The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, appears to be signaling its intention to tackle daylight saving time. Musk has indicated support for ending semiannual clock changes in recent days on his social media platform X, sharing a poll showing majority opposition to the practice.

DOGE co-head Ramaswamy also backed the stance, calling time changes "inefficient and easy to change."

The initiative follows a failed 2022 legislative attempt, the Sunshine Protection Act, which passed the Senate but stalled in the House. The Department of Transportation, which oversees time changes, cannot alter the system without congressional action.

Public sentiment appears to favor reform, with a 2022 YouGov poll showing two-thirds of Americans support ending time changes. Studies have linked the switches to increased rates of heart attacks and traffic accidents, while JPMorgan Chase research found the return to standard time reduces consumer spending by up to 4.9%. Several countries including Mexico, Russia, and Turkey have already discontinued daylight saving time, which originated during World War I as an energy conservation measure.

The Macquarie Dictionary, the national dictionary of Australia, has picked "enshittification" as its word of the year. Gizmodo reports: The Australians define the word as "the gradual deterioration of a service or product brought about by a reduction in the quality of service provided, especially of an online platform, and as a consequence of profit-seeking." We've all felt this. Google search is filled with garbage. The internet is clogged with SEO-farming websites that clog up results. Facebook is an endless stream of AI-generated slop. Zoom wants you to test out its new AI features while you're trying to go into a meeting. Twitter has become X, and its owner thinks sharing links is a waste of time. Last night I reinstalled Windows 11 on a desktop machine and got pissed as it was finalized and Microsoft kept trying to get me to install OneDrive, Office 360, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and a bunch of other shit I didn't want. Writer and activist Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification in 2022, and recently offered potential solutions to the age-old phenomenon in an interview with The Register.

"We need to have prohibition and regulation that prohibits the capital markets from funding predatory pricing," he explained. "It's very hard to enter the market when people are selling things below cost. We need to prohibit predatory acquisitions. Look at Facebook: buying Instagram, and Mark Zuckerberg sending an email saying we're buying Instagram because people don't like Facebook and they're moving to Instagram, and we just don't want them to have anywhere else to go."

Microsoft has denied claims that it automatically enables data collection from Word and Excel documents to train its AI models. The controversy emerged after cybersecurity expert nixCraft reported that Microsoft's Connected Experiences feature was collecting user data by default. While Microsoft's services agreement grants the company rights to use customer content, officials stated via Twitter that document data is not used for AI training.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TheGamer: With thousands of cards available in Pokemon's "Pokemon Trading Card Game," it can be hard to remember what is what. After all, since first debuting in the mid 1990s to coincide with the games of the same name, the popular collectible has been going strong ever since, with new releases constantly filling store shelves. That said, one avid Pokemon fan took it upon themselves to archive the card game's unique artwork. After hundreds of hours of work, over 23,000 cards have been archived, along with an additional 2,000 pieces of artwork. The end result is one of the best fan creations around.

Meet Twitter user pkm_jp, who devoted hundreds of hours to learning how to program in order to make their dream of a one-stop shop of all available card art a reality. "I remember the joy of getting the first set page working, displaying a small collection of cards," they wrote on Twitter. "I knew it was just the beginning." The site, artofpkm.com, "is dedicated to bringing artists and fans together," the created said on X (formerly Twitter). They note that there is still "lots of artwork still to be added and labeled," among other features such as "custom lists, voting, and a proper blog."

"Here's how Apple's next major product will work," writes Bloomberg's Mark Gurman: The company has been developing a smart home command center that will rival products like the Amazon Echo Hub and Google Nest Hub... The product will run many of Apple's core apps, like Safari, Notes and Calendar, but the interface will be centered on a customizable home screen with iOS-like widgets and smart home controls... The device looks like a low-end iPad and will include a built-in battery, speakers and a FaceTime camera oriented for a horizontal landscape view. The square device, which includes a roughly 6-inch screen, has sensors that let it change the interface depending on how far a user is from the screen. It will also have attachments for walls, plus a base with additional speakers so it can be placed on a table, nightstand or desk.

Apple envisions customers using the device as an intercom, with people FaceTiming each other from different rooms. They'll also be able to pull up home security footage, control their lights, and videoconference with family while cooking in the kitchen. And it will control music throughout the home on HomePod speakers. The device will work with hundreds of HomeKit-compatible items, a lineup that includes third-party switches, lights, fans and other accessories. But the company doesn't plan to roll out a dedicated app store for the product. Given the lack of success with app marketplaces for the Vision Pro, Apple Watch and Apple TV, that's not too surprising.
Looking ahead, the article concludes "The success of this device is still far from assured. Apple's recent track record pushing into new categories has been spotty, and its previous home products haven't been major hits."

