SoylentNews

upstart writes:

MSU researchers discover honeybees can detect lung cancer:

Michigan State University researchers have discovered that honeybees can detect biomarkers or chemical concentrations associated with lung cancer in human breath. The researchers have also shown that the honeybees can distinguish between different lung cancer cell types using only the 'smell' of the cell cultures. These findings could be used as a model for developing new tests to diagnose lung cancer early.

"Insects have an amazing sense of smell the same way dogs do," said Debajit Saha, an assistant professor in the College of Engineering and MSU's Institute for Quantitative Health Science and Engineering.

Saha and his team wanted to see if honeybees could distinguish between the chemicals in human breath from someone who was healthy compared to someone with lung cancer. Elyssa Cox, Saha's former lab manager, and Michael Parnas, a doctoral candidate working in Saha's lab, developed a "recipe" for a synthetic breath mixture using different levels of six compounds such as trichloroethylene and 2-methylheptane to create the chemical makeup of the breath of someone with lung cancer and a synthetic healthy breath mixture.

"It took a steady hand to create the recipe," said Cox. "We tested the synthetic lung cancer versus healthy human breath mixtures on approximately 20 bees."

Cox helped design a custom 3D-printed harness to hold a live honeybee while she attached a tiny electrode to its brain to measure any changes in the bee's brain signals.

"We pass those odors on to the antenna of the honeybees and recorded the neural signals from their brain," said Saha. "We see a change in the honeybee's neural firing response."

The researchers also wanted to measure how much of the cancer-indicating compounds needed to be present in someone's breath for the honeybee to detect cancer.

"The honeybees detected very small concentrations; it was a very strong result," said Saha. "Bees can differentiate between minute changes in the chemical concentrations of the breath mixture which is in the parts per 1 billion range."

Parnas analyzed the neural data and saw the spikes in the bees' brain signals.

"We can see differences in how the honeybees are smelling," said Parnas. "We detected several different neurons firing in the honeybees' brains that clearly differentiated between the synthetic lung cancer breath and healthy breath."

canopic jug writes:

cURL (established 1998) is one of the most widely used pieces of software in the world, especially if the development library libcurl is included. As has become tradition, the founder and lead developer Daniel Stenberg has published a detailed analysis of the annual cURL survey.

Ten quick things to take away

If you are in too much of a hurry to read it all, here are ten facts this year's survey revealed:

• 96.4% of the users run it on Linux (*)
• 98.6% use it for HTTPS (*)
• 98% of Windows users run curl on x86 64 bit architecture (*)
• 99% of the users who know, use curl with OpenSSL (*)
• curl users run it on Android more than on FreeBSD
• Windows 10 is the most used Windows version for curl use
• More than 100 different command line options is a favorite for at least one
• 83.1% rates our "security handling" 5 out of 5
• 22.8% of users would like to see it offer recursive HTML download
• 14.1% of users have used curl for 18 or more years

(*) = not exclusively - as these questions allowed respondents to select multiple answers the total ends up larger than 100%

cURL and libcurl are Free and Open Source Software. cURL and libcurl are licensed under conditions similar to the MIT License.

Previously:
(2024) The I in LLM Stands for Intelligence
(2023) "cURL", the URL Code That Can, Marks 25 Years of Transfers
(2021) Half of Curl's Security Vulnerabilities Due to C Mistakes
(2020) curl up 2020 and Other Conferences Go Online Only
(2018) Daniel Stenberg, Author of cURL and libcurl, Denied US Visit Again
(2018) Reducing Year 2038 Problems in curl
(2016) Your wget (and curl) is Broken and Should DIE, GitHubbers Tell Microsoft

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

In the U.S., as farmers wrestle with extreme heat and drought, heavy rainfall and flooding, and erosion—all factors of climate change which can take a toll on crops—there's been a lot of buzz over regenerative agriculture over the past few years, as big agriculture companies promise opportunities to make money from "carbon farming" while also improving soil health.

Regenerative farming strives to improve soil health through various methods, including reduced or no tillage, keeping the soil covered year-round through the use of cover crops, integrating livestock into crop farming, and rotating crops to encourage both above and below ground biodiversity.

Such practices can also be used to create carbon credits for carbon offset programs, which enable polluters to mitigate their greenhouse gas emissions through the purchase of credits.

