Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes:

Jeopardy time. A. This company spurred CEOs to make huge speculative capital expenditures based on wild unverified claims of future demand, resulting in the layoffs of tens of thousands of workers to reduce the resulting expenses, harming their core businesses. Q. What is OpenAI? Sorry, the correct response is, "What is WorldCom?" In 2002, WorldCom, the second largest long-distance company in the U.S., entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy after disclosing accounting fraud that eventually totaled $11 billion, the biggest ever at the time. CEO Bernard Ebbers was subsequently sentenced to 25 years in prison.

CNBC reported that an employee of WorldCom's Internet service provider UUNet set off a frenzy of speculative investment and infrastructure overbuild after he used Excel to create a best-case scenario model for the Internet's growth that suggested in the best of all possible worlds, Internet traffic would double every 100 days, a scenario that would greatly benefit WorldCom, whose lines would carry it. Despite no evidence to support it, WorldCom's lie became an immutable law and businesses around the world made important decisions based on the belief that traffic was doubling every 100 days. "For some period of time I can recall that we were backfilling that expectation with laying cables, something like 2,200 miles of cable an hour," AT&T CEO Michael Armstrong said. "Think of all the companies that went out of business that assumed that that was real."

In 2003, NBC News reported:


Armstrong and former Sprint CEO Bill Esrey struggled for years to understand how WorldCom could beat them so handily. "We would look at the conduct of WorldCom in terms of their pricing, revenue growth, margins, in terms of their cost structure... and the price leader almost every quarter was WorldCom," Armstrong said. Added Esrey, "We couldn't figure out how they were pricing as aggressively as they were.... How could they be so efficient in their costs and expenses?" AT&T and Sprint began cutting jobs to push down their costs to WorldCom's level. "The market said what a marvelous management job WorldCom was doing and they would look over to AT&T and say, 'these guys aren't keeping up.' So, my shareholders were hurt. We laid off tens of thousands of employees in an accelerated fashion [in a futile effort to match WorldCom's phantom profits] and I think the industry was hurt," Armstrong says. "It just wrecked the whole industry," says Esrey.

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Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, reports The Register, since they're still relying on non-continuous funding from grants and donations.
And it's not just because bandwidth is expensive, he said at this year's FOSDEM. "The problem is they don't have enough money to spend on the very security features that we all desperately need..."


In a follow-up LinkedIn exchange after this article had posted, Winser estimated it could cost $5 million to $8 million a year to run a major registry the size of Crates.io, which gets about 125 billion downloads a year. And this number wouldn't include any substantial bandwidth and infrastructure donations (Like Fastly's for Crates.io). Adding to that bill is the growing cost of identifying malware, the proliferation of which has been amplified through the use of AI and scripts. These repositories have detected 845,000 malware packages from 2019 to January 2025 (the vast majority of those nasty packages came to npm)...

In some cases benevolent parties can cover [bandwidth] bills: Python's PyPI registry bandwidth needs for shipping copies of its 700,000+ packages (amounting to 747PB annually at a sustained rate of 189 Gbps) are underwritten by Fastly, for instance. Otherwise, the project would have to pony up about $1.8 million a month. Yet the costs Winser was most concerned about are not bandwidth or hosting; they are the security features needed to ensure the integrity of containers and packages. Alpha-Omega underwrites a "distressingly" large amount of security work around registries, he said. It's distressing because if Alpha-Omega itself were to miss a funding round, a lot of registries would be screwed. Alpha-Omega's recipients include the Python Software Foundation, Rust Foundation, Eclipse Foundation, OpenJS Foundation for Node.js and jQuery, and Ruby Central.

Donations and memberships certainly help defray costs. Volunteers do a lot of what otherwise would be very expensive work. And there are grants about...Winser did not offer a solution, though he suggested the key is to convince the corporate bean counters to consider paid registries as "a normal cost of doing business and have it show up in their opex as opposed to their [open source program office] donation budget."

The dilemma was summed up succinctly by the anonymous Slashdot reader who submitted this story.

"Free beer is great. Securing the keg costs money!"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot writes: Researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm, and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time.

This article in Science News includes footage of the robotic arm reattaching itself to the skittering robot hand, which can also hold objects against both sides of its palm simultaneously, and "can even unscrew the cap off a mustard bottle while holding the bottle in place."

With its unusual agility, it could navigate and retrieve objects in spaces too confined for human hands. When attached to the mechanical arm, the robotic hand could pick up objects much like a human hand. The bot pinched a ball between two fingers, wrapped four fingers around a metal rod and held a flat disc between fingers and palm.


But the bot isn't constrained by human anatomy... When the robot was separated from the arm, it was most stable walking on four or five fingers and using one or two fingers for grabbing and carrying things, the team found. In one set of trials with both bots, the hand detached from the robotic arm and used its fingers as legs to skitter over to a wooden block. Once there, it picked up the block with one finger and carried it back to the arm.

