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The Washington Post's top standards editor Thursday decried "frustrating" errors in its new AI-generated personalized podcasts, whose launch has been met with distress by its journalists. From a report: Earlier this week, the Post announced that it was rolling out personalized AI-generated podcasts for users of the paper's mobile app. In a release, the paper said users will be able to choose preferred topics and AI hosts, and could "shape their own briefing, select their topics, set their lengths, pick their hosts and soon even ask questions using our Ask The Post AI technology." But less than 48 hours since the product was released, people within the Post have flagged what four sources described as multiple mistakes in personalized podcasts. The errors have ranged from relatively minor pronunciation gaffes to significant changes to story content, like misattributing or inventing quotes and inserting commentary, such as interpreting a source's quotes as the paper's position on an issue. According to four people familiar with the situation, the errors have alarmed senior newsroom leaders who have acknowledged in an internal Slack channel that the product's output is not living up to the paper's standards. In a message to other WaPo staff shared with Semafor, head of standards Karen Pensiero wrote that the errors have been "frustrating for all of us."

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Carl Rinsch, the director behind the 2013 Keanu Reeves film "47 Ronin," has been found guilty of defrauding Netflix out of $11 million that was meant to fund a science fiction series called "Conquest," which the streaming company ultimately cancelled in 2021 after Rinsch failed to meet any production milestones. A jury in the Southern District of New York convicted the 48-year-old on seven charges: one count each of wire fraud and money laundering, and five counts of transacting in illicitly obtained property. Prosecutors alleged that Rinsch funneled the $11 million through multiple bank accounts into a personal brokerage account, lost more than half of it on securities within two months, and then began speculating on cryptocurrency. Court records show he also spent $2.4 million on a Ferrari and five Rolls Royces, $3.3 million on furniture and antiques, and $387,000 on a Swiss watch. Netflix has written off $55 million in total and has not recovered any funds. Rinsch faces up to 90 years in prison and is scheduled for sentencing on April 17, 2026.

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It's getting crowded up there

Earth's orbit is starting to look like an LA freeway, with more and more satellites being launched each year. If you're worried about collisions and space debris making the area unusable – and you should be – scientists have proposed a new metric to contribute to your anxiety: the CRASH Clock.…

Bank sketches four scenarios in which monetization falters or demand swamps supply by 2030

Goldman Sachs warns that datacenter investments may fail to pay off if the industry is unable to monetize AI models, but hedges its bets by saying that demand could also overwhelm available capacity by 2030.…

Major automakers have urged Washington to prevent Chinese government-backed automakers and battery manufacturers from opening U.S. manufacturing plants, warning the industry's future is at stake. From a report: The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, which represents General Motors, Ford, Toyota Motor, Volkswagen, Hyundai, Stellantis and other major automakers, sounded the alarm and said Congress and the Trump administration needed to act. "China poses a clear and present threat to the auto industry in the U.S.," the group wrote in a statement for a U.S. House hearing on Chinese vehicles. The group also said lawmakers should maintain the U.S. Commerce Department's prohibition on importing information and communications technology and services from China that effectively bars the import of vehicles from Chinese manufacturers. "No amount of investment by automakers and battery manufacturers operating inside the U.S. can counter a China that is enabled by subsidies to chronically oversupply around the world. This is a recipe for dumping that Congress and the Trump Administration must prevent from happening inside the U.S.," the auto industry group said.

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Critical vulnerabilities found in third-party applications eligible for award under 'in scope by default' move

Microsoft is overhauling its bug bounty program to reward exploit hunters for finding vulnerabilities across all its products and services, even those without established bounty schemes.…

Justice Department alleges federal auditors were misled over compliance with FedRAMP and DoD requirements

The US is suing a former senior manager at Accenture for allegedly misleading the government about the security of an Army cloud platform.…

Competition Appeal Tribunal to decide if multibillion-pound overcharging case can go to trial

