one titled The Cosmic Treasure Chest and another on the Trifid and Lagoon Nebulae (which Space.com describe as clouds of gas and dust condensing to birth new stars).

Designated as a foreign terrorist group by multiple countries, Mexico's Sinaloa drug cartel fiercely defends its transnational organized crime syndicate.

"A hacker working for the Sinaloa drug cartel was able to obtain an FBI official's phone records," reports Reuters, "and use Mexico City's surveillance cameras to help track and kill the agency's informants in 2018, the U.S. Justice Department said in a report issued on Thursday." The incident was disclosed in a Justice Department Inspector General's audit of the FBI's efforts to mitigate the effects of "ubiquitous technical surveillance," a term used to describe the global proliferation of cameras and the thriving trade in vast stores of communications, travel, and location data... The report said the hacker identified an FBI assistant legal attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City and was able to use the attaché's phone number "to obtain calls made and received, as well as geolocation data."

The report said the hacker also "used Mexico City's camera system to follow the (FBI official) through the city and identify people the (official) met with." The report said "the cartel used that information to intimidate and, in some instances, kill potential sources or cooperating witnesses."

TweakTown writes that the Switch 2 "has reportedly beaten the record for the most-sold console within 24 hours and is on track to shatter the two-month record," selling over 3 million units and tripling the PlayStation 4's previous launch day sales.

So Nintendo's first console in 8 years becomes "one of the most successful hardware releases of all time," writes Barron's, raising hopes for the future: [2017's original Switch] ultimately sold more than 152 million units... Switch 2's big advantage is its backward compatibility, allowing it to play current-generation Switch games and giving gamers solace that their large investments in software are intact... Many older Switch games also play better on the Switch 2, taking advantage of the extra horsepower.
Bloomberg writes that its bigger screen and faster chip "live up to the hype: Despite the hype and a $150 increase over the launch price for the original, the second-generation system manages to impress with faster performance, improved graphics, more comfortable ergonomics and enough tweaks throughout to make this feel like a distinctly new machine... This time, it's capable of outputting 4K resolution and more impactful HDR video to your TV screen... It's a bigger, faster, more polished version of a wildly successful gadget.
The "buzzy launch drew long lines" at retailers like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Gamestop, according to the article. (See the photos from AOL.com and USA Today.) "The era of spending hours waiting in line for the latest iPhone is long gone, but the debut of a new video game console is still a rare enough event that Nintendo fans didn't think twice about driving to retailers in the middle of the night to secure a Switch 2."

The Verge also opines that "the Switch 2's eShop is much better," calling it "way faster... with much less lag browsing through sections and loading up game pages."

Or, as Barron's puts it, "Ultimately, Nintendo is winning because it has a different strategy than its competition, the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox. Instead of trying to appeal to tech snobs like me, who are obsessed with graphics resolution and hardware statistics like teraflops, Nintendo focuses on joy and fun."

"Google-owned YouTube's revenue last year was estimated to be $54.2 billion," reports the Los Angeles Times, "which would make it the second-largest media company behind Walt Disney Co., according to a recent report from research firm MoffettNathanson, which called YouTube 'the new king of all media.'" YouTube, run by Chief Executive Neal Mohan since 2023, accounted for 12% of U.S. TV viewing in March, more than other rival streaming platforms including Netflix and Tubi, according to Nielsen... More people are watching YouTube on TV sets rather than on smartphones and computer screens, consuming more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content on TV daily, the company said on its website.
When YouTube first started its founders envisioned it as a dating site, according to the article, "where people would upload videos and score them. When that didn't work, the founders decided to open up the platform for all sorts of videos." And since this was 20 years ago, "Users drove traffic to YouTube by sharing videos on MySpace."

But the article includes stories of people getting rich through YouTube's sharing of ad revenue: Patrick Starrr, who produces makeup tutorial videos, said he made his first $1 million through YouTube at the age of 25. He left his job at retailer MAC Cosmetics in Florida and moved to L.A...

[Video creator Dhar Mann] started posting videos on YouTube in 2018 with no film background. Mann previously had a business that sold supplies to grow weed. Today, his company, Burbank-based Dhar Mann Studios, operates on 125,000 square feet of production space, employs roughly 200 people and works with 2,000 actors a year on family friendly programs that touch on how students and families deal with topics such as bullying, narcolepsy, chronic inflammatory bowel disease and hoarding. Mann made $45 million last year, according to Forbes estimates. The majority of his company's revenue comes through YouTube.
He tells the Times "I don't think it's just the future of TV — it is TV, and the world is catching on."

