"The cab was cut from a 1997 Jeep Grand Cherokee," writes the New York Times. "The engine once revved up a 1985 Toyota Celica; and 107 hand-sewn rubber segments, courtesy of Mr. Tymofichuk's wife, help to direct low-pressure air beneath the craft so that it rises eight inches above the ground..." On a cold spring day in a small garage in Alberta, Canada, an engine revved up and an improbable machine — fabricated from auto parts, a hand-sewn rubber skirt and an abandoned fiberglass hull — came to life.

A homemade hovercraft began to rise off the ground with a small crew standing by.

The successful liftoff was the culmination of a lifelong fascination of Robert Tymofichuk, 55, who spent about 1,800 hours over a year working on it [according to this nifty video on YouTube ]. And, to the gratitude of passengers, it comes with heated seats. "If you're going through all that hassle, you might as well make yourself comfortable," Mr. Tymofichuk said. He repurposed the seats from a Volkswagen, so the heating coils were already installed.
Achieve speeds around 40 miles per hour (or 64 kmph), "Mr. Tymofichuk's hovercraft now sails above land and water, a bright red gem coasting over the Saskatchewan River," according to the article. And it also quotes Mr. Tymofichuk as saying it's the fulfillment of a childhood dream.

"To actually have something constructed with your own hands be zipping around, and it's fully functional — it's like magic."

Meta (the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and Threads) announced Monday that Russian state media outlets like RT are now "banned from our apps globally for foreign interference activity," reports CNN.

CNN adds that Meta is alleging that the "Kremlin-controlled networks" have "engaged in deceptive influence operations and attempted to evade detection... Prior to Monday's ban, RT had 7.2 million followers on Facebook and 1 million followers on Instagram." The move comes days after the US Justice Department announced charges against two RT employees for funneling nearly $10 million into a US company, identified by CNN as Tenet Media, to create and amplify content that aligned with Russian interests. The covert influence campaign was aimed at the American public ahead of the 2024 US presidential election, US officials said.
Last week the U.S. State department "revealed declassified U.S. intelligence findings that suggest RT is fully integrated into Russia's intelligence operations around the world," CNN reported earlier" In addition to its covert influence operations, the leaders of RT also administered an online crowdfunding effort to supply military equipment to Russian soldiers in Ukraine, Blinken alleged. The crowdfunding effort supplied "sniper rifles, suppressors, body armor, night vision equipment, drones, radio equipment, personal weapon sights, diesel generators" to Russian soldiers fighting in Ukraine, according to Blinken.

The goal of the U.S. announcement — and private discussions with allied diplomats — is to make sure that countries know that RT and Russian intelligence agencies are working together to sow division and harm democratic processes, while simultaneously making it much more difficult for RT to operate globally, a senior administration official said...

Asked for comment by CNN, RT responded with a mocking email that read in part: "We've been broadcasting straight out of the KGB headquarters all this time."
More from Reuters: U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Friday that countries should treat RT's activities as they do covert intelligence operations... In briefing materials shared with Reuters, Meta said it had seen Russian state-controlled media try to evade detection in their online activities in the past and expected them to continue trying to engage in deceptive practices going forward.
A YouTube spokesperson told Reuters they've also terminated over 230 channels affiliated with Kremlin-controlled outlets — channels which were previously only blocked from viewers.

YouTube "began blocking Russian state-sponsored news channels globally in 2022," reports NBC News, "including those tied to RT and Sputnik. Over the years, according to YouTube, the platform has blocked thousands of channels and millions of videos." James Rubin, coordinator for the State Department's Global Engagement Center, said RT is "where propaganda, disinformation and lies are spread to millions, if not billions, of people around the world."

The Federal Trade Commission said on Thursday it found that several social media and streaming services engaged in a "vast surveillance" of consumers, including minors, collecting and sharing more personal information than most users realized. From a report: The findings come from a study of how nine companies -- including Meta, YouTube and TikTok -- collected and used consumer data. The sites, which mostly offer free services, profited off the data by feeding it into advertising that targets specific users by demographics, according to the report. The companies also failed to protect users, especially children and teens.

