25 years ago today, the late, great Suck.com played a prank on Slashdot. Their daily column of pop-culture criticism was replaced by... Suckdot, a parody site satirically filled with Slashdot-style headlines like "Linux Possibly Defamed Somewhere." RabidZelot was one of a bunch to report: "In Richmond, California, this afternoon, this dude said something bad about Linux at the Hilltop Mall near the fountains right after the first showing of Phantom Menace let out. He was last seen heading towards Sears and has a 'Where Do You Want to Go Today?' T-shirt and brown hair. Let us know when you spot him."

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There's more Slashdot-style news blurbs like "Red Hat Reports Income". (In which Red Hat founder Bob Young finds a quarter on the way to the conference room, and adds it to the company's balance sheet...) Its list of user-submitted "Ask Suckdot" questions include geek-mocking topics like "Is Overclocking Worth That Burning Smell?" and "HOW DO I TURN OFF SHIFT_LOCK?" And somewhere there's even a parody of Jon Katz (an early contributor to Slashdot's content) — though clicking "Read More" on the essay leads to a surprising message from the parodist admitting defeat. "Slashdot has roughly 60 million links on its front page. I'm simply not going to waste any more of my life making fun of each and every one of them. Half the time you can't tell the real Slashdot from the parody anyway."

Suck.com was a fixture in the early days of the web, launched in 1995 (and pre-dating the launch of Slashdot by two years). It normally published link-heavy commentary every weekday for nearly six years. Contributing writer Greg Knauss was apparently behind much of the Suckdot parody — even taking a jab at Slashdot's early online podcast, "Geeks in Space" (1999-2001). [Suckdot informs its readers in 1999 that "The latest installment of Geeks Jabbering at a Mic is up..."] Other Suckdot headlines?

• Minneapolis-St. Paul Star-Tribune Uses Words "Red" and "Hat" in Article
• BSD Repeatedly Ignored
• DVD Encryption Cracked: Godzilla for Everybody!
• Linus Ascends Bodily Into Heaven
• iMac: Ha Ha Ha Ha Wimp

There were no hard feelings. Seven months later Slashdot was even linking to Greg Knauss's Suck.com essay proclaiming that "Mozilla is dead, or might as well be..."

So whatever happened to Suck.com? Though it stopped publishing in 2001, an outpouring of nostalgia in 2005 apparently prompted its owners at Lycos.com to continue hosting its content through 2018. (This unofficial history notes that one fan scrambling to archive the site was Aaron Swartz.) Though it's not clear what happened next, here in 2024 its original domain is now up for sale — at an asking price of $1 million.

But all of Suck.com's original content is still available online — including its Suckdot parody — at archive.org. Which, mercifully, is still here a full 28 years after launching in 1996...

Reddit's moderators drew some criticism after "locking" a discussion about C++ paper/proposal author Andrew Tomazos. The URL (in the post with the locked discussion) had led to a submission for Slashdot's queue of potential (but unpublished) stories, which nevertheless attracted 178 upvotes on Reddit and another 85 comments. That unpublished Slashdot submission was also submitted to Hacker News, where it drew another 38 upvotes but was also eventually flagged.

Back on Reddit's C++ subreddit (which has 300,000 members), a "direct appeal" was submitted to the moderators to unlock Reddit's earlier discussion (drawing over 100 upvotes). But there's one problem with this drama, as Slashdot reader brantondaveperson pointed out. "There appears to be no independent confirmation of this story anywhere. The only references to it are this Slashdot story, and a Reddit story. Neither cite sources or provide evidence." This drew a response from the person submitting the potential story to Slashdot: You raise a valid point. The communication around this was private. The complaint about the [paper's] title, the author's response, and the decision to expel were all communicated by either private email, on private mailing lists or in private in-person meetings. These private communications could be quoted by participants in said communications. Please let us know if that would be sufficient.
The paper had already drawn some criticism in a longer blog post by programmer Izzy Muerte (which called it "a fucking cleaned up transcript of a ChatGPT conversation".) It's one of six papers submitted this year by Tomaszos to the ISO's "WG21" C++ committee. Tomazos (according to his LinkedIn profile) is "lead programmer" of videogame company Fury Games (founded by him and his wife). It also shows an earlier two-year stint as a Google senior software engineer.

