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hubie writes:

Beware of OpenAI's 'Grantwashing' on AI Harms:

This month, OpenAI announced "up to $2 million" in funding for research studies on AI safety and well-being. At its surface, this may seem generous, but following in the footsteps of other tech giants facing scrutiny over their products' mental health impacts, it's nothing more than grantwashing.

This industry practice commits a pittance to research that is doomed to be ineffective due to information and resources that companies hold back. When grantwashing works, it compromises the search for answers. And that's an insult to anyone whose loved one's death involved chatbots.

OpenAI's pledge came a week after the company's lawyers argued that the company isn't to blame in the death of a California teenager who ChatGPT encouraged to commit suicide. In the company's attempt to disclaim responsibility in court, they even requested a list of invitees to the teen's memorial and video footage of the service and the people there. In the last year, OpenAI and other generative AI companies have been accused of causing numerous deaths and psychotic breaks by encouraging people into suicide, feeding delusions, and giving them risky instructions.

As scientists who study developmental psychology and AI, we agree that society urgently needs better science on AI and mental health. The company has recruited a group of genuinely credible scientists to give them closed-door advice on the issue, like so many other companies accused of causing harm. But OpenAI's funding announcement reveals how small a fig leaf they think will persuade a credulous public.

Look at the size of the grants. High quality public health research on mental health harms requires a sequence of studies, large sample sizes, access to clinical patients, and an ethics safety net that supports people at risk. The median research project grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health in 2024 was $642,918. In contrast, OpenAI is offering a measly $5,000 to $100,000 to researchers studying AI and mental health, one sixth of a typical NIMH grant at best.

Despite the good ideas Open AI suggests, the company is holding back the resource that would contribute most to science on those questions: records about their systems and how people use their products. OpenAI's researchers have purportedly developed ways to identify users who potentially face mental health distress. A well-designed data access program would accelerate the search for answers while preserving privacy and protecting vulnerable users. European regulators are still deciding if OpenAI will face data access requirements under the Digital Services Act, but OpenAI doesn't have to wait for Europe.

We have seen this playbook before from other companies. In 2019, Meta announced a series of fifty thousand dollar grants to six scientists studying Instagram, safety, and well being. Even as the company touted its commitment to science on user well-being, Meta's leaders were pressuring internal researchers to "amend their research to limit Meta's potential liability," according to a recent ruling in the D.C. Superior Court.

turgid writes:

The Register reports that UNIX V4, the first with the kernel written in C, has been recovered, restored and run.

The source code and binaries were recovered from a 1970s-vintage nine-track tape and posted to the Internet Archive where it can be downloaded.

It's very small: it contains around 55,000 lines of code, of which about 25,000 lines are in C, with under 1,000 lines of comments. But then, the late Dennis M. Ritchie and co-creator Ken Thompson were very definitely Real Programmers, and as is recorded in ancient wisdom: "Real Programmers don't need comments – the code is obvious."

For those who don't already know:

UNIX started out as a quick hack by two geniuses in their spare time, so that they could use a spare computer – an extremely rare thing in the 1960s – to run a simulation game flying the player around a 2D of the Solar System that one of them had written. It was called Space Travel.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://therecord.media/south-korea-facial-recognition-phones

South Korea will begin requiring people to submit to facial recognition when signing up for a new mobile phone number in a bid to fight scams, the Ministry of Science and ICT announced Friday.

The effort is meant to block people from illegally registering devices used for identity theft.

The plan reportedly applies to the country's three major mobile carriers and mobile virtual network operators. The new policy takes effect on March 23 after a pilot that will begin this week.

"By comparing the photo on an identification card with the holder's actual face on a real-time basis, we can fully prevent the activation of phones registered under a false name using stolen or fabricated IDs," the ministry reportedly said in a press release.

In August, South Korean officials unveiled a plan to combat voice phishing scams that included harsher penalties for mobile carriers that do not sufficiently act to prevent the scams were reportedly a central feature of that plan.

