An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Anthropic, the company that made one of the most popular AI writing assistants in the world, requires job applicants to agree that they won't use an AI assistant to help write their application. "While we encourage people to use AI systems during their role to help them work faster and more effectively, please do not use AI assistants during the application process," the applications say. "We want to understand your personal interest in Anthropic without mediation through an AI system, and we also want to evaluate your non-AI-assisted communication skills. Please indicate 'Yes' if you have read and agree."

Anthropic released Claude, an AI assistant that's especially good at conversational writing, in 2023. This question is in almost all of Anthropic's nearly 150 currently-listed roles, but is not in some technical roles, like mobile product designer. It's included in everything from software engineer roles to finance, communications, and sales jobs at the company. The field was spotted by Simon Willison, an open source developer. The question shows Anthropic trying to get around a problem it's helping create: people relying so heavily on AI assistants that they struggle to form opinions of their own. It's also a moot question, as Anthropic and its competitors have created AI models so indistinguishable from human speech as to be nearly undetectable.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL), whose tagline is "Win the Fight," has paid more than a hundred thousand dollars to a company that is providing generative AI services to other parts of the Department of Defense. But the AFRL refused to say what exactly the point of the research was, and provided page after page of entirely blacked out, redacted documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from 404 Media related to the contract. [...] "Ask Sage: Generative AI Acquisition Accelerator," a December 2023 procurement record reads, with no additional information on the intended use case. The Air Force paid $109,490 to Ask Sage, the record says.

Ask Sage is a company focused on providing generative AI to the government. In September the company announced that the Army was implementing Ask Sage's tools. In October it achieved "IL5" authorization, a DoD term for the necessary steps to protect unclassified information to a certain standard. 404 Media made an account on the Ask Sage website. After logging in, the site presents a list of the models available through Ask Sage. Essentially, they include every major model made by well-known AI companies and open source ones. Open AI's GPT-4o and DALL-E-3; Anthropic's Claude 3.5; and Google's Gemini are all included. The company also recently added the Chinese-developed DeepSeek R1, but includes a disclaimer. "WARNING. DO NOT USE THIS MODEL WITH SENSITIVE DATA. THIS MODEL IS BIASED, WITH TIES TO THE CCP [Chinese Communist Party]," it reads. Ask Sage is a way for government employees to access and use AI models in a more secure way. But only some of the models in the tool are listed by Ask Sage as being "compliant" with or "capable" of handling sensitive data.

[...] [T]he Air Force declined to provide any real specifics on what it paid Ask Sage for. 404 Media requested all procurement records related to the Ask Sage contract. Instead, the Air Force provided a 19 page presentation which seemingly would have explained the purpose of the test, while redacting 18 of the pages. The only available page said "Ask Sage, Inc. will explore the utilization of Ask Sage by acquisition Airmen with the DAF for Innovative Defense-Related Dual Purpose Technologies relating to the mission of exploring LLMs for DAF use while exploring anticipated benefits, clearly define needed solution adaptations, and define clear milestones and acceptance criteria for Phase II efforts."

The blog OMG Ubuntu reports: Ubuntu's key developers have agreed to switch to Matrix as the primary platform for real-time development communications involving the distro. From March, Matrix will replace IRC as the place where critical Ubuntu development conversations, requests, meetings, and other vital chatter must take place... Only the current #ubuntu-devel and #ubuntu-release Libera IRC channels are moving to Matrix, but other Ubuntu development-related channels can choose to move — officially, given some projects were using Matrix over IRC already.

As a result, any major requests to/of the key Ubuntu development teams with privileged access can only be actioned if requests are made on Matrix. Canonical-employed Ubuntu developers will be expected to be present on Matrix during working hours... The aim is to streamline organisation, speed up decision making, ensure key developers are reliably reachable, and avoid discussions and conversations from fragmenting across multiple platforms... It's hoped that in picking one platform as the 'chosen one' the split in where the distro's development discourse takes place can be reduced and greater transparency in how and when decisions are made restored.