And then there's this... "My mom would always give me so much crap about it — she would say, 'Why do you want to do YouTube?'" said Chucky Appleby, now an executive at MrBeast. His reply: "Mom, you can make a living from this." MrBeast's holding company, Beast Industries, which employs more than 400 people, made $473 million in revenue last year, according to Business Insider. In the last 28 days, MrBeast content — which includes challenges and stunt videos — received 3.6 billion views on YouTube, Appleby said.

Appleby, 28, said he's since bought a Jeep for his mom.

"I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over," a 53-year-old film and TV director told the New York Times: If you entered media or image-making in the '90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there's a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That's because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand... When digital technology began seeping into their lives, with its AOL email accounts, Myspace pages and Napster downloads, it didn't seem like a threat. But by the time they entered the primes of their careers, much of their expertise had become all but obsolete.

More than a dozen members of Generation X interviewed for this article said they now find themselves shut out, economically and culturally, from their chosen fields. "My peers, friends and I continue to navigate the unforeseen obsolescence of the career paths we chose in our early 20s," Mr. Wilcha said. "The skills you cultivated, the craft you honed — it's just gone. It's startling." Every generation has its burdens. The particular plight of Gen X is to have grown up in one world only to hit middle age in a strange new land. It's as if they were making candlesticks when electricity came in. The market value of their skills plummeted...

Typically, workers in their 40s and 50s are entering their peak earning years. But for many Gen-X creatives, compensation has remained flat or decreased, factoring in the rising cost of living. The usual rate for freelance journalists is 50 cents to $1 per word — the same as it was 25 years ago... As opportunities and incomes dwindle, Gen X-ers in creative fields are weighing their options. Move to a lower-cost place and remain committed to the work you love? Look for a bland corporate job that might provide health insurance and a steady paycheck until retirement?
The article includes several examples of the trend:

• One magazine's photo studio director says professional photographers have been replaced by "a 20-year-old kid who will do the job for $500."

• The article adds that "When photography went digital, photo lab technicians and manual retouchers were suddenly as inessential as medieval scribes." (And "In advertising, brands ditched print and TV campaigns that required large crews for marketing plans that relied on social media posts."")

• An editor at Spin magazine remembers the day its print edition folded...

And besides competition from influencers, there's also AI, "which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5 percent of the industry's work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester."

Meanwhile the cost of living has skyrocketed, the article points out — even while Gen X-ers "are less secure financially than baby boomers and lack sufficient retirement savings, according to recent surveys..."

"Scientists have just resurrected 'ELIZA,' the world's first chatbot, from long-lost computer code," reports LiveScience, "and it still works extremely well." (Click in the vintage black-and-green rectangle for a blinking-cursor prompt...) Using dusty printouts from MIT archives, these "software archaeologists" discovered defunct code that had been lost for 60 years and brought it back to life. ELIZA was developed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum and named for Eliza Doolittle, the protagonist of the play "Pygmalion," who was taught how to speak like an aristocratic British woman.

As a language model that the user could interact with, ELIZA had a significant impact on today's artificial intelligence (AI), the researchers wrote in a paper posted to the preprint database arXiv Sunday (Jan. 12). The "DOCTOR" script written for ELIZA was programmed to respond to questions as a psychotherapist would. For example, ELIZA would say, "Please tell me your problem." If the user input "Men are all alike," the program would respond, "In what way."

Weizenbaum wrote ELIZA in a now-defunct programming language he invented, called Michigan Algorithm Decoder Symmetric List Processor (MAD-SLIP), but it was almost immediately copied into the language Lisp. With the advent of the early internet, the Lisp version of ELIZA went viral, and the original version became obsolete. Experts thought the original 420-line ELIZA code was lost until 2021, when study co-author Jeff Shrager, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, and Myles Crowley, an MIT archivist, found it among Weizenbaum's papers. "I have a particular interest in how early AI pioneers thought," Shrager told Live Science in an email. "Having computer scientists' code is as close to having a record of their thoughts, and as ELIZA was — and remains, for better or for worse — a touchstone of early AI, I want to know what was in his mind...."

