According to a local report, the FBI used a Nintendo Switch to locate an abducted 15-year-old girl, who had been missing for 11 days back in August 2022. Kotaku reports: When the girl went missing on August 3, folks in Virginia put up fliers to locate her. Keitra Coleman, a volunteer with the local nonprofit Hear Their Voices (which helps find missing and exploited children, domestic violence victims, and people experiencing homelessness), told ABC15 they were on the case. [...] Unfortunately, no one was able to pinpoint her location -- until the girl booted up her Nintendo Switch to watch YouTube videos and download a game. A friend saw that she was online and informed the authorities. With Nintendo's cooperation, the FBI culled the Switch's IP address, uncovered her location, and moved in to arrest Roberts. Retired Arizona DPS Director Frank Milstead, who was not involved with the case, told ABC15 that police agencies often use digital device tracking info to apprehend suspected criminals and find missing people. "Thanks to the local police department's quick response and FBI Norfolk's ingenuity, we were able to locate the missing victim through her gaming account and reunite her with her family," an FBI representative said in a statement to Kotaku. "As the world evolves, so does the FBI and how we solve cases. This is just one example of that. And while criminals might think crossing state lines will help them get away, this case also serves as a reminder that because of the FBI's wide reach and partnership with local law enforcement -- these predators will be caught, and they will pay the consequences."

Online publishers are inundated with useless article pitches as websites using AI-generated content multiply. From a report: When she first heard of the humanlike language skills of the artificial-intelligence bot ChatGPT, Jennifer Stevens wondered what it would mean for the retirement magazine she edits. Months later, she has a better idea. It means she is spending a lot of time filtering out useless article pitches. People like Stevens, the executive editor of International Living, are among those seeing a growing amount of AI-generated content that is so far beneath their standards that they consider it a new kind of spam.

The technology is fueling an investment boom. It can answer questions, produce images and even generate essays based on simple prompts. Some of these techniques promise to enhance data analysis and eliminate mundane writing tasks, much as the calculator changed mathematics. But they also show the potential for AI-generated spam to surge and potentially spread across the internet. In early May, the news site rating company NewsGuard found 49 fake news websites that were using AI to generate content. By the end of June, the tally had hit 277, according to Gordon Crovitz, the company's co-founder. "This is growing exponentially," Crovitz said. The sites appear to have been created to make money through Google's online advertising network, said Crovitz, formerly a columnist and a publisher at The Wall Street Journal.

Researchers also point to the potential of AI technologies being used to create political disinformation and targeted messages used for hacking. The cybersecurity company Zscaler says it is too early to say whether AI is being used by criminals in a widespread way, but the company expects to see it being used to create high-quality fake phishing webpages, which are designed to trick victims into downloading malicious software or disclosing their online usernames and passwords. On YouTube, the ChatGPT gold rush is in full swing. Dozens of videos offering advice on how to make money from OpenAI's technology have been viewed hundreds of thousands of times. Many of them suggest questionable schemes involving junk content. Some tell viewers that they can make thousands of dollars a week, urging them to write ebooks or sell advertising on blogs filled with AI-generated content that could then generate ad revenue by popping up on Google searches.

As an "ambassador" for FTX, football quarterback Tom Brady appeared at the company's conference in the Bahamas, and in TV commercials promoting the exchange as "the most trusted" institution in crypto, remembers the New York Times. And it was all about to go very bad...

"His money was also at stake. As part of an endorsement agreement Brady signed in 2021, FTX had paid him $30 million, a deal that consisted almost entirely of FTX stock, three people with knowledge of the contract said. Brady's wife at the time, supermodel Gisele Bündchen, was paid $18 million in FTX stock, one of the people said." Now FTX is bankrupt, and Bankman-Fried is facing criminal fraud charges. Brady, 45, and Bündchen, 42, have been sued by a group of FTX customers seeking compensation from the celebrities who endorsed the exchange. On top of it all, the terms of the deal would have required the former couple, who divorced last year, to pay taxes on at least some of their now worthless FTX stock, two people familiar with the endorsement deal said. Their situation is the highest-profile example of a humiliating reckoning facing the actors, athletes, and other celebrities who rushed to embrace the easy money and online hype of cryptocurrencies...