Farmers have often been told all they need to do is adopt certain practices, such as no-till or cover cropping. But few adopting these practices have signed up for carbon market programs.

While farmer surveys suggest that carbon prices are still too low relative to the paperwork these programs demand, a new study published in Agriculture and Human Values finds that money alone does not explain either farmers' doubts about carbon markets or their interest in regenerative agriculture. Instead, many farmers view improving soil health as a way to improve their quality of life by reducing their dependence on agrochemical companies' products and advice.

"Farmers are really looking to get off that treadmill of high-input, high yield commodity agriculture," says the study's co-lead author Susanne Freidberg, a professor of geography at Dartmouth.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Japan’s parliament passed a landmark law on Wednesday, officially titled the Act on Promotion of Competition for Specified Smartphone Software. The law is a direct response to concerns about stifled competition and consumer choice, particularly regarding Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems, which have dominated the smartphone market.

This legislation, echoing some elements of Europe’s recent Digital Markets Act (DMA), aims to prevent tech giants like Apple and Google from monopolizing app sales and operations on their respective platforms, a practice generally known as “gatekeeping.”

[...] Should these companies violate the new regulations, they will face hefty fines — 20 percent of the offending service’s domestic revenue, which can increase to 30 percent if the anti-competitive behavior continues. These fines represent a substantial increase from the existing anti-monopoly penalties in Japan, which are set at 6 percent of revenue gained through unfair practices.

[...] Outlined in the new regulations, the law specifies that companies identified under the law as ‘designated providers’ cannot prevent third-party providers from offering their own app stores, using third-party billing systems, or providing items through websites.

Additionally, they cannot unfairly discriminate against app developers or restrict the use of third-party browsers. Much like Europe, Japan wants users to be able to change default settings easily and have a choice among similar services for browsers and search services.

Scheduled to take effect by the end of 2025, this legislation mirrors regulatory efforts seen in other parts of the world. The European Union’s Digital Markets Act, which was fully implemented in March, and recent legal actions by the U.S. Department of Justice against large tech firms illustrate a global push towards stricter control over digital markets.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

A study of medieval warrior monks at Zorita de los Canes castle revealed their high-society diet and violent deaths, including the unexpected discovery of a female warrior among them:

A collaborative study conducted by the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (URV) and the Max Planck Institute analyzed the remains of 25 individuals interred from the 12th to 15th centuries at the Zorita de los Canes castle in Guadalajara. The team exhumed these remains from the castle's graveyard, allowing them to determine the diet, lifestyle, and causes of death of the warrior monks who belonged to the Order of Calatrava.

The results, published in the journal Scientific Reports, have determined that 23 of the individuals died in battle and that the knights of the order followed a diet typical of medieval high society, with a considerable intake of animal protein and marine fish, in an area far from the coast. Unexpectedly, Carme Rissech, a researcher at the URV, identified the remains of a woman among the warrior monks.

[...] When Carme Rissech, a researcher at the URV's Department of Basic Medical Sciences, was told that they were sending her the remains of the Calatrava knights, she couldn't quite believe that they were actually knights. As part of the MONBONES project, which studies diet and lifestyle in monasteries during the Middle Ages, her project partners analyzed the presence of carbon isotopes 14 and nitrogen 15 in the bones of the 25 individuals. They also studied animal remains, found around the castle, which complemented the information provided by the isotopes and helped them to work out the habits of the people who lived in the castle between the 12th and 15th centuries. Once she got the remains in the laboratory, Rissech studied them to determine the age, sex, morphology, and health of the individuals and to determine their lifestyle and causes of death.

Of the 25 skeletons studied, 23 showed marks compatible with violent death. These were mainly penetrating puncture wounds and blunt force injuries and were found on the parts of the body that were most vulnerable to and unprotected from the weapons of the time. "We observed many lesions on the upper part of the skull, the cheeks, and the inner part of the pelvis, which is consistent with the hypothesis that we are dealing with warriors," explains Rissech. It was by studying the bone proportions that she realized that among the warriors there was a woman.

Microsoft and China

anubi writes:

It looks like Chinese routers aren't the only things that come loaded with bonus software...

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/microsoft-vows-fix-security-gaps-china-hackers-government-emails-rcna156995

NBC news reports:

Microsoft's president told Congress on Thursday his company accepted responsibility for major security failures that let China-linked hackers penetrate federal government computer networks, but defended his company's presence in China.