The crawling bot could one day aid in industrial inspections of pipes and equipment too small for a human or larger robot to access, says Xiao Gao, a roboticist now at Wuhan University in China. It might retrieve objects in a warehouse or navigate confined spaces in disaster response efforts.

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Imagine a 280-unit apartment complex offering no on-site leasing office with a human agent for questions. "Instead, the entire process has been outsourced to AI..." reports SFGate, "from touring to signing the lease to completing management tasks once you actually move in."

Now imagine it's far more than just one apartment complex...

At two other Jack London Square apartment buildings, my initial interactions were also with a robot. At the Allegro, my fiance and I entered the leasing office for our tour and asked for "Grace P," the leasing agent who had emailed us. "Oh, that's just our AI assistant," the woman at the front desk told us... At Aqua Via, another towering apartment complex across the street, I emailed back and forth with a very helpful and polite "Sofia M." My pal Sofia seemed so human-like in her responses that I did not realize she was AI until I looked a little closer at a text she'd sent me. "Msgs may be AI or human generated...." [S]he continued to text me for weeks after I'd moved on, trying to win me back. When I looked at the fine print, I realized both of these complexes were using EliseAI, a leading AI housing startup that claims to be involved in managing 1 in 6 apartments in the U.S...

[50 corporate landlords have funded a VC named RET Ventures to invest in and deploy rental-automating AI, and SFGate's reporter spoke to partner Christopher Yip.] According to Yip, AI is common in large apartment complexes not just in the tech-centric Bay Area, but across the entire country. It all kicked off at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, he said, when contactless, self-guided apartment tours and completely virtual tours where people rented apartments sight unseen became commonplace. Technology's infiltration into the renting process has only grown deeper in the years since, Yip said, mirroring how pervasive AI has become in many other facets of our lives. "From an industry perspective, it's really about meeting the renter where they are," Yip said. He pointed to how many renters now prefer to interact through text and email, and want to tour apartments at their convenience — say, at 7 p.m. after work, when a typical leasing office might be closed.

The latest updates in technology not only allow you to take a self-guided tour with AI unlocking the door for you, but also to ask AI questions by conversing with voice AI as you wander through the kitchen and bedroom at your leisure. And while a human leasing agent might ghost you for days or weeks at a time, AI responds almost instantly — EliseAI typically responds within 30 seconds, [said Fran Loftus, chief experience officer at EliseAI]... [I]n some scenarios, the goal does seem to be to eliminate humans entirely. "We do have long-term plans of building fully autonomous buildings," Loftus said.... "We think there's a time and a place for that, depending on the type of property. But really right now, it's about helping with this crazy turnover in this industry."
The reporter says they missed the human touch, since "The second AI was involved, the interaction felt cold. When a human couldn't even be bothered to show up to give me a tour, my trust evaporated."

But they conclude that in the years ahead, human landlords offering tours "will probably go the way of landlines and VCRs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Feyenoord heeft in De Kuip een minimale zege geboekt. In een levendige eerste helft wisten de Rotterdammers de achterstand tegen Telstar om te buigen in een 2-1 voorsprong door twee doelpunten van Anis Hadj Moussa. Het Legioen vermaakte zich in de tweede helft vooral met de invalbeurt van Raheem Sterling, die in minuut zestig van de wedstrijd zijn debuut maakte voor Feyenoord.

Veel mensen uit de media en politiek hebben zondag verdrietig gereageerd op het overlijden van presentator Koos Postema (93). Daarnaast klinken er veel lovende woorden voor de radio- en tv-vakman: “Het is een icoon van de Nederlandse radio en televisie met wie generaties zijn opgegroeid.”

Feyenoord staat op voorsprong in De Kuip tegen Telstar. In een levendige eerste helft kwamen de Rotterdammers op achterstand door een doelpunt van Jochem Ritmeester van der Kamp. Feyenoord wist het tij in de eerste helft te keren door twee doelpunten van Hadj Moussa, die de bal twee keer kreeg aangeleverd van Jordan Bos.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

MHKBB posted a photo:

Schwenningen Moor
Camera: Hasselblad 503CW
Lens: Carl Zeiss C-Planar T* 2.8/80
Film: Ilford XP2 super 400

beeldmark has added a photo to the pool:

Shimogyō-ku, Kyoto

VERONA (ANP) - Shorttrackster Xandra Velzeboer en langebaanschaatser Jorrit Bergsma hebben bij de sluitingsceremonie van de 25e Winterspelen de Nederlandse vlag binnengedragen in de historische Arena di Verona, waar normaal gesproken theater en opera worden opgevoerd. De Olympische Spelen begonnen zestien dagen eerder met de openingsceremonie in stadion San Siro in Milaan.

Velzeboer won op de Spelen de 500 en 1000 meter en Bergsma was de beste op de massastart en pakte brons op de 10 kilometer. Zij kregen zaterdag van chef de mission Carl Verheijen te horen dat ze de vlag mochten dragen. 24 van de 38 andere sporters van TeamNL zijn ook aanwezig bij de slotceremonie, die tot 23.00 uur duurt.

Met tien gouden medailles en twintig medailles totaal waren het voor Nederland de succesvolste Winterspelen ooit. Jens van 't Wout, vlaggendrager bij de openingsceremonie in Milaan, blonk uit met drie gouden en een bronzen medaille.

VERONA (ANP) - De sluitingsceremonie van de 25e editie van de Winterspelen in Milaan in Cortina d'Ampezzo is om 20.30 uur begonnen. Het slotfeest is in de historische Arena di Verona, een Romeins amfitheater dat plaats biedt aan 20.000 toeschouwers.

Van de 38 Nederlandse sporters die aan de Spelen meededen, wonen er 26 de ceremonie bij. Naast de twee vlaggendragers Xandra Velzeboer en Jorrit Bergsma zijn dat Kimberley Bos, Melissa Peperkamp, Romy van Vreden, Michel Tsiba, Daria Danilova, Michelle Velzeboer, Selma Poutsma, Zoë Deltrap, Jens van 't Wout, Melle van 't Wout, Teun Boer, Friso Emons, Itzhak de Laat, Tijmen Snel, Joy Beune, Stijn van de Bunt, Sebas Diniz, Jenning de Boo, Kjeld Nuis, Femke Kok, Antoinette Rijpma-de Jong, Marijke Groenewoud, Merel Conijn en Bente Kerkhoff.

Voor Nederland waren het met tien gouden medailles en de derde plaats in het medailleklassement de succesvolste Winterspelen ooit. Aan het einde van de zondag geeft Milaan de organisatie van de Winterspelen over aan de Franse Alpen. IJsstadion Thialf in Heerenveen is in beeld als mogelijke locatie voor het langebaanschaatsen tijdens de Winterspelen van 2030. Frankrijk beschikt zelf niet over een geschikt ijsstadion.

De Nederlandse sporters stappen maandag even voor 11.00 uur op het vliegtuig en komen naar verwachting rond 12.45 uur aan op Schiphol. De medaillewinnaars worden dinsdag ontvangen bij koning Willem-Alexander, koningin Máxima en prinses Amalia op Paleis Noordeinde in Den Haag.

PARIJS (ANP) - Activisten hebben in het Louvre in Parijs een foto van de Britse oud-prins Andrew opgehangen. Het gaat om een inmiddels bekende foto van afgelopen donderdag, waarop Andrew onderuitgezakt op de achterbank van zijn auto zit na een urenlang politieverhoor.

De actiegroep Everyone Hates Elon heeft beelden gedeeld waarop te zien is dat iemand de ingelijste foto aan de muur hangt. De foto is voorzien van het onderschrift "Nu zweet hij", als knipoog naar Andrews bewering dat hij nooit zweet.

Andrew werd donderdag opgepakt voor een ambtsmisdrijf en uren later weer vrijgelaten. Volgens Britse media wordt hij ervan verdacht als handelsgezant vertrouwelijke informatie te hebben doorgespeeld aan Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew komt veelvuldig voor in de Epstein-files, wat ertoe leidde dat zijn titels werden afgenomen. Hij is vooralsnog niet aangeklaagd.

Het incident gebeurt terwijl het Louvre onder vuur ligt vanwege de gebrekkige beveiliging na een spraakmakende juwelenroof afgelopen oktober.

„El Mencho” was de leider van een van de grootste drugskartels van Mexico en een van de meest gezochte drugsbazen ter wereld. In meerdere staten in het land worden branden en schietpartijen gemeld.

Vrijdag maakte de BBB bekend dat Caroline van der Plas het partijleiderschap zou neerleggen. Drie partijprominenten laten in een brief weten teleurgesteld te zijn dat partijleden niet mochten meebeslissen. „We hebben in Mona een zeer ervaren bestuurder en politicus, alsook een stemmenkanon.”

Het kindje had zich voor de pauze al gemeld. In een bomvol Concertgebouw luisterden we aandachtig naar de ‘Kammersinfonie op.110a’ van Sjostakovitsj toen een heldere kinderstem…

Guess the daily world capital in 6 tries. Each guess shows distance, a directional arrow, and matching attributes: Capitalle

The outcry and activism of the 2010s – itself enabled by earlier generations of feminists – brought us to this moment. But if the Trump administration has its way, opposing forces will prevail

This week, for the first time since 1647, a member of the royal family was arrested in the United Kingdom, not over allegations of sexual wrongdoing but for trade-related communications with the supplier of those victims, Jeffrey Epstein, to whom he is supposed to have leaked state secrets. The public outrage in the US about Epstein forced the government to release the files, including emails between Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Epstein now under investigation in the criminal case.

The arrestee formerly known as Prince Andrew was accused by Virginia Guiffre with having had sex with her when she was a minor being trafficked by Epstein. He has always denied wrongdoing. Until his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office, only his family had held him accountable for his ongoing association with Epstein after Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting a minor for prostitution. “Today our broken hearts have lifted,” Virginia Giuffre’s family stated, “at the news that no one is above the law, not even royalty.”

Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and the forthcoming The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change

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