The F.T.C. said it began its study nearly four years ago to offer the first holistic look into the opaque business practices of some of the biggest online platforms that have created multibillion-dollar ad businesses using consumer data. The agency said the report showed the need for federal privacy legislation and restrictions on how companies collect and use data. "Surveillance practices can endanger people's privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking," said Lina Kahn, the F.T.C.'s chair, in a statement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: At its Made On YouTube event on Wednesday, the company announced a new dedicated space for creators to interact with their fans and viewers. The space, called "Communities," is kind of like a Discord server built into a creator's channel. With Communities, YouTube is hoping creators won't need to use other platforms like Discord or Reddit in order to interact with viewers. Communities are a space for viewers to post and interact with other fans directly within a creator's channel. In the past, viewers have been limited to leaving comments on a creator's video. Now, they can share their own content in a creator's Community to interact with other fans over shared interests. For instance, a fitness creator's Community could include posts from fans who are sharing videos and photos from their most recent hike.

To start, the feature is only available to subscribers. The company sees Communities as a dedicated space for conversation and connection, while still allowing creators to maintain control over their content. Conversations in Communities are meant to flow over time, YouTube says, as they would in any other forum-style setting. The new Communities feature shouldn't be confused with YouTube's Community feature, which is a space for creators to share text and images with viewers. The feature launched back in 2016, and doesn't allow viewers to interact with each other. YouTube is testing Communities now on mobile devices with a small group of creators. The company plans to test the feature with more creators later this year before expanding access to additional channels in early 2025.

YouTube has announced a series of AI-related features on the platform, including a couple that might change how creators make videos -- and the videos they make. From a report: The first feature is the new Inspiration tab in the YouTube Studio app, which YouTube has been testing in a limited way over the last few months. The tab's job is, essentially, to tell you what to make: the AI-powered tool will suggest a concept for a video, provide a title and a thumbnail, and even write an outline and the first few lines of the video for you. YouTube frames it as a helpful brainstorming tool but also acknowledges that you can use it to build out entire projects. And I'm just guessing here, but I'd bet those AI-created ideas are going to be pretty darn good at gaming the YouTube algorithm.

Once you have some AI inspiration, you can make some AI videos with Veo, the superpowerful DeepMind video model that is now being integrated into YouTube Shorts. Veo is mostly going to be part of the "Dream Screen" feature YouTube has been working on, which is an extension of the green screen concept but with AI-generated backgrounds of all sorts. You'll also be able to make full Veo videos, too, but only with clips up to six seconds long. (After a few seconds, AI video tends to get... really weird.)

Google said in a blog post today it will begin labeling AI-generated and AI-edited image search results later this year. Digital Trends reports: The company will flag such content through the "About this image" window and it will be applied to Search, Google Lens, and Android's Circle to Search features. Google is also applying the technology to its ad services and is considering adding a similar flag to YouTube videos, but will "have more updates on that later in the year," per the announcement post.

Google will rely on Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) metadata to identify AI-generated images. That's an industry group Google joined as a steering committee member earlier in the year. This "C2PA metadata" will be used to track the image's provenance, identifying when and where an image was created, as well as the equipment and software used in its generation.

The Verge's Alex Heath reports: Snap's fifth-generation Spectacles have a richer, more immersive display. Using them feels snappier. They weigh less than their predecessor and last longer on a charge. Those are exactly the kinds of upgrades you'd expect from a product line that's technically eight years old. But the market for Spectacles -- and AR glasses in general -- still feels as nascent as ever. Snap has an idea for what could change that: developers. These new Spectacles, announced Tuesday at Snap's annual Partner Summit in Los Angeles, aren't being sold. Instead, Snap is repeating its playbook for the last version of Spectacles in 2021 and distributing them to the people who make AR lenses for Snapchat. This time around, though, there's an extra hurdle: you have to apply for access through Lens Studio, the company's desktop tool for creating AR software, and pay $1,188 to lease a pair for at least one year. (After a year, the subscription becomes $99 a month.)