But last year's crash ended the celebrity crypto bonanza. In October, the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered Kim Kardashian to pay $1.26 million for failing to make adequate disclosures when she endorsed the EthereumMax crypto token. In December, a lawyer in California sued two crypto companies, MoonPay and Yuga Labs, accusing them of using a "vast network of A-list musicians, athletes and celebrity clients" to mislead investors about digital assets. In March, the S.E.C. charged the actress Lindsay Lohan, the online influencer Jake Paul and musicians including Soulja Boy and Lil Yachty with illegally promoting crypto assets. And in late May, after months of failed attempts, a process server delivered court papers to Shaquille O'Neal, the retired basketball star, who was sued for promoting FTX, according to legal filings. Mr. O'Neal was served while broadcasting from a National Basketball Association playoff game...

Brady has also faced legal trouble. In December, Adam Moskowitz and the law firm Boies Schiller Flexner filed a lawsuit in federal court in Florida accusing him and Bündchen of misleading investors. Among the other defendants are comedian Larry David, NBA star Steph Curry and tennis player Naomi Osaka, all of whom endorsed FTX. "None of these defendants performed any due diligence prior to marketing these FTX products to the public," the lawsuit said.

The booster just touched down on the droneship. "The Falcon 9 first-stage has now successfully launched and landed for a record-breaking 16th time," announced SpaceX's feed on YouTube. It was also SpaceX's 206th landing of an orbital-class rocket.

Long-time Slashdot reader Amiga Trombone quotes Spaceflight Now on how SpaceX tested "the limits of its reusable Falcon 9 rocket on Sunday evening." The booster, tail number 1058, made its historic debut on May 20, 2020, carrying the first astronauts to ride atop a Falcon 9 aboard the Crew Dragon capsule Endeavour. The first stage is distinctive in the SpaceX fleet as it is the only one to display a red NASA "worm" logo on its fuselage. It went on to fly 14 more times, including the launches of South Korea's Anasis 2 military communications satellite, a space station cargo delivery run, two Transporter ride-share missions and ten batches of Starlink satellites. With 15 flights already accomplished, it is the joint fleet leader with booster 1060.

Originally, the company hoped to reuse each Falcon 9 first stage 10 times.

"We got to 10 [flights] and the vehicles were still looking really good, so we started the effort to qualify for 15," Jon Edwards, SpaceX vice president of Falcon launch vehicles and Falcon engineering, told the trade publication Aviation Week & Space Technology in an interview last year.

SpaceX is now further pushing the envelope by going beyond the previously certified limit of 15 flights. It has been over 200 days since booster 1058 last flew. During that time it is likely SpaceX conducted extensive inspections and refurbishment work to clear the rocket for additional launches.

For its 16th ride to space, booster 1058 will carry 22 second-generation Starlink 'V2 mini' satellites into orbit, on a mission designated Starlink 6-5.

The world's largest spherical structure "squats on the Las Vegas skyline like an enormous spaceship, black and mysterious," reports CNN, "until night falls, when it will glow like the Earth from space."

The $2 billion arena — called "The Sphere" — was built just east of the Venetian hotel/casino. It's 366 feet tall and 516 feet wide (or 111 meters tall and 157 meters wide) — and it boasts the world's highest-resolution wraparound LED screen: Its exterior is fitted with 1.2 million hockey puck-sized LEDs that can be programmed to flash dynamic imagery on a massive scale — again, reportedly the world's largest... The acts onstage will be dwarfed by the towering 16K LED screen, which wraps over and around much of the audience.
It was fully illuminated for the first time on Tuesday to celebrate the Fourth of July, CNN points out (offering some video footage). When it opens in September, the plan is to light up its exterior with animations every day and night.

Slashdot reader Tony Isaac says the news "got me wondering how they got such great video on the curved surface of the sphere." It turns out there's a whole lot more than just the exterior that breaks new ground in audio and video technology. An older IBC article goes into detail about how they accomplished both the exterior and interior screens, and the high-resolution audio inside.
CNN reports: Rich Claffey, Sphere's chief operations officer, says that more than 160,000 speakers spread around the bowl will deliver the same pristine sound to every seat, whether someone is in the top row or down on the floor. The venue also is equipped with haptic seats that can vibrate to match whatever is happening onscreen — an earthquake, for example — and 4D machines that can create wind, temperature and even scent effects.

