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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg's Ashley Carman: Welcome to the modern era of podcasting in which thousands of new shows are released into the world every day with a sizable portion likely being AI-generated. Figuring out exactly which ones fall into that growing category is becoming more difficult just as the industry is starting to take this issue seriously. In only the past month or so, Amazon launched a feature that explains a product by generating a quasi-podcast, complete with co-hosts talking to each other and taking questions from users. Shout out to Business Insider reporter Katie Notopoulos for spotting this (and, naturally, demoing it with an adult diaper rash-cream). Not long ago, Nicholas Thompson, chief executive officer of the Atlantic, noted "podslop" dominated his Spotify search results when he typed in the word "Sora." This was around the time that OpenAI shut down its user-generated, AI-content-only app. [...] All of which raises some big, difficult questions. For one, what should the listening platforms do about this incursion? As of right now, Apple Podcasts requires creators who generated a "material portion" of their show using AI to disclose it. The platform also bans misleading or deceptive content. Spotify hasn't published any specific guidelines around AI, though it maintains general rules around dangerous and misleading content. Where this conversation gets even trickier is when it comes to money. Many of these podcasts are hosted on at least one free service that allows programs to opt into their ad marketplace with zero barrier to entry, meaning these shows (and the hosting service) profit off every listen or download. Spreaker, a company owned by iHeartMedia, is the primary one to watch here. Though it tells users to disclose when they rely on AI, it still allows those shows to opt into its programmatic ad marketplace, which pays creators 60% of the revenue generated by the ads placed in their shows. It stands to reason that most of these thousands of shows don't reach many people. But in the aggregate, the ears and dollars could add up. Are the advertisers on board with being next to AI-generated content, some of which might be deemed "slop?" There's also the question of how to define "slop." Jackson of the Podcast Index and his co-host Adam Curry treat it as something listeners simply know when they hear it, while Alberto Betella, co-founder of RSS.com, defines it as "fully automated content with no human review." Jeanine Wright, co-founder of Inception Point, rejects the debate altogether: "The people still talking about slop are still making 6-7 jokes," she said. "It's still yesterday's conversation."

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Anthropic is reportedly nearing a roughly $1.5 billion joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, Hellman & Friedman, and other Wall Street firms to sell AI tools to private-equity-backed companies. "The investors aim to create a company that acts as a consulting arm for Anthropic and helps teach businesses -- including the private-equity firms' portfolio companies -- how to incorporate AI across their operations," reports the Wall Street Journal. Anthropic, Blackstone, and Hellman & Friedman would each invest about $300 million, while Goldman would contribute around $150 million.

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GameStop has made an unsolicited $56 billion cash-and-stock offer to buy eBay (paywalled; alternative source), with CEO Ryan Cohen arguing he can turn the marketplace into a far larger Amazon competitor. "EBay should be worth -- and will be worth -- a lot more money," Cohen said in an interview. "I'm thinking about turning eBay into something worth hundreds of billions of dollars." The Wall Street Journal reports: Cohen said GameStop has a commitment letter from TD Bank to provide up to $20 billion in debt financing to help make a deal possible. GameStop delivered an offer letter to eBay on Sunday and released a copy of it following the Journal's report on the details of the bid. Cohen wrote in the letter to eBay Chairman Paul Pressler that GameStop started building its eBay position on Feb. 4. It said its offer consists of 50% cash and 50% GameStop shares. EBay said Monday morning its board and financial advisers would review GameStop's unsolicited proposal. It said there were no discussions with or outreach from GameStop before receiving the offer. Ebay added that it will review the offer "with a focus on the value to be delivered to eBay shareholders, including the value of the GameStop stock consideration and the ability of GameStop to deliver a binding, actionable proposal." If eBay isn't receptive, Cohen said he was prepared to run a proxy fight and take the offer directly to its shareholders. The window for shareholders to nominate director candidates at eBay ahead of an annual meeting scheduled for this June has already closed, according to the company's proxy materials. Cohen told the Journal that putting his videogame retailer and eBay under one roof could create opportunities to cut costs and improve earnings. The two companies have some overlap already, including a focus on selling collectibles such as trading cards. "There is nobody who is more qualified, based on my experience, to run the eBay business," Cohen said, referencing his time at GameStop and previously Chewy, the online pet-products marketplace he co-founded.