Yes, Snap is asking developers to pay $1,188 to build software for hardware with no user base. Even still, Snap CEO Evan Spiegel believes the interest will be there. "Our goal is really to empower and inspire the developer and AR enthusiast communities," he tells me. "This really is an invitation, and hopefully an inspiration, to create." [...] Ultimately, I'm skeptical of why developers will want to build software for Spectacles right now, given the lack of a market and the cost of getting access to a pair. Still, Spiegel believes enough of them are excited about the promise of AR glasses and that they'll want to help shape that future. "I think it's the same reason why developers were really excited with the early desktop computer or the reason why developers were really excited by the early smartphones," he says. "I think this is a group of visionary technologists who are really excited about what the future holds." Spiegel may be right. AR glasses may be the future, and Spectacles may be well-positioned to become the next major computing platform, even with competition heating up. But there's still a lot of progress that needs to happen for Snap's vision to become reality. Road to VR has a full list of specs embedded in their report. They also published a reveal trailer on YouTube.

Google's acquisition strategy in online advertising has come under scrutiny in the U.S. antitrust trial against the tech giant. Neal Mohan, YouTube CEO and former Google ad executive, defended the company's purchases of DoubleClick and Admeld, saying they were aimed at competing, not neutralizing rivals.

The Justice Department alleges Google built an impenetrable ad empire by owning key parts of the ad tech stack, stifling competition. Prosecutors pointed to internal emails discussing "parking" acquired companies, which they argue shows intent to sideline competitors. Mohan countered that "parking" meant allowing acquired firms to operate independently while integrating with Google's technology.

Last October Slashdot reported on René Rebe's discovery of a random illegal instruction speculation bug on AMD Ryzen 7000-series and Epyc Zen 4 CPUs — which Rebe discussed on his YouTube channel.

But this week's YouTube episode had a different ending, reports Tom's Hardware... Two days ago, tech streamer and host of Code Therapy René Rebe was streaming one of many T2 Linux (his own custom distribution) development sessions from his office in Germany when he abruptly had to remove his microphone and walk off camera due to the arrival of police officers. The officers subsequently cuffed him and took him to the station for an hour of questioning, a span of time during which the stream continued to run until he made it back...

[T]he police seemingly have no idea who did it and acted based on a tip sent with an email. Finding the perpetrators could take a while, and options will be fairly limited if they don't also live in Germany.
Rebe has been contributing to Linux "since as early as 1998," according to the article, "and started his own T2 SD3 Embedded Linux distribution in 2004, as well." (And he's also a contributor to many other major open source projects.)

The article points out that Linux and other communities "are compelled by little-to-no profit motive, so in essence, René has been providing unpaid software development for the greater good for the past two decades."

"It is with great relief that I welcome you home!" SpaceX COO Gwynne Shotwell posted on X. "This mission was even more extraordinary than I anticipated."

"SpaceX's Polaris Dawn crew is home," reports CNN, "capping off a five-day mission to orbit — which included the world's first commercial spacewalk — by splashing down in the Gulf of Mexico." The Crew Dragon capsule carrying four astronauts landed off the coast of Dry Tortugas, Florida, at 3:37 a.m. ET Sunday.

The Polaris Dawn mission made history as it reached a higher altitude than any human has traveled in five decades. [870 miles (1,400 kilometers) — beating the 853-mile record set in 1966 by NASA's Gemini 11 mission.] A spacewalk conducted early Thursday morning also marked the first time such an endeavor has been completed by a privately funded and operated mis.sion.

But returning to Earth is among the most dangerous stretches of any space mission. To safely reach home, the Crew Dragon capsule carried out what's called a "de-orbit burn," orienting itself as it prepared to slice through the thickest part of Earth's atmosphere. The spacecraft then reached extremely hot temperatures — up to 3,500 degrees Fahrenheit (1,900 degrees Celsius) — because of the pressure and friction caused by hitting the air while still traveling around 17,000 miles per hour (27,000 kilometers per hour). The crew, however, should have remained at comfortable temperatures, protected by the Crew Dragon's heat shield, which is located on the bottom of the 13-foot-wide (4-meter-wide) capsule. Dragging against the air began to slow the vehicle down before the Crew Dragon deployed parachutes that further decelerated its descent. Having hit the ocean, the spacecraft briefly bobbed around in the water until rescue crews waiting nearby hauled it out of the ocean and onto a special boat, referred to as the "Dragon's nest." Final safety checks took place there before the crew disembarked from the capsule and began the journey back to dry land.
You can watch video of the splashdown on YouTube.

While in space, the crew performed 40 science experiments and research, according to the article. "Gillis, a trained violinist, also brought her instrument along for the mission and delivered a rendition of 'Rey's Theme' from "Star Wars: The Force Awakens." (Slashdot reader SuperKendall points out that the "Rey's Theme" rendition "was not just the astronaut playing violin in space, but was in conjunction with young adult orchestras around the world.")

