An anonymous reader shares a report: Most of the changes on the Sega Retro wiki every day are tiny things, like single-line tweaks to game details or image swaps. Early Monday morning, the site got something else: A 47MB, 272-page PDF full of confidential emails, notes, and other documents from inside a company with a rich history, a strong new competitor, and deep questions about what to do next.

The document offers glimpses, windows, and sometimes pure numbers that explain how Sega went from a company that broke Nintendo's near-monopoly in the early 1990s to giving up on consoles entirely after the Dreamcast. Enthusiasts and historians can see the costs, margins, and sales of every Sega system sold in America by 1997 in detailed business plan spreadsheets. Sega's Wikipedia page will likely be overhauled with the information contained in inter-departmental emails, like the one where CEO Tom Kalinske assures staff (and perhaps himself) that "we are killing Sony" in Japan in March 1996.

"Wish I could get our staff, sales people, retailers, analysts, media, etc. to see and understand what's happening in Japan. They would then understand why we will win here in the US eventually," Kalinske wrote. By September 1996, this would not be the case, and Kalinske would tender his resignation. Not all of the compilation is quite so direct or relevant. There are E3 floor plans, nitpicks about marketing campaigns, and the occasional incongruity. There is a Post-It note stuck to the front of the "Brand Strategy" folder -- "Screw Technology, what is bootleg 96/97" -- that I will be thinking about for days.

"Picture a world where computing is not limited by the binary confines of zeros and ones, but instead, is free to explore the vast possibilities of continuous value data." That's Microsoft's research blog, describing its newly-developed Analog Iterative Machine, an analog optical computer designed for solving difficult optimization problems.

"For a multidisciplinary group of researchers at the Microsoft Research Lab in Cambridge, U.K., the mission was to build a new kind of computer that would transcend the limitations of the binary systems," says a Microsoft blog post.

Neowin describes it as a computer "that uses photons and electrons, rather than transistors, to process data." Light "passes through several layers, making impressions on each part of what's known as a 'modular array'," writes PC Gamer. "It's this process of projecting light through the array that replaces the function of a standard transistor."

Microsoft says it can "solve practical problems at the speed of light." And "it's already shown potential for surpassing state-of-the art digital (silicon-based) technology," adds TechSpot, "or even the most powerful quantum computers being designed right now." The AIM machine is built using commodity opto-electronic technologies that are low-cost and scalable, Microsoft says, and is based on an "asynchronous data flow architecture" which doesn't require data exchange between storage units and "compute locations."

AIM isn't designed for general purpose computing tasks, though. The analog optical computer is useful to solve difficult "optimization problems" like the well-known travelling salesman riddle, Microsoft says, which are at the heart of many, math-intensive industries including finance, logistics, transportation, energy, healthcare, and manufacturing. When it comes to crunching all the possible combinations of an exponentially growing problem, traditional, digital computers struggle to provide a solution in a "timely, energy-efficient and cost-effective manner."

AIM was conceived to address two simultaneous trends, Microsoft explains, which are sidestepping the unraveling of Moore's Law and overcoming the limitations of specialized machines designed for solving optimization problems... AIM works at the speed of light, and it seemingly provides a 100x increase in performance compared to the most advanced digital approaches available today. For now, AIM is still a research project with limited access for potential customers. The machine, however, is already being tested by UK financial company Barclays, which is using it to track transactions of money into stock purchases.
Microsoft says it's now releasing its "AIM simulator as a service, allowing selected users to get first-hand experience. The initial users are the team's collaborators at Princeton University and at Cambridge University."

Wikipedia defines the Yocto Project as "a Linux Foundation collaborative open source project whose goal is to produce tools and processes that enable the creation of Linux distributions for embedded and IoT software that are independent of the underlying architecture of the embedded hardware."

This week the Linux Foundation shared an update on the 12-year-old Yocto Project: In an effort to support the community, The Yocto Project announced the first Long Term Support (LTS) release in October 2020. Today, we are delighted to announce that we are expanding the LTS release and extending the lifecycle from 2 to 4 years as standard.

The continued growth of the Yocto Project coincides with the welcomed addition of Exein as a Platinum Member, joining AMD/Xilinx, Arm, AWS, BMW Group, Cisco, Comcast, Intel, Meta and WindRiver. As a Member, Exein brings its embedded security expertise across billions of devices to the core of the Yocto Project...