"The way I describe it to my friends and family is, it's the entertainment venue of the future," Claffey says. If it all sounds a little over the top, well — this is Vegas.
The arena's first act will be 25 concerts by U2 (with tickets starting at $140). "There's nothing like it. It's light years ahead of everything that's out there," says U2's The Edge during a tour of the venue in a recent Apple Music video...

And U2's Bono adds that "Most music venues are sports venues. They're built for sports — they're not built for music. They're not built for art. This building was built for immersive experiences in cinema and performance... "

We've just had the world's first press conference with AI-enabled, humanoid social robots. Click here to jump straight to Slashdot's transcript of all the robots' answers during the press conference, or watch the 40-minute video here.

It all happened as the United Nations held an "AI for Good" summit in Geneva, where the Guardian reports that the foyer was "humming with robotic voices, the whirring of automated wheels and limbs, and Desdemona, the 'rock star' humanoid, who is chanting 'the singularity will not be centralised' on stage backed by a human band, Jam Galaxy."

But the Associated Press describes how one UN agency had "assembled a group of robots that physically resembled humans at a news conference Friday, inviting reporters to ask them questions in an event meant to spark discussion about the future of artificial intelligence. "The nine robots were seated and posed upright along with some of the people who helped make them at a podium in a Geneva conference center... Among them: Sophia, the first robot innovation ambassador for the U.N. Development Program, or UNDP; Grace, described as a health care robot; and Desdemona, a rock star robot."

"I'm terrified by all of this," said one local newscaster, noting that the robots also said they "had no intention of rebelling against their creators."

But the Associated Press points out an important caveat: While the robots vocalized strong statements - that robots could be more efficient leaders than humans, but wouldn't take anyone's job away or stage a rebellion - organizers didn't specify to what extent the answers were scripted or programmed by people. The summit was meant to showcase "human-machine collaboration," and some of the robots are capable of producing preprogrammed responses, according to their documentation.
Two of the robots seemed to disagree on whether AI-powered robots should submit to stricter regulation. (Although since they're only synthesizing sentences from large-language models, can they really be said to "agree" or "disagree"?)

There were unintentionally humorous moments, starting right from the beginning. Click here to start reading Slashdot's transcript of the robots' answers:

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NewScientist: Netflix researchers have created a new type of AI-powered green-screen technology that can produce realistic visual effects for film and television in real time. Green-screen technology is routinely used to capture footage of actors that can then be inserted in the foreground of virtual or prerecorded scenes. To do this, actors are filmed against a bright green background, which is easily isolated and removed digitally. This process can be done automatically with reasonable accuracy, such as in television weather forecasts, but it can be thrown by items of green clothing or by transparent or fine objects, like wisps of hair. When greater accuracy is needed in films or television series, specialist operators tweak settings manually, sometimes requiring hours to perfect a shot.

In a bid to create a technique that is both fast and accurate, Netflix has come up with a method it calls Magenta Green Screen (MGS). Actors are filmed against a background of bright green LEDs while being lit from the front with red and blue ones, which together create a magenta glow (see video, [here]). Because digital cameras work by taking an individual red, green and blue value for each pixel, this technique has the effect of creating a green channel that records only the background, with the foreground appearing black, and red and blue channels that record only the foreground, leaving the background looking black. Together these create the magenta and green look. Film editors can replace the green channel in real time, realistically and instantly placing the actors in the foreground of another scene, with even potentially tricky areas, such as transparent bottles or the area around strands of hair, working without problems.

But there is a problem with the method. Because the foreground is only recorded in blue and red, it leaves the actors looking magenta-tinted. To solve this, Netflix uses artificial intelligence to put the full range of color back into the foreground, using a photograph of the actors lit normally as a reference to create a realistic-looking green channel. This AI works quickly, but not yet in real time, although fast techniques such as averaging the red and blue channels to create an approximation of a green channel work effectively enough for the director to monitor while filming.

