Oscar winner Robert Downey Jr. has threatened legal action against future studio executives who attempt to recreate his likeness using AI. "I intend to sue all future executives just on spec," Downey said when asked about potential AI recreations of his performances. He dismissed concerns about Marvel Studios using his likeness without permission, citing trust in their leadership. During the interview, he criticized tech executives who position themselves as AI gatekeepers, calling it "a massive fucking error."

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: Over the past year we have seen Raspberry Pi working a lot on Wayland support for the Raspberry Pi OS desktop and using it on their latest Raspberry Pi models. With today's new Raspberry Pi OS update, Wayland is being used by default across all Raspberry Pi devices. The new Raspberry Pi OS update shipping today is using Wayland across all Raspberry Pi models. Labwc is also now the Wayland compositor of choice and those upgrading their existing Raspberry Pi OS installation will be prompted whether to switch to Labwc or keep using the prior Wayfire compositor. Raspberry Pi developers feel that the Labwc Wayland compositor offers the best experience on their single board computers. You can learn more about the update and download it via the RaspberryPi.com blog.

Further reading: Raspberry Pi Launches Its Own Branded SD Cards and SSDs - Plus SSD Kits

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Similar to how Mastodon offers an open source, distributed version of X, the fediverse is getting its own TikTok competitor. This week, an app called Loops began accepting signups on its new platform for sharing short, looping videos. Still in the early stages, Loops is not yet open sourced, nor has it completed its integration with ActivityPub, the protocol that powers Mastodon, Pixelfed, PeerTube, and other federated apps. However, both those efforts are in the works and when complete, will allow Loops to add another layer of social activity to the growing open social web known as the fediverse, which now has north of 11.6 million users and over 1 million monthly active users. (Mastodon accounts for roughly 65% of that activity.) Growth in this space has also encouraged other apps to adopt ActivityPub, like social magazine app Flipboard and Meta's Threads. The latter is not yet fully integrated but already has more than 200 million monthly active users.

Loops, meanwhile, was developed by Daniel Supernault, who also created the federated Instagram rival Pixelfed. In fact, Loops will run under the Pixelfed project, according to an FAQ on its website. [...] Aimed at users 13 and up, Loops will allow you to follow other users, as well as like, comment on, or share their videos. But as a part of the federated web -- the open social web running on ActivityPub -- remote users from other platforms like Mastodon and Pixelfed will also be able to follow users' Loops accounts and then view the videos in their home feed on those respective platforms. These remote followers will also be able to like, comment on, or share videos if their platform supports it. Videos published to the app will be held for moderation if the uploader has a low trust score, but trusted users will be able to skip the queue and publish immediately. The trust score is also used to hide problematic comments on posts and apply content warnings, Supernault notes. Other features, like profile sharing or the ability for Loops users to follow Mastodon and Pixelfed users in return, are still "to be announced," the site notes.

A commercial military simulation software, originally inspired by Tom Clancy novels, has become an unexpected tool for military training across NATO forces and defense analysts worldwide. Command: Professional Edition, developed by Britain's Slitherine Software, has secured contracts with the U.S. Air Force and British Strategic Command, while Taiwanese analysts use it to war-game potential conflicts with China.

The software's success stems from its vast database of military equipment and capabilities, compiled through contributions from its million-strong user base. Marine Corps University's wargaming director Tim Barrick employs the software to train officers, noting its effectiveness in developing tactical creativity. "These are not simple problems," said Barrick, a retired Marine colonel, told WSJ.

A fascinating excerpt from the report: Command's British publisher, Slitherine Software, stumbled into popularity. The family business got started around 2000 selling retail CD-ROM games like Legion, involving ancient Roman military campaigns. When Defense Department officials in 2016 first contacted Slitherine, which is based in an old house in a leafy London suburb, its father-and-son managers were so stunned they thought the call might be a prank. "Are you taking the piss?" J.D. McNeil, the father, recalled asking near the end of the conversation.