There were two people claiming direct knowledge of the situation posting on Reddit. A user named kritzikratzi posted: I contacted Andrew Tomazos directly. According to him the title "The Undefined Behavior Question" caused complaints inside WG21. The Standard C++ Foundation then offered two choices (1) change the paper title (2) be expelled. Andrew Tomazos chose (2).
A Reddit user Dragdu posted: He wasn't expelled for that paper, but rather this was the last straw. And he wasn't banned from the [WG21] committee, that is borderline impossible, but rather the organization he was representing told him to fuck off and don't represent them anymore. If he can find different organization to represent, he can still attend... Tomazos has been on lot of people's shit list, because his contributions suck... He decided that the title is too important to his ViSiOn for the chatgpt BS submitted as a paper, and that he won't change the title. This was the straw that broke the camel's back and his "sponsor" told him to fuck off....
There was also some back-and-forth on Hacker News. bun_terminator: r/cpp mods just woke up, banning everyone who question... this lunatic behavior.

(Reddit moderator): We did not go on a banning spree, we banned only one person, you. After removing the comment where you insulted someone, I checked your history, noticed that you did not meaningfully participate in r/cpp outside this thread, and decided to remove someone from the community who'd only be there to cause trouble.

Meta said it plans to introduce advertisements on Threads starting in early 2025, according to a report by The Information (paywalled). GuruFocus reports: Leading the effort -- which is still in its early phases -- is a team inside Instagram's advertising division. One source said Threads is anticipated to let a small number of marketers produce and post material on the platform in January. Threads had about 275 million monthly active users as late as October. During the company's third-quarter earnings call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg observed that Threads daily sign-up count was about one million, each day.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The US supreme court grappled on Wednesday with a bid by Meta's Facebook to scuttle a federal securities fraud lawsuit brought by shareholders who accused the social media platform of misleading them about the misuse of user data. The justices heard arguments in Facebook's appeal of a lower court's decision allowing the 2018 class action suit led by Amalgamated Bank to proceed. The suit seeks unspecified monetary damages in part to recoup the lost value of the Facebook stock held by the investors. It is one of two cases coming before them this month -- the other one involving artificial intelligence chipmaker Nvidia on 13 November -- that could lead to rulings making it harder for private litigants to hold companies to account for alleged securities fraud.

At issue is whether Facebook broke the law when it failed to detail the prior data breach in subsequent business-risk disclosures, and instead portrayed the risk of such incidents as purely hypothetical. Facebook argued in a supreme court brief that it was not required to reveal that its warned-of risk had already materialized because "a reasonable investor" would understand risk disclosures to be forward-looking statements. "When we think about these questions, we're not looking only to lies or complete false statements," the liberal justice Elena Kagan told Kannon Shanmugam, the lawyer for Facebook. "We're also looking to misleading statements or misleading omissions." The conservative justice Samuel Alito asked Shanmugam: "Isn't it the case that an evaluation of risks is always forward-looking?" "It is. And that is essentially what underlies our argument here," Shanmugam responded.

The plaintiffs accused Facebook of misleading investors in violation of the Securities Exchange Act, a 1934 federal law that requires publicly traded companies to disclose their business risks. They claimed the company unlawfully withheld information from investors about a 2015 data breach involving British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica that affected more than 30 million Facebook users. Edward Davila, a US district judge, dismissed the lawsuit but the San Francisco-based ninth US circuit court of appeals revived it. The supreme court's ruling is expected by the end of June.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta will allow U.S. government agencies and contractors working on national security to use its artificial intelligence models for military purposes, the company said on Monday, in a shift from its policy that prohibited the use of its technology for such efforts. Meta said that it would make its A.I. models, called Llama, available to federal agencies and that it was working with defense contractors such as Lockheed Martin and Booz Allen as well as defense-focused tech companies including Palantir and Anduril. The Llama models are "open source," which means the technology can be freely copied and distributed by other developers, companies and governments.