"The Yocto Project has been at the forefront of OS technologies for over a decade," said Andrew Wafaa, Yocto Project Chairperson. "The adaptability and variety of the tooling provided are clearly making a difference to the community. We are delighted to welcome Exein as a member as their knowledge and experience in providing secure Yocto Project based builds to customers will enable us to adapt to the modern landscape being set by the US Digital Strategy and the EU Cyber Resilience Act."

"We're extremely excited to become a Platinum Partner of the Yocto Project," said Gianni Cuozzo, founder and CEO of Exein. "The Yocto Project is the most important project in the embedded Linux space, powering billions of devices every year. We take great pride in contributing our extensive knowledge and expertise in embedded security to foster a future that is both enhanced and secure for Yocto-powered devices. We are dedicated to supporting the growth of the Yocto Project as a whole, aiming to improve its support for modern languages like Rust, and assist developers and OEMs in aligning with the goals outlined in the EU Cyber Resilience Act."

theodp writes: In The Man Who Broke Bowling, GQ's Eric Wills profiles professional bowler Jason Belmonte, whose two-handed bowling technique made him both an outcast as well as one of bowling's greatest, changing the sport forever. Unlike the rest of us, a 7-year-old Belmonte was unconvinced by the taunts used to prompt kids into switching from bowling two-handed to one-handed ("It was, Come on, you're a big boy now. It's time to bowl properly," Belmonte recalls). As a result, Belmonte was able to develop a 600-rpm throw when most pro bowlers averaged 350-400, imparting a spin that "sends the pins into concussion protocol." Wills writes:

"When he first alighted on the professional bowling scene, Belmonte resembled an alien species: one that bowled with two hands. And not some granny shot, to be clear, but a kickass power move in which he uses two fingers (and no thumb) on his right hand, palms the front of the ball with his left, and then, on his approach, which is marked by a distinctive shuffle step, rocks the ball back before launching it with a liquid, athletic whip, his delivery producing an eye-popping hook, his ball striking the pins like a mini mortar explosion. Not everyone welcomed his arrival. He's been called a cheat, told to go back to his native Australia; a PBA Hall of Famer once called the two-hander a 'cancer to an already diseased sport.'

If you're interested in more on the technical aspects of bowling -- Belmonte's installed a tracking system in his parent's bowling center back in Australia that generates reams of data he can sift through to find areas for improvement -- Wikipedia goes into some of the physics of bowling balls.

Rapid changes, fueled by AI, are impacting the large pockets of the internet, argues a new column. An excerpt: In recent months, the signs and portents have been accumulating with increasing speed. Google is trying to kill the 10 blue links. Twitter is being abandoned to bots and blue ticks. There's the junkification of Amazon and the enshittification of TikTok. Layoffs are gutting online media. A job posting looking for an "AI editor" expects "output of 200 to 250 articles per week." ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with "AI-generated junk."

Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don't. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and "AI is tearing Wikipedia apart." The old web is dying, and the new web struggles to be born. The web is always dying, of course; it's been dying for years, killed by apps that divert traffic from websites or algorithms that reward supposedly shortening attention spans. But in 2023, it's dying again -- and, as the litany above suggests, there's a new catalyst at play: AI.

Yevgeny V. Prigozhin heads the Russia-backed paramilitary Wagner Group — and was also "a close confidant of Russian president Vladimir Putin until he launched an alleged coup," according to Wikipedia.

The New York Times notes Prigozhin's remarkable ability to bypass government censorship: Despite years of creeping Kremlin control over the internet, the mercenary tycoon Yevgeny V. Prigozhin continued to comment live on Saturday through videos, audio recordings and statements posted on the messaging app Telegram.

His remarkable continued access to a public platform amid a crisis demonstrated both the limits of official restrictions and the rise of Telegram as a powerful mode of communication since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022. The app, along with the proliferation of virtual private networks, has effectively loosened the information controls that the Russian authorities had tightened for years.

Russian internet service providers began blocking access to Google News shortly after the authorities accused Mr. Prigozhin of organizing an armed uprising on Friday. But while unconfirmed reports surfaced of Telegram outages in some Russian cities, people within Russia continued to post on the app.
CNN just reported that Prigozhin's paramilitary group "has claimed control of several military facilities and has dispatched some of his troops towards Moscow... Russian security forces in body armor and equipped with automatic weapons have taken up a position near a highway linking Moscow with southern Russia, according to photos published by the Russian business newspaper Vedomosti Saturday."