South Korea has been plagued by voice phishing scams, with 21,588 reported as of November, the ministry said.

In April, South Korea's SK Telecom was hacked and SIM card data belonging to nearly 27 million subscribers was stolen.

Privacy regulators determined the telecom "did not even implement basic access control," allowing hackers to take authentication data and subscriber information on a mass basis.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://linuxiac.com/phoenix-emerges-as-a-modern-x-server-written-from-scratch-in-zig/

Phoenix is a new X server written from scratch in Zig, aiming to modernize X11 without relying on Xorg code.

Although Wayland has largely replaced Xorg, and most major Linux distributions and desktop environments have either already dropped support for the aging display protocol or are in the process of doing so, efforts to extend Xorg's life or replace it with similar alternatives continue. Recent examples include projects such as XLibre Xserver and Wayback. And now, a new name is joining this group: Phoenix.

It is a new X server project that takes a fundamentally different approach to X11. Written entirely from scratch in the Zig programming language, it is not yet another fork of the Xorg codebase and does not reuse its legacy code. Instead, according to devs, Phoenix aims to show that the X11 protocol itself is not inherently obsolete and can be implemented in a simpler, safer, and more modern way.

Phoenix is designed for real desktop and professional use, not for full protocol coverage. It supports only the X11 features that modern applications need, including older software like GTK2-based programs. By omitting rarely used or outdated parts, Phoenix keeps things simpler while still supporting many applications.

Right now, Phoenix is still experimental and not ready for daily use. It can run simple, hardware-accelerated apps using GLX, EGL, or Vulkan, but only in a nested setup under another X server. This will stay the case until the project is ready for more demanding use.

On the security side, which is actually one of the aspects for which Xorg receives the most criticism, Phoenix isolates applications by default, and access to sensitive capabilities such as screen recording or global hotkeys is mediated through explicit permission mechanisms. Importantly, this is done without breaking existing clients, as unauthorized access attempts return dummy data rather than protocol errors.

Under the hood, Phoenix includes a built-in compositor that enables tear-free rendering by default, supports disabling compositing for full-screen applications, and is designed to reduce compositor and vsync latency. Proper multi-monitor support is a priority, allowing different refresh rates, variable refresh rate displays, and future HDR support without relying on a single global framebuffer.

hubie writes:

The experiment showed that physical violence is not necessary to scare off gulls:

Shouting at seagulls makes them more likely to leave your food alone, research shows.

University of Exeter researchers put a closed Tupperware box of chips on the ground to pique herring gulls' interest.

Once a gull approached, they played either a recording of a male voice shouting the words, "No, stay away, that's my food", the same voice speaking those words, or the 'neutral' birdsong of a robin.

They tested a total of 61 gulls across nine seaside towns in Cornwall and found that nearly half of those gulls exposed to the shouting voice flew away within a minute.

Only 15% of the gulls exposed to the speaking male voice flew away, while the rest walked away from the food, still sensing danger.

In contrast, 70% of gulls exposed to the robin song stayed near the food for the duration of the experiment.

"We found that urban gulls were more vigilant and pecked less at the food container when we played them a male voice, whether it was speaking or shouting," said Dr Neeltje Boogert of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"But the difference was that the gulls were more likely to fly away at the shouting and more likely to walk away at the speaking.

"So when trying to scare off a gull that's trying to steal your food, talking might stop them in their tracks but shouting is more effective at making them fly away."

The recordings, in which five male volunteers recorded themselves uttering the same phrase in a calm speaking voice and, separately, in a shouting voice, were adjusted to be at the same volume, which suggests gulls can detect differences in the acoustic properties of human voices.

"Normally when someone is shouting, it's scary because it's a loud noise, but in this case all the noises were the same volume, and it was just the way the words were being said that was different," said Dr Boogert.