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It's not the fork that's the problem, it's the attempt to make it look official, says original Notepad++ dev Don Ho

It's not the fork that's the problem, it's the attempt to make it look official, says original Notepad++ dev Don Ho

Notepad++ remains a Windows-only app, at least under that name. The beloved developer-focused, open-source text editor recently was ported to macOS by a third party. However, developer Don Ho wants to be perfectly clear that, no matter how convincing the new project might look, it's not official. …

Astronomers have identified 27 potential new circumbinary planets -- worlds that orbit two stars, like Star Wars' Tatooine. "To date, only about 18 circumbinary planets ... had been identified in the universe," reports the Guardian. "More than 6,000 planets have been discovered that orbit single stars, like Earth does around the sun." The Guardian reports: In a timely publication for May 4, also known as Star Wars Day, scientists have identified nearly 30 more candidate planets, whose distances range from 650 to 18,000 light years away from Earth. [...] More than half of the stars in the universe exist in binary or multiple star systems. The researchers instead used a method known as "apsidal precession," searching for a wobble between stars that orbit around and eclipse each other. "If we monitor the exact timing of these eclipses ... that can tell us that there's something else going on in the system," said Margo Thornton, the study's lead author and a PhD candidate at UNSW. After eliminating other factors such as the rotation and gravitational pull of the two stars, the team identified 36 star systems out of 1,590 whose behavior could only be explained by a third body. For "27 of those objects, it is possible that they are planet mass," Thornton said. More research into their spectra -- the light they emit -- was needed to formally confirm them as circumbinary planets, she said. "It's just a matter of: what is the mass of it? Is it a planet? Is it a brown dwarf? Is it a star?" The team discovered the potential planets -- which likely range from Neptune-sized to ten times heavier than Jupiter -- using data from Nasa's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, a planet-hunting space telescope that launched in 2018. The research was published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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The Register gets a look inside AWS' networking lab in Cupertino

The Register gets a look inside AWS' networking lab in Cupertino

FEATURE In an unassuming three-story office building in Cupertino, California, engineers from Amazon Web Services are busy trying to make networking inconspicuous.…

'If you don't have visibility, you can't understand what to protect'

'If you don't have visibility, you can't understand what to protect'

When it comes to securing enterprise supply chains, now heavily infused with AI applications and agents, a software bill of materials (SBOM) no longer provides a complete inventory of all the components in the environment. Enter AI-BOMs.…

Why no cloud storage architecture was designed for what agentic AI is about to demand

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In a makeshift demonstration kitchen in Concord, California, cooking oil splatters in and around a frying pan, which catches fire on an unattended gas stove. Within moments, a smoke detector wails. But in this demonstration, something less common happens: An AI-driven sensor activates and wall emitters blast infrasound waves toward the source of the fire in an attempt to put it out. The science of acoustic fire suppression, which has long been known and documented in scientific literature and the press, works by vibrating oxygen molecules away from a fuel source, depriving the fire of a critical component needed for combustion. Indeed, after just a few seconds of infrasound, the tiny kitchen blaze goes out. "We were able to not just point-and-shoot like a fire extinguisher; we figured out how to run it through ducting and distribute it like a sprinkler system," said Geoff Bruder, co-founder and CEO of Sonic Fire Tech, during the presentation. The company's goal is to replace sprinklers, which are effective at stopping fires but can also do significant water damage to a property. Sonic Fire Tech appears to be the first company trying to commercialize the science of acoustic fire suppression. Its executives have already been touring Southern California; Wednesday's event was the first in the northern half of the state. The company aims to make this infrasound technique mainstream in both commercial (for instance, a data center, where sprinklers would damage electronics) and in-home installations, given that sprinklers are already required in all new California homes built in 2011 and later. Sonic Fire Tech also hopes to produce a backpack-based system that could be worn by wildland firefighters headed out into the field. "We are making meaningful technological improvements on a monthly basis," Stefan Pollack, a company spokesperson, emailed Ars after the event. But two experts who spoke with Ars raised serious questions about the potential for this technology to supplant traditional sprinklers in a home. They are even more skeptical as to whether the technique can be effective in an uncontrolled wildfire situation, where flames can grow very quickly. Experts are concerned that infrasound may knock down small flames but does not cool hot surfaces or wet fuel like sprinklers do, which raises the risk of re-ignition, smoldering fires, hidden fires, or blocked fires. Sonic Fire Tech has claimed third-party validation and possible NFPA 13D equivalency, but it has not publicly released full testing details. Fire officials and outside observers also want more information about reliability, maintenance, calibration, and how system failures would be detected and communicated.