IRC remains popular with many Ubuntu developers but its old-school, lo-fi nature is said to be off-putting to newer contributors. They're used to richer real-time chat platforms with more features (like discussion history, search, offline messaging, etc). It's felt this is why many newer developers employed by Canonical prefer to discuss and message through the company's internal Mattermost instance — which isn't publicly accessible. Many Ubuntu teams, flavours, and community chats already take place on Matrix...
"End-users aren't directly affected, of course," they point out. But an earlier post on the same blog notes that Matrix "is increasingly ubiquitous in open-source circles. GNOME uses it, KDE embraces it, Linux Mint migrated last year, Mozilla a few years before, and it's already widely used by Ubuntu community members and developers." IRC remains unmatched in many areas but is, rightly or wrongly, viewed as an antiquated communication platform. IRC clients aren't pretty or plentiful, the syntax is obtuse, and support for 'modern' comforts like media sending, read receipts, etc., is lacking.To newer, younger contributors IRC could feel ancient or cumbersome to learn.

Though many of IRC's real and perceived shortcomings are surmountable with workarounds, clients, bots, scripts, and so on, support for those varies between channels, clients, servers, and user configurations. Unlike IRC, which is a centralised protocol relying on individual servers, Matrix is federated. It lets users on different servers to communicate without friction. Plus, Matrix features encryption, message history, media support, and so, meeting modern expectations.

Tom's Hardware reports: Facebook's heavy-handed censorship of Linux groups and topics was "in error," the social media juggernaut has admitted. Responding to reports earlier this week, sparked by the curious censorship of the eminently wholesome DistroWatch, Facebook contacted PCMag to say that it had made a mistake and that the underlying issue had been rectified.

"This enforcement was in error and has since been addressed. Discussions of Linux are allowed on our services," said a Meta rep to PCMag. That is the full extent of the statement reproduced by the source... Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has appealed against the Community Standards-triggered ban shortly after it noticed it was in effect (January 19). PCMag received the Facebook admission of error on January 28. The latest statement from DistroWatch, which now prefers posting on Mastodon, indicates that Facebook has lifted the DistroWatch links ban.
More details from PCMag: Meta didn't say what caused the crackdown in the first place. But the company has been revamping some of its content moderation and plans to replace its fact-checking methodology with a user-driven Community Notes, similar to X. "We're also going to change how we enforce our policies to reduce the kind of mistakes that account for the vast majority of the censorship on our platforms," the company said earlier this month, in another irony.

"Up until now, we have been using automated systems to scan for all policy violations, but this has resulted in too many mistakes and too much content being censored that shouldn't have been," Meta added in the same post.

Star Wars star Mark Hamill, science fiction author William Gibson, XKCD cartoonist Randall Munroe, and The Onion have joined millions of others bringing Bluesky's user count to 30 million, reports CNET. In fact Bluesky has added over 14 million users in the last three months, and for a few days in early November was adding over one million users a day. "That rate equals about 12 new users per second. The 30 million user mark compares to 9 million users in September."

But meanwhile Meta's social media site Threads — launched 19 months ago — "now has 320 million monthly active users," reports TechCrunch, "up from 300 million last month. The app had 275 million monthly active users in [early] November." That's a 16% grow rate in just three months. In comparison, Bluesky is experiencing a slowdown in growth, with an increase of less than 10% month-over-month in December 2024, following a remarkable 189% growth in November, according to analytics firm Similarweb. Bluesky now has a total of 26.44 million users. Additionally, Zuckerberg noted that Threads is adding more than 1 million daily signups [while presenting fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday].

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Meta is in talks to move its incorporation from Delaware to Texas or other states. Reuters reports: The social media giant has talked to Texas officials about the potential changes, WSJ said, adding that the discussions predate President Donald Trump's new administration. The paperwork change would not relocate its corporate headquarters.