"So it seems that gulls pay attention to the way we say things, which we don't think has been seen before in any wild species, only in those domesticated species that have been bred around humans for generations, such as dogs, pigs and horses."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Engineer turns E-ink tablet into computer monitor in Linux — perfect secondary reading screen to reduce eye strain over the network

E-ink enjoyers can upgrade old tablets into part of the desktop experience using a simple server setup

While the traditional computer monitor is a tried-and-true standard, many who use screens insist on a higher standard of readability and eye comfort. For these happy few screen enthusiasts, a recent project and tutorial from software engineer Alireza Alavi offers Linux users the ability to add an E-ink display to their desktop by reusing an existing E-ink tablet.

The project turns an E-ink tablet into a mirrored clone of an existing second display in a desktop setup. Using VNC for network remote control of a computer, this implementation turns the E-ink tablet into both a display and an input device, opening up options from being used as a primarily reading and writing display to also being usable as a drawing tablet or other screen-as-input-device use cases.

The example video above [in article] shows Alavi using the E-ink display as an additional monitor, first to write his blog post about the VNC protocol, then to read a lengthy document. The tablet runs completely without a wired connection, as VNC sharing happens over the network and thus enables a fully wireless monitor experience. The second screen, seen behind the tablet, reveals the magic by displaying the source of the tablet's output.

Many readers will correctly observe that the latency and lag on the E-ink tablet are a bit higher than desirable for a display. This is not due to the streaming connection's efficacy, but rather to the slowness that stems from the old age of the Boox tablet used by Alavi. A newer, more modern E-ink display, such as Modos Tech's upcoming 75Hz E-ink monitor, will get the job done without any such visible latency distractions.

For Linux users wanting to follow along and create a tertiary monitor of their very own, Alavi's blog has all the answers. Setting up a VNC connection between the computer and the tablet display took only around 20 minutes, with help from the Arch Linux wiki.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/24/lg-forces-tv-owners-to-use-microsoft-ai-copilot-app-you-cant-uninstall-and-nobody-asked-for/

If your product is even a third as innovative and useful as you claim it is, you shouldn't have to go around trying a little too hard to convince people. The product's usefulness should speak for itself. And you definitely shouldn't be forcing people to use products they've repeatedly told you they don't actually appreciate or want.

LG and Microsoft learned that lesson recently when LG began installing Microsoft's Copilot "AI" assistant on people's televisions, without any way to disable it:

"According to affected users, Copilot appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain LG TV models. The feature shows up on the home screen alongside streaming apps, but unlike Netflix or YouTube, it cannot be uninstalled."

To be clear this isn't the end of the world. Users can apparently "hide" the app, but people are still generally annoyed at the lack of control. Especially coming from two companies with a history of this sort of behavior.

Many people just generally don't like Copilot, much like they didn't really like a lot of the nosier features integrated into Windows 11. Or they don't like being forced to use Copilot when they'd prefer to use ChatGPT or Gemini.

You only have to peruse this Reddit thread to get a sense of the annoyance. You can also head over to the Microsoft forums to get a sense of how Microsoft customers are very very tired of all the forced Copilot integration across Microsoft's other products, even though you can (sometimes) disable the integration.

But "smart" TVs are already a sector where user choice and privacy take a backseat to the primary goal of collecting and monetizing viewer behavior. And LG has been at the forefront of disabling features if you try to disconnect from the internet. So there are justifiable privacy concerns raised over this tight integration (especially in America, which is too corrupt to pass even a baseline internet privacy law).

hubie writes:

Examining the use of expressions like "recent studies" or "recent data" in different medical specialties:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word recent is defined as "having happened or started only a short time ago." A simple, innocent sounding definition. And yet, in the world of scientific publishing, it may be one of the most elastic terms ever used. What exactly qualifies as "a short time ago"? A few months? A couple of years? The advent of the antibiotic era?

In biomedical literature, "recent" is something of a linguistic chameleon. It appears everywhere: in recent studies, recent evidence, recent trials, recent literature, and so forth. It is a word that conveys urgency and relevance, while neatly sidestepping any commitment to a specific year—much like saying "I'll call you soon" after a first date: reassuring, yet infinitely interpretable. Authors wield it with confidence, often citing research that could have been published in the previous season or the previous century.

