Test scores across OECD countries peaked around 2012 and have declined since. IQ scores in many developed countries appear to be falling after rising throughout the twentieth century. Nataliya Kosmyna at MIT’s Media Lab began noticing changes around two years ago when strangers started emailing her to ask if using ChatGPT could alter their brains. She posted a study in June tracking brain activity in 54 students writing essays. Those using ChatGPT showed significantly less activity in networks tied to cognitive processing and attention compared to students who wrote without digital help or used only internet search engines. Almost none could recall what they had written immediately after submitting their work.
She received more than 4,000 emails afterward. Many came from teachers who reported students producing passable assignments without understanding the material. A British survey found that 92% of university students now use AI and roughly 20% have used it to write all or part of an assignment. Independent research has found that more screen time in schools correlates with worse results. Technology companies have designed products to be frictionless, removing the cognitive challenges brains need to learn. AI now allows users to outsource thinking itself.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
On this crisp October morning, it feels like half of the internet is dealing with a hangover. A severe Amazon Web Services outage took out many, many websites, apps, games and other services that rely on Amazon’s cloud division to stay up and running.
According to the AWS service health page, Amazon was looking into “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services” in the US-EAST-1 region (i.e. data centers in Northern Virginia) as of 3:11AM ET on Monday. By 5:01AM, AWS had figured out that a DNS resolution issue with its DynamoDB API was the cause of the outage. DynamoDB is a database that holds info for AWS clients.
“Amazon had the data safely stored, but nobody else could find it for several hours, leaving apps temporarily separated from their data,” Mike Chapple, a teaching professor of IT, analytics and operations at University of Notre Dame, told CNN. “It’s as if large portions of the internet suffered temporary amnesia.”
As of 6:35AM, AWS said it had fully mitigated the DNS issue and that “most AWS Service operations are succeeding normally now.” However, the knock-on effect caused issues with other AWS services, including EC2, a virtual machine service on which many companies build online applications.
At 8:48AM, AWS said it was “making progress on resolving the issue with new EC2 instance launches in the US-EAST-1 Region.” It recommended that clients not tie new deployments to specific Availability Zones (i.e. one or more data centers in a given region) “so that EC2 has flexibility” in picking a zone that may be a better option.
At 9:42AM, Amazon noted on the status page that although it had applied “multiple mitigations” across several Availability Zones in US-EAST-1, it was “still experiencing elevated errors for new EC2 instance launches.” As such, AWS was “rate limiting new instance launches to aid recovery.” The company added at 10:14AM that it was seeing “significant API errors and connectivity issues across multiple services in the US-EAST-1 Region.” Even once all the issues are resolved, AWS will have a significant backlog of requests and other factors to process, so it’ll take some time for everything to recover.
Many, many, many companies use US-EAST-1 for their AWS deployments, which is why it felt like half of the internet was knocked offline on Monday morning. As of mid-morning, tons of websites and other services were sluggish or offering up error messages. Outage reports for a broad swathe of services spiked on Down Detector. Along with Amazon’s own services, users reported issues with the likes of banks, airlines, Disney+, Snapchat, Reddit, Lyft, Apple Music, Pinterest, Fortnite, Roblox and The New York Times — sorry to anyone whose Wordle streaks may be at risk.
AWS offers a lot of useful features to clients, such as the ability for websites and apps to automatically scale compute and server capacity up and down as needed to handle ebbs and flows in traffic. It also has data centers around the world. That kind of infrastructure is attractive to companies that serve a global audience and need to stay online around the clock. As of mid-2025, it was estimated that AWS’ share of the worldwide cloud infrastructure market was 30 percent. But incidents such as this highlight that relying on just a few providers to be the backbone of much of the internet is a bit of a problem.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/aws-fell-on-its-face-knocking-many-apps-websites-and-games-offline-142935040.html?src=rss
Formula 1 held the third of its five North American rounds this past weekend at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Unlike the races in Montreal, Miami, and Las Vegas, the US Grand Prix is held on a proper road course, one purpose-built for the task of hosting F1 a little over a decade ago.