Brad Smith struck a humble tone in his testimony before the House Homeland Security Committee and promised that the giant tech firm would fix security gaps in its products, which are widely used across federal agencies.

----------------------------------------------------

Somehow, I think it's so ironic that my own government is such a fan of security, yet, by enforced ignorance, the very things that they implement give only the illusion of security. No one knows if there's a backdoor or not, and who can verify?

Gone are the days just a homebrew CRC16 digester, knowledge of exact file length, and a list of files to check, would tell me with almost absolute certainty if my system files had been monkeyed with. If so, which ones? And what did they do? ( File compare... FC.EXE to known good backup copies of the critical files stored on another floppy )

"We acknowledge that we can and must do better"

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/06/13/tech/microsoft-president-congress-cybersecurity-failures/

Microsoft "accepts responsibility for each and every one" of the issues cited in a scathing US government-backed report on the tech giant's cybersecurity failings, Microsoft President Brad Smith will tell US lawmakers Thursday, according to his prepared testimony.

"We acknowledge that we can and must do better, and we apologize and express our deepest regrets to those who have been impacted," reads Smith's testimony to the House Homeland Security Committee. He is set to testify before the panel Thursday afternoon in a hearing the committee says will assess the impact of Microsoft's "cybersecurity shortfalls" on homeland security.

Microsoft has been at the center of two sweeping hacking campaigns in the last year allegedly carried out by Chinese and Russian spies.

A report issued in April by the US Cyber Safety Review Board found that Microsoft committed a "cascade" of "avoidable errors" that allowed Chinese hackers to breach the tech giant's network and later the email accounts of senior US officials last year, including the secretary of commerce. The board is comprised of government and private cybersecurity experts led by the Department of Homeland Security.

Smith says Microsoft has for months been overhauling its cybersecurity practices, in part by implementing recommendations from the US government-backed board.

looorg writes:

News consumption is down. The reasons appear to be multiple from that the readers don't trust the sources anymore, disinformation, journalistic agendas, AI (fake-) news or that news in general are just downers and sad to read.

This year's report reveals new findings about the consumption of online news globally. It is based on a YouGov survey of more than 95,000 people in 47 countries representing half of the world's population.

The report looks at the growing importance of platforms in news consumption and production, including more visual and video-led social media such as TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. It explores audience attitudes towards the use of AI in news, the role of creators and news influencers, how much people pay for news and more.

[...] There is no single cause for this crisis; it has been building for some time, but many of the immediate challenges are compounded by the power and changing strategies of rival big tech companies, including social media, search engines, and video platforms.

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2024/dnr-executive-summary

https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/digital-news-report/2024
(report available as pdf or read to you or in various summaries)

I guess I have entered the porch phase of my news consumption. I don't care for video news, or having someone read the news to me. I much prefer to just read it.

Original Submission

Inescapable Conclusion: USC Researchers Prove Earth's Core is Losing Speed

mrpg (and 2 more Anonymous Cowards) write:

Inescapable Conclusion: USC Researchers Prove Earth's Core Is Losing Speed:

A new study provides clear evidence that the Earth's inner core began to decrease its speed around 2010.

USC scientists have discovered that the Earth's inner core is slowing down relative to the planet's surface, a phenomenon that started around 2010 after decades of the opposite trend. This significant shift was detected through detailed seismic data analysis from earthquakes and nuclear tests. The slowdown is influenced by the dynamics of the surrounding liquid outer core and the gravitational pull from the Earth's mantle, potentially affecting Earth's rotation slightly.

Scientists at USC have proven that the Earth's inner core is backtracking — slowing down — in relation to the planet's surface, as shown in new research published on June 12 in the journal Nature.

The scientific community has long debated the movement of the inner core, with some studies suggesting it rotates faster than the Earth's surface. However, recent research from USC conclusively shows that starting around 2010, the inner core has slowed down, now moving at a pace slower than that of the planet's surface.

"When I first saw the seismograms that hinted at this change, I was stumped," said John Vidale, Dean's Professor of Earth Sciences at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. "But when we found two dozen more observations signaling the same pattern, the result was inescapable. The inner core had slowed down for the first time in many decades. Other scientists have recently argued for similar and different models, but our latest study provides the most convincing resolution."