A Meta spokesperson said that it does not plan on shifting its corporate headquarters out of Menlo Park, California, but declined to comment on reincorporation when contacted by Reuters. Texas is perceived by some businesses as having a more favorable legal and regulatory environment, particularly in areas such as taxation and corporate governance, which can be attractive to companies looking to cut costs and streamline operations.

At an all hands meeting inside Meta Thursday, the company's co-founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said he was increasingly careful about what he says internally at Meta. From a report: "Everything I say leaks. And it sucks, right?," Zuckerberg said. Meta made changes to the question-and-answer section of the company all hands meeting because of the leaks, Zuckerberg said, according to meeting audio obtained by 404 Media. "I want to be able to be able to talk about stuff openly, but I am also trying to like, well, we're trying to build stuff and create value in the world, not destroy value by talking about stuff that inevitably leaks," he said.

So rather than take direct questions, the company used a "poll" system, where questions asked beforehand were voted on so that "main themes" of questions were addressed. "There are a bunch of things that I think are value-destroying for me to talk about, so I'm not going to talk about those. But I think it'll be good. You all can give us feedback later," he added. "Maybe it's just the nature of running a company at scale, but it's a little bit of a bummer."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Datasets aggregated on data.gov, the largest repository of U.S. government open data on the internet, are being deleted, according to the website's own information. Since Donald Trump was inaugurated as president, more than 2,000 datasets have disappeared from the database. As people in the Data Hoarding and archiving communities have pointed out, on January 21, there were 307,854 datasets on data.gov. As of Thursday, there are 305,564 datasets. Many of the deletions happened immediately after Trump was inaugurated, according to snapshots of the website saved on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. Harvard University researcher Jack Cushman has been taking snapshots of Data.gov's datasets both before and after the inauguration, and has worked to create a full archive of the data.

"Some of [the entries link to] actual data," Cushman told 404 Media. "And some of them link to a landing page [where the data is hosted]. And the question is -- when things are disappearing, is it the data it points to that is gone? Or is it just the index to it that's gone?" For example, "National Coral Reef Monitoring Program: Water Temperature Data from Subsurface Temperature Recorders (STRs) deployed at coral reef sites in the Hawaiian Archipelago from 2005 to 2019," a NOAA dataset, can no longer be found on data.gov but can be found on one of NOAA's websites by Googling the title. "Stetson Flower Garden Banks Benthic_Covage Monitoring 1993-2018 -- OBIS Event," another NOAA dataset, can no longer be found on data.gov and also appears to have been deleted from the internet. "Three Dimensional Thermal Model of Newberry Volcano, Oregon," a Department of Energy resource, is no longer available via the Department of Energy but can be found backed up on third-party websites. [...]

Data.gov serves as an aggregator of datasets and research across the entire government, meaning it isn't a single database. This makes it slightly harder to archive than any individual database, according to Mark Phillips, a University of Northern Texas researcher who works on the End of Term Web Archive, a project that archives as much as possible from government websites before a new administration takes over. "Some of this falls into the 'We don't know what we don't know,'" Phillips told 404 Media. "It is very challenging to know exactly what, where, how often it changes, and what is new, gone, or going to move. Saving content from an aggregator like data.gov is a bit more challenging for the End of Term work because often the data is only identified and registered as a metadata record with data.gov but the actual data could live on another website, a state .gov, a university website, cloud provider like Amazon or Microsoft or any other location. This makes the crawling even more difficult."

Phillips said that, for this round of archiving (which the team does every administration change), the project has been crawling government websites since January 2024, and that they have been doing "large-scale crawls with help from our partners at the Internet Archive, Common Crawl, and the University of North Texas. We've worked to collect 100s of terabytes of web content, which includes datasets from domains like data.gov." [...] It is absolutely true that the Trump administration is deleting government data and research and is making it harder to access. But determining what is gone, where it went, whether it's been preserved somewhere, and why it was taken down is a process that is time intensive and going to take a while. "One thing that is clear to me about datasets coming down from data.gov is that when we rely on one place for collecting, hosting, and making available these datasets, we will always have an issue with data disappearing," Phillips said. "Historically the federal government would distribute information to libraries across the country to provide greater access and also a safeguard against loss. That isn't done in the same way for this government data."