It’s a circuit Ars knows quite well—along with some friends, I was on the turn-19 banking for the first race in 2012, and we checked out Caterham’s setup the following year; toured the F1 tech center in 2015, where the race broadcasts are directed; then learned about tires there with Pirelli in 2021. And we’ve driven it in everything from an Audi TT-S to a Corvette ZR1 to a Mocabene Vent Noir. Not to mention all the Lone Star Le Mans races we’ve attended.
The crowds now exceed even the mass of humanity that showed up for that first race. And while Miami and Las Vegas have been pitched at the “more money than they know what to do with” people, ticket prices at COTA are more reasonable (for an F1 event). As long as you don’t mind brutal heat and humidity, it can be quite a good race to attend.
The disruption began shortly
AWS experienced a three-hour outage early Monday morning that disrupted thousands of websites and applications across the globe. The cloud computing provider reported DNS problems with DynamoDB in its US-EAST-1 region in northern Virginia starting at 12:11 a.m. Pacific time. Over 4 million users reported issues, according to Downdetector. Snapchat saw reports spike from more than 22,000 to around 4,000 as systems recovered. Roblox dropped from over 12,600 complaints to fewer than 500. Reddit and the financial platform Chime remained affected longer. Perplexity, Coinbase and Robinhood attributed their platform disruptions directly to AWS.
Gaming platforms including Fortnite, Clash Royale and Clash of Clans went offline. Signal confirmed the messaging app was down. In Britain, Lloyd Bank, Bank of Scotland, Vodafone, BT, and the HMRC website faced problems. United Airlines reported disrupted access to its app and website overnight. Some internal systems were temporarily affected. Delta experienced a small number of minor flight delays. By 3:35 a.m. Pacific time, AWS said the issue had been fully mitigated. Most service operations were succeeding normally though some requests faced throttling during final resolution. AWS holds roughly one-third of the cloud infrastructure market ahead of Microsoft and Google.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
If you found it difficult to access sites and services early Monday morning, you are not alone. In fact, the rest of the world was having trouble, too. For a short period of time, a global outage prevented people from accessing a wide variety of sites and services, from Facebook to Fortnite.
The trouble stemmed from Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon product that offers cloud hosting for a massive number of websites and companies. If you use internet-connected products, chances are a good number of them rely on AWS. As such, when AWS goes down, so do those sites and services.
That includes social media platforms like Facebook and Snapchat; retailers and restaurants like Amazon, AT&T, and McDonald’s; streaming services like Prime Video, Hulu, and Disney+; messaging apps like Signal; games like Fortnite, Roblox, and Pokémon; cryptocurrency platforms like Coinbase; and media organizations like The New York Times. Even services not immediately associated with AWS appear to have struggled over the past 12 hours. Notably, that includes Apple online services like Apple TV, Apple Music, and the App Store.
Amazon says an issue with one of its core database products caused the outage. AWS’s first report came at 12:11 a.m. PT (3:11 a.m. ET) noting “increased error rates and latencies” specifically with its services around its U.S.-East-1 Region center. After a few more updates, AWS confirmed it had discovered a “potential root cause” at 2:01 a.m. PT. By 2:22 a.m. PT, the company had rolled out the first of its mitigations to solve the issue, and saw “early signs of recovery.” Five minutes later, they reported “significant signs of recovery.” By 3:35 a.m. PT, AWS says the underlying issue was fixed, and most operations are normal now, though certain requests may be throttled, while some services may also be working through a backlog.
The issue highlights the fragility of the current internet and its services: When so many companies all rely on the same provider for cloud hosting, any critical issues to that cloud hosting service can take out a huge number of sites and services.
For now, the internet as a whole appears to be back to normal operations—just in time for anyone on the East Coast to start work.