Microsoft took the unusual step on Monday of publicly criticizing longtime rival Google for running "shadow campaigns" in Europe designed to discredit the software giant with regulators. CNBC: Microsoft lawyer Rima Alaily wrote in a blog post that Google hired a firm to recruit European cloud companies to represent the search company's case. "This week an astroturf group organized by Google is launching," Microsoft lawyer Rima Alaily wrote in a blog post. "It is designed to discredit Microsoft with competition authorities, and policymakers and mislead the public. Google has gone through great lengths to obfuscate its involvement, funding, and control, most notably by recruiting a handful of European cloud providers, to serve as the public face of the new organization."

The conflict represents a fresh battle between two companies that do battle in cloud infrastructure as well as online advertising and productivity software. The latest chapter surfaces as Google faces heightened regulatory pressure in Europe and in the U.S., where it's in the midst of its second antitrust trial against the Justice Department. Alaily suggested in Monday's post that Google hired advisory firm DGA Group to set up the Open Cloud Coalition. One company that opted not to participate in the group told Microsoft that the coalition would receive financial backing from Google and criticize Microsoft's practices in Europe, Alaily wrote.

Italian technology firm Bending Spoons has emerged as an unconventional private equity player, acquiring struggling tech companies and dramatically restructuring them for profitability, most notably with its purchase of note-taking app Evernote.

The Milan-based company, valued at $2.6 billion, has acquired six companies since 2022, including WeTransfer and Meetup's assets. CEO Luca Ferrari has told investors the company could deploy up to $2 billion for future acquisitions. Bending Spoons typically targets subscription-based software companies with steady cash flow, implementing steep price hikes and significant staff reductions post-acquisition.

At Evernote, the company dismissed over half the workforce and increased annual subscription costs by 63% to $130. The strategy appears to be working. Bending Spoons reports annual sales have surged to $700 million from $162 million in 2022, with Evernote turning profitable earlier this year.

An anonymous reader shares a report: As Meta tries to keep up with OpenAI in developing AI, the Facebook owner is working on a search engine [non-paywalled link] that crawls the web to provide conversational answers about current events to people using its Meta AI chatbot.

In doing so, Meta hopes to lower its reliance on Google Search and Microsoft's Bing, which currently provide information about news, sports and stocks to people using Meta AI, according to a person who has spoken with the search engine team. It could also give Meta a backup option if Google or Microsoft withdrew from these arrangements, according to a person who has been involved with the strategy.

AmiMoJo shares a report: Tech behemoth OpenAI has touted its artificial intelligence-powered transcription tool Whisper as having near "human level robustness and accuracy." But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers.

Those experts said some of the invented text -- known in the industry as hallucinations -- can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments. Experts said that such fabrications are problematic because Whisper is being used in a slew of industries worldwide to translate and transcribe interviews, generate text in popular consumer technologies and create subtitles for videos.

[...] It's impossible to compare Nabla's AI-generated transcript to the original recording because Nabla's tool erases the original audio for "data safety reasons," Nabla's chief technology officer Martin Raison said.

Indonesia has banned sales of Apple's iPhone 16, citing the tech giant's failure to meet local investment requirements, the country's Ministry of Industry said. The ministry said Apple's local unit has not fulfilled the mandatory 40% local content threshold for smartphones, making imported iPhone 16 units illegal for sale in Southeast Asia's largest economy.

About 9,000 iPhone 16 devices have entered Indonesia through passenger luggage since last month's launch. "These phones entered legally, but will be illegal if traded," the ministry said. Apple has invested 1.48 trillion rupiah ($108 million) of its 1.71 trillion rupiah commitment in Indonesia. The company operates four developer academies but no manufacturing facilities in the country, despite government pressure to expand its presence.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the Verge: Ever wondered why some of your Instagram videos tend to look blurry, while others are crisp and sharp? It's because, on Instagram, the quality of your video apparently depends on how many views it's getting.

Here's part of Mosseri's explanation, from the video, which was reposted by a Threads user today. "In general, we want to show the highest-quality video we can ... But if something isn't watched for a long time — because the vast majority of views are in the beginning — we will move to a lower quality video. And then if it's watched again a lot then we'll re-render the higher quality video...."

