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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

looorg writes:https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/

looorg writes:https://mashable.com/article/penguin-random-house-ai-protections-copyright-page

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It is a long time since we issued a Meta regarding the situation of the site. Much has been happening, but nowhere near as quickly as we had imagined or had hoped. But we are now almost there.The handover of assets is taking place. The new Board has been instrumental in this and, when the transfer is finally complete, I know that NCommander wishes to write his own Meta to you, the community. Details of who is in which seat will happen once the handover is complete because, until that point, the current site is the one that has existed since 2014, and it is still headed by NCommander.New hardware is being set up which will allow us to drastically reduce the running costs of the site. Two people, fliptop and kolie, have donated the use of servers and internet connections free of charge to SoylentNews. This is an extremely generous donation on their part and one for which the new Board is extremely grateful. Contracts, where requested, are being actioned as I write this Meta. There will still be annual costs for domains etc.The new hardware will have a new software structure installed on it, based on Docker containers. These will provide a significantly easier system to manage and, hopefully, will also take care automatically with many of the disruptive issues that we have seen in recent months. I do not claim that there will not be any initial hiccups but the site will still be running on Rehash and will look and behave exactly as it does today. There will be issues regarding updates to software for which new procedures will have to be produced and documented, but that is a task for the future and it need not delay the transfer.Regarding changes to software, there is an incident that took place last weekend. A community member informed us that the moderation system, under certain usages, could compromise the identity of both the moderator and the moderatee. I passed the information to NCommander and kolie who, despite it being a weekend, identified and confirmed the problem, and subsequently identified a potential fix. The software change was made by kolie first thing on (his) Monday morning, which means that a serious problem was identified and the fix implemented in a fraction over 24 hours. I don't think anyone could have done it any faster bearing in mind that this is an all-volunteer site and considering that it occurred at a time when most people would rather be having some private time with their families. The team we have at the moment is much smaller than we have ever had before but it is still capable of managing the site and keeping the stories flowing. It is only right that I acknowledge on your behalf the contribution made by, and offer my thanks to, the community member who reported the issue (who may identify themself if they wish), NCommander and in particular kolie, who is very much involved in the new site just as he has been for the last 18 months or so.However, not all problems are under our control. The current issues with IRC have resulted in a ticket being raised by NCommander for support action to be taken by Akamai/Linode. The problem occurred immediately after some routine maintenance, and it appears to be related to DNS and IPv6 as a result of changes that have been introduced by that maintenance. I do not have all the details to hand but it is being actioned.For this site to remain active and interesting we rely on community support. Whether that be by making submissions (you should know the sort of topics that we are looking for, and we can always put some things under the 'random' topic), or by offering to assist with one of the teams, or just by commenting as many of you are doing now. I realise that this is an important time in the run-up to an election but please discuss TFA and not bring politics into every discussion. You can discuss politics as much as you wish in your journals. In fact, there is no 'politics' topic, nor has there ever been one.I have been asked numerous times when will ACs be allowed back onto the front pages? There is only one person stopping that from happening now, and it is not me. There will always be occasional spamming and that can be managed quite effectively by community moderation. When the excessive spamming and abuse stops for good then ACs can return to full discussions. But spamming will not result in closing down this site.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.

Frosty Piss writes:https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/19/us/philip-zimbardo-stanford-death/index.htmlPhilip G. Zimbardo, the psychologist behind the controversial "Stanford Prison Experiment" that was intended to examine the psychological experiences of imprisonment, has died. In the 1971 prison study funded by the US Office of Naval Research, Zimbardo and a team of graduate students recruited male college students to spend two weeks in a mock prison in the basement of a building on the Stanford campus. The United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps wanted to understand anti-social behavior and investigate conflict between military guards and prisoners. After psychologist Christina Maslach (later to become his wife) visited to evaluate the conditions, she was troubled to see how study participants were behaving and she confronted Zimbardo. He ended the experiment on the sixth day.Selected student participants were assigned randomly to be "prisoners" or "guards" in a mock prison located in the basement of the psychology building at Stanford. Prisoners were confined to a 6 by 9 feet cell with black steel-barred doors. The only furniture in each cell was a cot. Solitary confinement was a small unlit closet. In his book Humankind - a hopeful history (2020) historian Rutger Bregman discusses charges that the whole experiment was faked and fraudulent; Bregman argued this experiment is often used as an example to show that people succumb easily to evil behavior, but Zimbardo was less than candid about the fact that he told the guards to act the way they did.Zimbardo's primary reason for conducting the experiment was to focus on the power of roles, rules, symbols, group identity and situational validation of behavior that generally would repulse ordinary individuals. "I had been conducting research for some years on deindividuation, vandalism and dehumanization that illustrated the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive of others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects," said Zimbardo.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.

Indonesia Bans Chinese E-Commerce App TemuArthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

owl writes:The Terminator: How James Cameron's 'science-fiction slasher film' predicted AI fears, 40 years ago

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Why Hurricanes Like Milton In The Us And Cyclones In Australia Are Becoming More Intense And Harder Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

owl writes:https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/10/17/meta-staff-sacked-for-using-25-takeaway-vouchers-wine-glass/

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

looorg writes:https://torrentfreak.com/sony-defeated-as-cjeu-finds-datels-ram-data-cheat-non-copyright-infringing-241018/

Booga1 writes:Wales Online reports: James Howells has spent more than a decade trying to get back a dumped hard drive. Now he has assembled a team of top lawyers to sue the council he claims has 'ignored' him "I'm suing the council for 495m because they won't give me back my bin bag."

AnonTechie writes:

fliptop writes:Google has initiated the discontinuation of support for uBlock Origin, the popular ad-tracking blocker, in Chrome:

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owl writes:https://www.hagerty.com/media/automobilia/the-rise-and-fall-of-matchboxs-toy-car-empire/

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:[Editor's Comment: I was sceptical when I first read this report but a little bit of searching suggests that the technique is used elsewhere but at very different frequencies. I will let you reach your own conclusions.]

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

AnonTechie writes:

Sometime last Tuesday, our IRC went offline. If you made any changes prior to that, could you please reverse them?In the meantime, we have a backup server that you might want to use:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

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upstart writes:Ex-Twitter execs push for $200M severance as Elon Musk runs X into ground:

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upstart writes:How a subfield of physics led to breakthroughs in AI - and from there to this year's Nobel Prize:We covered the announcement of the Nobel Prize here. This article is to introduce the subject of Statistical Mechanics, for which you will need your thinking caps and an understanding of some serious mathematics. Follow the links for much more detail.

canopic jug writes:Charlie Stross, a science fiction writer based in Scotland, has written a post about different possible approaches to space colonization. He includes a discussion of several different models.

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

upstart writes:Should I be more or less scared of the doctor?The products include a service that helps healthcare organizations build their own AI agents:

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canopic jug writes:Software developer and former computer science student Amit Patel has written a post about generating curved text for maps and other purposes.

upstart writes:The new text is timed to a new California law against false advertising:

Ward Christensen, inventer of XMODEM and co-inventer of the BBS, has diedSnotnose writes:Not much I can say, .Story here"

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upstart writes:Boeing Slashes 10% Of Workforce, CEO Warns "Hard To Overstate The Challenges We Face":

AnonTechie writes:[Source]: Time.com

upstart writes:Darpa Thinks Walls of Oysters Could Protect Shores Against Hurricanes:

canopic jug writes:Computer consultant J B Crawford, author of the Computers Are Bad newsletter, has posted an overview of commercial HF radio with a bit of background into the technology and some of its advantages and disadvantages: