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reg writes: Twenty-five years ago today, CmdrTaco innocently posted a story entitled "Collection of Fun Video Clips" in the days of T1 lines and invited anyone with the bandwidth to check it out. Even though the term "Slashdot Effect" had already been coined, this was the first time it took down a site. The site owner got a personal call from their ISP, which was later reported in the comments, where he also noted that he was writing a novella called "She Hates My Futon." Many old timers started reading that, although it's never been finished, despite having a Good Reads page, a Facebook page, and several promises that he'll complete it.

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Genuine parts for the Google Pixel 8 and 8 Pro are now available on iFixit's Pixel parts store. "The Pixel 8 is the first Google phone with seven years of major OS updates, and Google previously said these parts will be in stock for seven years to match, so the phone sounds like it will be a longevity champion," reports Ars Technica's Ron Amadeo. From the report: The most common replacement will probably be the screen, which costs $160 for the Pixel 8 and $230 for the Pixel 8 Pro. The product described as a "rear case" is the entire aluminum body of the phone, with the rear glass, camera bar, camera cover glass, side buttons, and charging coil. The Pixel 8 version of this will run you $143, while the 8 Pro version is $173. The batteries are both $43. If your camera breaks, get ready for some serious sticker shock: The Pixel 8 Pro rear camera assembly is $200 for the bundled set of three cameras. Interestingly, the Pixel 8 also has $200 worth of camera parts despite having one less camera by skipping the complicated periscope zoom lens. The Pixel 8 parts come in separate pieces: $143 for the main camera and $63 for the ultra-wide. Along with the $43 front camera, a Pixel 8 is $700 and has $243 worth of camera parts! Other than that, there are various small adhesive and thermal strips. There's no replacement motherboard available, which is a shame since that's probably the first thing that would break from water damage. (Phone motherboards contain your IMEI number used for things like billing and theft blocklisting, and the industry doesn't have a good solution for repairing these.) Since the USB port is part of the motherboard, there's no official repair method. The Google Pixel 8 Parts store is available here.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Facebook recently rolled out a new "Link History" setting that creates a special repository of all the links you click on in the Facebook mobile app. Users can opt-out, but Link History is turned on by default, and the data is used for targeted ads. The company pitches Link History as a useful tool for consumers "with your browsing activity saved in one place," rather than another way to keep tabs on your behavior. With the new setting you'll "never lose a link again," Facebook says in a pop-up encouraging users to consent to the new tracking method. The company goes on to mention that "When you allow link history, we may use your information to improve your ads across Meta technologies." Facebook promises to delete the Link History it's created for you within 90 days if you turn the setting off. According to a Facebook help page, Link History isn't available everywhere. The company says it's rolling out globally "over time." This is a privacy improvement in some ways, but the setting raises more questions than it answers. Meta has always kept track of the links you click on, and this is the first time users have had any visibility or control over this corner of the company's internet spying apparatus. In other words, Meta is just asking users for permission for a category of tracking that it's been using for over a decade. Beyond that, there are a number of ways this setting might give users an illusion of privacy that Meta isn't offering. "The Link History doesn't mention anything about the invasive ways Facebook monitors what you're doing once you visit a webpage," notes Gizmodo's Thomas Germain. "It seems the setting only affects Meta's record of the fact that you clicked a link in the first place. Furthermore, Meta links everything you do on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and its other products. Unlike several of Facebook's other privacy settings, Link History doesn't say that it affects any of Meta's other apps, leaving you with the data harvesting status quo on other parts of Mark Zuckerberg's empire." "Link History also creates a confusing new regime that establishes privacy settings that don't apply if you access Facebook outside of the Facebook app. If you log in to Facebook on a computer or a mobile browser instead, Link History doesn't protect you. In fact, you can't see the Link History page at all if you're looking at Facebook on your laptop."