Despite its ubiquity, "recent" remains a suspiciously vague descriptor. Readers are expected to blindly trust the author's sense of time. But what happens if we dare to ask the obvious question? What if we take "recent" literally?

In this festive horological investigation, we decided to find out just how recent the recent studies really are. Armed with curiosity, a calendar, and a healthy disregard for academic solemnity, we set out to measure the actual age of those so-called fresh references. The results may not change the course of science, but they might make you raise an eyebrow the next time someone cites a recent paper from the past decade.

[Ed. note: Dec. 30 - The headline has been updated to reflect the fact that the Microsoft researcher who posted the original LinkedIn post stating they want to rewrite all Windows code in Rust later qualified his statement by saying that this is a research project --hubie]

turgid writes:

The Register reports that Microsoft wants to replace all of its C and C++ code bases with Rust rewrites by 2030, developing new technology to do the translation along the way.

"Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases," he added. "Our North Star is '1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.'"

The article goes on to quote much management-speak drivel from official Microsoft sources making grand claims about magic bullets and the end of all known software vulnerabilities with many orders of magnitude productivity improvements promised into the bargain.

Unlike C and C++, Rust is a memory-safe language, meaning it uses automated memory management to avoid out-of-bounds reads and writes, and use-after-free errors, as both offer attackers a chance to control devices. In recent years, governments have called for universal adoption of memory-safe languages – and especially Rust – to improve software security.

Automated memory management? Is the magic not in the compiler rather than the runtime? Do these people even know what they're talking about? And anyway, isn't C++2.0 going to solve all problems and be faster than Rust and better than Python? It'll be out Real Soon Now(TM). Plus you'll only have to half-rewrite your code.

Are we witnessing yet another expensive wild goose chase from Microsoft? Windows Longhorn, anyone?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Swearing boosts performance by helping people feel focused, disinhibited, study finds:

Letting out a swear word in a moment of frustration can feel good. Now, research suggests that it can be good for you, too: Swearing can boost people's physical performance by helping them overcome their inhibitions and push themselves harder on tests of strength and endurance, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"In many situations, people hold themselves back—consciously or unconsciously—from using their full strength," said study author Richard Stephens, PhD, of Keele University in the U.K. "Swearing is an easily available way to help yourself feel focused, confident and less distracted, and 'go for it' a little more."

Previous research by Stephens and others has found when people swear, they perform better on many physical challenges, including how long they can keep their hand in ice water and how long they can support their body weight during a chair push-up exercise.

"That is now a well replicated, reliable finding," Stephens said. "But the question is—how is swearing helping us? What's the psychological mechanism?"

He and his colleagues believed that it might be that swearing puts people in a disinhibited state of mind. "By swearing, we throw off social constraint and allow ourselves to push harder in different situations," he said.

To test this, the researchers conducted two experiments with 192 total participants. In each, they asked participants to repeat either a swear word of their choice, or a neutral word, every two seconds while doing a chair push-up. After completing the chair push-up challenge, participants answered questions about their mental state during the task. The questions included measures of different mental states linked to disinhibition, including how much positive emotion participants felt, how funny they found the situation, how distracted they felt and how self-confident they felt. The questions also included a measure of psychological "flow," a state in which people become immersed in an activity in a pleasant, focused way.

Overall, and confirming earlier research, the researchers found that participants who swore during the chair push-up task were able to support their body weight significantly longer than those who repeated a neutral word. Combining the results of the two experiments as well as a previous experiment conducted as part of an earlier study, they also found that this difference could be explained by increases in participants' reports of psychological flow, distraction and self-confidence—all important aspects of a disinhibition.

"These findings help explain why swearing is so commonplace," said Stephens. "Swearing is literally a calorie neutral, drug free, low cost, readily available tool at our disposal for when we need a boost in performance."