UPDATE: CNN now reports Prigozhin "says he is turning his forces around from a march toward Moscow shortly after the Belarusian government claimed President Alexander Lukashenko had reached a deal with Prigozhin to halt the march."

Reuters reports: U.S. intelligence agencies found no direct evidence that the COVID-19 pandemic stemmed from an incident at China's Wuhan Institute of Virology, a report declassified on Friday said.
America's Director of National Intelligence was responding to March legislation requiring declassification (within 90 days) of any information on possible links between the Wuhan Institute of Virology (or "WIV") and the origin of the COVID-19 pandemic. One key finding in the just-released report?

"We continue to have no indication that the Wuhan Institute of Virology's pre-pandemic research holdings included SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, nor any direct evidence that a specific research-related incident occurred involving WIV personnel before the pandemic that could have caused the COVID pandemic." The information available to the U.S. Intelligence Community "indicates that the WIV first possessed SARS-CoV-2 in late December 2019, when WIV researchers isolated and identified the virus from samples from patients diagnosed with pneumonia of unknown causes."

And in addition, "All Intelligence Community agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not developed as a biological weapon."

Beyond that, the report also emphasizes that "Almost all Intelligence Community agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not genetically engineered," adding "Most agencies assess that SARS-CoV-2 was not laboratory-adapted; some are unable to make a determination." The National Intelligence Council and four other Intelligence Community agencies assess that the initial human infection with SARS-CoV-2 most likely was caused by natural exposure to an infected animal that carried SARS-CoV-2 or a close progenitor, a virus that probably would be more than 99 percent similar to SARS-CoV-2...

The Central Intelligence Agency and another agency remain unable to determine the precise origin of the COVID-19 pandemic, as both hypotheses rely on significant assumptions or face challenges with conflicting reporting.
The only two outliers appear to be the Department of Energy, which gives "low confidence" support to the lab-leak theory, and the FBI (whose Trump-appointed director "said he couldn't share many details of the agency's assessment because they were classified.")

Addressing rumors online, the report notes that the lab has performed public health-related research with the army, such as work on vaccines and therapeutics. This included working "with several viruses, including coronaviruses, but no known viruses that could plausibly be a progenitor of SARS-CoV-2."

And while several researchers were ill in the fall of 2019, their symptoms "were consistent with but not diagnostic of COVID-19... [T]he researchers' symptoms could have been caused by a number of diseases and some of the symptoms were not consistent with COVID-19... [T]hey experienced a range of symptoms consistent with colds or allergies with accompanying symptoms typically not associated with COVID-19, and some of them were confirmed to have been sick with other illnesses unrelated to COVID-19." And there's no indication any of them were ever hospitalized for COVID-19 symptoms.

Moderators of Stack Overflow have announced a strike in protest of the company's ban on moderating AI-generated content, claiming that this policy allows incorrect information and plagiarism to proliferate on the platform. Gizmodo reports: Last week in a post -- which has been downvoted at least 283 times -- Stack Overflow announced its new moderation policy that will only remove AI-generated content in specific instances, claiming that over-moderation of posts made with artificial intelligence was turning away human contributors. The company also said in its post that a strict standard of evidence needed to be used moving forward in order to manage AI content, and that that standard of evidence hasn't applied to most suspensions issued by moderators thus far. This directive was also communicated to the platform's moderation team privately before being posted publicly. The moderators of the website are claiming that this directive will allow AI content, which can frequently be incorrect, to run rampant on the forum while expressing discontent with Stack Overflow for not communicating this new policy more effectively.

"Stack Overflow, Inc. has decreed a near-total prohibition on moderating AI-generated content in the wake of a flood of such content being posted to and subsequently removed from the Stack Exchange network, tacitly allowing the proliferation of incorrect information ("hallucinations") and unfettered plagiarism on the Stack Exchange network. This poses a major threat to the integrity and trustworthiness of the platform and its content," the mods write in their letter to Stack Overflow. "Stack Overflow, Inc. has decreed a near-total prohibition on moderating AI-generated content in the wake of a flood of such content being posted to and subsequently removed from the Stack Exchange network, tacitly allowing the proliferation of incorrect information ("hallucinations") and unfettered plagiarism on the Stack Exchange network. This poses a major threat to the integrity and trustworthiness of the platform and its content," the mods write in their letter to Stack Overflow.