The inner core is considered to be reversing and backtracking relative to the planet's surface due to moving slightly slower instead of faster than the Earth's mantle for the first time in approximately 40 years. Relative to its speed in previous decades, the inner core is slowing down.

The inner core is a solid iron-nickel sphere surrounded by the liquid iron-nickel outer core. Roughly the size of the moon, the inner core sits more than 3,000 miles under our feet and presents a challenge to researchers: It can't be visited or viewed. Scientists must use the seismic waves of earthquakes to create renderings of the inner core's movement.

Vidale and Wei Wang of the Chinese Academy of Sciences utilized waveforms and repeating earthquakes in contrast to other research. Repeating earthquakes are seismic events that occur at the same location to produce identical seismograms.

c0lo writes:

Adobe

June 8 - Adobe users are furious about the company's terms of service change to help it train AI

Adobe is facing backlash over recent updates to its Terms of Service for the company's generative AI products.

The revised terms, affecting over 20 million global users of Adobe's Creative Cloud Suite, include language that some users interpret as allowing Adobe to access, view or listen to their content, including sensitive content such as information protected by non-disclosure agreements.

Updates to the Terms of Service have also sparked concern among creative users, with some alleging that Adobe is surveilling their work and potentially using it to train AI models.

Section 2.2 states that Adobe may use techniques such as machine learning to analyze user content to improve its services and software.

Instagram/Meta

Meta to use Instagram and Facebook posts from as far back as 2007 to train artificial intelligence tools

In short: Meta is about to start using social activity on Facebook and Instagram accounts to train its AI tools, and in Australia, users won't be able to opt out.

Data from as far back as 2007 will be used, including posts, photos and messages to Meta's AI chatbot.

What's next? The policy comes into effect on June 26.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A study from the University of California San Diego reveals that differences in brain development associated with autism begin in utero, with larger and faster-growing brain cortical organoids in autistic toddlers correlating with more severe symptoms. This research opens new avenues for understanding and potentially treating autism.

Some children with autism face severe, enduring challenges including developmental delays, social difficulties, and possibly an inability to speak. Meanwhile, others may have milder symptoms that lessen over time.

The disparity in outcomes has been a mystery to scientists, until now. A new study, published in Molecular Autism by researchers at the University of California San Diego, is the first to shed light on the matter. Among its findings: The biological basis for these two subtypes of autism develops in utero.

Researchers used blood-based stem cells from 10 toddlers, ages 1 through 4, with idiopathic autism (in which no single-gene cause was identified) to create brain cortical organoids (BCOs), or models of the fetal cortex. They also created BCOs from six neurotypical toddlers.

Often referred to as gray matter, the cortex lines the outside of the brain. It holds tens of billions of nerve cells and is responsible for essential functions like consciousness, thinking, reasoning, learning, memory, emotions and sensory functions.

Among their findings: The BCOs of toddlers with autism were significantly larger — roughly 40 percent — than those of neurotypical controls, according to two rounds of study performed in different years (2021 and 2022). Each round involved the creation of hundreds of organoids from each patient.

Reference: “Embryonic origin of two ASD subtypes of social symptom severity: the larger the brain cortical organoid size, the more severe the social symptoms” by Eric Courchesne, Vani Taluja, Sanaz Nazari, Caitlin M. Aamodt, Karen Pierce, Kuaikuai Duan, Sunny Stophaeros, Linda Lopez, Cynthia Carter Barnes, Jaden Troxel, Kathleen Campbell, Tianyun Wang, Kendra Hoekzema, Evan E. Eichler, Joao V. Nani, Wirla Pontes, Sandra Sanchez Sanchez, Michael V. Lombardo, Janaina S. de Souza, Mirian A. F. Hayashi and Alysson R. Muotri, 25 May 2024, Molecular Autism.
  DOI: 10.1186/s13229-024-00602-8

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

[...] AMD SVP and CMO John Taylor posted on LinkedIn that the Ryzen AI 300 chips the company showed at Computex 2024 targets will enable Copilot experiences later in 2024. Tom’s Hardware clarified with AMD that this means the features won't be available at launch.
 
  “Yes, Copilot+ will come via a Windows Update later this year,”  we were told. This means that laptops with the Ryzen AI processor won’t be Copilot+ certified at launch, so it cannot use features like Paint’s Cocreator, Restyle Image, or the Recall feature that Microsoft has delayed.