Journal Reference:Stephens, R., Dowber, H., Richardson, C., & Washmuth, N. B. (2025). "Don't hold back": Swearing improves strength through state disinhibition. American Psychologist. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001650 [PDF]

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Study finds built-in browsers across gadgets often ship years out of date

Web browsers for desktop and mobile devices tend to receive regular security updates, but that often isn't the case for those that reside within game consoles, televisions, e-readers, cars, and other devices. These outdated, embedded browsers can leave you open to phishing and other security vulnerabilities.

Researchers affiliated with the DistriNet Research Unit of KU Leuven in Belgium have found that newly released devices may contain browsers that are several years out of date and include known security bugs.

In a research paper [PDF] presented at the USENIX Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS) 2025 in August, computer scientists Gertjan Franken, Pieter Claeys, Tom Van Goethem, and Lieven Desmet describe how they created a crowdsourced browser evaluation framework called CheckEngine to overcome the challenge of assessing products with closed-source software and firmware.

The framework functions by providing willing study participants with a unique URL that they're asked to enter into the integrated browser in the device being evaluated. During the testing period between February 2024 and February 2025, the boffins received 76 entries representing 53 unique products and 68 unique software versions.

In 24 of the 35 smart TVs and all 5 e-readers submitted for the study, the embedded browsers were at least three years behind current versions available to users of desktop computers. And the situation is similar even for newly released products.

"Our study shows that integrated browsers are updated far less frequently than their standalone counterparts," the authors state in their paper. "Alarmingly, many products already embed outdated browsers at the time of release; in fact, eight products in our sample included a browser that was over three years obsolete when it hit the market."

According to KU Leuven, the study revealed that some device makers don't provide security updates for the browser, even though they advertise free updates.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://events.ccc.de/congress/2025/infos/index.html

The 39th Chaos Communication Congress (39C3) takes place in Hamburg on 27–30 Dec 2025, and is the 2025 edition of the annual four-day conference on technology, society and utopia organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) and volunteers.

Congress offers lectures and workshops and various events on a multitude of topics including (but not limited to) information technology and generally a critical-creative attitude towards technology and the discussion about the effects of technological advances on society.

Starting in 1984, Congress has been organized by the community and appreciates all kinds of participation. You are encouraged to contribute by volunteering, setting up and hosting hands-on and self-organized events with the other components of your assembly or presenting your own projects to fellow hackers.

Find infos how to get in contact & chat with other participants and the organizing teams on our Communication page.

= More Information:

- Chaos Computer Club at Wikipedia
- Media
- 2025 Hub

Interesting talks, upcoming and previously recorded, available on their streams page --Ed.

Original Submission

upstart writes:

"The vast majority of Codex is built by Codex," OpenAI told us about its new AI coding agent writing code:

With the popularity of AI coding tools rising among some software developers, their adoption has begun to touch every aspect of the process, including the improvement of AI coding tools themselves.

In interviews with Ars Technica this week, OpenAI employees revealed the extent to which the company now relies on its own AI coding agent, Codex, to build and improve the development tool. "I think the vast majority of Codex is built by Codex, so it's almost entirely just being used to improve itself," said Alexander Embiricos, product lead for Codex at OpenAI, in a conversation on Tuesday.

Codex, which OpenAI launched in its modern incarnation as a research preview in May 2025, operates as a cloud-based software engineering agent that can handle tasks like writing features, fixing bugs, and proposing pull requests. The tool runs in sandboxed environments linked to a user's code repository and can execute multiple tasks in parallel. OpenAI offers Codex through ChatGPT's web interface, a command-line interface (CLI), and IDE extensions for VS Code, Cursor, and Windsurf.

The "Codex" name itself dates back to a 2021 OpenAI model based on GPT-3 that powered GitHub Copilot's tab completion feature. Embiricos said the name is rumored among staff to be short for "code execution." OpenAI wanted to connect the new agent to that earlier moment, which was crafted in part by some who have left the company.