Meta's move is an exception to its "acceptable use policy," which forbade the use of the company's A.I. software for "military, warfare, nuclear industries," among other purposes. In a blog post on Monday, Nick Clegg, Meta's president of global affairs, said the company now backed "responsible and ethical uses" of the technology that supported the United States and "democratic values" in a global race for A.I. supremacy. "Meta wants to play its part to support the safety, security and economic prosperity of America -- and of its closest allies too," Mr. Clegg wrote. He added that "widespread adoption of American open source A.I. models serves both economic and security interests." The company said it would also share its technology with members of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance: Canada, Britain, Australia and New Zealand in addition to the United States.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Last month at Meta Connect, Mark Zuckerberg said that Meta AI was "on track" to become the most-used generative AI assistant in the world. The company has now passed a significant milestone toward that goal, with Meta AI passing the 500 million user mark, Zuckerberg revealed during the company's latest earnings call. The half billion user mark comes just barely a year after the social network first launched its AI assistant last fall. Zuckerberg said the company still expects to become the "most-used" assistant by the end of 2024, though he's never specified how the company is measuring that metric. Zuck said that AI-driven improvements in feed and video recommendations have led to an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and 5% increase on Instagram this year. Advertisers have also leveraged the company's AI tools to generate over 15 million ads in just the past month.

Separately, Meta's Threads app is gaining over a million new sign-ups daily, with nearly 275 million total monthly users.

According to The Verge, Meta has "begun laying off employees across various departments, including WhatsApp, Instagram, and Reality Labs." From the report: Rather than a mass, companywide layoff, these smaller cuts seem to coincide with reorganizations of specific teams. Some Meta employees have started posting that they've been laid off. Among them is Jane Manchun Wong, who gained notoriety for reporting on unannounced features coming to apps before joining the Threads team in 2023. Meta laid off 11,000 employees in 2022 and then cut 10,000 more people as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "year of efficiency" in 2023.

Further reading: Tech Layoffs Highest Since Dot-Com Crash

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Adobe (ADBE.O), opens new tab on Monday said it has started publicly distributing an AI model that can generate video from text prompts, joining the growing field of companies trying to upend film and television production using generative artificial intelligence. The Firefly Video Model, as the technology is called, will compete with OpenAI's Sora, which was introduced earlier this year, while TikTok owner ByteDance and Meta Platforms have also announced their video tools in recent months.

Facing much larger rivals, Adobe has staked its future on building models trained on data that it has rights to use, ensuring the output can be legally used in commercial work. San Jose, California-based Adobe will start opening up the tool to people who have signed up for its waiting list but did not give a general release date. While Adobe has not yet announced any customers using its video tools, it said on Monday that PepsiCo-owned Gatorade will use its image generation model for a site where customers can order custom-made bottles, and Mattel has been using Adobe tools to help design packaging for its Barbie line of dolls.

For its video tools, Adobe has aimed at making them practical for everyday use by video creators and editors, with a special focus on making the footage blend in with conventional footage, said Ely Greenfield, Adobe's chief technology officer for digital media. "We really focus on fine-grain control, teaching the model the concepts that video editors and videographers use -- things like camera position, camera angle, camera motion," Greenfield told Reuters in an interview.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The European Union's top court has sided with a privacy challenge to Meta's data retention policies. It ruled on Friday that social networks, such as Facebook, cannot keep using people's information for ad targeting indefinitely. The judgement could have major implications on the way Meta and other ad-funded social networks operate in the region. Limits on how long personal data can be kept must be applied in order to comply with data minimization principles contained in the bloc's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Breaches of the regime can lead to fines of up to 4% of global annual turnover -- which, in Meta's case, could put it on the hook for billions more in penalties (NB: it is already at the top of the leaderboard of Big Tech GDPR breachers). [...]

The original challenge to Meta's ad business dates back to 2014 but was not fully heard in Austria until 2020, per noyb. The Austrian supreme court then referred several legal questions to the CJEU in 2021. Some were answered via a separate challenge to Meta/Facebook, in a July 2023 CJEU ruling -- which struck down the company's ability to claim a "legitimate interest" to process people's data for ads. The remaining two questions have now been dealt with by the CJEU. And it's more bad news for Meta's surveillance-based ad business. Limits do apply. Summarizing this component of the judgement in a press release, the CJEU wrote: "An online social network such as Facebook cannot use all of the personal data obtained for the purposes of targeted advertising, without restriction as to time and without distinction as to type of data."

The ruling looks important on account of how ads businesses, such as Meta's, function. Crudely put, the more of your data they can grab, the better -- as far as they are concerned. Back in 2022, an internal memo penned by Meta engineers which was obtained by Vice's Motherboard likened its data collection practices to tipping bottles of ink into a vast lake and suggested the company's aggregation of personal data lacked controls and did not lend itself to being able to silo different types of data or apply data retention limits. Although Meta claimed at the time that the document "does not describe our extensive processes and controls to comply with privacy regulations." How exactly the adtech giant will need to amend its data retention practices following the CJEU ruling remains to be seen. But the law is clear that it must have limits. "[Advertising] companies must develop data management protocols to gradually delete unneeded data or stop using them," noyb suggests. The court also weighed in a second question that concerns sensitive data that has been "manifestly made public" by the data subject, "and whether sensitive characteristics could be used for ad targeting because of that," reports TechCrunch. "The court ruled that it could not, maintaining the GDPR's purpose limitation principle."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, Meta announced a preview of Movie Gen, a new suite of AI models designed to create and manipulate video, audio, and images, including creating a realistic video from a single photo of a person. The company claims the models outperform other video-synthesis models when evaluated by humans, pushing us closer to a future where anyone can synthesize a full video of any subject on demand. The company does not yet have plans of when or how it will release these capabilities to the public, but Meta says Movie Gen is a tool that may allow people to "enhance their inherent creativity" rather than replace human artists and animators. The company envisions future applications such as easily creating and editing "day in the life" videos for social media platforms or generating personalized animated birthday greetings.

Movie Gen builds on Meta's previous work in video synthesis, following 2022's Make-A-Scene video generator and the Emu image-synthesis model. Using text prompts for guidance, this latest system can generate custom videos with sounds for the first time, edit and insert changes into existing videos, and transform images of people into realistic personalized videos. [...] Movie Gen's video-generation model can create 1080p high-definition videos up to 16 seconds long at 16 frames per second from text descriptions or an image input. Meta claims the model can handle complex concepts like object motion, subject-object interactions, and camera movements. You can view example videos here. Meta also released a research paper with more technical information about the model.

As for the training data, the company says it trained these models on a combination of "licensed and publicly available datasets." Ars notes that this "very likely includes videos uploaded by Facebook and Instagram users over the years, although this is speculation based on Meta's current policies and previous behavior."

Novelist Christopher Farnsworth has filed a class-action lawsuit (PDF) against Meta, accusing the company of using his and other authors' pirated books to train its Llama AI model. Farnsworth seeks damages and an order to stop the alleged copyright infringement, joining a growing group of creators suing tech companies over unauthorized AI training. Reuters reports: Farnsworth said in the lawsuit on Tuesday that Meta fed Llama, which powers its AI chatbots, thousands of pirated books to teach it how to respond to human prompts. Other authors including Ta-Nehisi Coates, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee and comedian Sarah Silverman have brought similar class-action claims against Meta in the same court over its alleged use of their books in AI training. [...] Several groups of copyright owners including writers, visual artists and music publishers have sued major tech companies over the unauthorized use of their work to train generative AI systems. The companies have argued that their AI training is protected by the copyright doctrine of fair use and that the lawsuits threaten the burgeoning AI industry.

At its Connect event earlier this week, Meta said it'll be adding conversational voices to its AI chatbot from celebrities like Awkwafina, John Cena, Dame Judi Dench, Keegan-Michael Key and Kristen Bell. The Verge reports: These celebrity voices will only be available to US users of Meta's apps to start. And if you prefer a voice that is a little more mundane, you can also pick from non-celeb voices with names like "Aspen," "Atlas," or "Clover." [...] Meta is explicitly announcing celebrity partnerships, which likely involve payment or some other deal. Meta hasn't shared those details, but the company has paid each celebrity "millions of dollars" for their voices, according to The Wall Street Journal. And in negotiations, some of the people reportedly wanted to limit what their voices could say and to make sure they weren't liable if Meta AI was used. [...]