The shift in quality "isn't huge," Mosseri said in response to another Threads user, who'd asked if that approach disadvantaged smaller creators. That's "the right concern," he told them, but said people interact with videos based on its content, not its quality. That's consistent with how Meta has described its approach before... Meta wrote in a blog [post] that in order to conserve computing resources for the relatively few, most watched videos, it gives fresh uploads the fastest, most basic encoding. After a video "gets sufficiently high watch time," it receives a more robust encoding pass.
"It works at an aggregate level, not an individual viewer level," Mosseri wrote later on Threads. "We bias to higher quality (more CPU intensive encoding and more expensive storage for bigger files) for creators who drive more views. It's not a binary theshhold, but rather a sliding scale."

When it comes to introducing liability for software products, "the EU and U.S. are taking very different approaches," according to Lawfare's cybersecurity newsletter. "While the U.S. kicks the can down the road, the EU is rolling a hand grenade down it to see what happens." Under the status quo, the software industry is extensively protected from liability for defects or issues, and this results in systemic underinvestment in product security. Authorities believe that by making software companies liable for damages when they peddle crapware, those companies will be motivated to improve product security... [T]he EU has chosen to set very stringent standards for product liability, apply them to people rather than companies, and let lawyers sort it all out.

Earlier this month, the EU Council issued a directive updating the EU's product liability law to treat software in the same way as any other product. Under this law, consumers can claim compensation for damages caused by defective products without having to prove the vendor was negligent or irresponsible. In addition to personal injury or property damages, for software products, damages may be awarded for the loss or destruction of data. Rather than define a minimum software development standard, the directive sets what we regard as the highest possible bar. Software makers can avoid liability if they prove a defect was not discoverable given the "objective state of scientific and technical knowledge" at the time the product was put on the market.

Although the directive is severe on software makers, its scope is narrow. It applies only to people (not companies), and damages for professional use are explicitly excluded. There is still scope for collective claims such as class actions, however. The directive isn't law itself but sets the legislative direction for EU member states, and they have two years to implement its provisions. The directive commits the European Commission to publicly collating court judgements based on the directive, so it will be easy to see how cases are proceeding.

Major software vendors used by the world's most important enterprises and governments are publishing comically vulnerable code without fear of any blowback whatsoever. So yes, the status quo needs change. Whether it needs a hand grenade lobbed at it is an open question. We'll have our answer soon.

Boeing received an email from the chief pilot at Ethiopian Airlines on December 1, 2018 with several questions, reports the New York Times (alternate URL here). "in essence the pilot was asking for direction. If we see a series of warnings on the new 737 Max, he posed, what do we do?" What ensued was an email conversation among a number of Boeing senior officials about whether they could answer the pilot's questions without violating international restrictions on disseminating information about a crash while it was still under investigation. That restriction was in play because a 737 Max flown by Lion Air had crashed a few weeks earlier leaving Indonesia. The inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines would prove chillingly prescient because just months later one of its 737s would go down because of a flight control malfunction similar to the one that led to the Lion Air crash. The Ethiopian Airlines crash would kill everyone on board and leave questions about whether Boeing had done everything it could to inform pilots of what it had learned about the malfunction and how to handle it.

In response to the inquiry from Ethiopian Airlines, Boeing's chief pilot, Jim Webb, proposed to his colleagues that he thank the airline for attending a previous briefing on the flight control system, called MCAS, but otherwise decline to answer the pilot's first two questions and just refer the airline to training materials and previously issued guidance. Most of those on the email agreed.
Boeing's eventual response? "I can only address the current system and the Operations Manual Bulletin. The first two questions directly relate to the accident scenario; therefore, I will be unable to address them here." The Times adds that Boeing's chief pilot Jim Webb then "ended the email by stating that if airline officials had any additional questions about the bulletin and system, they should feel free to reach out....

"It is impossible to know whether any pilots with Ethiopian Arlines would have acted differently if Webb's reply had been more forthcoming. But Boeing's limited response to an airline seeking help highlights a missed opportunity to collaborate on safety and to pass along lessons Boeing had collected following the Lion Air jet's crash into the Java Sea on Oct. 29, 2018."

This week Google-backed Anthropic announced its upgraded AI model Claude 3.5 Sonnet could "perform tasks like navigating web browsers, filling forms, and manipulating data."