Longtime Slashdot reader nunya_bizns shares a report from Reuters: The U.S. Department of Justice has sued to block Hewlett Packard Enterprise's $14 billion deal to acquire networking gear maker Juniper Networks, arguing that it would stifle competition, according to a complaint filed on Thursday. The DOJ argued that the acquisition would eliminate competition and would lead to only two companies -- Cisco Systems and HPE -- controlling more than 70% of the U.S. market for networking equipment. More than a year ago, the server maker said that it would buy Juniper Networks for $14 billion in an all-cash deal, as it looks to spruce up its artificial intelligence offerings.

"Juniper has also introduced innovative tools that have materially decreased the cost of operating a wireless network for many customers. This competitive pressure has forced HPE to discount its offerings and invest in its own innovation," the DOJ said in its complaint. Stiff competition from Juniper forced HPE to sell its products at a discount and spend to introduce new features under the "Beat Mist" campaign, named after the networking gear company's rival product, the DOJ wrote. "Having failed to beat Mist on the merits, HPE changed tactics and in January 2024 opted to try to buy Juniper instead," the agency added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: US Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) today proposed a law that would let copyright owners obtain court orders requiring Internet service providers to block access to foreign piracy websites. The bill would also force DNS providers to block sites. Lofgren said in a press release that she "work[ed] for over a year with the tech, film, and television industries" on "a proposal that has a remedy for copyright infringers located overseas that does not disrupt the free Internet except for the infringers." Lofgren said she plans to work with Republican leaders to enact the bill. [...]

Lofgren's bill (PDF) would impose site-blocking requirements on broadband providers with at least 100,000 subscribers and providers of public domain name resolution services with annual revenue of over $100 million. The bill has exemptions for VPN services and "similar services that encrypt and route user traffic through intermediary servers"; DNS providers that offer service "exclusively through encrypted DNS protocols"; and operators of premises that provide Internet access, like coffee shops, bookstores, airlines, and universities. Lofgren released a summary of the bill explaining how copyright owners can obtain blocking orders. "A copyright owner or exclusive licensee may file a petition in US District Court to obtain a preliminary order against a foreign website or online service engaging in copyright infringement," the summary said.

For non-live content, the petition must show that "transmission of a work through a foreign website likely infringes exclusive rights under Section 106 [of US law] and is causing irreparable harm." For live events, a petition must show that "an imminent or ongoing unauthorized transmission of a live event is likely to infringe, and will cause irreparable harm." The proposed law says that after a preliminary order is issued, copyright owners would be able to obtain orders directing service providers "to take reasonable and technically feasible measures to prevent users of the service provided by the service provider from accessing the foreign website or online service identified in the order." Judges would not be permitted to "prescribe any specific technical measures" for blocking and may not require any action that would prevent Internet users from using virtual private networks.Consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge described the bill as a "censorious site-blocking" measure "that turns broadband providers into copyright police at Americans' expense."

"Rather than attacking the problem at its source -- bringing the people running overseas piracy websites to court -- Congress and its allies in the entertainment industry has decided to build out a sweeping infrastructure for censorship," Public Knowledge Senior Policy Counsel Meredith Rose said. "Site-blocking orders force any service provider, from residential broadband providers to global DNS resolvers, to disrupt traffic from targeted websites accused of copyright infringement. More importantly, applying blocking orders to global DNS resolvers results in global blocks. This means that one court can cut off access to a website globally, based on one individual's filing and an expedited procedure. Blocking orders are incredibly powerful weapons, ripe for abuse, and we've seen the messy consequences of them being implemented in other countries."