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Three women become choked up as they deliver news in a video posted to social media. “We did it, everybody,” says Leslie Manookian, the woman in the middle. She is a driving force in a campaign that has chipped away at the foundations of modern public health in Idaho. The group had just gotten lawmakers to pass what she called the first true “medical freedom” bill in the nation. “It’s literally landmark,” Manookian said. “It is changing everything.”
With Manookian in the video are two of her allies, the leaders of Health Freedom Idaho. It was April 4, hours after the governor signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act into law.
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If you’ve been meaning to add a smart doorbell to your home setup, this might be the time to do it: The Arlo Video Doorbell 2K (2nd Gen) and Chime 2 bundle has dropped to $88.26 on Amazon.
That’s a strong deal for a doorbell/camera combo that’s been highly praised by reviewers—PCMag named it the best video doorbell of 2024. It’s a smart, wireless setup that delivers a clear 2K video feed and works without a base station, making it easy to install. You can mount it on your front door, porch, or gate in minutes. It runs on a rechargeable battery that lasts up to four months, or you can hardwire it into your existing doorbell system for continuous trickle charging.
When someone presses the doorbell button, your phone rings like a call instead of sending a silent push notification, which makes it harder to miss visitors or deliveries. And the built-in 2K camera captures a wide 180-degree field of view, giving you a full head-to-toe look at whoever’s outside. The motion detection kicks in even if no one presses the button, and the app lets you speak to visitors or play pre-recorded messages if you’re busy. Daytime video looks sharp, with balanced contrast and detail, while the black-and-white night vision holds up well for spotting people or packages after dark, notes this PCMag review.
The bundle also includes the Arlo Chime 2, which plugs into any wall outlet and acts as an indoor alert system. You’ll get audible notifications whenever the doorbell rings or motion is detected, and you can even customize the chime sound, volume, or silence it completely if you prefer just app notifications. There’s also an 80-decibel siren built into the Chime 2 for extra deterrence. Arlo doesn’t lock basic features behind a paywall—you’ll get live video access for free, but if you want to store clips or get smarter alerts, you’ll need an Arlo Secure subscription (starting at $7.99/month). That unlocks cloud recording for up to 60 days, plus object detection for people, packages, and vehicles. Also, while it’s compatible with Alexa, Google Home, SmartThings, and IFTTT, it lacks Apple HomeKit support.
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Welcome to The Out of Touch Adults’ Guide to Kid Culture, where I make sense of youth nonsense. This week, kids are bringing hollowed-out pumpkins into Starbucks and demanding they be filled with pumpkin spice lattes; TikTok is obsessed with a fake video game called Bird Game 3; everyone’s growing the universe’s AI slop-pile with videos about a fictional video game, and teens are fighting about Lorax costumes. Plus the world’s police departments are issuing a warning about a prank that is not funny and you should never do.
Look, we’re all excited for Halloween; it’s decorative gourd season, motherfuckers. But please, in the name of all that is holy, do not bring a hollowed-out pumpkin to the Starbucks drive-through and ask the baristas to fill it with a pumpkin spice latte. Even if influencers on TikTok are doing it. Even if their videos are getting millions of views. Virality is not a permission slip.
It’s fine, sometimes heroic, to be whimsical, but baristas are doing seven invisible jobs at once and being paid for half a job, and trying to force them to be extras in your twee little video is job number eight. Maybe they’ll force a smile when you hand them the gourd, but when they say “oh, cute,” there will be murder in their eyes. They want to react like this, I promise:
Bird Game 3 is the name of an imaginary video game for the imaginary Xbox50 game system. Making AI videos of people who are very excited to play Bird Game 3 is becoming a hot thing to do on TikTok and elsewhere. Unlike almost all other AI slop videos, some of the Bird Game 3 videos are actually funny. Like this one:
And this one:
I don’t know what everyone is so excited about. Now, when I played the first Bird Game at E3 2010, that was exciting.