But Gurman shares the most interesting part on X.com: If the product does catch on, it will help set the stage for more home devices. Apple is working on a high-end AI companion with a [$1,000] robotic arm and large display that could serve as a follow-up. The company could also put more resources into developing mobile robots, privacy-focused home cameras and speakers. It may even revisit the idea of making an Apple-branded TV set, something it's evaluating. But if the first device fails, Apple may have to rethink its smart home ambitions once again.
Gurman also writes that Apple is also working on a new AirTag with more range and improved privacy features (including "making it more difficult for someone to remove the speaker.")

Bluesky, the social network surging in popularity, says it has "no intention" of training AI tools on users content. "The social network made the announcement on the same day that X (formerly Twitter) is implementing its new terms of service that allow the platform to use public posts to train AI," notes TechCrunch. From the report: "A number of artists and creators have made their home on Bluesky, and we hear their concerns with other platforms training on their data," Bluesky said in a post on its app. "We do not use any of your content to train generative AI, and have no intention of doing so." The company went on to note that it uses AI internally to help with content moderation and that it also uses the technology in its "Discover" algorithmic feed. However, Bluesky says "none of these are Gen AI systems trained on user content."

Bluesky has reached 15 million users, driven by a recent surge in U.S. signups following the presidential election. It's currently the top free app on iOS. The Verge reports: The platform, which rests on the decentralized AT Protocol, added about a million new users in the last week. Bluesky COO Rose Wang recently told The Verge that the "majority" of new users flocking to the platform have been from the US. Meta's Threads is still outpacing Bluesky, having recently hit 275 million monthly users and growing at a rate of over a million signups per day. But Bluesky offers a very different experience. Both are ad-free (for now), but whereas Threads uses a single Meta-made algorithmic feed, Bluesky offers user-created algorithmic feeds in addition to its "Discover" and "Popular With Friends" ones.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The CEO of AI search company Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, has offered to cross picket lines and provide services to mitigate the effect of a strike by New York Times tech workers. The NYT Tech Guild announced its strike Monday, after setting November 4 as its deadline months earlier. The workers represented provide software support and data analysis for the Times, on the business side of the outlet. They have been asking for an annual 2.5% wage increase and to cement a current two days per week in-office expectation, among other things. [...] Picketers demonstrated in front of the NYT building in New York as negotiations continued. Meanwhile, on X, formerly known as Twitter, Perplexity's CEO offered to step in for the striking workers.

Replying to Semafor media editor Max Tani quoting the publisher, Srinivas wrote: "Hey AG Sulzberger @nytimes sorry to see this. Perplexity is on standby to help ensure your essential coverage is available to all through the election. DM me anytime here." Many on X immediately castigated Srinivas for acting as a scab -- a derogatory term for people willing to perform the jobs of striking workers. It is widely considered a disreputable behavior in matters of labor and equity. By undercutting collective action, scabs limit the ability of workers to bargain with those in positions of power. Srinivas may simply be trying to make sure people have the information they need on election day. The company has lately unveiled its own elections info hub and map. But to offer its services explicitly as a replacement for striking workers was bound to be an unpopular move.

Though TechCrunch asked Perplexity for comment, Srinivas responded to TechCrunch's post on X saying that "the offer was *not* to 'replace' journalists or engineers with AI but to provide technical infra support on a high-traffic day." The striking workers in question, however, are the ones who provide that service to the NYT. It's not really clear what services other than AI tools Perplexity could offer, or why they would not amount to replacing the workers in question.

SpaceNews reports: SpaceX's Super Heavy booster came within a second of aborting a "catch" landing attempt on the latest Starship test flight, according to audio posted online, apparently inadvertently, by Elon Musk... In the audio, one person, not identified, described an issue with the Super Heavy landing burn where a "misconfigured" parameter meant that spin pressure, presuming in the Raptor engines in the booster, did not increase as expected. "We were one second away from that tripping and telling the rocket to abort and try to crash into the ground next to the tower," that person said. That scenario would "erroneously tell a healthy rocket to not try that catch...."

The people on the audio note that there had been discussions of delaying the Flight 5 launch to provide additional time to check those parameters. "We were scared about the fact that we had 100 aborts that were not super-trivial," one person said... Another issue discussed in the audio... was a cover on a chine, a vertical structure on the booster, that came off as the vehicle went transonic during its descent. A SpaceX official said in the audio that having chine cover come off was something that they were worried about before launch... The person also started to discuss an issue with the engine plume during the landing burn, but the video stops at that point.