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According to NBC, law enforcement in California can't ticket driverless cars for traffic violations, thanks to a legal loophole requiring an actual driver in the car. NBC Bay Area reports: An internal memo from San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott, obtained by the NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit, instructs officers that "no citation for a moving violation can be issued if the [autonomous vehicle] is being operated in a driverless mode." Scott added, "Technology evolves rapidly and, at times, faster than legislation or regulations can adapt to the changes." While autonomous vehicles in California have received parking citations, the state's transportation laws appear to leave driverless vehicles immune from receiving any type of traffic ticket stemming from moving violations. "I think it sends a message that it's not a level playing field, that fairness is not the priority," said Michael Stephenson, the founder and senior attorney of Bay Area Bicycle Law, a law firm that specializes in representing cyclists in accident cases. Stephenson said that driverless vehicles don't exactly fit into the state's current legal framework and that California needs new laws to appropriately govern the evolving technology. "We're perhaps trying to shove a square peg into a round hole," he said. "We are very much in the Wild West when it comes to driverless cars." The report notes that other states have rewritten traffic laws to allow ticketing of driverless cars. "Texas, which rivals California as another popular testing ground for autonomous vehicles, changed its transportation laws in 2017 to adapt to the emerging technology," reports NBC. "According to the Texas Transportation Code, the owner of a driverless car is 'considered the operator' and can be cited for breaking traffic laws 'regardless of whether the person is physically present in the vehicle.'" "Arizona, another busy site for autonomous vehicles, took similar steps," adds NBC. "In revising its traffic laws, Arizona declared the owner of an autonomous vehicle 'may be issued a traffic citation or other applicable penalty if the vehicle fails to comply with traffic or motor vehicle laws.'"

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Arizona and Texas are ahead in terms of regulating autonomous vehicles

Driverless cars are not subject to traffic citations in California even if they violate driving laws under the state's current rules.…

In a letter (PDF) citing "strong public interest in a prompt resolution," U.S. prosecutors said they do not plan to proceed with a second trial of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). The Register reports: The prosecutors reasoned that much of the evidence that would be submitted had already been considered in his October trial -- an event which yielded a guilty verdict after just four hours of jury deliberation. Although forgoing an additional trial means not holding SBF accountable for conspiracy to make unlawful campaign contributions, additional court dates would most certainly delay a scheduled March 2024 sentencing, as it would require negotiating with The Bahamas regarding terms of extradition. SBF was extradited to the US from The Bahamas, where his crypto exchange FTX was headquartered, in December 2022. While the island nation agreed to extradition on seven out of eight charges, local authorities did not consent to extradition on a charge of conspiracy to make unlawful campaign contributions. US courts were therefore unable to pursue the eighth charge. SBF's first trial yielded seven guilty verdicts. Those included two counts of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, two counts of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit commodities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering. Together they carry a combined maximum sentence of 110 years. However, even though the campaign finance charge was not pursued, it could be considered relevant in sentencing matters, wrote the attorneys in their filing. The prosecutors' letter detailed that the sentencing judgment will also "likely include orders of forfeiture and restitution for the victims of the defendant's crimes."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Modern fighting games have come quite a long way from their origins in providing accessibility options. Street Fighter 6 has audio cues that can convey distance, height, health, and other crucial data to visually impaired players. King of Fighters 15 allows for setting the contrast levels between player characters and background. Competitors like BrolyLegs and numerous hardware hackers have taken the seemingly inhospitable genre even further. Tekken 8, due later this month, seems to aim even higher, offering a number of color vision options in its settings. This includes an unofficially monikered "colorblind mode," with black-and-white and detail-diminished backgrounds and characters' flattened shapes filled in with either horizontal or vertical striped lines. But what started out as excitement in the fighting game and accessibility communities about this offering has shifted into warnings about the potential for migraines, vertigo, or even seizures. You can see the mode in action in the Windows demo or in a YouTube video shared by Gatterall -- which, of course, you should not view if you believe yourself susceptible to issues with strobing images. Gatterall's enthusiasm for Tekken 8's take on colorblind accessibility ("Literally no game has done this") drew comment from Katsuhiro Harada, head of the Tekken games for developer and publisher Bandai Namco, on X (formerly Twitter). Harada stated that he had developed and tested "an accessibility version" of Tekken 7, which was never shipped or sold. Harada states that those "studies" made it into Tekken 8. Not everybody in game accessibility circles was excited to see the new offerings, especially when it was shared directly with them by excited followers. Morgan Baker, game-accessibility lead at Electronic Arts, asked followers to "Please stop tagging me in the Tekken 8 'colorblind' stripe filters." The scenes had "already induced an aura migraine," Baker wrote, and she could not "afford to get another one right now." Accessibility consultant Ian Hamilton reposted a number of people citing migraines, nausea, or seizure concerns while also decrying the general nature of colorblind "filters" as an engineering-based approach to a broader design challenge. He added in the thread that shipping a game that contained a potentially seizure-inducing mode could result in people inadvertently discovering their susceptibility, similar to an infamous 1997 episode of the Pokemon TV series. Baker and Hamilton also noted problems with such videos automatically playing on sites like X/Twitter. "Patterns of lines moving on a screen creates a contiguous area of high-frequency flashing, like an invisible strobe," explained James Berg, accessibility project manager at Xbox Game Studios. "Human meat-motors aren't big fans of that." People typically start to notice "flicker fusion frequency" at around 40 frames per second, notes Ars. Tekken's Harada responded by saying a "very few" number of people misunderstood what his team was trying to do with this mode. There are multiple options, not just one colorblind mode, Harada wrote, along with brightness adjustments for effects and other elements. "These color vision options are a rare part of the fighting game genre, but they are still being researched and we intend to expand on them in the future," Harada wrote. Developers "have been working with several research institutes and communities to develop this option," even before the unsold "accessibility version of Tekken 7," added Harada.