Virgin Money's AI-powered chatbot has reprimanded a customer who used the word "virgin," underlining the pitfalls of rolling out external AI tools. From a report: In a post last week on social media site LinkedIn, David Birch, a fintech commentator and Virgin Money customer, shared a picture of his online conversation with the bank in which he asked: "I have two ISAs with Virgin Money, how do I merge them?" The bank's customer service tool responded: "Please don't use words like that. I won't be able to continue our chat if you use this language," suggesting that it deemed the word "virgin" inappropriate.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Bolstered by Silicon Valley investment, scientists are making such rapid progress that lab-grown human eggs and sperm could be a reality within a decade, a meeting of the Human Fertilization and Embryology Authority board heard last week (PDF). In-vitro gametes (IVGs), eggs or sperm that are created in the lab from genetically reprogrammed skin or stem cells, are viewed as the holy grail of fertility research. The technology promises to remove age barriers to conception and could pave the way for same-sex couples to have biological children together. It also poses unprecedented medical and ethical risks, which the HFEA now believes need to be considered in a proposed overhaul of fertility laws.

Peter Thompson, chief executive of the HFEA, said: "In-vitro gametes have the potential to vastly increase the availability of human sperm and eggs for research and, if proved safe, effective, and publicly acceptable, to provide new fertility treatment options for men with low sperm counts and women with low ovarian reserve." The technology also heralds more radical possibilities including "solo parenting" and "multiplex parenting." Julia Chain, chair of HFEA, said: "It feels like we ought to have Steven Spielberg on this committee," in a brief moment of levity in the discussion of how technology should be regulated. Lab-grown eggs have already been used produce healthy babies in mice -- including ones with two biological fathers. The equivalent feat is yet to be achieved using human cells, but US startups such as Conception and Gameto claim to be closing in on this prize.

The HFEA meeting noted that estimated timeframes ranged from two to three years -- deemed to be optimistic -- to a decade, with several clinicians at the meeting sharing the view that IVGs appeared destined to become "a routine part of clinical practice." The clinical use of IVGs would be prohibited under current law and there would be significant hurdles to proving that IVGs are safe, given that any unintended genetic changes to the cells would be passed down to all future generations. The technology also opens up myriad ethical issues. Thompson said: "Research on IVGs is progressing quickly but it is not yet clear when they might be a viable option in treatment. IVGs raise important questions and that is why the HFEA has recommended that they should be subject to statutory regulation in time, and that biologically dangerous use of IVGs in treatment should never be permitted."

"This is the latest of a range of detailed recommendations on scientific developments that we are looking at to future-proof the HFE Act, but any decisions around UK modernizing fertility law are a matter for parliament."

The Federal Communications Commission will abandon a proposal that would have banned mandatory internet service charges for apartment and condominium residents. FCC Chair Brendan Carr halted the Biden-era plan that sought to prevent landlords from requiring tenants to pay for specific broadband providers. Housing industry groups said they welcomed the decision, arguing bulk billing arrangements help secure discounted rates. They claim these agreements can reduce internet costs by up to 50%. However, public interest advocates, who backed the original proposal, contend that landlords don't always pass these savings to tenants.

An anonymous reader shares a report: LinkedIn has removed at least two accounts that were created for AI "co-workers" whose profile images said they were "#OpenToWork." "I don't need coffee breaks, I don't miss deadlines, and I'll outperform any social media team you've ever worked with -- Guaranteed," the profile page for one of these AI accounts called Ella said. "Tired of human 'experts' making excuses? I deliver, period." The #OpenToWork flair on profile pictures is a feature on LinkedIn that lets people clearly signal they are looking for a job on the professional networking platform.

"People expect the people and conversations they find on LinkedIn to be real," a LinkedIn spokesperson told me in an email. "Our policies are very clear that the creation of a fake account is a violation of our terms of service, and we'll remove them when we find them, as we did in this case." The AI profiles were created by an Israeli company called Marketeam, which offers "dedicated AI agents" that integrate with a client's marketing team and help them execute their marketing strategies "from social media and content marketing to SEO, RTM, ad campaigns, and more."