"For many people, that model powering GitHub Copilot was the first 'wow' moment for AI," Embiricos said. "It showed people the potential of what it can mean when AI is able to understand your context and what you're trying to do and accelerate you in doing that."

It's no secret that the current command-line version of Codex bears some resemblance to Claude Code, Anthropic's agentic coding tool that launched in February 2025. When asked whether Claude Code influenced Codex's design, Embiricos parried the question but acknowledged the competitive dynamic. "It's a fun market to work in because there's lots of great ideas being thrown around," he said. He noted that OpenAI had been building web-based Codex features internally before shipping the CLI version, which arrived after Anthropic's tool.

OpenAI's customers apparently love the command line version, though. Embiricos said Codex usage among external developers jumped 20 times after OpenAI shipped the interactive CLI extension alongside GPT-5 in August 2025. On September 15, OpenAI released GPT-5 Codex, a specialized version of GPT-5 optimized for agentic coding, which further accelerated adoption.

It hasn't just been the outside world that has embraced the tool. Embiricos said the vast majority of OpenAI's engineers now use Codex regularly. The company uses the same open-source version of the CLI that external developers can freely download, suggest additions to, and modify themselves. "I really love this about our team," Embiricos said. "The version of Codex that we use is literally the open source repo. We don't have a different repo that features go in."

What happens when a computer can do your job better than you can? What happened to all those people who studied in school and trained to draft designs on huge desks with filing cabinets that would kill you if it fell? What happened, well, to any job that could be done faster, cheaper, or more effectively? Gone like the dodos. So, in this vein, how long do lawyers have before their profession is made redundant? If an LLM can find which law applies, how it applies, and write the legal argument needed, then why pay tens of thousands for a human to do this? Have lawyers had their day in sun and are now the buggy whip makers of the 21st century?

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/texas-sues-tv-makers-for-spying-on-users-selling-data-without-consent/

The Texas Attorney General sued five major television manufacturers, accusing them of illegally collecting their users' data by secretly recording what they watch using Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology.

The lawsuits target Sony, Samsung, LG, and China-based companies Hisense and TCL [PDF files] Technology Group Corporation. Attorney General Ken Paxton's office also highlighted "serious concerns" about the two Chinese companies being required to follow China's National Security Law, which could give the Chinese government access to U.S. consumers' data.

According to complaints filed this Monday in Texas state courts, the TV makers can allegedly use ACR technology to capture screenshots of television displays every 500 milliseconds, monitor the users' viewing activity in real time, and send this information back to the companies' servers without the users' knowledge or consent.

Paxton's office described ACR technology as "an uninvited, invisible digital invader" designed to unlawfully collect personal data from smart televisions, alleging that the harvested information then gets sold to the highest bidder for ad targeting.

"Companies, especially those connected to the Chinese Communist Party, have no business illegally recording Americans' devices inside their own homes," Paxton said.

"This conduct is invasive, deceptive, and unlawful. The fundamental right to privacy will be protected in Texas because owning a television does not mean surrendering your personal information to Big Tech or foreign adversaries."

[...] Almost a decade ago, in February 2017, Walmart-owned smart TV manufacturer Vizio paid $2.2 million to settle charges brought by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and the New Jersey Attorney General that it collected viewing data from 11 million consumers without their knowledge or consent using a "Smart Interactivity feature.

The two agencies said that since February 2014, Vizio and an affiliated company have manufactured and sold smart TVs (and retrofitted older models by installing tracking software remotely) that captured detailed information on what is being watched, including content from cable, streaming services, and DVDs.

According to the complaint, Vizio also attached demographic information (such as sex, age, income, and education) to the collected data and sold it to third parties for targeted advertising purposes.

In August 2022, the FTC published a consumer alert on securing Internet-connected devices, advising Americans to adjust the tracking settings on their smart TVs to protect their privacy.

Related:
    • Smart TVs Are Like "a Digital Trojan Horse" in People's Homes
    • Vizio Settles With FTC, Will Pay $2.2 Million and Delete User Data

Original Submission