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Justice Roberts thinks ML can help in legal cases, if humans keep their hands on the tiller

US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts believes that artificial intelligence will play an increasingly important role in the legal process, but he expects "human judges will be around for a while."…

Security researchers say info-stealing malware can still access victims' compromised Google accounts even after passwords have been changed. From a report: A zero-day exploit of Google account security was first teased by a cybercriminal known as "PRISMA" in October 2023, boasting that the technique could be used to log back into a victim's account even after the password is changed. It can also be used to generate new session tokens to regain access to victims' emails, cloud storage, and more as necessary. Since then, developers of infostealer malware -- primarily targeting Windows, it seems -- have steadily implemented the exploit in their code. The total number of known malware families that abuse the vulnerability stands at six, including Lumma and Rhadamanthys, while Eternity Stealer is also working on an update to release in the near future. Eggheads at CloudSEK say they found the root of the exploit to be in the undocumented Google OAuth endpoint "MultiLogin." The exploit revolves around stealing victims' session tokens. That is to say, malware first infects a person's PC -- typically via a malicious spam or a dodgy download, etc -- and then scours the machine for, among other things, web browser session cookies that can be used to log into accounts.

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Now every miscreant is jumping on Big G's OAuth account security hole

Security researchers say info-stealing malware can still access victims' compromised Google accounts even after passwords have been changed.…

Updates for the 1% of holdouts halt

Valve rang in the New Year by dropping Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 support on its Steam gaming platform, giving your gaming grandparets yet another reason to upgrade.…

No, you aren't special - we're probably all visual leaners

The folks at Dartmouth College say they have discovered a neural coding system used to transform images into memories, suggesting we're all visual thinkers deep down.…

The Crimson: Harvard President Claudine Gay will resign Tuesday afternoon, bringing an end to the shortest presidency in the University's history, according to a person with knowledge of the decision. It is not clear who will be appointed to serve as interim president. University spokesperson Jonathan L. Swain declined to comment on Gay's decision to step down. Gay's resignation -- just six months and two days into the presidency -- comes amid growing allegations of plagiarism and lasting doubts over her ability to respond to antisemitism on campus after her disastrous congressional testimony Dec. 5.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A court in Washington, D.C., has been stuck with a tough, maybe impossible question: What does full moon face emoji mean? Let me explain: In the summer of 2022, Ryan Cohen, a major investor in Bed Bath & Beyond, responded to a tweet about the beleaguered retailer with this side-eyed-moon emoji. Later that month, Cohen -- hailed as a "meme king" for his starring role in the GameStop craze -- disclosed that his stake in the company had grown to nearly 12 percent; the stock price subsequently shot up. That week, he sold all of his shares and walked away with a reported $60 million windfall. Now shareholders are suing him for securities fraud, claiming that Cohen misled investors by using the emoji the way meme-stock types sometimes do -- to suggest that the stock was going "to the moon." A class-action lawsuit with big money on the line has come to legal arguments such as this: "There is no way to establish objectively the truth or falsity of a tiny lunar cartoon," as Cohen's lawyers wrote in an attempt to get the emoji claim dismissed. That argument was denied, and the court held that "emojis may be actionable." The humble emoji -- and its older cousin, the emoticon -- has infiltrated the corporate world, especially in tech. Last month, when OpenAI briefly ousted Sam Altman and replaced him with an interim CEO, the company's employees reportedly responded with a vulgar emoji on Slack. That FTX, the failed cryptocurrency exchange once run by Sam Bankman-Fried, apparently used these little icons to approve million-dollar expense reports was held up during bankruptcy proceedings as a damning example of its poor corporate controls. And in February, a judge allowed a lawsuit to move forward alleging that an NFT company called Dapper Labs was illegally promoting unregistered securities on Twitter, because "the 'rocket ship' emoji, 'stock chart' emoji, and 'money bags' emoji objectively mean one thing: a financial return on investment."