Stack Overflow moderators, like those at Wikipedia, are volunteers tasked with maintaining the integrity of the platform. The moderators say that they tried to express their concerns with the company's new policy through proper channels, but their anxieties fell on deaf ears. The mods plan to strike indefinitely, and will cease all actions including closing posts, deleting posts, flagging answers, and other tasks that help with website upkeep until AI policy has been retracted.

Long-time Slashdot theodp writes: Writing for the masses in It's the End of Computer Programming as We Know It. (And I Feel Fine.), NY Times opinion columnist Farhad Manjoo explains that while A.I. might not spell the end of programming ("the world will still need people with advanced coding skills"), it could mark the beginning of a new kind of programming — "one that doesn't require us to learn code but instead transforms human-language instructions into software."

"Wasn't coding supposed to be one of the can't-miss careers of the digital age?," Manjoo asks. "In the decades since I puttered around with my [ZX] Spectrum, computer programming grew from a nerdy hobby into a vocational near-imperative, the one skill to acquire to survive technological dislocation, no matter how absurd or callous-sounding the advice. Joe Biden told coal miners: Learn to code! Twitter trolls told laid-off journalists: Learn to code! Tim Cook told French kids: Apprenez à programmer! Programming might still be a worthwhile skill to learn, if only as an intellectual exercise, but it would have been silly to think of it as an endeavor insulated from the very automation it was enabling. Over much of the history of computing, coding has been on a path toward increasing simplicity."

In closing, Manjoo notes that A.I. has alleviated one of his worries (one shared by President Obama). "I've tried to introduce my two kids to programming the way my dad did for me, but both found it a snooze. Their disinterest in coding has been one of my disappointments as a father, not to mention a source of anxiety that they could be out of step with the future. (I live in Silicon Valley, where kids seem to learn to code before they learn to read.) But now I'm a bit less worried. By the time they're looking for careers, coding might be as antiquated as my first PC."

Btw, there are lots of comments — 700+ and counting — on Manjoo's column from programming types and others on whether reports of programming's death are greatly exaggerated.

New submitter terrorubic shares a report from Reuters: The United States said it will stop providing Russia some notifications required under the New START arms control treaty from Thursday, including updates on its missile and launcher locations, to retaliate for Moscow's 'ongoing violations' of the accord. In a fact sheet on its website, the State Department said it would also stop giving Russia telemetry information - remotely gathered data about a missile's flight - on launches of U.S. intercontinental and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has not formally withdrawn from the treaty, which limits deployed strategic nuclear arsenals. On Feb. 21, he said Russia would suspend participation, imperiling the last pillar of U.S.-Russian arms control. Signed in 2010 and due to expire in 2026, the New START treaty caps the number of strategic nuclear warheads that the countries can deploy. Under its terms, Moscow and Washington may deploy no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear warheads and 700 land- and submarine-based missiles and bombers to deliver them. "The State Department said it continues to notify Russia of intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and submarine ballistic missile (SLBM) launches in accordance with the 1988 Ballistic Missile Launch Notifications Agreement, and of strategic exercises in accordance with a separate 1989 accord," notes Reuters.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A Virginia jury held Cox liable for pirating subscribers because it failed to terminate accounts after repeated accusations, ordering the company to pay $1 billion in damages to the labels. This landmark ruling is currently under appeal. As part of the appeal, Cox informed the court of a supplemental authority that could support its position. The case in question is Twitter vs. Taamneh, in which the U.S. Supreme Court recently held that the social media platform isn't liable for ISIS terrorists, who used Twitter to recruit and raise funds. The Supreme Court rejected (PDF) the claim that Twitter aided-and-abetted terrorist activity, because it didn't "consciously and culpably" participate in the illegal activity. According to Cox, the same logic applies in its case, where the ISP was held liable for the piracy activities of subscribers.

"These same aiding-and-abetting principles animate copyright law's contributory liability doctrine, and they likewise foreclose liability here," an attorney for Cox informed the court. Cox argues that the Supreme Court ruling confirms that aiding-and-abetting liability only applies when parties knowingly took part in the activity. That runs contrary to the finding in its own dispute with the record labels, where "culpable expression and conduct" or "intent" were not required. "Though Twitter arises in a different context, its reasoning applies with full force and supports reversal of the contributory infringement verdict," Cox added. The two cases are indeed quite different, but ultimately they are about imposing liability on third-party services.