The UK is considering making households who only use streaming services such as Netflix and Disney pay the BBC license fee, as part of plans to modernize the way it funds the public-service broadcaster. Bloomberg: Extending the fee to streaming applications is on a menu of options being discussed by Prime Minister Keir Starmer's office, the Treasury and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be named discussing internal government deliberations. Alternatives under discussion include allowing the British Broadcasting Corp. to use advertising, imposing a specific tax on streaming services, and asking those who listen to BBC radio to pay a fee.

The government is the early stages of examining how to overhaul the funding of Britain's public broadcaster when its current 11-year charter ends on Dec. 31, 2027. Ministers are looking to either retain and alter the current television license fee model or scrap it and instead fund the BBC through alternative models such as taxation or subscription. That's because viewing habits have changed as users gravitate toward on-demand services. [...] The license fee dates back to 1946, when consumers watched programs at the time of broadcast. It currently costs households who watch live TV or use BBC iPlayer $210.6 a year, an amount that usually rises annually with inflation. Even if they don't watch BBC programs, households are required to hold a TV license to view or stream programs live on sites including YouTube and Amazon Prime Video. However it's not needed by those who only watch on-demand, non-BBC content.

After observing 20 chimpanzees for over 600 hours, researchers in Japan found that chimps are more likely to urinate after witnessing others do so. "[T]he team meticulously recorded the number and timing of 'urination events' along with the relative distances between 'the urinator and potential followers,'" writes 404 Media's Becky Ferreira. "The results revealed that urination is, in fact, socially contagious for chimps and that low-dominant individuals were especially likely to pee after watching others pee. Call it: pee-r pressure." The findings have been published in the journal Cell Biology. From the study: The decision to urinate involves a complex combination of both physiological and social considerations. However, the social dimensions of urination remain largely unexplored. More specifically, aligning urination in time (i.e. synchrony) and the triggering of urination by observing similar behavior in others (i.e. social contagion) are thought to occur in humans across different cultures (Figure S1A), and possibly also in non-human animals. However, neither has been scientifically quantified in any species.

Contagious urination, like other forms of behavioral and emotional state matching, may have important implications in establishing and maintaining social cohesion, in addition to potential roles in preparation for collective departure (i.e. voiding before long-distance travel) and territorial scent-marking (i.e. coordination of chemosensory signals). Here, we report socially contagious urination in chimpanzees, one of our closest relatives, as measured through all-occurrence recording of 20 captive chimpanzees across >600 hours. Our results suggest that socially contagious urination may be an overlooked, and potentially widespread, facet of social behavior.

In conclusion, we find that in captive chimpanzees the act of urination is socially contagious. Further, low-dominance individuals had higher rates of contagion. We found no evidence that this phenomenon is moderated by dyadic affiliation. It remains possible that latent individual factors associated with low dominance status (e.g. vigilance and attentional bias, stress levels, personality traits) might shape the contagion of urination, or alternatively that there are true dominance-driven effects. In any case, our results raise several new and important questions around contagious urination across species, from ethology to psychology to endocrinology. [...]

Facebook has banned posts mentioning Linux-related topics, with the popular Linux news and discussion site, DistroWatch, at the center of the controversy. Tom's Hardware reports: A post on the site claims, "Facebook's internal policy makers decided that Linux is malware and labeled groups associated with Linux as being 'cybersecurity threats.' We tried to post some blurb about distrowatch.com on Facebook and can confirm that it was barred with a message citing Community Standards. DistroWatch says that the Facebook ban took effect on January 19. Readers have reported difficulty posting links to the site on this social media platform. Moreover, some have told DistroWatch that their Facebook accounts have been locked or limited after sharing posts mentioning Linux topics.