Even though it was intended to be a research platform for human-computer communication, "ELIZA was such a novelty at the time that its 'chatbotness' overwhelmed its research purposes," Shrager said.
I just remember that time 23 years ago when someone connected a Perl version of ELIZA to "an AOL Instant Messenger account that has a high rate of 'random' people trying to start conversations" to "put ELIZA in touch with the real world..."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader MattSparkes for sharing the news.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says IT departments will evolve into human resources managers for AI agents, as companies adopt AI tools across their operations. "In a lot of ways, the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future," Huang told the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. From a report: He believes that in the not so near future IT teams will be tasked with onboarding these agents and ensuring they're kept in line, similarly to how HR teams manage employees. They may need to be trained to use certain vocabulary that's unique to the company, or be given examples of the kind of product the team is looking to develop, or briefed on company culture policies. Instead of just fixing servers and resetting passwords, IT professionals will soon be supervising fleets of digital workers.

Bruce Perens, original co-founder of the Open Source Initiative, has responded to questions from Slashdot readers about a new alternative he's developing that hopefully helps "Post Open" developers get paid.

But first, "One of the things that's clear from the Slashdot patter is that people are not aware of what I've been doing, in general," Perens says. "So, let's start by filling that in..."

Read on for the rest of his wide-ranging answers....

The new movie Y2K is either a comedy or a disaster/horror film, according to Wikipedia. The film "imagines a turn of the century where the machines don't just glitch or stop working," writes the Hollywood Reporter. "They go full homicidal." With a cast that includes 1990s icons like Alicia Silverstone and the lead singer for the Napster-loving 1990s metal band Limp Bizkit, the movie "gives the '90s the ending it deserved," according to the article.

They interviewed the film's director (and co-writer and co-star) Kyle Mooney, best-known for SNL, starting by complimenting his fidelity to the tech of its day. "The film opens with a high schooler getting home and logging into AOL Instant Messenger, which is not a scene I think I've ever seen in another movie..." Mooney: All of my relationships, between 17 and 22 years old, were short-lived and spawned because I was most confident flirting on Instant Messager....

Q: The tech here is such a huge part of the story. Were there any logos or brands you had a tough time getting on camera?

Mooney: Definitely. This isn't really a spoiler, but Jaeden Martell's character's computer — the one that we open up with him logging into AOL — eventually turns into a robot. That was supposed to be an iMac. But I don't think Apple wanted their machines strangling people or whatever the robot does — so we had to change the look of it by, like, 30 percent. There were a few instances like that, where we couldn't get the exact thing, but we were allowed to get as close as possible.
Deadline's article includes a spoiler about the film, but also this interesting note about two of its young actors, Julian Dennison and Jaeden Martell: [A]lthough Dennison and Martell were both born after 2000, they enjoyed slipping into the "lack of convenience and the lack of technology" that came with the era.

"I wish I got to experience that. I wish I didn't live in the age of everything being so accessible," said Martell.
And apparently the movie also includes a quick shout-out to Myspace co-founder Tom Anderson.

Elwood Edwards, the voice of AOL's "You've Got Mail" greeting, has died at age 74 following a long illness, according to local Ohio news station WKYC. "He worked at 3News for many years as graphics guru, camera operator, and general jack-of-all-trades, yet it was a somewhat random opportunity in 1989 that earned him international fame." From the report: That year, Elwood received $200 from the then-unknown America Online, merely because his wife worked at a predecessor company. He was asked to simply record four voiceover lines:

- "Welcome"
- "You've Got Mail"
- "Files done"
- "Goodbye"

Of course, the company better known as AOL blew up, and millions around the world would hear Elwood's voice telling them "You've Got Mail" every time they logged on to the internet. Despite his face not being visible, Elwood still achieved minor celebrity status. In 2015, he even appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" to utter the famous greeting as well as other audience-suggested phrases.

Tony Isaac shares a report from WOSU Public Media: Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today. A listener submitted a question to WOSU's Curious Cbus series wanting to know more about the legacy of CompuServe and what it meant to go online before the Internet. That legacy was recently commemorated by the Ohio History Connection when they installed a historical marker in Upper Arlington -- near the corner of Arlington Center and Henderson roads -- where the company located its computer center and corporate building in 1973. The plaque explains that CompuServe was "the first major online information service provider," and that its subscribers were among the first to have access to email, online newspapers and magazines and the ability to share and download files. CompuServe, founded in 1969 in Ohio as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance, began as a computer time-sharing service for businesses. In 1979, it launched an online service for consumers, partnering with RadioShack since they "were key in reaching early computer users."