Now Google plans something similar for Chrome, reports 9to5Linux.com: According to The Information, Google is "developing artificial intelligence that takes over a person's web browser to complete tasks such as gathering research, purchasing a product or booking a flight."

"Project Jarvis" — in a nod to J.A.R.V.I.S. in Iron Man — would operate in Google Chrome and is a consumer-facing (rather than enterprise) feature to "automate everyday, web-based tasks." The article doesn't specify whether this would be for mobile or desktop... Given a command/action, Jarvis works by taking "frequent screenshots of what's on their computer screen, and interpreting the shots before taking actions like clicking on a button or typing into a text field."
The Information reports that Google "plans to preview the product, also known as a computer-using agent, as early as December alongside the release of its next flagship Gemini large language model, which would help power the product, two of the people said."

SFGate spills the secrets of Disneyland's "Enchanted Tiki Room" and its lifelike animatronic singing birds — Jose, Fritz, Michael and Pierre — "whose movements were perfectly synced with the audio track." "Beneath the room, the heartbeat of the attraction is a $1 million installation of electronics equipment, operated by a roll of 14-channel magnetic tape," the Orange County Register wrote upon its opening. "It is the same system which programs the U.S. military's polaris missile." That system also ran very hot. To keep guests from overheating, air conditioning was installed throughout the building, making the Tiki Room Disneyland's first attraction to be fully air conditioned...
Or, as another article puts it, "While Disney did not delve into the speculative science of cryogenics to preserve his life, he did borrow the mechanical brain of a nuclear missile to simulate life, creating a new type of entertainment in the process."

The article remembers how Wernher Von Braun became a technical advisor (and on-camera presenter) for three Disney-produced TV episodes about space travel — at the same time Von Braun was working as technical director for the U.S. Army rocket program that produced the world's first long-range guided ballistic missile, plus the first submarine-launched ballistic missile with its ground-breaking launch control mechanism: An important aspect of the Polaris launch system hinged on the fact that the conditions under which the missiles might be launched were constantly changing. Different underwater currents, temperatures, and flexing of the metal hull all contributed to the difficulty of a successful launch. In order to minimize human errors and to automate the sequence as much as possible, scientists developed an audio control system. A magnetic audio tape with a series of prerecorded cues precisely timed to account for the submarine's movement, controlled the launch machinery.

This new technology, invented to deliver nuclear destruction, proved exactly what Disney needed for his wonderland developed for children.
The article concludes that Disneyland engineering "transformed Von Braun's military technology" to the point today where "what was once controlled by the artificial brain of a nuclear missile is now run by the equivalent of a MacBook."

SFGate delves deeper into the attraction's strange origins — and how it all came full circle 63 years later... At the intersection of Main Street and Adventureland, a restaurant called the Pavillion — now the Jolly Holiday — bridged the gap. Under one roof, it served food to Main Street guests on one side and Adventureland diners on the other. The inelegant transition created an eyesore that Walt despised... The need for the Tiki Cafe "appeared to be less about food and more about aesthetics," Ken Bruce writes in Before the Birds Sang Words , a comprehensive history of the attraction.

In 1961, Walt gathered with park designers about the concept. The sketch made by legendary theme park designer John Hench was remarkably thorough, with much of its design incorporated into the final product... When Walt saw a plethora of birds in the sketch, he famously exclaimed, "We can't have birds in there ... because they'll poop in the food." Hench hurriedly ad-libbed that the birds would be mechanical, a concept that Walt adored...

Although its powerful air conditioning may be its biggest draw today, many attractions you love owe their existence to the flock of singing birds. Disney engineers' work on the talking flora and fauna laid the foundation for much more complex Audio-Animatronics (a word that Walt Disney coined). Without Jose, Fritz, Michael and Pierre, there would be no Haunted Mansion, no Pirates of the Caribbean, no Rise of the Resistance. Next year, in celebration of Disneyland's 70th anniversary, the park will unveil one of its most sophisticated animatronics yet: Walt Disney himself. It will be the first time Walt appears in a Disney attraction anywhere in the world, completing a journey that started with a mechanical bird and ends with an immortal homage.
Their article also reveals that a year after the Tiki Room opened, one of the birds was programmed to say "Come, there's an island there for you in Hawaii. Soaring birds of United Airlines fly there too!" Because Disneyland had signed a sponsorship deal with United Airlines...