According to Cox, the Twitter terrorist ruling clearly shows that it isn't liable for pirating subscribers, but the music companies see things differently. Earlier this week, the music labels responded in court (PDF), countering Cox's arguments. They argue that the Twitter ruling doesn't apply to their piracy dispute with Cox, as the cases are grounded in different laws. While the music industry certainly isn't happy with pirates, the Cox case is a copyright matter while the Twitter lawsuit fell under the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. And for now, pirates are not categorized as terrorists. After establishing the difference between pirates and terrorists, the music companies point out that Twitter wasn't directly connected to the misconduct. The platform's role was more passive and its connection to ISIS was more distant than Cox's connection to its subscribers. Cox took a more active role and materially contributed to the pirating activities, which stands no comparison to the Twitter case, plaintiffs argue.

"Over the past 13 years, Tim Taylor and Christine Dennison have scoured the ocean floor using autonomous underwater robots," according to a history writer's commentary on CNN, "to discover and document the wrecks of seven US submarines lost in World War II." Taylor and Dennison are ensuring that more families of those lost know where their loved ones' deep-water graves reside. They are racing against time as underwater development threatens many of these wrecks... Budget constraints hinder the Navy from devoting resources to undertaking these kinds of searches, according to Taylor, and his team is showing how private groups can fill the gap.
A philanthropic private investment group funds the expeditions, the article points out, adding that Taylor and Dennison "hope to employ the special autonomous underwater technology they created to help others map the ocean floor for environmental and other purposes."

Their latest find was part of the 82-day battle of Okinawa in 1945: The USS Mannert L. Abele, which the explorers found 4,500 feet under the Pacific Ocean and 81 miles from the nearest landmass, was the first American ship sunk by an unusual type of rocket-powered Japanese kamikaze plane... Though the Abele managed to shoot down two aircraft and damage or fend off others, at six minutes in, a Japanese fighter plunged into the destroyer's engine room and exploded, cutting off all electrical power. Just a minute later, another, much more unusual, plane slammed into the destroyer's hull. The Abele had been struck by a unique rocket-propelled kamikaze plane called the MXY7 Ohka ("Cherry Blossom"), which due to its very short range had to be carried under the belly of a larger bomber until close to US ships, whereupon it was released to soar toward its target at immense speed.

The detonation of this manned missile's 1.3 tons of explosives caused the ship to seemingly break into two and begin sinking. In a matter of minutes, 84 sailors and officers had been killed. Japanese aircraft strafed the surviving crew as they jumped into the oil-slick water, but two smaller landing craft escorting the Abele shot down two more planes and beat off the rest, managing to rescue 255 crew members.

Nearly eight decades later, modern robotics technologies allowed Taylor and Dennison to find the destroyer's submerged hull. In the past, Taylor noted, it would have been practically inconceivable for a small, private team to have undertaken the cumbersome search process that, Taylor estimated, would have taken four to five times as long and cost significantly more money...

It was on their last remaining day of a more-than-month-long search, just before bad weather would force them to conclude the expedition, that they spotted the Abele's wreck.

The PyPi registry of open source Python packages "began evaluating ways to reduce the amount of identifying information that it stores," reports the Register, "even before the U.S. Justice Department came asking for data on suspect users."

But now, "the Python community package registry wants developers to understand that it's working to minimize the user data that it stores." The goal is not to be unable to respond to lawful requests for information; rather it's to store only the minimum amount of data necessary so as not to expose users to unnecessary privacy intrusion. Coincidentally, data minimization may prevent organizations from becoming a preferred source of on-demand surveillance: having excessive amounts of information about users invites legal demands, which staff then have to handle...

Mike Fiedler, a member of the PyPI admin team, said in a statement on Friday that the organization's effort to improve user privacy and security dates back to 2020. Since the receipt of the subpoenas in March and April, that effort has been reinvigorated.

Much of the concern focuses on IP address data, which gets stored in conjunction with web log access; user events such as logins; project events including uploads; events associated with recently introduced organizations; and administrative PyPI journal entries. According to Fiedler, PyPI was able to stop storing IP data for journal entries — an append-only transaction log — because these were only exposed to administrators... To obscure IP addresses, PyPI is salting them — adding an arbitrary value — and then hashing them — running the data through a one-way scrambling function that creates a value called a hash. This provides a way to store a reference to potentially identifying data without actually storing raw data... PyPI has been using its CDN provider Fastly to pass along a salted hash of the IP address for requests via a custom header, along with broad GeoIP data (the country and city where the user is located), and is using that instead of the raw IP address. In April, the registry adopted code changes for hashing and salting IP addresses for requests that PyPI handles directly in Warehouse, the web application that implements the official Python package index.