Acquired by H&R Block in 1980, CompuServe became a leader in digital innovations like email, online newspapers, and chat forums, with The Columbus Dispatch becoming the first online newspaper. "... it turned out that what was most popular is not reading reliable news sources, but just shooting the breeze with your friends or arguing with strangers over politics," said former tech journalist and early Compuserve user Dylan Tweney.

Despite competing with Prodigy and AOL through the 1990s, CompuServe struggled with the rise of the internet. AOL acquired the company in 1997, but CompuServe remains a digital pioneer for fostering online communities. "For a lot of people, CompuServe was a connection to the world and their first introduction to the idea that their computer could be more than a computer," said Tweney. "It was a communications device, an information device."

theodp writes: Typos happen to the best of us, but spelling still counts when it comes to software development. So, it's kind of surprising to see that both Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and former AWS CEO Adam Selipsky failed to notice an embarrassing typo in a demo video they offered to their millions of followers on social media as evidence of Amazon Q AI's Java upgrade capabilities, which Amazon has been trumpeting for months in SEC filings, shareholder communication, and Amazon's latest earnings call with Wall Street analysts.

Just 37 seconds into the demo of the software that Amazon says saved it 4,500 developer-years of work and provided an additional $260M in annualized efficiency gains, Amazon Q kicks off the Java upgrade conversation by saying, "I can help you upgrade your Jave [sic] 8 and 11 codebases to Java 17." The embarrassing misspelling did prompt Twitter user @archo5dev to alert Jassy to the typo, but there's been no response yet from Jassy, who boasted that Amazon developers were unable to find any mistakes in Q's work in "79% of the auto-generated code reviews."

It's probably worth noting that both Jassy and Selipsky opted to showcase a drop-dead simple demo of Amazon Q Code Transformation rather than some of the lengthier and less-magical demos of the product.

Dutch-based copyright enforcement group BREIN has taken down a large language dataset that was being offered for use in training AI models, the organization said on Tuesday. From a report: The dataset included information collected without permission from tens of thousands of books, news sites, and Dutch language subtitles harvested from "countless" films and TV series, BREIN said in a statement. Director Bastiaan van Ramshorst told Reuters it was not clear whether or how widely the dataset may already have been used by AI companies. "It's very difficult to know, but we are trying to be on time" to avoid future lawsuits, he said. He said the European Union's AI Act will require AI firms to disclose what datasets they have used to train their models.

Oracle agreed to pay $115 million to settle a lawsuit accusing the database software and cloud computing company of invading people's privacy by collecting their personal information and selling it to third parties. Reuters: The plaintiffs, who otherwise have no connection to Oracle, said the company violated federal and state privacy laws and California's constitution by creating unauthorized "digital dossiers" for hundreds of millions of people. They said the dossiers contained data including where people browsed online, and where they did their banking, bought gas, dined out, shopped and used their credit cards. Oracle then allegedly sold the information directly to marketers or through products such as ID Graph, which according to the company helps marketers "orchestrate a relevant, personalized experience for each individual."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Samuel Axon: In one of the most egregiously unethical uses of AI we've seen, a web advertising company has re-created some defunct, classic tech blogs like The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) and iLounge by mimicking the bylines of the websites' former writers and publishing AI-generated content under their names. The Verge reported on the fiasco in detail, including speaking to Christina Warren, a former writer for TUAW who now works at GitHub. Warren took to the social media platform Threads yesterday to point out that someone had re-launched TUAW at its original domain and populated it with fake content allegedly written by her and other past TUAW staff. Some of the content simply reworded articles that originally appeared on TUAW, while other articles tied real writers' names to new, AI-generated articles about current events.