President Emmanuel Macron is partially blaming video games for the spread of violence in France following the shooting death of a teenager during a police traffic stop in a Paris suburb last week. NPR reports: "It sometimes feels like some of them are experiencing, on the streets, the video games that have intoxicated them," Macron said in a press conference on July 1. He added that protesters are using Snapchat and TikTok to organize themselves and spread "a mimicking of violence, which for the youngest leads to a kind of disconnect from reality." Concerns that video games promote shootings, massacres or rioting are now about half a century old; it has been traced back to the 1976 release of Death Race, an arcade video game which put players behind the wheel of a car to mow down humanoid figures for points. The argument gained renewed traction in the 1990s with the release of much more realistic first-person shooter games. It is an old bogeyman that politicians have latched onto in the wake of horrific tragedies. But it has become less common as troves of studies have largely concluded there is no causal link between video games and violent behavior.

Christopher Ferguson, a professor at Stetson University in Florida who has studied the impact of such games on the public, said he is surprised at Macron's comments. The president is 45 years old and belongs to a generation raised with video games, so "seeing him mention this is almost anachronistic," Ferguson said, sounding perplexed. "The evidence is very clear. Whatever may be going on in France, whatever violence is occurring, it certainly is not due to violence in video games." Decades of research, especially long-term experiments spanning decades, have consistently found "that playing violent video games, do not cause even prank-level aggressive behaviors, let alone violent crimes," Ferguson said. He also noted that the overall violent crime in the U.S. dropped significantly between 1993 and 2020, the same period during which violent video games soared in popularity.

And it's not just in the United States. A 2019 study out of Oxford University determined that early violent video game playing among British teenagers does not predict serious or violent criminal behavior later in life. According to Ferguson, if video games were the cause of rampant violence, then countries like Japan, South Korea and the Netherlands, which consume more violent video games per capita, would be rife with bloodshed. "Instead, they're three of the most peaceful countries on the planet in terms of violent crime," he said. "You could wave a magic wand and take all these people's video games away, and that's not going to have any effect in any way going to help their lives and reduce their aggression," Ferguson said. So why do politicians turn to the familiar refrain? Ferguson said it is a way for elected leaders to shift the blame away from failing government policies. "It gets people talking about the wrong thing. They're thinking about video games. They're not thinking about gun control or whatever inequalities are happening in France," Ferguson said.

A federal judge on Tuesday blocked key Biden administration agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies about "protected speech," in an extraordinary preliminary injunction in an ongoing case that could have profound effects on the First Amendment. From a report: The injunction came in response to a lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who allege that government officials went too far in their efforts to encourage social media companies to address posts that they worried could contribute to vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic or upend elections.

The Trump-appointed judge's move could undo years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies. For more than a decade, the federal government has attempted to work with social media companies to address a wide range of criminal activity, including child sexual abuse images and terrorism. Over the last five years, coordination and communication between government officials and the companies increased as the federal government responded to rising election interference and voter suppression efforts after revelations that Russian actors had sowed disinformation on U.S. social sites during the 2016 election. Public health officials also frequently communicated with the companies during the coronavirus pandemic, as falsehoods about the virus and vaccines spread on social networks including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

Gfycat, a place where users uploaded, created, and distributed GIFs of all sorts, is shutting down as of Sept. 1, according to a message on its homepage. From a report: Users of the Snap-owned service are asked to "Please save or delete your Gfycat content." "After September 1, 2023, all Gfycat content and data will be deleted from gfycat.com." Gfycat rose as a service during a period where, like Imgur, it was easier to use than any native tools provided by content sites like Facebook or Reddit.

As CEO and co-founcer Richard Rabbat told TechCrunch in 2016, after raising $10 million from investors, GIFs were "hard to make, slow to upload, and when you shared them, the quality wasn't very good." Gfycat created looped, linked Webm videos that, while compressed, retained an HD quality to them. They were easier to share than actual GIF-format files, and offered an API for other sites to tap in. "I see Gfycat as the ultimate platform for all short-form content, the way that YouTube is the platform for longer videos and Twitter is the platform for text-based news and media discussions," VC funder Ernestine Fu told TechCrunch in 2016, long before TikTok, YouTube shorts, and Elon Musk's Twitter ownership came to pass.