And over the past few days, it has been replacing IP addresses in the PyPI user interface with geolocation data. PyPI still relies on IP address information to identify abuse — the creation of malicious packages, harassments, and so on — but Fiedler says even that is being looked at. "We're thinking about how to manage that without storing IP data, but we're not there yet," he said. Fiedler says the PyPI team will be weighing whether it can remove IP data from event history records after a period of time and whether the service can handle all its requests via CDN.

Slashdot reader Zapotek brings an update from the Ecsypno skunkworks, where they've been busy with R&D for distributed computing systems: Armed with Cuboid, Qmap was built, which tackled the handling of nmap in a distributed environment, with great results. Afterwards, an iterative clean-up process led to a template of sorts, for scheduling most applications in such environments.

With that, Peplum was born, which allows for OS applications, Ruby code and C/C++/Rust code (via Ruby extensions) to be distributed across machines and tackle the processing of neatly grouped objects.

In essence, Peplum:

- Is a distributed computing solution backed by Cuboid.
- Its basic function is to distribute workloads and deliver payloads across multiple machines and thus parallelize otherwise time consuming tasks.
- Allows you to combine several machines and built a cluster/supercomputer of sorts with great ease.

After that was dealt with, it was time to port Qmap over to Peplum for easier long-term maintenance, thus renamed Peplum::Nmap.

We have high hopes for Peplum as it basically means easy, simple and joyful cloud/clustering/super-computing at home, on-premise, anywhere really. Along with the capability to turn a lot of security oriented apps into super versions of themselves, it is quite the infrastructure.
Yes, this means there's a new solution if you're using multiple machines for "running simulations, to network mapping/security scans, to password cracking/recovery or just encoding your collection of music and video" -- or anything else: Peplum is a F/OSS (MIT licensed) project aimed at making clustering/super-computing affordable and accessible, by making it simple to setup a distributed parallel computing environment for abstract applications... TLDR: You no longer have to only imagine a Beowulf cluster of those, you can now easily build one yourself with Peplum.
Some technical specs: It is written in the Ruby programming language, thus coming with an entire ecosystem of libraries and the capability to run abstract Ruby code, execute external utilities, run OS commands, call C/C++/Rust routines and more...

Peplum is powered by Cuboid, a F/OSS (MIT licensed) abstract framework for distributed computing — both of them are funded by Ecsypno Single Member P.C., a new R&D and Consulting company.

Virgin Orbit, a bankrupt rocket company spun off from Virgin Galactic, is shutting down after selling its facility leases and equipment to aerospace companies in an auction. CNBC reports: Spun out of Virgin Galactic in 2017 by founder Sir Richard Branson, Virgin Orbit reached rarefied air by flying multiple missions. But difficulty raising funds, and slow execution, brought the once multibillion-dollar company to bankruptcy and ultimately shut down. Monday's auction bids amount to about $36 million in total. Virgin Orbit's six or so rockets that were in various stages of manufacturing assembly, and its intellectual property, have yet to be sold, a Virgin Orbit spokesperson confirmed.

Rocket Lab successfully bid $16.1 million for the company's headquarters in Long Beach, California, which is about 140,000 square feet, the spokesperson said. Although founded in New Zealand, Rocket Lab was already a neighbor of Virgin Orbit, with a headquarters and facilities in the Long Beach area. Additionally, Rocket Lab's purchase includes assets such as 3D-printers and a specialty tank welding machine. In a press release, Rocket Lab said the Virgin Orbit assets will improve its production, manufacturing, and test capabilities, especially in developing its larger Neutron rocket.

Stratolaunch was awarded its $17 million "stalking horse" bid for Virgin Orbit's 747 jet. A Stratolaunch spokesperson, in a statement to CNBC, said the company "continually evaluates ways to increase our capacity to meet the imperative for testing hypersonic technologies via leap-ahead flight demonstrations." "We will share more news about the sale as it becomes available," Stratolaunch noted. Previously in the bankruptcy process, Virgin Orbit agreed to the terms of Stratolaunch's bid, which was to purchase the 747 jet "Cosmic Girl" and other aircraft assets. Stratolaunch has been developing its own airborne system, the world's largest airplane called "Roc," as a platform for hypersonic flight testing.