TUAW was shut down in 2015, but its intellectual property and domain name continued to be owned by Yahoo. A Hong Kong-based web advertising firm named Web Orange Limited claims to have purchased the domain and brand name but not the content. The domain name still carries some value in terms of Google ranking, so Web Orange Limited seems to have relaunched the site and then used AI summarization tools to reword the original content and publish it under the original authors' names. (It did the same with another classic Apple blog, iLounge.) The site also includes author bios, which are generic and may have been generated, and they are accompanied by author photos that don't look anything like the real writers. The Verge found that some of these same photos have appeared in other places, like web display ads for iPhone cases and dating websites. They may have been AI-generated, though the company has also been caught reusing photos of real people without permission in other contexts.

At first, some of Web Orange Limited's websites named Haider Ali Khan, an Australian currently residing in Dubai, as the owner of the company. Khan's own website identified him as "an independent cyber security analyst" and "long-time advocate for web security" who also runs a web hosting company, and who "started investing in several technology reporting websites" and "manages and runs several news blogs such as the well-known Apple tech-news blog iLounge." However, mentions of his name were removed from the websites today, and the details on his personal website have apparently been taken offline. Warren emailed the company, threatening legal action. After she did that, the byline was changed to what we can only assume is a made-up name -- "Mary Brown." The same goes for many of the other author names on Web Orange Limited's websites.

The company likely tried to use the original authors' names as part of an SEO play; Google tracks the names of authors and gives them authority rankings on specific topics as another layer on top of a website's own authority. That way, Google can try to respond to user queries with results written by people who have built strong reputations in the users' areas of interest. It also helps Google surface authors who are experts on a topic but who write for multiple websites, which is common among freelance writers. The websites are still operational, even though the most arguably egregious breach of ethics -- the false use of real people's names -- has been addressed in many cases.

"The Short Happy Reign of the CD-ROM" was just one article in a Fast Company series called 1994 Week. As the week rolled along they also re-visited Yahoo, Netscape, and how the U.S. Congress "forced the videogame industry to grow up."

But another article argues that it's in web pages from 1994 that "you can start to see in those weird, formative years some surprising signs of what the web would be, and what it could be." It's hard to say precisely when the tipping point was. Many point to September '93, when AOL users first flooded Usenet. But the web entered a new phase the following year. According to an MIT study, at the start of 1994, there were just 623 web servers. By year's end, it was estimated there were at least 10,000, hosting new sites including Yahoo!, the White House, the Library of Congress, Snopes, the BBC, sex.com, and something called The Amazing FishCam. The number of servers globally was doubling every two months. No one had seen growth quite like that before. According to a press release announcing the start of the World Wide Web Foundation that October, this network of pages "was widely considered to be the fastest-growing network phenomenon of all time."

As the year began, Web pages were by and large personal and intimate, made by research institutions, communities, or individuals, not companies or brands. Many pages embodied the spirit, or extended the presence, of newsgroups on Usenet, or "User's Net." (Snopes and the Internet Movie Database, which landed on the Web in 1993, began as crowd-sourced projects on Usenet.) But a number of big companies, including Microsoft, Sun, Apple, IBM, and Wells Fargo, established their first modest Web outposts in 1994, a hint of the shopping malls and content farms and slop factories and strip mines to come. 1994 also marked the start of banner ads and online transactions (a CD, pizzas), and the birth of spam and phishing...

[B]ack in '94, the salesmen and oilmen and land-grabbers and developers had barely arrived. In the calm before the storm, the Web was still weird, unruly, unpredictable, and fascinating to look at and get lost in. People around the world weren't just writing and illustrating these pages, they were coding and designing them. For the most part, the design was non-design. With a few eye-popping exceptions, formatting and layout choices were simple, haphazard, personal, and — in contrast to most of today's web — irrepressibly charming. There were no table layouts yet; cascading style sheets, though first proposed in October 1994 by Norwegian programmer Håkon Wium Lie, wouldn't arrive until December 1996... The highways and megalopolises would come later, courtesy of some of the world's biggest corporations and increasingly peopled by bots, but in 1994 the internet was still intimate, made by and for individuals... Soon, many people would add "under construction" signs to their Web pages, like a friendly request to pardon our dust. It was a reminder that someone was working on it — another indication of the craft and care that was going into this never-ending quilt of knowledge.
The article includes screenshots of Netscape in action from browser-emulating site OldWeb.Today (albeit without using a 14.4 kbps modems). "Look in and think about how and why this web grew the way it did, and what could have been. Or try to imagine what life was like when the web wasn't worldwide yet, and no one knew what it really was."