Speaking of AI slop, if you’ve been anywhere near TikTok lately, you’ve likely seen the proliferation of posts of people posing with celebrities in elevators, like this one:
They are, of course, fake—products of AI image generation tools—but it’s a fun kind of fakery that’s easy to be part of. You just use CapCut or Gemini, or any AI-slop-making machine, and you too can pretend you rode an elevator with Brian Boitano or Ice Spice. If you’d like more detailed instructions, I broke it down here.
On a more serious note, the kids making these fake videos are devaluing the unique and meaningful relationship between some random person and a celebrity jerk who are forced to interact because they’re trapped in an enclosed space. Now no one will believe my dream-come-true celebrity elevator encounter with Dr. Phil actually happened.
Over the last few years, TikTok and Instagram have been taken over by Lorax girls every October. Videos of girls dressed as Dr. Seuss’s self-righteous hero are everywhere. Here’s a typical example:
The Lorax costume pioneer seems to be TikToker McKenna, who posted a Lorax video in 2023 that went viral to the tune of over 30 million plays:
Since then, the costume has become very popular; there are over 200,000 TikTok videos tagged #Lorax. The trend has become so widespread that a backlash is building. The word among young men/boys is that only “unfunny popular girls” dress as the Lorax for Halloween. Some teenage boys are even calling the costumes a red flag and posting anti-Lorax-Girl meme videos like these:
Fellas, the only thing less funny than dressing as the Lorax for Halloween is complaining about other people dressing as the Lorax for Halloween. Face it: You’re actually mad because girls are doing something that isn’t designed for male approval. On the flip side of the coin, I can totally understand the appeal of the costume for “popular girls.” You gotta really work on shaping your personality to be “well-liked” in the murder pit of high school popularity, so having a night where you dress like a pot-bellied goof and act the fool must be liberating, especially when acting the fool in an established way that won’t reflect badly upon your image and might get millions of views.
Last week, I laid out the basics of the AI Homeless Person prank going viral—basically, kids are AI-faking images of homeless dudes in their houses and sending them to their parents as a funny joke. Well, the cops want everyone to know it’s not funny and no one should do it, because some parents, understandably, seem to have called the cops when they got the message.
The police in Salem, MA got the ball rolling by issuing a statement warning that pranksters could face up to two and a half years in jail for the stunt. Many other police departments followed, from all over the U.S. and even overseas. My favorite is from Yonkers, NY, who posted this on its Facebook:
“We get it — some pranks are funny and we like to laugh at the best of them. Some, though, pose a public safety risk…”
Yonkers Police Department, you do not “like to laugh at the best of them.” I’ve had enough teachers use that line to know it’s a lie.
But on a serious note, it’s actually a bad idea to pretend a homeless person is in your house to scare your parents. It wastes resources and the cops coming to your door is almost always a bad thing. If you must pull a prank, try the less confrontational option of generating a shirtless plumber to prank your boyfriend:
Beats devices have been the more colorful, full-of-personality complements to Apple’s clean-and-minimal gear ever since Apple bought the company back in 2014. Beats earbuds and speakers are the more flexible alternatives to things like AirPods and HomePods, and the new Beats Powerbeats Fit keep that tradition alive. Some six months after the Powerbeats Pro 2 debuted earlier this year, Beats now has an updated version of the Fit Pro to offer folks looking for many of the conveniences of an Apple device in something with slightly more character and versatility. Rather than reinventing the wheel, Beats made small changes on the Powerbeats Fit that ultimately make for a more polished version of its predecessor.
If you’re familiar with the Beats Fit Pro, you’ll be familiar with the Powerbeats Fit. Beats kept much of what worked with its previous $200 earbuds here (including the price), making very minor changes to improve the comfort and the overall design. The new buds have 20 percent more flexible wingtips and the charging case is 17 percent more compact than that of the Beats Fit Pro. More on the wingtips in a moment, but first I have to commend Beats for making the charging case feel ever so slightly more premium this time around — and since it’s smaller than before, it’s less cumbersome to tuck in your back pocket. The buds also fit snugly into the charging case with a satisfying snap every time; they always align properly to recharge, something I cannot say about past pairs of the AirPods Pro I’ve owned.