Launcher, a subsidiary of Vast Space, is purchasing the company's facility in Mojave, California -- as well as some machinery, equipment and inventory -- for $2.7 million. Virgin Orbit's Mojave leases include infrastructure such as rocket engine test stands and an aircraft hangar. A liquidation company, Inliper, is purchasing the company's office equipment for $650,000.

Time magazine once described Lauren Weinstein as an internet-policy expert and privacy advocate. Also a long-time Slashdot reader, he now brings this cautionary blog post "to share with you an example of what Google account recovery failure means to the people involved..."

In this case it's a 90-year-old woman who "For at least the last decade... was just using the stored password to login and check her email," according to an email Weinstein received: When her ancient iPad finally died, she tried to add the gmail account to her new replacement iPad. However, she couldn't remember the password in order to login.... I don't know if you've ever attempted to contact a human being at google tech support, but it's pretty much impossible. They also don't seem to have an exception mechanism for cases like this.

So she had to abandon hopes of viewing the google photos of her (now deceased) beloved pet, her contacts, her email subscriptions, reminders, calendar entries, etc... [I]t's difficult to know what to say to someone like this when she asks "what can we do now" and there are no options... It's tough to explain that your treasured photos can't be retrieved because you're not the sort of user that Google had in mind.
Weinstein adds "this is by no means the worst such case I've seen — not even close, unfortunately." I've been discussing these issues with Google for many years. I've suggested "ombudspeople", account escalation and appeal procedures that ordinary people could understand, and many other concepts. They've all basically hit the brick wall of Google suggesting that at their scale, nothing can be done about such "edge" cases.
Here's Google's page for providing an alternate recovery email address and phone number. Unfortunately, the 90-year-old woman's account "was created so long ago that she didn't need to provide any 'recovery' contacts at that time," according to the email, "or she may have used a landline phone number that's long been cancelled now..."

It's an educational pocket-sized codable computer with a motion detector, compass, and other sensors. Wikipedia describes the micro:bit as "half the size of a credit card" -- (43 mm x 52 mm or 1.7 inches by 2.0 inches).

Now long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: If British schoolchildren aren't inspired to code by the tiny 5x5 grid of LED lights on the micro:bit single-board computer, well it's not for lack of trying. The BBC on Monday announced a partnership with Microsoft, Arm, and others that will offer a classroom set of 30 free handheld BBC micro:bits (about 700,000 total devices) and brand-new teaching resources to every primary school across the UK "to support all schoolchildren and teachers..."

The news follows January's announcement of the Micro:bit Educational Foundation's newest partnership. They teamed with US-based/tech giant-backed nonprofit Code.org to offer teachers computing resources to incorporate the micro:bit in Code.org's CS Fundamentals curriculum (aimed at children in Kindergarten-5th Grade).

Microsoft is a Founding Partner of both the Micro:bit Educational Foundation and Code.org, and back in 2015 Microsoft also partnered with the BBC to provide an estimated 1 million free micro:bits to every 11- and 12-year old in the UK. A 2017 research paper reported that after testing with 15 teachers, "primarily comments around engagement were positive." But one skeptical teacher offered some doubts about the appeal of a small relatively low-tech device to younger children. "I mean I think it's cute but I could easily see why you know a 4K mobile phone screen is going to hold more appeal than regular LEDs ... I think there is merit in that but I could see how people would understandably go where's the screen?"

"I keep reading and hearing about calls for regulations on artificial intelligence," writes long-time Slashdot reader bartoku , "and it pisses me off."

"I want more so called artificial intelligence, not less, and I do not want it to be regulated, filtered, restricted in anyway." I love that Deep Fakes are now available to the masses, and I stopped believing anything is real in 1997 after Hoffman and De Niro scared me in " Wag the Dog".

I love automation and I want more of it; robots please take my job. I want robots to go fight wars for me instead of our sons.

Surveillance is already terrifying, adding "Artificial Intelligence" does not really make it that much more scary; we all need to just starve the system of our personal data anyway. All the other arguments like crashing economic systems and discrimination just seemed to be based on stupid "Artificial Intelligence" hooked up to something it should not be...