Slashdot reader tedlistens calls it "a trip down memory lane," offering "some telling glimpses of the future, and some lessons for it too." The article revisits 1994 sites like Global Network Navigator, Time-Warner's Pathfinder, and Wired's online site HotWired as well as 30-year-old versions of the home pages for Wells Fargo and Microsoft.

What did they miss? Share your own memories in the comments.

What do you remember about the web in 1994?

A collection of over 2,200 new old stock computers from the 1980s, manufactured by a company called NABU and featuring a groundbreaking pre-internet network, are being liberated from a barn in Massachusetts. "In a way, this is two stories: The first, of a breakthrough network from Canada, a consumer-friendly 1983 version of the internet decades ahead of its time," writes Ernie Smith via Motherboard. "The other story, of the man who got a hold of these machines, held onto them for 33 years, and mysteriously allowed them to flood the used market one day. One day, thanks to a confluence of the right people noticing the right eBay listings, these two stories merged and created a third story -- the tale of a computer network, brought back to life." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: For more than two decades, the biggest retro computing story in recent memory sat like a sleeper cell in a Massachusetts barn. The barn was in danger of collapse. It could no longer protect the fleet of identical devices hiding inside. A story like this doesn't need the flash of a keynote or a high-profile marketing campaign. It really just needs someone to notice. And the reason anyone did notice was because this barn could no longer support the roughly 2,200 machines that hid on its second floor. These computers, with a weight equivalent to roughly 11 full-size vehicles, were basically new, other than the fact that they had sat unopened and unused for nearly four decades, roughly half that time inside this barn. Every box was "new old stock," essentially a manufactured time capsule, waiting to be found by somebody.

These machines, featuring the label of a forgotten brand built around an idea that was tragically too early to succeed, could have disappeared, anonymously, into the junkyard of history, as so many others like them have. Instead, they ended up on eBay, at a bargain-basement price of $59.99 each. And when the modern retro computing community turned them on, what they found was something worth bringing back to life. It took a while for anyone to notice these stylish metal-and-plastic machines from 1983. First, information spread like whispers in the community of tech forums, Discord servers, and Patreon channels where retro tech collectors hid. But then, a well-known tech YouTuber, Adrian Black, did a video about them, and these eBay machines, slapped with the logo of a company called NABU, were anonymous no more. [...]

Black was impressed. These devices, which utilized the landmark Z80 processor -- a chip common in embedded systems, arcade machines like Pac-Man, and home consoles like the Colecovision -- had an architecture very similar to the widely used MSX platform, making them a great choice for device hackers. (Well, minus the fact that they didn't have floppy drives.) Plus, they were essentially new. "It's new old stock, but it is tested," he says at the beginning of the clip. "I think the seller actually peeled the original tape off, tested it, and then taped it back up again." Essentially, this was the retro-computing version of a unicorn: An extremely obscure platform, being sold at a scale wide enough that basically anyone who wanted one could have it. And on top of all that, NABU -- an acronym standing for Natural Access to Bi-directional Utilities -- was essentially the 1983 version of AOL, except built around proprietary hardware. The flood of interest was so significant that it knocked the seller's eBay account offline for months while the company verified that the units were actually his. (They were.)

For people who love tinkering with devices, there was a lot to work with here, especially in 2023. There was a real chance that this relic of the past could live again, with its network available to anyone who took a chance on buying one of these devices. "The kind of hardware and software hacking that people are doing with those wouldn't have been possible 10 or even 5 years ago," says Sean Malseed, host of the popular YouTube channel Action Retro and one of the many people who bought a NABU from the mysterious eBay listing. "These machines were once considered basically e-waste, but instead they're seeing a very unlikely renaissance." So where did this computer come from? Why did this seller have so many? And why didn't you know about the NABU until now? [...]

If it weren't for Slashdot, Mark Zuckerberg wouldn't be facing a six-hour deposition over alleged involvement in the Cambridge Analytica Scandal, argues long-time Slashdot reader theodp: In 2003, Harvard's student newspaper the Harvard Crimson reported that Zuck's programming skills attracted attention from the likes of Microsoft and others following a 2003 Slashdot post. That post — titled Machine Learning and MP3s — described how "Students at Caltech [freshman Adam D'Angelo, Quora CEO and co-founder] and Harvard [freshman Zuck] developed a system that analyzes playlists and learns people's listening patterns." The playlist-making software, Synapse AI, was Zuck's high school senior project at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Interestingly, in a modded-up comment ("Informative") on the post, Slashdot user Mark Zuckerberg vowed to protect user privacy. "And a note about privacy," promised Zuck. "None of your musical listening data will be available to anyone other than you. We hope to use massive amounts of data to aid in analysis, but your individual data will never be seen by anyone else."