SpaceX's COO said the performance "made me tear up. Thank you all for taking this journey."

"For 75 years Cosm built planetariums," reports a Texas news station, "and then a few years ago realized this technology could take you from the night sky to anywhere under the sun."

So now Los Angeles and Dallas have massive 9,600-square-foot, 8K-resolution screens that one reviewer for SFGate calls "an absolute game-changer" for sports fans. "At its best, Cosm's floor-to-ceiling screen gives anyone with a seat the opportunity to embrace a face full of on-the-field action at such high quality that it can be staggering, almost overwhelming at times — so just be sure to hold on tight, to the handrails and to your wallets."

There's also a bar with a 150-foot band of screens and a rooftop area with mounted TV, but they're "not why anyone has come," SFGate points out. Even the Dome has three distinct floors, though it's the second floor "where full visual immersion happens." The action feels so close, I can almost smell it, and all the focus is pulled to the center of the giant screen. Patrons truly do feel at the absolute heart of the action, with better seats than perhaps they could even pay for at Manchester's Old Trafford stadium. From a sports-viewing standpoint, I can't imagine it gets much better than this... Over the course of just a few minutes, the viewing angle flips from corner looks to right up against the goalkeeper's net, and then it widens out to dead center to catch crisp passes. Some angles put me right in the stands, cheering along with the loyalists at a stadium half a world away...

To be clear, the premium ticket costs are good for recouping Cosm's substantial investment in this gorgeous technological product, which has been in the works for years. The price tag is also likely to be little issue for any Los Angeles fan with money to spend, but the cost really does lay bare the growing division between the haves and have-nots in American sports society... If you paid $20 for a general admission entry that mostly just grants access to the fringes of the action, well ... good luck getting the most out of the Dome... The edges of the massive screen are stretched to comic effect, making the fisheye perspective more disorienting than fun. At the center of the room, it feels like you're absolutely in the meat of the action; at the fringes, you're left to pick at a few digital bones...

[F]or the rest of us, the normal sports fans who like to sway with strangers during the seventh-inning stretch, the ones who want to be able to take their kids to a game without feeling quite so financially wrung out, Cosm is yet another troubling sign of big, expensive things to come. Being a fan of a sports franchise in 2024 is an increasingly costly proposition. Watching your favorite NFL team now requires cable access, as well as multiple streaming services like Amazon Prime... There is no question that Cosm is a unique experience and that it will absolutely have a hand in transforming the modern digital sports-watching landscape, especially for those who want a digital re-creation of the best seat in the house over the camaraderie of a shared, in-person sports experience. The place will be able to charge incredible sums for the Super Bowl or World Series games, and — when at its best, with a prime seat in the middle of the action — the cost will be justifiable for many.

But for the folks at the financial fringes, the ones with the most spirit and often the least to spend, Cosm undoubtedly feels like a widening of the economic chasm that is pulling fans and their favorite teams further apart.
Besides sports events, Cosm's Dome also offers other immersive experiences like Circque du Soleil's "O" and Planetary Collective's "Orbital".

Another Cosm location is planned for Phoenix in 2025.

Google's describes their new Gemini-powered foldable phone as "an epic display of Google AI" (also calling it "unfoldgettable").

The Android Authority blog says the phone is "impressive," "incredibly thin" — and, at $1,800, expensive.

But long-time Slashdot reader mprindle notes some complaints from the YouTube channel JerryRigEverything ("known for in-depth testing of phones and other devices".) The blog 9to5Google summarizes some of the video's findings: - When exposed to dirt and sand, we hear the hinge start grinding since there's no dust protection...

- A closed bend test reveals no problems for the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, but the issues arise when it's open and bent from the back. Despite the left/right back panels meeting and covering the spine of the hinge, "there doesn't appear to be a whole lot of resistance."
"Not sure why Google thought it was a good idea to put an antenna line right here at the weakest point in an already thin frame," the video notes (arguing it's "like putting an exhaust port in the Death Star...")

But they also tell their 8.8 million subscribers that "One cool thing that Google has done is that they've made every single part of this metal frame from recycled aluminum." And "Out of the box, I'm already a huge fan of how it looks," the video begins. "It feels amazing, and folds completely shut and appears like the hardware has finally caught up to the folding form factor to where it looks just natural."