"Google essentially disappeared us from the internet," says the couple who created price-comparison site Foundem in 2006. Google's search results for "price comparison" and "comparison shopping" buried their site — for more than three years.

Today the BBC looks at their 15-year legal battle, which culminated with a then record €2.4 billion fine (£2 billion or $2.6 billion) for Google, which was deemed to have abused its market dominance. The case has been hailed as a landmark moment in the global regulation of Big Tech. Google spent seven years fighting that verdict, issued in June 2017, but in September this year Europe's top court — the European Court of Justice — rejected its appeals.

Speaking to Radio 4's The Bottom Line in their first interview since that final verdict, Shivaun and Adam explained that at first, they thought their website's faltering start had simply been a mistake. "We initially thought this was collateral damage, that we had been false positive detected as spam," says Shivaun, 55. "We just assumed we had to escalate to the right place and it would be overturned...." The couple sent Google numerous requests to have the restriction lifted but, more than two years later, nothing had changed and they said they received no response. Meanwhile, their website was "ranking completely normally" on other search engines, but that didn't really matter, according to Shivaun, as "everyone's using Google".

The couple would later discover that their site was not the only one to have been put at a disadvantage by Google — by the time the tech giant was found guilty and fined in 2017 there were around 20 claimants, including Kelkoo, Trivago and Yelp... In its 2017 judgement, the European Commission found that Google had illegally promoted its own comparison shopping service in search results, whilst demoting those of competitors... "I guess it was unfortunate for Google that they did it to us," Shivaun says. "We've both been brought up maybe under the delusion that we can make a difference, and we really don't like bullies."

Even Google's final defeat in the case last month did not spell the end for the couple. They believe Google's conduct remains anti-competitive and the EC is looking into it. In March this year, under its new Digital Markets Act, the commission opened an investigation into Google's parent company, Alphabet, over whether it continues to preference its own goods and services in search results... The Raffs are also pursuing a civil damages claim against Google, which is due to begin in the first half of 2026. But when, or if, a final victory comes for the couple it will likely be a Pyrrhic one — they were forced to close Foundem in 2016.
A spokesperson for Google told the BBC the 2024 judgment from the European Court of Justice only relates to "how we showed product results from 2008-2017. The changes we made in 2017 to comply with the European Commission's Shopping decision have worked successfully for more than seven years, generating billions of clicks for more than 800 comparison shopping services.

"For this reason, we continue to strongly contest the claims made by Foundem and will do so when the case is considered by the courts."

NoWayNoShapeNoForm writes: OpenVault believes that data caps on broadband are not a problem because most people do not exceed their existing data caps. OpenVault contends that people that do exceed their broadband data caps are simply being forgetful — leaving a streaming device on 24x7, or deploying unsecure WiFi access points, or reselling their service within an apartment building.

Yes, there may be some ISPs that have older networks that they have not upgraded. Or maybe they are unable to increase network capacity in "the middle mile" of their networks, but the Covid pandemic certainly encouraged many ISPs to upgrade their networks and capacity while many ISPs that had broadband data caps ended that feature.

Perhaps the biggest problem, according to OpenVault, is that most broadband users do not really have any idea how much bandwidth they "consume" every month. If Internet access is a service that people want to treat as a "utility", then you have to ask, Would they keep the water running after finishing their shower?
In the article Ookla's VP of Smart Communities adds that "Scrolling through social media feeds for hours can 'push' hundreds of videos to the user, many of which may be of no interest — they just start running." So the main driver for usage-based billing wasn't to increase revenue, OpenVault CEO Mark Trudeau tells the site, but to "balance the network a little more..." (Though he then also adds that sometimes a subscriber could also be reselling broadband service in their apartment building, "And that's not even legal.")

"If one or two customers on a given node is causing issues for 300 others, where those 300 are not getting the service that they paid for, then that's a problem right?" he said.

Having said that, the article also points out that "Many major fiber providers, like AT&T, Frontier, Google Fiber and Verizon Fios, don't have data caps at all."