Hey, things change. And Slashdot user SkyIce (apparently D'Angelo) added, "I'm not going to spam people. I promise." .
Zuckerberg was just 18 years old — and Steven Levy's 2020 book Facebook: The Inside Story recounts how all "the Slashdot attention was a boon." Zuckerberg heard from multiple companies interested in the student project, including Microsoft and AOL. Zuckerberg and D'Angelo got an offer approaching a million dollars from one of those suitors. But the payout would be contingent on Zuckerberg and D'Angelo committing to work for that company for three years. They turned it down.
That summer, back in Cambridge, young Mark Zuckerberg "thought it was interesting that I was so excited about Friendster," D'Angelo remembered in the book. Friendster was an earlier social network founded in 2002 (which eventually closed in 2018). D'Angelo remembered that Zuckerberg "wasn't into it as a user, but it was clear to him that there was something there...."

Winamp, the premiere music player of the late 1990s and early 2000s that was acquired by Radionomy from AOL in 2014, has received a major new update for the first time in four years. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from a report via Ars Technica: The release notes for Winamp 5.9 RC1 Build 1999 say that the update represents four years of work across two separate development teams, delayed in between by the COVID-19 pandemic. Most of the work done in this build focuses on behind-the-scenes work that modernizes the codebase, which means it still looks and acts like a turn-of-the-millennium Windows app. The entire project has been migrated from Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 to Visual Studio 2019, a wide range of audio codecs have been updated to more modern versions, and support for Windows 11 and https streams have both been improved.

The final release will be version 5.9, with some features targeted for release in version 5.9.1 "and beyond" (version 6.0 goes unmentioned). It requires Windows 7 SP1 or newer, dropping support for Windows XP. That said, in our limited testing the "new" Winamp is still in many ways an ancient app, one not made for the age of high-resolution, high-density displays. This may cause usability problems, depending on what you're trying to run it on. But hey, for all you people out there still trying to keep hope alive, it's nice to see something on Winamp.com that isn't a weird NFT project and a promise of updates yet to come.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Forbes: According to cyber security firm Volexity, the threat research team has found the North Korean 'SharpTongue' group, which appears to be part of, or related to, the Kimsuky advanced persistent threat group, deploying malware called SHARPEXT that doesn't need your Gmail login credentials at all. Instead, it "directly inspects and exfiltrates data" from a Gmail account as the victim browses it. This quickly evolving threat, Volexity says it is already on version 3.0 according to the malware's internal versioning, can steal email from both Gmail and AOL webmail accounts, and works across three browsers: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and a South Korean client called Whale.

The U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, CISA, reports that Kimsuky has been operating since 2012, and is "most likely tasked by the North Korean regime with a global intelligence gathering mission." While CISA sees Kimsuky most often targeting individuals and organizations in South Korea, Japan, and the U. S., Volexity says that the SharpTongue group has frequently been seen targeting South Korea, the U. S. and Europe. The common denominator between them is that the victims often " work on topics involving North Korea, nuclear issues, weapons systems, and other matters of strategic interest to North Korea."

The report says that SHARPEXT differs from previous browser extensions deployed by these hacking espionage groups in that it doesn't attempt to grab login credentials but bypasses the need for these and can grab email data as the user reads it. The good news is that your system needs to be compromised by some means before this malicious extension can be deployed. Unfortunately, we know all too well that system compromise is not as difficult as it should be. Once a system has been compromised by phishing, malware, unpatched vulnerabilities, whatever, the threat actors can install the extension using a malicious VB script that replaces the system preference files. Once that's done and the extension runs quietly in the background, it is tough to detect. The user logs in to their Gmail account from their normal browser on the expected system. The security researchers recommend "enabling and analyzing PowerShell ScriptBlock logging" to detect whether you've been targeted by this attack, reports Forbes. Additionally, they recommend reviewing installed extensions regularly, especially looking for ones you don't recognize or are not available from the Chrome Web Store.