However, since AMD’s Ryzen AI 300 chips do not have Microsoft’s AI certification yet, users who pick this processor won’t enjoy those Copilot+ features, even though the Ryzen AI 300’s NPU offers 50 TOPS — which ismore than the 45 TOPS that the Snapdragon X Elite and X Plus outputs via their NPUs. Nevertheless, AMD says that the Copilot+ certification will arrive later this year, meaning these laptops will eventually get Windows’ AI features via a free Windows Update.

But even if the Ryzen AI 300 chip does not get the Microsoft Copilot+ branding at launch, you can still take advantage of the processor’s AI capabilities via third-party software. Apps like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, and Blender, which are likely to take advantage of the Ryzen AI 300’s NPU core (Adobe and Blender are listed as ISV partners), will allow you to use their AI features on device — no need to connect a distant AI server.

Intel's Lunar Lake chips are also expected to be in laptops getting Copilot+ branding sometime this year, but we don't know the dates just yet.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

Researchers have discovered that microplastics, once ingested, travel from the gut to tissues such as the liver, kidneys, and brain, potentially causing significant health issues. The team’s findings emphasize the critical link between gut health and overall well-being, with ongoing studies exploring how diet and gut microbiota interact with microplastic absorption. Credit: SciTechDaily.com

It’s happening every day. From our water, our food, and even the air we breathe, tiny plastic particles are finding their way into many parts of our body.

But what happens once those particles are inside? What do they do to our digestive system?

In a recent paper published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, University of New Mexico researchers found that those tiny particles – microplastics – are having a significant impact on our digestive pathways, making their way from the gut and into the tissues of the kidney, liver, and brain.

Research continues to show the importance of gut health. If you don’t have a healthy gut, it affects the brain, it affects the liver and so many other tissues. So even imagining that the microplastics are doing something in the in the gut, that chronic exposure could lead to systemic effects.

[...] While other researchers are helping to identify and quantify ingested microplastics, Castillo and his team focus on what the microplastics are doing inside the body, specifically to the gastrointestinal (GI) tract and to the gut immune system.

Over a four-week period, Castillo, postdoctoral fellow Marcus Garcia, PharmD, and other UNM researchers exposed mice to microplastics in their drinking water. The amount was equivalent to the quantity of microplastics humans are believed to ingest each week.

Microplastics had migrated out of the gut into the tissues of the liver, kidney and even the brain, the team found. The study also showed the microplastics changed metabolic pathways in the affected tissues.

In Vivo Tissue Distribution of Polystyrene or Mixed Polymer Microspheres and Metabolomic Analysis after Oral Exposure in Mice” by Marcus M. Garcia, Aaron S. Romero, Seth D. Merkley, Jewel L. Meyer-Hagen, Charles Forbes, Eliane El Hayek, David P. Sciezka, Rachel Templeton, Jorge Gonzalez-Estrella, Yan Jin, Haiwei Gu, Angelica Benavidez, Russell P. Hunter, Selita Lucas, Guy Herbert, Kyle Joohyung Kim, Julia Yue Cui, Rama R. Gullapalli, Julie G. In, Matthew J. Campen, and Eliseo F. Castillo, 10 April 2024, Environmental Health Perspectives.
  DOI: 10.1289/EHP13435

Original Submission

upstart writes:

FAA investigating how titanium parts with falsified records wound up in Boeing and Airbus planes - Japan Today:

Federal regulators are investigating how parts made with titanium that was sold with falsified quality documentation wound up in Boeing and Airbus passenger jets that were built in recent years.

Boeing and Airbus said Friday that planes containing the parts are safe to fly, but Boeing said it was removing affected parts from planes that haven't been delivered yet to airline customers.

It will be up to regulators including the Federal Aviation Administration to decide whether any work needs to be done to planes that are already carrying passengers.

The FAA said it is "investigating the scope and impact of the issue." The agency said Boeing reported the problem covering material from a distributor "who may have falsified or provided incorrect records." The FAA did not name the distributor.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

A complaint that Tesla has misled consumers with the name of its Full Self-Driving (FSD) and Autopilot features, brought by the California Department of Motor Vehicles, will be allowed to go forward, according to a report from Bloomberg Monday.

Tesla had previously defended the use of the term, which is now known as “Full Self-Driving (Supervised),” as a free speech issue. But an administrative judge ruled the complaint from the California DMV could continue on Monday, according to Bloomberg.