One thing to note... "Moving to the inner display, I start to get the vibe that when Google says 'super durable', they mean 'regular durable', since the inner display is made from the same soft flexible plastic that we've seen on every folding phone so far, which scratches at level two. Even fingernails can leave very permanent marks on the center screen. This is absolutely normal for a folding phone, though, and really not too big of a deal if you take care it, making sure there are no bits of dust or dirt in the screen when you close it will go a long way to keeping things pristine, since there's not a lot of room between the two halves."

iFixit makes an interesting observation: "Over half of the phone's internal area is occupied by the lithium polymer battery cells!" (They've also created another teardown video available on YouTube.)

"There's no denying that the inner screens are delicate and prone to damage," according to an accompanying iFixit blog post, "and the mechanical nature of the hinge mechanism provides additional avenues for dust and liquid ingress that may eventually become a problem."

But it also applauds "the less obvious repairability wins, from repair guides and a detailed Bill of Materials to spare parts that are available without malicious restrictions... [T]he Pixel team has gone to great lengths to support your right to repair the device you paid for and own" — and from Day One. There's really only a single criticism I'd direct at the Pixel 9 Fold from my own disassembly experience: the battery removal tabs. These tabs simply do not work, with or without the application of heat. They are flimsy and break often, require a second pair of hands to secure the device, and they fail to cut through adhesive reliably. Whether they should even try to cut through adhesive is debatable. Stretch release adhesive might age and break over time but at least they give you a chance at removing the adhesive. Pull tabs don't even work when the adhesive is brand new, they literally have no redeeming qualities when compared to other battery release mechanisms. Even the more robust pull tabs Samsung uses in its phones work better than this, though they aren't necessarily the easiest to use either.

As for the device itself, it prompted one of my colleagues — an iPhone user since forever — to say "this is nice, I'd switch to Android for this"... Setting aside the downsides of owning a foldable smartphone, I am excited to see Google and the Pixel team devoting so much time and energy towards improving the overall repairability of the device. The effort is seen and appreciated by device owners and as a technician, I look forward to seeing how manufacturers will continue to innovate for repairability.
Slashdot reader mprindle reminds us that when it comes to waterproofing, the JerryRigEverything video "noted that the footnotes say the device is rated IP68 yet the Sim tray is rated at IPx8."

Wired published some thoughts from Hans Peter Brondmo, the former head of "Google's seven-year mission to give AI a robot body".

An anonymous reader shared this report from Axios: Building AI-powered robots that can flexibly operate in the real world is going to take much longer than Silicon Valley believes and promises, according to the former head of Google's robotics moonshot project, writing in Wired...

Everyday Robotics spent seven years and a small Google fortune developing a one-armed robot on a wheeled platform. By the time Google pulled the plug on the project in February 2023, the robots were helping clean up researchers' desks and sorting trash during the daytime; in the evening, they were improvising dances. [Google hired a professional dancer as an artist-in-residence who teamed with "a few other engineers" to build an AI algorithm trained on the dancer's choreography preferences...]

Google founder Larry Page — favored moving directly to "end to end" (e2e) learning, where you'd hand robots a general task and they'd be able to figure out how to execute it. That, Page felt, was a goal worthy of a moonshot. But it also turned out to be out of reach. "I have come to believe," Brondmo writes, "it will take many, many thousands, maybe even millions of robots doing stuff in the real world to collect enough data to train e2e models that make the robots do anything other than fairly narrow, well-defined tasks...." ["Building robots that perform useful services — like cleaning up and wiping all the tables in a restaurant, or making the beds in a hotel — will require both AI and traditional programming for a long time to come. In other words, don't expect robots to go running off outside our control, doing something they weren't programmed to do, anytime soon."]

The bottom line: So far, robot hype is outpacing robot reality. Boston Dynamics' back-flipping humanoid and quadruped bots have wowed YouTube viewers — but you wouldn't want to let them anywhere near your office or home.
It's an interesting look back. "My job: help figure out what to do with the employees and technology left over from nine robot companies that Google had acquired," Brondmo writes: Andy "the father of Android" Rubin, who had previously been in charge, had suddenly left. Larry Page and Sergey Brin kept trying to offer guidance and direction during occasional flybys in their "spare time...." I knew from firsthand experience how hard it was to build a company that, in Steve Jobs' famous words, could put a dent in the universe, and I believed that Google was the right place to make certain big bets. AI-powered robots, the ones that will live and work alongside us one day, was one such audacious bet.