CNBC has created a 15-minute video titled "The Rise and Fall of Skype," telling the story of how Skype was developed in just nine months in 2003 by a six-person group of childhood friends in Estonia. "We were smart engineers," says Skype's former chief technical architect Ahti Heinla. "We learned on the go. None of us had any telecoms background." But at the end of the interview, he concedes "I myself use Skype right now fairly little. I still have it installed on my phone, but my primary communication methods now are elsewhere."

GigaOm founder Om Malik tells CNBC it was Skype's missteps that enabled the massive growth of WhatsApp, and shared this succinct diagnosis of what's happening to Skype. "Microsoft is where consumer brands go to die." From an accompanying article on CNBC's web site: In 2005 eBay bought it. That deal didn't work out as planned, and an investor group led by Silver Lake purchased a majority stake. Microsoft then stepped in, shelling out $8.5 billion for the company in 2011. Even backed by the world's largest software company, Skype is falling by the wayside. During the pandemic, consumers and business workers turned to tools like Zoom and Meta's WhatsApp, and now there are any number of options to quickly connect with groups of friends and colleagues over smartphones... Microsoft has promoted Skype in Outlook and Windows and even enriched the app with its Bing generative artificial intelligence chatbot. But the numbers still don't look great.

In March 2020, Microsoft said Skype had 40 million daily active users, a number that's since slipped to 36 million, according to a spokesperson. Microsoft's newer Teams communication app, by contrast, is growing in popularity, rising from nearly 250 million monthly users in July 2021 to a record of over 300 million in the first quarter.
Microsoft Teams reached an all-time high of 300 million active users in the second quarter of 2023, according to CNBC's video report. But a research VP at International Data Corp says Microsoft Teams was successful — in taking users away from Skype.

GigaOm's Malik says Microsoft "failed to capitalize on Skype, 100%. Steve Balmer was the king of buying things and not knowing what to do with them... What happened with Skype is the story of every large company with a lot of middle management: they didn't innovate on the product for a very long time."

Jordan Novet from CNBC Business News calls Skype "a product with an uncertain future," arguing that Microsoft "is pouring a lot of engineering resources into making Teams a big destination for communication. It's not doing the same thing with Skype." Could Skype make a comeback? "Anything is possible," Novet concedes. "Microsoft is trying to make Skype happen in a bigger way now." He points out that Skype is now equipped with Bing's AI-powered chatbot, so "You can talk to Bing in Skype. Will that make Skype explode in popularity, or make a comeback? I don't think so."

Microsoft's current head of Skype was not available for CNBC's video. But as a kind of epilogue, they report that Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype's original programmers, now "spends most of his time discussing the dangers of unchecked AI development."

"I don't know what the future holds for Skype..." he tells CNBC. "I'm concerned about humans being wiped out, so it's unlikely that we'll need Skype if that happens."

The company behind Flipper Zero expects $80 million in sales this year, which ZDNet estimates at around 500,000 unit sales.

In its Kickstarter days the company sold almost $5 million as preorders, remembers TechCrunch, and the company claims it sold $25 million worth of the devices last year: So what are they selling? Flipper Zero is a "portable gamified multi-tool" aimed at everyone with an interest in cybersecurity, whether as a penetration tester, curious nerd or student — or with more nefarious purposes. The tool includes a bunch of ways to manipulate the world around you, including wireless devices (think garage openers), RFID card systems, remote keyless systems, key fobs, entry to barriers, etc. Basically, you can program it to emulate a bunch of different lock systems.

The system really works, too — I'm not much of a hacker, but I've been able to open garages, activate elevators and open other locking systems that should be way beyond my hacking skill level. On the one hand, it's an interesting toy to experiment with, which highlights how insecure much of the world around us actually is. On the other hand, I'm curious if it's a great idea to have 300,000+ hacking devices out in the wild that make it easy to capture car key signals and gate openers and then use them to open said apertures.
The company points out that their firmware is open source, and can be inspected by anyone.

ZDNet calls it "incredibly user-friendly" and "a fantastic educational tool and a stepping stone to get people — young and old — into cybersecurity," with "a very active community of users that are constantly finding new things to do with it". (Even third-party operating systems are available).