The decision comes as Tesla faces federal investigations into FSD technology, which is often blamed when Tesla vehicles are involved in crashes. Officially, Tesla acknowledges that FSD doesn’t allow the average user to ignore the road completely, something that the average person would probably understand as a fully autonomous vehicle.

But CEO Elon Musk has long been predicting that FSD will allow for completely autonomous transportation. And as recently as last week, he touted the latest version by suggesting it may be even more powerful than the name sounds.

“FSD 12.4.1 releases today to Tesla employees,” Musk tweeted on June 5. “If that goes well, then it will be released to a limited number of external customers this weekend. There are a massive number of changes to this build. It should arguably be called v13, but we’re sticking to 12.”

[...] Musk even claimed that soon people will be able to use FSD for as long as a year before a human needs to intervene, though he included a very important caveat.

“Two other versions are in earlier stages of testing: 12.5 and 12.6, which could be called v14 and v15. We are starting to get to the point where, once known bugs are fixed, it will take over a year of driving to get even one intervention,” Musk wrote.

Original Submission

Although it might seem that the site is not progressing there is nothing that could be further from the truth...

The New Company and Transfer Of Assets

A new company has now been formed, along with IRS agreement that we are a registered as a 501(c)(3) company (donations will be tax deductible for anyone under the US IRS system) , and we have our own bank account and Board. Therefore, I informed the current Board of this at the end of last week requesting that we initiate the transfer of site ownership and its assets. I also proposed a way that we could do this with the minimum of disruption to the site itself. Ideally, it should from the community point of view be nothing more than a redirection of URLs to different IP addresses. The proposal has to be studied and accepted by the current Board, or they might suggest an alternative proposal. NCommander is moving home for much of this week and so I do not expect a response in the next few days.

Site Downtime

We are experiencing a recurring problem with a drive that keeps filling up. Several of our community have offered suggestions which have been implemented but they do not appear to be having the desired effect. Further investigation is ongoing but, for now at least, the problem has been resolved by freeing up space by moving files that did not have to be on that particular drive to a different drive on that server. I would like to thank the community for their patience but there are only 3 people who have easy access to that particular server, and I am one of them. The configuration of the infrastructure is not straightforward, and I am not a sys-admin. So to some extent we are still reliant on NCommander and kolie for some of the technical expertise or advice that is sometimes necessary, and to whom I am grateful for any assistance that they can give.

Submissions

We have had a small number of our community helping by making submissions that meet our stated interests and topics of discussion. There has also been a handful of submissions on the '/dev/random' topic which have also received a very healthy number of comments. But for the majority we are still relying on upstart and Arthur (both bots) to bring fresh material to our submission queue. Any relevant submissions from the community would be welcome and I encourage you to think about the more unusual and loosely-tech-related topics that you would like to see discussed. A fully prepared submission would be ideal but if all we get is a URL then that is just putting a greater workload on the small number of active editors that we currently have. Try to at least provide some kind of summary and perhaps ask your own questions to prompt the community to respond. We can do all of the formatting to meet the site's needs for you. But if all you have is a URL then we will try to make a submission from it. Off-topic submissions that are just a URL will probably not be processed.

Spamming

There has been a significant reduction in the amount of spamming anywhere on the site over the last few weeks. It hasn't gone completely but it is currently manageable by normal moderation by the community, and occasionally by the staff.

Complaints

Complaining about things you don't like on the site by means of public comments is not recommended and is usually a waste of your time and ours. If it is something that can be rectified immediately then we will, of course, do so but anything more significant takes a lot of time for the few staff that we have. Complaining anonymously will not be actioned. If you wish to make a complaint then we must have a way of contacting you privately. This can be any email address that you choose, providing that it lasts until the problem can be investigated and any necessary action taken to remedy the problem. We will probably have further questions to help us resolve the Issue and we will also need to inform you of the progress of our investigations and the final decision. That will be at least several days as an absolute minimum. If you keep repeating the same complaint anonymously in different threads and over a period of time it will be treated as spam - as was explained about 3 years ago in a Meta by Martyb.

If it is not important enough to justify an email then it is possibly your personal problem and not something on the site that must be changed. Any alternative response could result in the staff being tied up in malicious anonymous complaints which we have not got the resources to address.