Eight and a half years later — and 18 months after Google decided to discontinue its largest bet in robotics and AI — it seems as if a new robotics startup pops up every week. I am more convinced than ever that the robots need to come. Yet I have concerns that Silicon Valley, with its focus on "minimum viable products" and VCs' general aversion to investing in hardware, will be patient enough to win the global race to give AI a robot body. And much of the money that is being invested is focusing on the wrong things...

When I arrived, the lab had already hatched Waymo, Google Glass, and other science-fiction-sounding projects like flying energy windmills and stratospheric balloons that would provide internet access to the underserved... [But] in January 2023, two months after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, Google shut down Everyday Robots, citing overall cost concerns. The robots and a small number of people eventually landed at Google DeepMind to conduct research. In spite of the high cost and the long timeline, everyone involved was shocked.
They'd tackled the problem with earnestness. ("[S]even robots working for months to learn how to pick up a rubber duckling? That wasn't going to cut it... So we built a cloud-based simulator and, in 2021, created more than 240 million robot instances in the sim.ma")

Brondmo adds this his mother had advanced Parkinson's disease, and hoped that one day robots could support her. "Our frequent conversations toward the end of her life convinced me more than ever that a future version of what we started at Everyday Robots will be coming. In fact, it can't come soon enough.

"So the question we are left to ponder becomes: How does this kind of change and future happen? I remain curious, and concerned."

Television has ceased to be the main source of news in the UK for the first time since the 1960s as Britons turn increasingly to online news and social media apps, according to research by the media regulator. From a report: Ofcom said on Tuesday that viewing of TV news had continued to fall steeply, with online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and TikTok and digital versions of broadcasters now slightly more widely used as a source of news.ÂIn its annual study of audience habits, the watchdog said 71 per cent of adults obtained news online, compared with 70 per cent via TV -- a finding it described as "marking a generational shift in the balance of news media."

The reach of TV news has fallen from 75 per cent last year. More than four-fifths of people between the ages of 16 and 24 obtained their news from social media, Ofcom found. The report underlines the pressure on more traditional linear broadcasters such as the BBC, Sky and Channel 4 to accelerate moves to digital platforms, which include their own streaming sites as well as social media apps such as TikTok.Â

After tonight's ABC presidential debate, Taylor Swift announced her support for Vice President Kamala Harris in the upcoming presidential election after AI-generated images falsely depicted her endorsing Donald Trump. "Recently I was made aware that AI of 'me' falsely endorsing Donald Trump's presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation," Swift wrote in an Instagram post. "It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth." The Verge reports: Her post references an incident in late August, in which Trump shared a collection of images to Truth Social intended to show support for his presidential campaign. Some of the photos depict "Swifties for Trump," and another obviously AI-generated image shows Swift herself in an Uncle Sam-type image with text reading, "Taylor wants YOU to vote for Donald Trump." The former president captioned the post, "I accept!" [...]

This wasn't the first time AI images of Swift were circulated on social media. Earlier this year, nonconsensual sexualized images of her made using AI were shared on X. That incident prompted the White House to call for legislation to "deal" with the issue.

In a newsletter for Bloomberg, Ashley Carman discusses the rising trend of long podcasts and their surprising popularity among listeners. "By today's standards of interminable podcast discussions, a nearly three-hour recording isn't even particularly notable," she writes, highlighting recent episodes from Joe Rogan (2 hours; 16 minutes with Adam Sandler), Lex Fridman (8 hours; 37 minutes with Elon Musk), and the Acquired podcast (3 hours; 38 minutes with Lockheed Martin). "Increasingly, podcasters are pushing the outer limits of episode length while stress testing the endurance of their audiences. Popular podcast gabfests can now run on for half a workday or longer." From the report: One might assume such marathon episodes must be the result of a hands-off approach to editing. But this is not the case, said Ben Gilbert, co-host of the Acquired podcast. Every month, he and his co-host David Rosenthal release a three- to four-hour podcast, detailing the story of a specific company. The in-depth histories, he said, are the result of nine-hour recording sessions and a month of research.