When it comes to the wingtips on the Powerbeats Fit, they appear to be a hair shorter than those on the Beats Fit Pro, and certainly more malleable. I felt the biggest difference in flexibility at the base of the wingtip where it meets the earbud — those on the Powerbeats Fit have a bit more give than those on its predecessor. These small changes make it easy to pop the Powerbeats Fit into your ears and really not fuss with the wingtips at all. They’re present just to provide a more secure fit during intense workouts, and they do just that.
I wore them during strength training, 5K runs and leisurely walks and I didn’t have to adjust them at all once I popped them in. When Beats announced these new buds, the company claimed its design tweaks would also make the Powerbeats Fit more comfortable to wear all day long, not just during workouts. I’ll admit that I didn’t find the previous Beats Fit Pro uncomfortable to wear when not at the gym or on the trail. Yes, the Powerbeats Fit are marginally more comfortable now and the wingtips are more supple, but the change is subtle. If you jibe with the wingtip design to begin with, you’ll safely be able to use the Powerbeats Fit as daily drivers in addition to workout companions.
Notably, the Powerbeats Fit come with one extra pair of eartips in the box (four instead of the previous three), so once you find the eartips that are your best fit, you’ll be off to the races. There are also two new bold colors to choose from, orange and pink, in addition to gray and black.
Thankfully, Beats didn’t mess with all of the good things about the Fit Pro when developing the Powerbeats Fit. The new buds have an IPX4 water resistance rating, which isn’t the highest level of protection out there, but more than enough to withstand your sweatiest training sessions. Onboard controls in the form of physical buttons remain the same, although I didn’t accidentally trigger the buttons on the Powerbeats Fit nearly as much as I did with the Fit Pro. That might be because all the small changes Beats made in the design paid off — I didn’t fuss with the new buds in my ears as much as before, therefore I didn’t accidentally press the buttons as much.
The Powerbeats Fit also have Apple’s H1 chip inside, which enables features like hands-free Siri, automatic switching between devices, Adaptive EQ, Audio Sharing and Personalized Spatial Audio with dynamic head tracking. Transparency mode returns here as well, and it remains one of the standout features of any Apple-associated wireless earbuds. And if you do decide to wear the Powerbeats Fit all day long, you’ll likely make even more use of transparency mode as you need to jump in and out of conversations happening around you. In addition, you can keep track of the new earbuds in Apple’s Find My app.
Beats didn’t bill any improvements in sound quality on the Powerbeats Fit, and after listening to them alongside the Beats Fit Pro, I can say they sound almost identical. While listening to some tracks with the Powerbeats Fit, I noticed an almost imperceptible increase in the clarity of vocals, but that’s about it. Bass remains punchy and strong, and the buds get decently loud.
Active noise cancellation (ANC) is also the same on the new buds: strong enough to block out ambient noise around you and people’s voices. While running outside, I still heard the loudest disturbances like passing trucks and oddly sonorous cackling of nearby wildlife, but that’s arguably for the best. If you’re exercising outside, be it in a park or on city streets, you should be at least somewhat aware of your surroundings.
Battery life is consistent here as well, with Beats promising up to seven hours on a single charge (or six with ANC turned on) and up to 30 hours total when employing the Powerbeats Fit charging case. Anecdotally, after a week of using the Powerbeats Fit for an average of one hour each day, the charging case still had 75 percent battery left. If you’re using these all day, every day, you’ll obviously need to power it up more frequently. But if these are primarily your workout companions, you could get a week or two before needing to plug them in.