Please scare me, or vote on your favorite sci-fi "Artificial Intelligence" scenario. I will be being boring and hope we can have a "good" Matrix; one where I am rich and sexy.
The original submission notes that they posed this question to ChatGPT — and to Google — but "I did not get a single compelling answer."

So share your own thoughts in the comments: why should this Slashdot user be afraid of AI?

NOTE: Though they didn't feel it conveyed the right tone, they also submitted their original post to Microsoft's Bing AI, which delivered this rewrite:

What are the real dangers of artificial intelligence? I am not convinced by the common arguments against it, such as regulation, deep fakes, automation, war, surveillance, economic disruption, or discrimination. I think these are either exaggerated or solvable problems. I actually want more artificial intelligence in my life, not less. Can you give me some compelling reasons why I should be afraid of artificial intelligence? Or what are some sci-fi scenarios that you find plausible or interesting? Personally, I would like a Matrix-like simulation where I can live out my fantasies.

Wikipedia describes Freenet as "a peer-to-peer platform for censorship-resistant, anonymous communication," released in the year 2000. "Both Freenet and some of its associated tools were originally designed by Ian Clarke," Wikipedia adds. (And in 2000 Clarke answered questions from Slashdot's readers...)

And now Ian Clarke (aka Sanity — Slashdot reader #1,431) returns to share this announcement: Freenet, a familiar name to Slashdot readers for over 23 years, has undergone a radical transformation: Freenet 2023, or "Locutus". While the original Freenet was like a decentralized hard drive, the new Freenet is like a full decentralized computer, allowing the creation of entirely decentralized services like messaging, group chat, search, social networking, among others. The new Freenet is implemented in Rust and designed for efficiency, flexibility, and transparency to the end user.
"Designed for simplicity and flexibility, Freenet 2023 can be used seamlessly through your web browser, providing an experience that feels just like using the traditional web," explains the announcement...

And in the comments below, Ian points out that "When the new Freenet is up and running, I think it will be the first system of any kind that could host something like Wikipedia, not just the data but the wiki CMS system it's built on. An editable wikipedia, entirely decentralized and very scalable...

"We've already had interest from everyone from video game developers who want to build a decentralized MMORPG, to political advocacy groups across the political spectrum. Plenty of people value freedom."

Researchers in the Hybrid Quantum Systems Group at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich have put a sapphire crystal weighing 16 micrograms in a quantum-mechanical superposition of two vibrational states. The researchers "excited the crystal into vibrations such that its atoms oscillated back and forth simultaneously and in two opposite directions -- putting the entire crystal in what is known as a state of quantum superposition," reports Scientific American. From the report: As the research group reports in Science, this condition is much like that of the cat in the famous thought experiment of physicist Erwin Schrodinger. In Schrodinger's quantum-mechanical scenario, a cat is simultaneously alive and dead, depending on the decay of an atom that releases a vial of poison. The sapphire crystal in the new experiment has been put in the macroscopic equivalent of that "cat state." Such states can help scientists fathom how and why the laws of the quantum world transition into the rules of classical physics for larger objects.

To get the sapphire, which consists of about 10^17 atoms, to behave like a quantum-mechanical object, the research group set it to oscillate and coupled it to a superconducting circuit. (In the terms of the original thought experiment, the sapphire was the cat, and the superconducting circuit was the decaying atom.) The circuit was used as a qubit, or bit of quantum information that is simultaneously in the states "0" and "1." The circuit's superposition was then transferred to the oscillation of the crystal. Thus, the atoms in the crystal could move in two directions at the same time -- for example, up and down -- just as Schrodinger's cat is dead and alive at the same time. Importantly, the distance between these two states (alive and dead or up and down) had to be greater than the distance ascribed to the quantum uncertainty principle, which the ETH Zurich scientists confirmed. Using the superconducting qubit, the researchers succeeded in determining the distance between the crystal's two vibrational states. At about two billionths of a nanometer, it's tiny -- but still large enough to distinguish those two states from each other beyond doubt.

These findings have "pushed the envelope on what can be considered quantum mechanical in an actual lab experiment," says Shlomi Kotler, a physicist who studies quantum mechanical circuits at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Kotler did not participate in the study. [...] Kotler notes that finding larger cat states is a way of "stretching the limit" of observed quantum-mechanical objects -- in this case, by demonstrating that something as massive as 16 micrograms can exist in this state. (Though, to be clear, 16 micrograms is still microscopic.)