"It's not important to ship every good minute," Gilbert said. "It's important to ship only great minutes. If you're actually intellectually honest with yourself, that's how to release a really good product." Even with the longer runtimes, he said, their audience listens to the vast majority of each episode. Consider their deep dive on Lockheed Martin, which runs for three hours and 38 minutes. On Apple Podcasts, the average listener consumed 70% of the show, he said. An episode on Nike, which clocks in at upwards of four hours, had an average consumption rate of 68%. "Every time we made something longer... people only seemed to love it more," he said. On the show's website, the hosts describe the episodes as "conversational audiobooks." [...]

[Jack Sylvester, executive director at Flight Studio, the Bartlett-founded podcast company behind Diary of a CEO] said the team can view data around how much of the audience consumes episodes on YouTube's TV app versus on a phone, tablet or computer. TV usage, he said, is ticking up. To give viewers a reason to keep the show on as their primary viewing experience, they're now making sure the videos have a top-quality polish. Still, in a world in which people scoff at the prospect of a three-hour movie -- and short-form video is the dominant consumption trend in entertainment -- these podcasters are eagerly meandering in the opposite direction. "The short-form obsession ended up creating white space for us," said Gilbert of Acquired. "Whenever you have a trend, that means there's people who feel left behind and want to flock to something new. This sets us apart."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Jazmin Jones knowswhat she did. "If you're online, there's this idea of trolling," Jones, the director behindSeeking Mavis Beacon, said during a recent panel for her new documentary. "For this project, some things we're taking incredibly seriously ... and other things we're trolling. We're trolling this idea of a detective because we're also, like,ACAB." Her trolling, though, was for a good reason. Jones and fellow filmmaker Olivia Mckayla Ross did it in hopes of finding the woman behind Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing. The popular teaching tool was released in 1987 by The Software Toolworks, a video game and software company based in California that produced educational chess, reading, and math games. Mavis, essentially the "mascot" of the game, is a Black woman donned in professional clothes and a slicked-back bun. Though Mavis Beacon was not an actual person, Jones and Ross say that she is one of the first examples of Black representation they witnessed in tech. Seeking Mavis Beacon, which opened in New York City on August 30 and is rolling out to other cities in September, is their attempt to uncover the story behind the face, which appeared on the tool's packaging and later as part of its interface.

The film shows the duo setting up a detective room, conversing over FaceTime, running up to people on the street, and even tracking down a relative connected to the ever-elusive Mavis. But the journey of their search turned up a different question they didn't initially expect: What are the impacts of sexism, racism, privacy, and exploitation in a world where you can present yourself any way you want to? Using shots from computer screens, deep dives through archival footage, and sit-down interviews, the noir-style documentary reveals that Mavis Beacon is actually Renee L'Esperance, a Black model from Haiti who was paid $500 for her likeness with no royalties, despite the program selling millions of copies. [...]

In a world where anyone can create images of folks of any race, gender, or sexual orientation without having to fully compensate the real people who inspired them, Jones and Ross are working to preserve not only the data behind Mavis Beacon but also the humanity behind the software. On the panel, hosted by Black Girls in Media, Ross stated that the film's social media has a form where users of Mavis Beacon can share what the game has meant to them, for archival purposes. "On some level, Olivia and I are trolling ideas of worlds that we never felt safe in or protected by," Jones said during the panel. "And in other ways, we are honoring this legacy of cyber feminism, historians, and care workers that we are very seriously indebted to." You can watch the trailer for "Seeking Mavis Beacon" on YouTube.

Acer has announced its first Steam Deck and Asus ROG Ally competitor, the Acer Nitro Blaze 7. The Verge's Sean Hollister reports: Like Asus -- but unlike most rivals -- it features a seven-inch 1080p variable refresh rate IPS screen to keep things smooth, one that refreshes slightly faster at 144Hz. (Acer tells The Verge it's a landscape-native screen.) It's also got a newer Ryzen 7 8840HS chip, albeit with the same Radeon 780M integrated GPU as most other Windows handhelds. With 16GB of 7500 MT/s memory and a 50 watt-hour battery, it's a step ahead of the original Ally's 6400 MT/s memory and 40Wh pack, and it comes with up to 2TB worth of SSD storage. But with 24GB of memory and an 80Wh pack, the $800 Asus ROG Ally X is currently the Windows handheld to beat, so I suspect this Acer will need to cost quite a bit less to compete.