The Powerbeats Fit are a fitting update to the Beats Fit Pro. The latter was one of the best devices in the Beats lineup to begin with, and the latest model only improves upon the winning formula. They offer a solid balance of a comfortable, secure design, good sound quality and ANC and handy additional features at a decent price. The latter is arguably just as important as the buds’ ability to withstand a sweaty training session: folks looking for many of the conveniences found in AirPods will find them here in an alternative design, and in a pair of buds that also works just as well with Android devices. If you’re willing to pay more, you could shell out $250 for either the Powerbeats Pro 2 to get that full over-ear hook style, or AirPods Pro 3 — both of which have built-in heart rate tracking But that feature in particular will be more of a nice-to-have than a necessity for most.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/audio/headphones/beats-powerbeats-fit-review-deja-vu-in-a-good-way-120058332.html?src=rss
A recent article in Noema magazines explores the issues in “editing nature to fix our failures.”
“It turns out playing God is neither difficult nor expensive,” the article points out. “For about $2,000, I can go online and order a decent microscope, a precision injection rig, and a vial of enough CRISPR-Cas9 — an enzyme-based genome-editing tool — to genetically edit a few thousand fish embryos…” So when going beyond the kept-in-captivity Dire Wolf to the possibility of bringing back forests of the American chestnut tree, “The process is deceptively simple; the implications are anything but…”
If scientists could use CRISPR to engineer a more heat-tolerant coral, it would give coral a better chance of surviving a marine environment made warmer by climate change. It would also keep the human industries that rely on reefs afloat. But should we edit nature to fix our failures? And if we do, is it still natural…? Evolution is not keeping pace with climate change, so it is up to us to give it an assist [according to Christopher Preston, an environmental philosopher from the University of Montana, who wrote a book on CRISPR called “Ma href=”https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262537094/the-synthetic-age/”>The Synthetic Age.”] In some cases, the urgency is so great that we may not have time to waste. “There’s no doubt there are times when you have to act,” Preston continued. “Corals are a case where the benefits of reefs are just so enormous that keeping some alive, even if they’re genetically altered, makes the risks worth it.”
Kate Quigley, a molecular ecologist and a principal research scientist at Australia’s Minderoo Foundation, says “Engineering the ocean, or the atmosphere, or coral is not something to be taken lightly. Science is incredible. But that doesn’t mean we know everything and what the unintended consequences might be.” Phillip Cleves, a principal investigator at the Carnegie Institute for Science’s embryology department, is already researching whether coral could be bioengineered to be more tolerant to heat.
But both of them have concerns:
For all the research Quigley and Cleves have dedicated to climate-proofing coral, neither wants to see the results of their work move from experimentation in the lab to actual use in the open ocean. Needing to do so would represent an even greater failure by humankind to protect the environment that we already have. And while genetic editing and selective breeding offer concrete solutions for helping some organisms adapt, they will never be powerful enough to replace everything lost to rising water temperatures. “I will try to prepare for it, but the most important thing we can do to save coral is take strong action on climate change,” Quigley told me. “We could pour billions and billions of dollars — in fact, we already have — into restoration, and even if, by some miracle, we manage to recreate the reef, there’d be other ecosystems that would need the same thing. So why can’t we just get at the root issue?”
And then there’s the blue-green algae dilemma:
George Church, the Harvard Medical School professor of genetics behind Colossal’s dire wolf project, was part of a team that successfully used CRISPR to change the genome of blue-green algae so that it could absorb up to 20% more carbon dioxide via photosynthesis. Silicon Valley tech incubator Y Combinator seized on the advance to call for scaled-up proposals, estimating that seeding less than 1% of the ocean’s surface with genetically engineered phytoplankton would sequester approximately 47 gigatons of CO2 a year, more than enough to reverse all of last year’s worldwide emissions.
But moving from deploying CRISPR for species protection to providing a planetary service flips the ethical calculus. Restoring a chestnut forest or a coral reef preserves nature, or at least something close to it. Genetically manipulating phytoplankton and plants to clean up after our mistakes raises the risk of a moral hazard. Do we have the right to rewrite nature so we can perpetuate our nature-killing ways?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
For more than a decade, researchers have wondered whether artificial intelligence could help predict what incapacitated patients might want when doctors must make life-or-death decisions on their behalf.