"Instead of looking like some scary hacking tool, all black and bristling with antennas, it looks like a kid's toy, all plastic and brightly colored," writes ZDNet. "It reminds me of Tamagotchis..."

Thanks to Slashdot reader ZipNada for suggesting the article.

"Alaska Weather," a daily 30-minute TV show that has broadcast across Alaska for the past 47 years, is going off the air due to a lack of funds. Gizmodo reports: In lieu of the news, residents seeking information on their state's weather will be forced to lean on spotty, sub-par internet. Friday evening will be the final television installment of "Alaska Weather," as first reported by Alaska Public Media. The show, which is the only weather program produced directly by the National Weather Service, has filled an information and communications void for decades. Without it, "if you don't have good internet connectivity, you're in a world of hurt in western and northern Alaska as far as getting weather information," said Rick Thoman, a climate specialist at the International Arctic Research Center, to the Associated Press. And many in Alaska don't have reliable or fast internet access.

General, aviation, and maritime forecast segments will remain available online only, via YouTube. Emergency alerts, like storm warnings, will be relegated to the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration radio broadcasts, which don't cover the whole state, per Alaska Public Media. Officials from the state-owned, non-profit media organization say that money problems are to blame. Putting together and distributing "Alaska Weather" has cost Alaska Public Media $200,000 annually, and the network can't afford to do it anymore, according to Linda Wei, APM's chief content officer.

"It's no longer sustainable for us to continue in this manner," Wei told AP. "It's not a decision that we came to lightly." Big state funding cuts in 2019 left APM in a tough spot. The media org kept "Alaska Weather" going on its own for years, following the loss of state backing, but now Wei says the network can't anymore. "We've been doing this, without support, for about four or five years, and we've made that known to NOAA," said Wei to WaPo. "It just got to the point where we couldn't continue." Wei says she's hoping there's a possibility of getting "Alaska Weather" back on the air. But for now, there will be a gap.

Some YouTube users with ad blockers are seeing a new three-strikes popup menu while watching videos. "The popup menu in the screenshot suggests users will be barred from YouTube viewing after watching three videos with an ad blocker enabled," reports Android Authority. From the report: "It looks like you may be using an ad blocker. Video playback will be blocked unless YouTube is allowlisted or the ad blocker is disabled," reads an excerpt of the screenshot. The service presents users with two buttons, prompting them to either allow ads in their ad blocker or letting them buy YouTube Premium. YouTube confirmed to The Verge that it's currently running "a small experiment globally that urges viewers with ad blockers enabled to allow ads on YouTube or try YouTube Premium."

A collection of over 2,200 new old stock computers from the 1980s, manufactured by a company called NABU and featuring a groundbreaking pre-internet network, are being liberated from a barn in Massachusetts. "In a way, this is two stories: The first, of a breakthrough network from Canada, a consumer-friendly 1983 version of the internet decades ahead of its time," writes Ernie Smith via Motherboard. "The other story, of the man who got a hold of these machines, held onto them for 33 years, and mysteriously allowed them to flood the used market one day. One day, thanks to a confluence of the right people noticing the right eBay listings, these two stories merged and created a third story -- the tale of a computer network, brought back to life." An anonymous Slashdot reader shares an excerpt from the report: For more than two decades, the biggest retro computing story in recent memory sat like a sleeper cell in a Massachusetts barn. The barn was in danger of collapse. It could no longer protect the fleet of identical devices hiding inside. A story like this doesn't need the flash of a keynote or a high-profile marketing campaign. It really just needs someone to notice. And the reason anyone did notice was because this barn could no longer support the roughly 2,200 machines that hid on its second floor. These computers, with a weight equivalent to roughly 11 full-size vehicles, were basically new, other than the fact that they had sat unopened and unused for nearly four decades, roughly half that time inside this barn. Every box was "new old stock," essentially a manufactured time capsule, waiting to be found by somebody.