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Dutch photolithography giant claims export control not hurting its bottom line

Washington reportedly pressed chipmaking equipment giant ASML to cancel some deliveries to China ahead of updated restrictions coming into force, but the company itself is declining to confirm if this is the case.…

A 13-year-old has beaten the original NES Tetris, previously thought to be an impossible task, after 34 years. The Gamer reports: The assumption I always had was that Tetris goes on forever and ever until you finally run out of space. While that's mostly true, as the game has no story, levels, or any form of progress beyond high scores and increasing speed, you 'beat' the game by crashing it, AKA reaching the "True Killscreen". It's called the "True Killscreen" because, for decades, it was assumed that level 29 was the Killscreen. For context, the longer you play Tetris, the faster the blocks fall, upping the ante as you're forced to think in split-second moments about where each piece should drop. The speed caps at level 29, making it near impossible to reach the sides. So, the community believed that was the 'end' of the game. It isn't. The end comes when you reach a level so high, Tetris simply crashes.

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'Magnificent' image shows violent volcanic surface

New images of Jupiter's moon, Io, were this week released by NASA following the flyby of the Juno spacecraft on December 30.…

When a deluge of jobless claims overwhelmed Texas in 2020, the workforce agency deployed AI chatbot "Larry" to field unemployment questions. Larry answered over 21 million queries before being upgraded, but its adoption sparked fears over loss of control. Texas last year established an advisory council to inventory current state AI usages like Larry and consider safeguards against unintended consequences like bias. More than one-third of agencies already use some form of AI, including for job matching, translations and security. From a report: The workforce commission also has an AI tool for job seekers that provides customized recommendations of job openings. Various agencies are using AI for translating languages into English and call center tools such as speech-to-text. AI is also used to enhance cybersecurity and fraud detection. Automation is also used for time-consuming work in order to "increase work output and efficiency," according to a statement from the Department of Information Resources. One example of this could be tracking budget expenses and invoices. In 2020, DIR launched an AI Center for Excellence aimed at helping state agencies implement more AI technology. Participation in DIR's center is voluntary, and each agency typically has its own technology team, so the extent of automation and AI deployment at state agencies is not closely tracked. Right now, Texas state agencies have to verify that the technology they use meets safety requirements set by state law, but there are no specific disclosure requirements on the types of technology or how they are used. HB 2060 will require each agency to provide that information to the AI advisory council by July 2024.

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From legal proceedings to potential YouTube fodder

The court system of Victoria, Australia, was subject to a suspected ransomware attack in which audiovisual recordings of court hearings may have been accessed.…

Retired officers and departing defense officials are flocking to investment firms that are pushing the government to provide more money to defense-technology startups. The New York Times: When Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin III and other top officials assembled for an event this month at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, they walked into a lesson in how the high-stakes world of Pentagon lobbying is being altered by the rise of defense technology startups. Inside, at this elite gathering near Los Angeles of senior leaders from government and the arms industry, was a rapidly growing group of participants: former Pentagon officials and military officers who have joined venture capital firms and are trying to use their connections in Washington to cash in on the potential to sell a new generation of weapons. They represent a new path through the revolving door that has always connected the Defense Department and the military contracting business. Retiring generals and departing top Pentagon officials once migrated regularly to the big established weapons makers like Lockheed Martin and Boeing. Now they are increasingly flocking to venture capital firms that have collectively pumped billions of dollars into Silicon Valley-style startups offering the Pentagon new war-fighting tools like autonomous killer drones, hypersonic jets and space surveillance equipment. This new route to the private sector is one indicator of the ways in which the United States is trying to become more agile in harnessing technological advances to maintain military superiority over China and other rivals. But the close ties between venture capital firms and Defense Department decision makers have also put a new twist on long-running questions about industry access and influence at a time when the Pentagon is under pressure to rethink how it allocates its huge procurement budget.

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