It remains one of the most high-stakes questions in health care AI today. But as AI improves, some experts increasingly see it as inevitable that digital “clones” of patients could one day aid family members, doctors, and ethics boards in making end-of-life decisions that are aligned with a patient’s values and goals.
Ars spoke with experts conducting or closely monitoring this research who confirmed that no hospital has yet deployed so-called “AI surrogates.” But AI researcher Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad is aiming to change that, taking the first steps toward piloting AI surrogates at a US medical facility.
“The gig economy is facing a reckoning,” argues Business Insider’s BI Today newsletter.”
Two stories this past week caught my eye. Uber unveiled a new way for its drivers to earn money. No, not by giving rides, but by helping train the ride-sharing company’s AI models instead. On the same day, Waymo announced a partnership with DoorDash to test driverless grocery and meal deliveries.
Both moves point toward the same future: one where the very workers who built the gig economy may soon find themselves training the technology that replaces them.
Uber’s new program allows drivers to earn cash by completing microtasks, such as taking photos and uploading audio clips, that aim to improve the company’s AI systems. For drivers, it’s a way to diversify income. For Uber, it’s a way to accelerate its automated future. There’s an irony here. By helping Uber strengthen its AI, drivers could be accelerating the very driverless world they fear… Uber already offers autonomous rides in Waymo vehicles in Atlanta and Austin, and plans to expand. Meanwhile, Waymo is rolling out its pilot partnership with DoorDash [for driverless grocery/meal deliveries] starting in Phoenix.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
“Windows Recovery Environment (RE), as the name suggests, is a built-in set of tools inside Windows that allow you to troubleshoot your computer, including booting into the BIOS, or starting the computer in safe mode,” writes Tom’s Hardware.
“It’s a crucial piece of software that has now, unfortunately, been rendered useless (for many) as part of the latest Windows update.”
A new bug discovered in Windows 11’s October build, KB5066835, makes it so that your USB keyboard and mouse stop working entirely, so you cannot interact with the recovery UI at all.
This problem has already been recognized and highlighted by Microsoft, who clarified that a fix is on its way to address this issue. Any plugged-in peripherals will continue to work just fine inside the actual operating system, but as soon as you go into Windows RE, your USB keyboard and mouse will become unresponsive. It’s important to note that if your PC fails to start-up for any reason, it defaults to the recovery environment to, you know, recover and diagnose any issues that might’ve been preventing it from booting normally.
Note that those hanging onto old PS/2-connector equipped keyboards and mice seem to be unaffected by this latest Windows software gaffe.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Readers in 2025 “may struggle to remember the optimism of the aughts, when the internet seemed to offer endless possibilities for virtual art and writing that was free…” argues a new review at Bookforum. “The content we do create online, if we still create, often feels unreflectively automatic: predictable quote-tweet dunks, prefabricated poses on Instagram, TikTok dances that hit their beats like clockwork, to say nothing of what’s literally thoughtlessly churned out by LLM-powered bots.”