The Nitro has no touchpads, but it also unusually has no back buttons; most PC handhelds now have at least two macro keys around back. But I suspect some people will be happy that it not only has two USB4 ports but that one of them is on the bottom. Hopefully, we'll get our choice of whether to charge and dock from top or bottom with this portable PC. Acer released a product launch video on YouTube but hasn't shared pricing or release information.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Thursday, ABC announced an upcoming TV special titled, "AI and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special." The one-hour show, set to air on September 12, aims to explore AI's impact on daily life and will feature interviews with figures in the tech industry, like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Bill Gates. Soon after the announcement, some AI critics began questioning the guest list and the framing of the show in general. [...] Critics of generative AI ... question the utility of the technology, its perceived environmental impact, and what they see as blatant copyright infringement.

"Sure is nice of Oprah to host this extended sales pitch for the generative AI industry at a moment when its fortunes are flagging and the AI bubble is threatening to burst," tweeted author Brian Merchant, who frequently criticizes generative AI technology in op-eds, social media, and through his "Blood in the Machine" AI newsletter. "The way the experts who are not experts are presented as such what a train wreck," replied artist Karla Ortiz, who is a plaintiff in a lawsuit against several AI companies. "There's still PLENTY of time to get actual experts and have a better discussion on this because yikes." On Friday, Ortiz created a lengthy viral thread on X that detailed her potential issues with the program, writing, "This event will be the first time many people will get info on Generative AI. However it is shaping up to be a misinformed marketing event starring vested interests (some who are under a litany of lawsuits) who ignore the harms GenAi inflicts on communities NOW." The AI TV special will feature "some of the most important and powerful people in AI," said ABC. They include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, YouTube creator Marques Brownlee, Tristan Harris and Aza Raskin from the Center for Humane Technology, FBI Director Christopher Wray, and author Marilynne Robinson.

The show will air on September 12 on ABC (and a day later on Hulu) in the U.S.

"Houston resident Brandy Deason put an Apple AirTag in her recycling to see where her plastic trash was going," writes Tom's Hardware.

"While many might expect the city would drop the recyclables off at a recycling center, Deason instead found her trash sitting in an open-air lot alongside millions of other pieces of trash at Wright Waste Management." Wright Waste Management did not allow CBS News to enter and inspect its premises. Still, the news team's drone camera discovered that all the trash picked up from the Houston Recycling Collaboration (HRC) was apparently just sitting there on its premises, stacked more than 10 feet high. This came as a shock, as the HRC was meant to revolutionize the city's recycling program, allowing it to process all kinds of plastic. Instead, we see all the collected waste sitting idle in open-air lots waiting for the right technology to appear.

That's because [Exxon-funded] Cyclix International, one of the partners in the HRC, has yet to open its massive factory to scale up its plastic recycling operation. The company said that it recycles all kinds of plastic and has even already set aside a sprawling space big enough to accommodate nine football fields. However, the current facility is just an empty husk without a single piece of machinery in sight.
Deason included 12 airtags in bags of recycling — and nine of them ended up at the HRC facility (with another one going to the local dump). In a video report, CBS News asked Deason what they thought about household recycling ended up in massive piles of plastic. "I thought it was kind of strange, because if you store plastic outside in the heat, it's a fire problem." In fact, that facility has already failed three fire-safety inspections by the county, according to CBS News. And while the facility has "applied" for approval to store plastic waste, that application has not yet been approved.

CBS asked a Cyclix project manager about the piles of unprocessed plastic sitting in the sun. "We need a huge supply of plastics to get ready for startup here," a spokesperson answered, "And we want to start that now in order to get ahead of it."

CBS's interviewer also raised another issue: the facility's plan is to recycle some of the plastic products into fuel. "So if you turn plastic waste into fuel that is then burned and creates greenhouse gas emissions, that's just another environmental problem."

Cyclix Project Manager: "Plastic waste is the challenge. So if we have the ability to take plastic waste and convert it to new products — that's what we're trying to do!"

CBS News points out that turning plastics into burn-able fuel is considered "recycling" by 25 states...