It was originally created back in 2005 by Sun Microsystems for its proprietary Solaris Unix systems, "for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time," explains Wikipedia. "DTrace can be used to get a global overview of a running system, such as the amount of memory, CPU time, filesystem and network resources used by the active processes," explains its Wikipedia entry.

But this week, Gentoo announced: The real, mythical DTrace comes to Gentoo! Need to dynamically trace your kernel or userspace programs, with rainbows, ponies, and unicorns — and all entirely safely and in production?! Gentoo is now ready for that!

Just emerge dev-debug/dtrace and you're all set. All required kernel options are already enabled in the newest stable Gentoo distribution kernel...

Documentation? Sure, there's lots of it. You can start with our DTrace wiki page, the DTrace for Linux page on GitHub, or the original documentation for Illumos. Enjoy!
Thanks to Heraklit (Slashdot reader #29,346) for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Delta Air Lines on Friday sued cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike in a Georgia state court after a global outage in July caused mass flight cancellations, disrupted travel plans of 1.3 million customers and cost the carrier more than $500 million. Delta's lawsuit filed in Fulton County Superior Court called the faulty software update from CrowdStrike "catastrophic" and said the firm "forced untested and faulty updates to its customers, causing more than 8.5 million Microsoft Windows-based computers around the world to crash." [...]

Delta, which has purchased CrowdStrike products since 2022, said the outage forced it to cancel 7,000 flights, impacting 1.3 million passengers over five days. "If CrowdStrike had tested the faulty update on even one computer before deployment, the computer would have crashed," Delta's lawsuit says. "Because the faulty update could not be removed remotely, CrowdStrike crippled Delta's business and created immense delays for Delta customers." Delta said that as part of its IT-planning and infrastructure, it has invested billions of dollars "in licensing and building some of the best technology solutions in the airline industry."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InfoWorld: Select developers now are getting free access to JetBrains' WebStorm and Rider IDEs. The company on October 24 announced it has launched non-commercial licenses for its WebStorm JavaScript and TypeScript IDE and the Rider cross-platform .NET and game development IDE. As of now, developers using these IDEs for non-commercial purposes, such as open source project development or content creation, can use them for free. JetBrains views the move as expanding the availability of these IDEs to a broader swath of developer roles. More than two-thirds of developers code outside of work as a hobby and nearly 40% code for educational and learning purposes outside of work, the company said."Previously this year, JetBrains released other products under the same terms for non-commercial use, including RustRover, an IDE for Rust development, and Aqua, an IDE designed for test automation," notes InfoWorld. "JetBrains also provides community editions of IntelliJ and PyCharm, IDEs for Java and Python, respectively, which can be used to build proprietary and commercial software."

JetBrains has an FAQ section with additional details about the change.

The Browser Company is developing a new, much simpler browser distinct from Arc, which has proven too complex for mainstream adoption despite a strong following among power users. The Verge's David Pierce reports: Arc is not dying, [says CEO Josh Miller]. He says that over and over, in fact, even after I tell him the YouTube video the company just released sounds like the thing companies say right before they kill a product. It's just that Arc won't change much anymore. It'll get stability updates and bug fixes, and there's a team at The Browser Company dedicated to those. "In that sense," Miller says, "it feels like a complete-ish product." Most of the team's energy and time will now be dedicated to starting from scratch. "Arc was basically this front-end, tab management innovation," Miller says. "People loved it. It grew like a weed. Then it started getting slow and started crashing a lot, and we felt bad, and we had to learn how to make it fast. And we kind of lost sight, in some ways, of the fact that we've got to do the operating system part."

The plan this time is to build not just a different interface for a browser, but a different kind of browser entirely -- one that is much more proactive, more powerful, more AI-centric, more in line with that original vision. Call it the iPhone of web browsers, or the "internet computer," or whatever other metaphor you like. The idea is to turn the browser into an app platform. Miller still wants to do it, and he wants to do it for everyone. What does that look like? Miller is a bit vague on the details. The new browser, which Miller intimates could launch as soon as the beginning of next year, is designed to come with no switching costs, which means among other things that it will have horizontal tabs and fewer ideas about organization. The idea is to "make the first 90 seconds effortless" in order to get more people to switch. And then, slowly, to reveal what this new browser can do.