They write that author Joanna Walsh “wants us to remember how truly creative, and human, the internet once was,” in the golden age of user-generated content — and funny cat picture sites like I Can Has Cheezburger:
I Can Has Cheezburger… was an amateur project, an outlet for tech professionals who wanted an easier way to exchange cute cat pics after a hard day at work. In Amateurs!: How We Built Internet Culture and Why It Matters, Walsh documents how unpaid creative labor is the basis for almost everything that’s good (and much that’s bad) online, including the open-source code Linux, developed by Linus Torvalds when he was still in school (“just as a hobby, won’t be big and professional”), and even, in Walsh’s account, the World Wide Web itself. The platforms that emerged in the 2000s as “Web 2.0,” including Facebook, YouTube, Reddit, and Twitter, allowed anyone to experiment in a space that had been reserved for coders and hackers, making the internet interactive even for the inexpert and virtually unlimited in potential audience. The explosion in amateur creativity that followed took many forms, from memes to tweeted one-liners to diaristic blogs to durational digital performances to sloppy Photoshops to the formal and informal taxonomic structures — wikis, neologisms, digitally native dialects…
[U]ser-generated content was also, at bottom, about the bottom line, a business model sold to us under the guise of artistic empowerment. Even referring to an anonymous amateur as a “user,” Walsh argues, cedes ground: these platforms are populated by producers, but their owners see us as, and turn us into, “helpless addicts.” For some, online amateurism translated to professional success, a viral post earning an author a book deal, or a reputation as a top commenter leading to a staff writing job on a web publication… But for most, these days, participation in the online attention economy feels like a tax, or maybe a trickle of revenue, rather than free fun or a ticket to fame. The few remaining professionals in the arts and letters have felt pressured to supplement their full-time jobs with social media self-promotion, subscription newsletters, podcasts, and short-form video. On what was once called Twitter, users can pay, and sometimes get paid, to post with greater reach…
The chapters are bookended by an introduction on the early promise of 2004 and a coda on the defeat of 2025 and supplemented by an appendix with a straightforward timeline of the major events and publications that serve as the book’s touchstones… The online spaces where amateur content creators once “created and steered online culture” have been hollowed out and replaced by slop, but what really hurts is that the slop is being produced by bots trained on precisely that amateur content.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
On Cloudflare’s blog, a senior research engineer shares a plan for “improving the trustworthiness of JavaScript on the web.”
“It is as true today as it was in 2011 that Javascript cryptography is Considered Harmful.”
The main problem is code distribution. Consider an end-to-end-encrypted messaging web application. The application generates cryptographic keys in the client’s browser that lets users view and send end-to-end encrypted messages to each other. If the application is compromised, what would stop the malicious actor from simply modifying their Javascript to exfiltrate messages? It is interesting to note that smartphone apps don’t have this issue. This is because app stores do a lot of heavy lifting to provide security for the app ecosystem. Specifically, they provide integrity, ensuring that apps being delivered are not tampered with, consistency, ensuring all users get the same app, and transparency, ensuring that the record of versions of an app is truthful and publicly visible.
It would be nice if we could get these properties for our end-to-end encrypted web application, and the web as a whole, without requiring a single central authority like an app store.
Further, such a system would benefit all in-browser uses of cryptography, not just end-to-end-encrypted apps. For example, many web-based confidential LLMs, cryptocurrency wallets, and voting systems use in-browser Javascript cryptography for the last step of their verification chains. In this post, we will provide an early look at such a system, called Web Application Integrity, Consistency, and Transparency (WAICT) that we have helped author. WAICT is a W3C-backed effort among browser vendors, cloud providers, and encrypted communication developers to bring stronger security guarantees to the entire web… We hope to build even wider consensus on the solution design in the near future….
We would like to have a way of enforcing integrity on an entire site, i.e., every asset under a domain. For this, WAICT defines an integrity manifest, a configuration file that websites can provide to clients. One important item in the manifest is the asset hashes dictionary, mapping a hash belonging to an asset that the browser might load from that domain, to the path of that asset.
The blog post points out that the WEBCAT protocol (created by the Freedom of Press Foundation) “allows site owners to announce the identities of the developers that have signed the site’s integrity manifest, i.e., have signed all the code and other assets that the site is serving to the user… We’ve made WAICT extensible enough to fit WEBCAT inside and benefit from the transparency components.” The proposal also envisions a service storing metadata for transparency-enabled sites on the web (along with “witnesses” who verify the prefix tree holding the hashes for domain manifests).
“We are still very early in the standardization process,” with hopes to soon “begin standardizing the integrity manifest format. And then after that we can start standardizing all the other features. We intend to work on this specification hand-in-hand with browsers and the IETF, and we hope to have some exciting betas soon. In the meantime, you can follow along with our transparency specification draft,/A>, check out the open problems, and share your ideas.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