These machines, featuring the label of a forgotten brand built around an idea that was tragically too early to succeed, could have disappeared, anonymously, into the junkyard of history, as so many others like them have. Instead, they ended up on eBay, at a bargain-basement price of $59.99 each. And when the modern retro computing community turned them on, what they found was something worth bringing back to life. It took a while for anyone to notice these stylish metal-and-plastic machines from 1983. First, information spread like whispers in the community of tech forums, Discord servers, and Patreon channels where retro tech collectors hid. But then, a well-known tech YouTuber, Adrian Black, did a video about them, and these eBay machines, slapped with the logo of a company called NABU, were anonymous no more. [...]

Black was impressed. These devices, which utilized the landmark Z80 processor -- a chip common in embedded systems, arcade machines like Pac-Man, and home consoles like the Colecovision -- had an architecture very similar to the widely used MSX platform, making them a great choice for device hackers. (Well, minus the fact that they didn't have floppy drives.) Plus, they were essentially new. "It's new old stock, but it is tested," he says at the beginning of the clip. "I think the seller actually peeled the original tape off, tested it, and then taped it back up again." Essentially, this was the retro-computing version of a unicorn: An extremely obscure platform, being sold at a scale wide enough that basically anyone who wanted one could have it. And on top of all that, NABU -- an acronym standing for Natural Access to Bi-directional Utilities -- was essentially the 1983 version of AOL, except built around proprietary hardware. The flood of interest was so significant that it knocked the seller's eBay account offline for months while the company verified that the units were actually his. (They were.)

For people who love tinkering with devices, there was a lot to work with here, especially in 2023. There was a real chance that this relic of the past could live again, with its network available to anyone who took a chance on buying one of these devices. "The kind of hardware and software hacking that people are doing with those wouldn't have been possible 10 or even 5 years ago," says Sean Malseed, host of the popular YouTube channel Action Retro and one of the many people who bought a NABU from the mysterious eBay listing. "These machines were once considered basically e-waste, but instead they're seeing a very unlikely renaissance." So where did this computer come from? Why did this seller have so many? And why didn't you know about the NABU until now? [...]

Google violated its promised standards when placing video ads on other websites, according to new research that raises questions about the transparency of the tech giant's online-ad business. From a report: Google's YouTube runs ads on its own site and app. But the company also brokers the placement of video ads on other sites across the web through a program called Google Video Partners. Google charges a premium, promising that the ads it places will run on high-quality sites, before the page's main video content, with the audio on, and that brands will only pay for ads that aren't skipped.

Google violates those standards about 80% of the time, according to research from Adalytics, a company that helps brands analyze where their ads appear online. The firm accused the company of placing ads in small, muted, automatically-played videos off to the side of a page's main content, on sites that don't meet Google's standards for monetization, among other violations. Adalytics compiled its data by observing campaigns from more than 1,100 brands that got billions of ad impressions between 2020 and 2023. The company shared its findings with The Wall Street Journal. In a statement, Google said the report "makes many claims that are inaccurate and doesn't reflect how we keep advertisers safe."

Four volunteers will spend the next 378 days in a simulation of Mars, facing harsh, realistic challenges in tight quarters under NASA's watchful eye in preparation for a real-life mission to the red planet. From a report: Research scientist Kelly Haston, structural engineer Ross Brockwell, emergency medicine physician Nathan Jones and US Navy microbiologist Anca Selariu were locked into the virtual planet at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas, on Sunday as part of the first of a three-year-long simulation study by the space agency. "The knowledge we gain here will help enable us to send humans to Mars and bring them home safely," Grace Douglas, the mission's principal investigator at NASA, said during a briefing.

Nasa 3D-printed the 1,700-square-foot facility, dubbed Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog -- or CHAPEA. It will be the longest analog mission in the agency's history. The habitat -- named Mars Dune Alpha -- will feature a kitchen, private crew quarters, and two bathrooms, with medical, work, and recreation areas. The crew will be expected to carry out "mission activities," like collecting geological samples, exercising, and practicing personal hygiene and health care, with minimal contact with their family and loved ones, according to NASA. To capture the true essence of life on our neighboring planet, the crew must work through "environmental stressors," including limits on resources, periods of isolation, and equipment failures.