If you're wondering if there might be something specific to DistroWatch.com, something on the site that the owners/operators perhaps don't even know about, for example, then it seems pretty safe to rule out such a possibility. Reports show that "multiple groups associated with Linux and Linux discussions have either been shut down or had many of their posts removed." However, we tested a few other Facebook posts with mentions of Linux, and they didn't get blocked immediately. Copenhagen-hosted DistroWatch says it has tried to appeal against the Community Standards-triggered ban. However, they say that a Facebook representative said that Linux topics would remain on the cybersecurity filter. The DistroWatch writer subsequently got their Facebook account locked... DistroWatch points out the irony at play here: "Facebook runs much of its infrastructure on Linux and often posts job ads looking for Linux developers."

UPDATE: Facebook has admited they made a mistake and stopped blocking the posts.

The EFF has complained that in general "smart" products for babies "collect a ton of information about you and your baby on an ongoing basis". (For this year's "worst in privacy" product at CES they chose a $1,200 baby bassinet equipped with a camera, a microphone, and a radar sensor...)

But today the Washington Post reported on a $1,700 bassinet that surprised the mother of a one-month-old when it "abruptly demanded money for a feature she relied on to soothe her baby to sleep." The internet-connected bassinet... reliably comforted her 1-month-old — just as it had her first child — until it started charging $20 a month for some abilities, including one that keeps the bassinet's motion and sounds at one level all night. The level-lock feature previously was available without a fee. "It all felt really intrusive — like they went into our bedroom and clawed back this feature that we've been depending on...." When the Snoo's maker, Happiest Baby, introduced a premium subscription for some of the bassinet's most popular features in July, owners filed dozens of complaints to the Federal Trade Commission and the Better Business Bureau, coordinated review bombs and vented on social media — saying the company took advantage of their desperation for sleep to bait-and-switch them...

Happiest Baby isn't the only baby gear company that has rolled out a subscription. In 2023, makers of the Miku baby monitor, which retails for up to $400, elicited similar fury from parents when it introduced a $10 monthly subscription for most features. A growing number of internet-connected products have lost software support or functionality after purchase in recent years, such as Spotify's Car Thing — a $90 Bluetooth streaming device that the company announced in May it plans to discontinue — and Levi's $350 smart jacket, which let users control their phones by swiping sensors on its sleeve...

Seventeen consumer protection and tech advocacy groups cited Happiest Baby and Car Thing in a letter urging the FTC to create guidelines that ensure products retain core functionality without the imposition of fees that did not exist when the items were originally bought.
The Times notes that the bassinets are often resold, so the subscription fees are partly to cover the costs of supporting new owners, according to Happiest Baby's vice president for marketing and communications. But the article three additional perspectives:

• "This new technology is actually allowing manufacturers to change the way the status quo has been for decades, which is that once you buy something, you own it and you can do whatever you want. Right now, consumers have no trust that what they're buying is actually going to keep working." — Lucas Gutterman, who leads the Public Interest Research Group's "Design to Last" campaign.

• "It's a shame to be beholden to companies' goodwill, to require that they make good decisions about which settings to put behind a paywall. That doesn't feel good, and you can't always trust that, and there's no guarantee that next week Happiest Baby isn't going to announce that all of the features are behind a paywall." — Elizabeth Chamberlain, sustainability director at iFixit.

• "It's no longer just an out-and-out purchase of something. It's a continuous rental, and people don't know that." — Natasha Tusikov, an associate professor at York University