The discussions appeared to involve planning for the next Starship test flight, Flight 6. SpaceX is moving ahead with preparations for the flight, moving the next Super Heavy booster to the launch site for testing. "Flight 6 is coming up soon!" Musk posted early Oct. 25.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

"The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed," announced the Internet Archive Thursday, "as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications. Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online."

Founder Brewster Kahle told The Washington Post it's the first time in its almost 30-year history that it's been down more than a few hours. But their article says the Archive is "fighting back." Kahle and his team see the mission of the Internet Archive as a noble one — to build a "library of everything" and ensure records are kept in an online environment where websites change and disappear by the day. "We're all dreamers," said Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive's director of library services. "We believe in the mission of the Internet Archive, and we believe in the promise of the internet." But the site has, at times, courted controversy. The Internet Archive faces lawsuits from book publishers and music labels brought in 2020 and 2023 for digitizing copyrighted books and music, which the organization has argued should be permissible for noncommercial, archival purposes. Kahle said the hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties from the lawsuits could sink the Internet Archive.

Those lawsuits are ongoing. Now, the Internet Archive has also had to turn its attention to fending off cyberattacks. In May, the Internet Archive was hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a fairly common type of internet warfare that involves flooding a target site with fake traffic. The archive experienced intermittent outages as a result. Kahle said it was the first time the site had been targeted in its history... [After another attack October 9th], Kahle and his team have spent the week since racing to identify and fix the vulnerabilities that left the Internet Archive open to attack. The organization has "industry standard" security systems, Kahle said, but he added that, until this year, the group had largely stayed out of the crosshairs of cybercriminals. Kahle said he'd opted not to prioritize additional investments in cybersecurity out of the Internet Archive's limited budget of around $20 million to $30 million a year...

[N]o one has reliably claimed the defacement and data breach that forced the Internet Archive to sequester itself, said [cybersecurity researcher] Scott Helmef. He added that the hackers' decision to alert the Internet Archive of their intrusion and send the stolen data to Have I Been Pwned, the monitoring service, could imply they didn't have further intentions with it.... Helme said the episode demonstrates the vulnerability of nonprofit services like the Internet Archive — and of the larger ecosystem of information online that depends on them. "Perhaps they'll find some more funding now that all of these headlines have happened," Helme said. "And people suddenly realize how bad it would be if they were gone."
"Our priority is ensuring the Internet Archive comes online stronger and more secure," the archive said in Thursday's statement. And they noted other recent-past instances of other libraries also being attacked online: As a library community, we are seeing other cyber attacks — for instance the British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and now Calgary Public Library. We hope these attacks are not indicative of a trend."

For the latest updates, please check this blog and our official social media accounts: X/Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon.

Thank you for your patience and ongoing support.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: The Internet Archive and Wayback Machine went down on Tuesday following a sustained cyber attack. In addition, the Archive's user data has been compromised. If you've ever logged into the site to pore over its ample archives, it's time to change your passwords. [...] A pro-Palestenian hacktivist group called SN_BLACKMETA has taken responsibility for the hack on X and Telegram. "They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of 'Israel,'" the group said on X when someone asked them why they'd gone after the Archive.

The group elaborated on its reasoning in a now-deleted post on X. Jason Scott, an archivist at the Archive, screenshotted it and shared it. "Everyone calls this organization 'non-profit', but if its roots are truly in the United States, as we believe, then every 'free' service they offer bleeds millions of lives. Foreign nations are not carrying their values beyond their borders. Many petty children are crying in the comments and most of those comments are from a group of Zionist bots and fake accounts," the post said.

SN_BLACKMETA also claimed responsibility for a six-day DDoS attack on the Archive back in May. "Since the attacks began on Sunday, the DDoS intrusion has been launching tens of thousands of fake information requests per second. The source of the attack is unknown," Chris Freeland, Director of Library Services at the Archive said in a post about the attacks back in May. SN_BLACKMETA launched its Telegram channel on November 23 and has claimed responsibility for a number of other attacks including a six-day DDoS run at Arab financial institutions and various attacks on Israeli tech companies in the spring.

X has been restored in Brazil after being shut down nationwide for over a month. According to court documents released today, X ultimately complied with all of Brazilian Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes' demands. "They included blocking certain accounts from the platform, paying outstanding fines and naming a legal representative in the country," reports NPR. "Failure to do the latter had triggered the suspension." From the report: Elon Musk's X was blocked blocked on Aug. 30 in the highly online country of 213 million people -- and one of X's biggest markets, with estimates of its user base ranging from 20 to 40 million. De Moraes ordered the shutdown after a monthslong dispute with Musk over free speech, far-right accounts and misinformation. Musk had disparaged de Moraes, calling him an authoritarian and a censor, even though his rulings, including X's suspension, were repeatedly upheld by his peers.

Brazilian law requires foreign companies to have a local legal representative to receive notifications of court decisions and swiftly take any requisite action -- particularly, in X's case, the takedown of accounts. Conceicao was first named X's legal representative in April and resigned four months later. The company named her to the same job on Sep. 20, according to the public filing with the Sao Paulo commercial registry. In an apparent effort to shield Conceicao from potential violations by X -- and risking arrest -- a clause has been written into Conceicao's new representation agreement that she must follow Brazilian law and court decisions, and that any legal responsibility she assumes on X's behalf requires prior instruction from the company in writing, according to the company's filing.

There is nothing illegal or suspect about using a company like BR4Business for legal representation, but it shows that X is doing the bare minimum to operate in the country, said Fabio de Sa e Silva, a lawyer and associate professor of International and Brazilian Studies at the University of Oklahoma. "It doesn't demonstrate an intention to truly engage with the country. Take Meta, for example, and Google. They have an office, a government relations department, precisely to interact with public authorities and discuss Brazil's regulatory policies concerning their businesses," Silva added. [...] "The concern now is what comes next and how X, once back in operation, will manage to meet the demands of the market and local authorities without creating new tensions," he said.

The decline of journalism has been attributed to many factors, from slow adaptation to the internet to the dominance of tech giants in advertising. But a veteran journalist offers a new perspective: the death of the hyperlink could be changing the fundamental nature of the internet, with significant implications for the news industry. Matt Pearce: There is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It's something that's kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk's version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links. That's why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days. Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking. TikTok as well...

If you degrade hyperlinks, and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that's out there, and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal... That was a real epiphany to me, because the argument against one form of this legislation was, "My God, you'll destroy this fundamental way of how the internet works." I'm like, dude, these companies are already destroying the fundamental way of how the internet works.

[...] If you look at what technology has done to journalism over the last 10 years, it was journalists who figured out how to make Twitter work for them. It was journalists who figured out how to be really good on Instagram and Tik Tok. I know there's this argument about content creators and versus journalists, but I'm like, we're all in the same ecosystem. If you're performing the functions of a journalist, you're a journalist. Some people are really good on different platforms. But it's hard to imagine a scenario where Google is going to be the party that creates a more humane, intelligent, responsive form of journalism.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Reuters: Brazil's Supreme Court said on Friday that lawyers representing social media platform X did not pay pending fines to the proper bank, postponing its decision on whether to allow the tech firm to resume services in Brazil.

The payment of the fines, which X lawyers argued that the company had paid correctly, is the only outstanding measure demanded by the court in order to authorize X to operate again in Brazil... Earlier on Friday, X, owned by billionaire Elon Musk, filed a fresh request to have its services restored in Brazil, saying it had paid all pending fines. In response to the request, Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes requested the payment to be transferred to the right bank. He also determined that once fines are sorted out, Brazil's prosecutor general will give his opinion on the recent requests made by X's legal team in Brazil, which has been seeking to have the platform restored in the country.

Following Moraes' decision on Friday, X lawyers again asked the court for authorization to resume operations in Brazil, denying that the company had paid the fines to the wrong account and saying they do not see the need for the prosecutor general to be consulted before the ban is lifted.

A study published in Nature has found that conservative social media users were more likely to face sanctions, but attributes this to their higher propensity to share low-quality news rather than political bias. Researchers analyzed 9,000 Twitter users during the 2020 U.S. election, finding pro-Trump users were 4.4 times more likely to be suspended than pro-Biden users.

However, they also shared significantly more links from sites rated as untrustworthy by both politically balanced groups and Republican-only panels. Similar patterns were observed across multiple datasets spanning 16 countries from 2016 to 2023. The study concludes that asymmetric enforcement can result from neutral policies when behavior differs between groups.

Nintendo has convinced Ryujinx's lead developer to shut down the project. According to The Verge, the Switch emulator's download page is empty and its GitHub is gone. The Verge reports: "Yesterday, gdkchan was contacted by Nintendo and offered an agreement to stop working on the project, remove the organization and all related assets he's in control of," writes developer and moderator ripinperiperi on Discord. "While awaiting confirmation on whether he would take this agreement, the organization has been removed, so I think it's safe to say what the outcome is." The rest of ripinperiperi's message is a eulogy for the project, including a pair of videos showing the Ryujinx team's progress on iOS and Android ports of the Nintendo Switch emulator, among other core changes -- ones that will now presumably never ship.