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The Independent reports that "more than a third of children in the UK have found a way around age verification measures" for social media sites and other online platforms. And new research from online safety organisation Internet Matters "suggests one in six parents have helped their child to get past age verification checks, with children reporting 'tricking' platforms into thinking they are older. " Parents also said they had caught their children drawing on facial hair in a bid to evade the technology. One mother said: "I did catch my son using an eyebrow pencil to draw a moustache on his face, and it verified him as 15 years old"... From a sample of 1,000 UK children, 46% said they believed age checks are easy to bypass, while 32% admitted to having done so. 49% of the children surveyed said they'd still encountered harmful content, according to the online safety activists. The group called the figure "unacceptable," and complained that age verification measures "are often ineffective in practice or easy to bypass."

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Serious Linux VMs will enjoy big iron – if you can learn to love lock-in risks and skills challenges

Serious Linux VMs will enjoy big iron – if you can learn to love lock-in risks and skills challenges

VMware users considering a new home might find it cheaper to move to an IBM mainframe than adopting Broadcom’s new licenses, according to Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti.…

Even limited voter rolls can be linked to identify people, research shows

Even limited voter rolls can be linked to identify people, research shows

Your voter data could be used against you. A foreign intelligence service that wished to identify the family members of deployed military personnel could do so by cross-referencing public voter record data and social media posts.…

Forget 'have you tried turning it off and on again?' Agentic AI support systems now seek and destroy tech issues before they're a problem.

A Wall Street Journal opinion piece warns of "a troubling trend" in AI's growth. "Rather than selling software, some AI companies are paying their partners to use it." It cites OpenAI's $1.5 billion joint venture with private-equity firms, Anthropic's $200 million contribution to a private-equity firm joint venture, and Google's $750 million subsidization of Gemini's adoption by consulting firms. "These agreements muddy the distinction between a company's sound growth trajectory and artificial financial engineering." [T]he scale and structure of the recent AI deals go beyond standard incentive mechanisms... When a seller pays customers to buy its products, it is unclear if its revenue growth reflects vibrant demand or a willingness to accept subsidies. Slashdot reader destinyland writes: This warning comes from a prominent figure in the investing community. For six years Robert Pozen was chairman of America's oldest mutual fund company, after five years at Fidelity. An advocate for corporate governance, he's currently a lecturer at MIT's business school (and the author of the book Remote Inc.: How to Thrive at Work...Wherever You Are). "As AI companies prepare initial public offerings, investors should scrutinize their numbers closely," Pozner writes, warning about "time-limited financial support". "In evaluating AI sales figures, analysts should consider the distorted incentives that the recent financing deals create," writes Pozner: Private-equity firms, enticed by promised returns, might demand rapid rollouts of AI products, rather than ensuring their orderly and safe development. Portfolio companies of private-equity firms may embrace AI tools not because they are needed but because adoption is mandated by their owners. Consultants may favor one set of AI models based on the subsidy instead of the merits. If guarantees and subsidies are major factors in the rapid adoption of AI tools, investors should be skeptical of AI companies' revenue projections. Many of their customers enticed by consultants will stop paying full price when the financial incentives are gone. Many of the portfolio companies of private-equity firms could back away from selected AI tools once these joint ventures expire. The challenge with evaluating these AI financing deals is the lack of transparency. At present, AI vendors don't separate revenue driven by subsidies or joint ventures from standard sales. The lesson from the telecom debacle is that financial engineering can obscure, for years, the difference between real customer demand and demand driven by incentives. When AI companies begin to finance their own product distribution, guaranteeing returns to investors and subsidizing sales, it's a signal for investors to dig deeper. Investing in an AI company? Ask what percentage of enterprise revenue is coming from subsidized channels or joint ventures, Pozner suggests. And the renewal/retention rate for customers not supported by subsidies or joint ventures...

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That box-full-of-old-tech-you-should-probably-have-thrown-out-but-kept-just-in-case got a techie in trouble