Google users who add "Reddit" to searches for specific topics found this ineffective when numerous Reddit forums went dark this month. This happened as many popular forum moderators turned pages private to protest Reddit's decision to charge developers for data access, resulting in inaccessible or unhelpful search results. The incident, CNBC reports, has prompted Google to search for a better fix. An anonymous reader shares a report: It's an issue that Google executives say is at least partially resolved by a new feature called Perspectives that was unveiled on Monday. The Perspectives tab, available now on mobile web and the Google app in the U.S., promises to surface discussion forums and videos from social media platforms like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and Quora.

At an all-hands meeting earlier this month, Prabhakar Raghavan, Google's senior vice president in charge of search, told employees that the company was working on ways for search to display helpful resources in results without requiring users to add "Reddit" to their searches. Raghavan acknowledged that users had grown frustrated with the experience. "Many of you may wonder how we have a search team that's iterating and building all this new stuff and yet somehow, users are still not quite happy," Raghavan said. "We need to make users happy."

The US Supreme Court refused to revive a lawsuit by music website Genius Media accusing Alphabet's Google of stealing millions of song lyrics. From a report: The justices left in place a ruling that tossed out the suit, which accused Google of violating a contract with Genius by using its song lyrics in search results without attribution. It's the latest victory at the Supreme Court for Google, which earlier this year won a battle over whether its video-streaming platform YouTube can be held liable for hosting terrorist videos.

There are deep disagreements over how copyright laws apply to online speech and aggregation. The lower court said Genius does not own any of the copyrights to its lyrics -- instead, those are held by the songwriters and publishers. Genius claimed that Google violated its contract by scraping lyrics and boosting them in Google Search results without any attribution. Genius, which claimed the saga caused millions of dollars in losses for the website, initially sued Google in 2019. In order to drum up attention and prove its case, Genius said it used a secret code spelling out the word "red-handed" to prove Google was stealing its lyrics. "We appreciate the court's decision, agreeing with the Solicitor General and multiple lower courts that Genius' claims have no merit," Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said Monday. "We license lyrics on Google Search from third parties, and we do not crawl or scrape websites to source lyrics."

The "BepiColombo" mission, a joint European-Japanese effort, "has recently completed its third of six planned flybys of Mercury, capturing dozens of images in the process," reports the Byte: At its closest, the spacecraft soared within just 150 miles of Mercury. This occurred on the night side of the planet, however, too dark for optimal imaging. Instead, the first and nearest image was taken 12 minutes after the closest approach, at the still impressive proximity of some 1,100 miles above the surface.
Now the ESA has spliced together 217 images from that flyby into a short video, which culminates with a zoomed-in closeup of Mercury's cratered surface. And the music in that video had a little help from AI, reports Phys.org: Music was composed for the sequence by ILÄ (formerly known as Anil Sebastian), with the assistance of AI tools developed by the Machine Intelligence for Musical Audio group, University of Sheffield.

Music from the previous two flyby movies — composed by Maison Mercury Jones' creative director ILÄ and Ingmar Kamalagharan — was given to the AI tool to suggest seeds for the new composition, which ILÄ then chose from to edit and weave together with other elements into the new piece.

The team at the University of Sheffield has developed an Artificial Musical Intelligence (AMI), a large-scale general-purpose deep neural network that can be personalized to individual musicians and use cases. The project with the University of Sheffield is aimed at exploring the boundaries of the ethics of AI creativity, while also emphasizing the essential contributions of the (human) composer.
From the ESA's announcement: BepiColombo's next Mercury flyby will take place on 5 September 2024, but there is plenty of work to occupy the teams in the meantime... BepiColombo's Mercury Transfer Module will complete over 15 000 hours of solar electric propulsion operations over its lifetime, which together with nine planetary flybys in total — one at Earth, two at Venus, and six at Mercury — will guide the spacecraft towards Mercury orbit.

The ESA-led Mercury Planetary Orbiter and the JAXA-led Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter modules will separate into complementary orbits around the planet, and their main science mission will begin in early 2026.
One spaceflight blog notes the propulsive energy required for an eventual entry into the orbit of Mercury "is greater than that of a mission to fly by Pluto.

"Only one other spacecraft has orbited Mercury, and that was NASA's MESSENGER probe, which orbited the planet from 2011 to 2015."