Nintendo would not confirm or deny to The Verge that it made a deal with the developer. Instead, Nintendo spokesperson Eddie Garcia mysteriously pointed me to the Entertainment Software Association's head of public affairs Aubrey Quinn -- who said she couldn't speak on behalf of Nintendo.

schwit1 shares a report SpaceNews with the caption: "Failures aren't failures if you learn from them." From the report: Chinese commercial rocket firm Deep Blue Aerospace conducted a first-stage rocket hop test Sunday, experiencing a partial failure during the final moments of landing. Deep Blue Aerospace carried out the test at 1:40 a.m. Eastern (0540 UTC) Sept. 22 at the firm's Ejin Banner Spaceport in Inner Mongolia using a Nebula-1 rocket first stage. Footage of the vertical liftoff, vertical landing test shows the rocket ascending to a predetermined altitude before shutting off two of the three engines used for the 179-second flight. Landing legs deployed as planned, and the stage hovered above its planned landing spot. However an anomaly during the final engine shutdown phase led to a higher-than-expected landing altitude, leading to partial damage. You can watch the landing attempt and explosion here.

X's struggles in Brazil got this update from the Guardian Wednesday: In a statement tweeted from X's global government affairs account, the company said the restoration of service was an "inadvertent and temporary" side-effect of switching network providers.
But Friday "After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, Mr. Musk's social network, X, has capitulated," writes the New York Times. "In a court filing on Friday night, the company's lawyers said that X had complied with orders from Brazil's Supreme Court in the hopes that the court would lift a block on its site."

"The company's lawyers said X had complied with the court's orders — blocking designated accounts, paying fines, and naming a new formal representative in the country," writes TechCrunch (citing reporting by the New York Times): In a filing of its own, the Supreme Court reportedly responded by telling X it had not provided the proper paperwork and giving it five days to do so....

X came back online in Brazil earlier this week, although Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince told TechCrunch that the timing of the company's recent switch to Cloudflare infrastructure is just a "coincidence." During the ban, Brazilian users sought out social media alternatives, leading to dramatic growth at Bluesky and Tumblr.
The New York Times believes "The moment showed how, in the yearslong power struggle between tech giants and nation-states, governments have been able to keep the upper hand."

Although I'm curious about that missing paperwork...

The creator of an open source project that scraped the internet to determine the ever-changing popularity of different words in human language usage says that they are sunsetting the project because generative AI spam has poisoned the internet to a level where the project no longer has any utility. 404 Media: Wordfreq is a program that tracked the ever-changing ways people used more than 40 different languages by analyzing millions of sources across Wikipedia, movie and TV subtitles, news articles, books, websites, Twitter, and Reddit. The system could be used to analyze changing language habits as slang and popular culture changed and language evolved, and was a resource for academics who study such things. In a note on the project's GitHub, creator Robyn Speer wrote that the project "will not be updated anymore."

"Generative AI has polluted the data," she wrote. "I don't think anyone has reliable information about post-2021 language usage by humans." She said that open web scraping was an important part of the project's data sources and "now the web at large is full of slop generated by large language models, written by no one to communicate nothing. Including this slop in the data skews the word frequencies." While there has always been spam on the internet and in the datasets that Wordfreq used, "it was manageable and often identifiable. Large language models generate text that masquerades as real language with intention behind it, even though there is none, and their output crops up everywhere," she wrote.

A conspiracy theory known as "Dead Internet Theory" has gained traction in recent years, positing that most online social activity is artificial and designed to manipulate users. This theory has grown alongside the rise of large language models like ChatGPT. On Monday, software developer Michael Sayman launched SocialAI, an app that seems to embody aspects of this theory. ArsTechnica: SocialAI's 28-year-old creator, Michael Sayman, previously served as a product lead at Google, and he also bounced between Facebook, Roblox, and Twitter over the years. In an announcement post on X, Sayman wrote about how he had dreamed of creating the service for years, but the tech was not yet ready. He sees it as a tool that can help lonely or rejected people.

"SocialAI is designed to help people feel heard, and to give them a space for reflection, support, and feedback that acts like a close-knit community," wrote Sayman. "It's a response to all those times I've felt isolated, or like I needed a sounding board but didn't have one. I know this app won't solve all of life's problems, but I hope it can be a small tool for others to reflect, to grow, and to feel seen." As The Verge reports in an excellent rundown of the example interactions, SocialAI lets users choose the types of AI followers they want, including categories like "supporters," "nerds," and "skeptics." These AI chatbots then respond to user posts with brief comments and reactions on almost any topic, including nonsensical "Lorem ipsum" text.