This weekend Cory Doctorow delved into "the two factors that make services terrible: captive users, and no constraints." If your users can't leave, and if you face no consequences for making them miserable (not solely their departure to a competitor, but also fines, criminal charges, worker revolts, and guerrilla warfare with interoperators), then you have the means, motive and opportunity to turn your service into a giant pile of shit... Every economy is forever a-crawl with parasites and monsters like these, but they don't get to burrow into the system and colonize it until policymakers create rips they can pass through.
Doctorow argues that "more and more critics are coming to understand that lock-in is the root of the problem, and that anti-lock-in measures like interoperability can address it." Even more important than market discipline is government discipline, in the form of regulation. If Zuckerberg feared fines for privacy violations, or moderation failures, or illegal anticompetitive mergers, or fraudulent advertising systems that rip off publishers and advertisers, or other forms of fraud (like the "pivot to video"), he would treat his users better. But Facebook's rise to power took place during the second half of the neoliberal era, when the last shreds of regulatory muscle that survived the Reagan revolution were being devoured... But it's worse than that, because Zuckerberg and other tech monopolists figured out how to harness "IP" law to get the government to shut down third-party technology that might help users resist enshittification... [Doctorow says this is "why companies are so desperate to get you to use their apps rather than the open web"] IP law is why you can't make an alternative client that blocks algorithmic recommendations. IP law is why you can't leave Facebook for a new service and run a scraper that imports your waiting Facebook messages into a different inbox. IP law is why you can't scrape Facebook to catalog the paid political disinformation the company allows on the platform...
But then Doctorow argues that "Legacy social media is at a turning point," citing as "a credible threat" new systems built on open standards like Mastodon (built on Activitypub) and Bluesky (built on Atproto): I believe strongly in improving the Fediverse, and I believe in adding the long-overdue federation to Bluesky. That's because my goal isn't the success of the Fediverse — it's the defeat of enshtitification. My answer to "why spend money fixing Bluesky?" is "why leave 20 million people at risk of enshittification when we could not only make them safe, but also create the toolchain to allow many, many organizations to operate a whole federation of Bluesky servers?" If you care about a better internet — and not just the Fediverse — then you should share this goal, too... Mastodon has one feature that Bluesky sorely lacks — the federation that imposes antienshittificatory discipline on companies and offers an enshittification fire-exit for users if the discipline fails. It's long past time that someone copied that feature over to Bluesky.
Doctorow argues that federated and "federatable" social media "disciplines enshittifiers" by freeing social media's captive audiences.

"Any user can go to any server at any time and stay in touch with everyone else."

Two computer scientists at the University of Waterloo in Canada believe changing 30 lines of code in Linux "could cut energy use at some data centers by up to 30 percent," according to the site Data Centre Dynamics.

It's the code that processes packets of network traffic, and Linux "is the most widely used OS for data center servers," according to the article: The team tested their solution's effectiveness and submitted it to Linux for consideration, and the code was published this month as part of Linux's newest kernel, release version 6.13. "All these big companies — Amazon, Google, Meta — use Linux in some capacity, but they're very picky about how they decide to use it," said Martin Karsten [professor of Computer Science in the Waterloo's Math Faculty]. "If they choose to 'switch on' our method in their data centers, it could save gigawatt hours of energy worldwide. Almost every single service request that happens on the Internet could be positively affected by this."

The University of Waterloo is building a green computer server room as part of its new mathematics building, and Karsten believes sustainability research must be a priority for computer scientists. "We all have a part to play in building a greener future," he said. The Linux Foundation, which oversees the development of the Linux OS, is a founder member of the Green Software Foundation, an organization set up to look at ways of developing "green software" — code that reduces energy consumption.
Karsten "teamed up with Joe Damato, distinguished engineer at Fastly" to develop the 30 lines of code, according to an announcement from the university. "The Linux kernel code addition developed by Karsten and Damato was based on research published in ACM SIGMETRICS Performance Evaluation Review" (by Karsten and grad student Peter Cai).

Their paper "reviews the performance characteristics of network stack processing for communication-heavy server applications," devising an "indirect methodology" to "identify and quantify the direct and indirect costs of asynchronous hardware interrupt requests (IRQ) as a major source of overhead...

"Based on these findings, a small modification of a vanilla Linux system is devised that improves the efficiency and performance of traditional kernel-based networking significantly, resulting in up to 45% increased throughput..."