Stop us if you've heard this one before. Microsoft is in court regarding allegedly sharp software licensing practices.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Reddit has filed a challenge against Australia's under-16s social media ban in the high court, lodging its case two days after implementing age restrictions on its website. The company said in a Reddit post on Friday that while it agreed with protecting people under 16, the law "has the unfortunate effect of forcing intrusive and potentially insecure verification processes on adults as well as minors, isolating teens from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences." Reddit said there was an "illogical patchwork" of platforms included in the ban. "As the Australian Human Rights Commission put it, 'There are less restrictive alternatives available that could achieve the aim of protecting children and young people from online harms, but without having such a significant negative impact on other human rights.'" Reddit argued it was a forum primarily for adults without the traditional social media features the government has "taken issue with." Reddit was challenging the law on the grounds it infringed on the implied freedom of political communication. It was also seeking to challenge whether Reddit could be considered an age-restricted social media platform under the legislation. It said it was not seeking to challenge the law to avoid compliance, and had implemented age-assurance measures since Wednesday. The company said the vast majority of Redditors were adults, and advertising wasn't targeted to children under 18. The Apple app store age rating for Reddit is 17+. "Despite the best intentions, this law is missing the mark on actually protecting young people online," Reddit said. "So, while we will comply with this law, we have a responsibility to share our perspective and see that it is reviewed by the courts."

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Rights groups say digital-only record is leaking data and courting trouble

Civil society groups are urging the UK's data watchdog to investigate whether the Home Office's digital-only eVisa scheme is breaching GDPR, sounding the alarm about systemic data errors and design failures that are exposing sensitive personal information while leaving migrants unable to prove their lawful status.…

Wiz says React2Shell attacks accelerating, ranging from cryptominers to state-linked crews

Half of the internet-facing systems vulnerable to a fast-moving React remote code execution flaw remain unpatched, even as exploitation has exploded into more than a dozen active attack clusters ranging from bargain-basement cryptominers to state-linked intrusion tooling.…

Analysts say the shift offers stability, but embedded usage caps ensure vendors keep control

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff last week came closer to answering a multibillion-dollar question when he said seat-based pricing – with some caveats – was becoming the norm for its AI agents after flirting with pricing based on consumption and per-conversation payments.…

The SEC has granted the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., or DTCC, a no-action letter allowing it to custody and recognize tokenized stocks, ETFs, and Treasuries on approved blockchains for three years. "Although this program is a pilot subject to various operational limitations, it marks a significant incremental step in moving markets onchain," SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a statement. Bloomberg reports: With the permission, DTCC will also extend their record-keeping to the blockchain, Michael Winnike, global head of strategy and market solutions at DTCC Clearing & Securities Services, said in an interview. "It's the same legal entitlement, the same stock that you would hold in your account from the DTCC in traditional form," Winnike said. [...] The SEC's authorization of tokenization services only applies to a specific set of securities that trade often. The approval includes the Russell 1000 index which represents the 1,000 largest publicly traded US companies, as well as exchange-traded funds that track major indices and US Treasury bills, bonds and notes, Winnike said. "This allows us both to create value for the markets, while staying in a pre-defined pool of highly-liquid securities to start," said Winnike. The firm's ultimate aspiration is to add its entire depository, which represents $100 trillion in securities, to the blockchain, a move that would require further expansion of the no-action relief from the SEC, he said. Winnike said the tokenization service will help bridge the traditional and digital worlds in part because the new technology will have the same legal entitlements and controls as traditional markets, including freezing or forced transfers if assets are stolen. "This enables participants to adopt and integrate, because they know there is a trusted party that can recover their securities as needed" and can address potential errors, he said. The new blockchain service will also allow investors to move assets all the time, not just Monday through Friday when traditional markets are open. "That creates a lot of new utility," Winnike said. "It brings the two ecosystems together."

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Replacement rollout plagued by bad data and missing features, says watchdog

Despite completing its rollout of a new case management system, Home Office caseworkers are still referring back to data in a 25-year-old legacy system when processing asylum claims, according to a public spending watchdog.…

Getting that confession took hours, during which L1 and L2 support gave up

On Call Welcome once more to On Call, the Friday column in which we share stories of tech support incidents that went pear-shaped until cunning Reg readers stepped in to save the day.…

Cadmium zinc telluride (CZT), a hard-to-manufacture semiconductor produced by only a handful of companies, is enabling a quiet revolution in medical imaging, science, and security by delivering faster scans, lower radiation doses, and far more precise X-ray and gamma-ray detection. "You get beautiful pictures from this scanner," says Dr Kshama Wechalekar, head of nuclear medicine and PET. "It's an amazing feat of engineering and physics." The BBC reports: Kromek is one of just a few firms in the world that can make CZT. You may never have heard of the stuff but, in Dr Wechalekar's words, it is enabling a "revolution" in medical imaging. This wonder material has many other uses, such as in X-ray telescopes, radiation detectors and airport security scanners. And it is increasingly sought-after. Investigations of patients' lungs performed by Dr Wechalekar and her colleagues involve looking for the presence of many tiny blood clots in people with long Covid, or a larger clot known as a pulmonary embolism, for example. The 1-million-pound scanner works by detecting gamma rays emitted by a radioactive substance that is injected into patients' bodies. But the scanner's sensitivity means less of this substance is needed than before: "We can reduce doses about 30%," says Dr Wechalekar. While CZT-based scanners are not new in general, large, whole-body scanners such as this one are a relatively recent innovation. CZT itself has been around for decades but it is notoriously difficult to manufacture. "It has taken a long time for it to develop into an industrial-scale production process," says Arnab Basu, founding chief executive of Kromek. [...] The newly formed CZT, a semiconductor, can detect tiny photon particles in X-rays and gamma rays with incredible precision -- like a highly specialized version of the light-sensing, silicon-based image sensor in your smartphone camera. Whenever a high energy photon strikes the CZT, it mobilizes an electron and this electrical signal can be used to make an image. Earlier scanner technology used a two-step process, which was not as precise. "It's digital," says Dr Basu. "It's a single conversion step. It retains all the important information such as timing, the energy of the X-ray that is hitting the CZT detector -- you can create color, or spectroscopic images."

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Forum site says it’s potentially more harmful to users who don’t log in

Forum site Reddit has filed a case that seeks to exempt itself from Australia’s ban on children under 16 holding social media accounts.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Do Kwon, the South Korean cryptocurrency entrepreneur behind two digital currencies that lost an estimated $40 billion in 2022, was sentenced in New York federal court on Thursday to 15 years in prison for fraud and conspiracy. Kwon, 34, who co-founded Singapore-based Terraform Labs and developed the TerraUSD and Luna currencies, previously pleaded guilty and admitted to misleading investors about a coin that was supposed to maintain a steady price during periods of crypto market volatility. Kwon was one of several cryptocurrency moguls to face federal charges after a slump in digital token prices in 2022 prompted the collapse of a number of companies. [...] Kwon was accused of misleading investors in 2021 about TerraUSD, a so-called stablecoin designed to maintain a value of $1. Prosecutors alleged that when TerraUSD slipped below its $1 peg in May 2021, Kwon told investors a computer algorithm known as "Terra Protocol" had restored the coin's value. Instead, Kwon arranged for a high-frequency trading firm to secretly buy millions of dollars of the token to artificially prop up its price, according to charging documents. "I made false and misleading statements about why it regained its peg by failing to disclose a trading firm's role in restoring that peg," Kwon said in court. "What I did was wrong." He also faces charges in South Korea, and under his plea deal, prosecutors won't oppose his transfer abroad after he serves half of his U.S. sentence.

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Longtime Slashdot reader Gilmoure shares a report from Nature: Scientists have produced the most detailed 3D map of almost all buildings in the world. The map, called GlobalBuildingAtlas, combines satellite imagery and machine learning to generate 3D models for 97% of buildings on Earth. The dataset, published in the open-access journal Earth System Science Data on December 1, covers 2.75 billion buildings, each mapped with footprints and heights at a spatial resolution of 3 meters by 3 meters. The 3D map opens new possibilities for disaster risk assessment, climate modeling and urban planning, according to study co-author Xiaoxiang Zhu, an Earth observation data scientist at the Technical University of Munich in Germany. "Imagine a video game with the world's buildings already mapped in basic spatial dimensions!" writes Gilmoure.

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Judge said his fraud was on 'epic, generational scale'

Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon will spend 15 years in jail after pleading guilty to committing fraud.…