Meta's AI updates aren't just about voice conversations. Its chatbot will also now "answer questions about your photos" when you upload images. Send a picture of a cake, ask how to make it, and it'll grab you a recipe that hopefully does just that. And if you want something "added, changed, or removed" from an image, Meta says you can describe anything from "changing your outfit to replacing the background with a rainbow," and it'll carry out that request.

Meta has been fined $101.5 million by the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for storing over half a billion user passwords in plain text for years, with some engineers having access to this data for over a decade. The issue, discovered in 2019, predominantly affected non-US users, especially those using Facebook Lite. AppleInsider reports: Meta Ireland was found guilty of infringing four parts of GDPR, including how it "failed to notify the DPC of a personal data breach concerning storage of user passwords in plain text." Meta Ireland did report the failure, but only some months after it was discovered. "It is widely accepted that user passwords should not be stored in plaintext, considering the risks of abuse that arise from persons accessing such data," said Graham Doyle, Deputy Commissioner at the DPC, in a statement about the fine. "It must be borne in mind, that the passwords the subject of consideration in this case, are particularly sensitive, as they would enable access to users' social media accounts."

Other than the fine and an official reprimand, the full extent of the DPC's ruling is yet to be released publicly. The details published so far do not reveal whether the passwords included any of US users as well as ones in Ireland or across the rest of the European Union. It's most likely that the issue concerns only non-US users, however. That's because in 2019, Facebook told CNN that the majority of the plain text passwords were for a service called Facebook Lite, which it described as being a cut-down service for areas of the world with slower connectivity.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced updates to the company's Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses at Meta Connect 2024 on Wednesday. [...] Meta says its smart glasses will soon have real-time AI video capabilities, meaning you can ask the Ray Ban Meta glasses questions about what you're seeing in front of you, and Meta AI will verbally answer you in real time. Currently, the Ray-Ban Meta glasses can only take a picture and describe that to you or answer questions about it, but the video upgrade should make the experience more natural, in theory at least. These multimodal features are slated to come later this year. In a demo, users could ask Ray-Ban Meta questions about a meal they were cooking, or city scenes taking place in front of them. The real-time video capabilities mean that Meta's AI should be able to process live action and respond in an audible way. This is easier said than done, however, and we'll have to see how fast and seamless the feature is in practice. We've seen demonstrations of these real-time AI video capabilities from Google and OpenAI, but Meta would be the first to launch such features in a consumer product.

Zuckerberg also announced live language translation for Ray-Ban Meta. English speaking users can talk to someone speaking French, Italian, or Spanish, and their Ray-Ban Meta glasses should be able to translate what the other person is saying into their language of choice. Meta says this feature is coming later this year and will include more language later on. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses are getting reminders, which will allow people to ask Meta AI to remind them about things they look at through the smart glasses. In a demo, a user asked their Ray-Ban Meta glasses to remember a jacket they were looking at, so they could share the image with a friend later on. Meta announced that integrations with Amazon Music, Audible, and iHeart are coming to its smart glasses. This should make it easier for people to listen to music on their streaming service of choice using the glasses' built-in speakers. The Ray-Ban Meta glasses will also gain the ability to scan QR codes or phone numbers from the glasses. Users can ask the glasses to scan something, and the QR code will immediately open on the person's phone with no further action required. Zuckerberg also unveiled the company's prototype AR glasses codenamed Orion, which feature a 70-degree field of view, Micro LED projectors, and silicon carbide lenses that beam graphics directly into the wearer's eyes.

Amazon, Meta, and Tesla were named by the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) as some of the worst corporate underminers of democracy . These companies were accused of union busting, monopolizing media and technology, violating human rights, contributing to climate change, and fostering political movements that threaten democratic institutions. The full list of "corporate underminers of democracy for 2024" is Amazon, Blackstone Group, ExxonMobil, Glencore, Meta, Tesla and the Vanguard Group. The Register reports: The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) today published a list of seven companies it said were "emblematic" of the ways large international corporations have begun tossing their weight around to influence global affairs. Those businesses, ITUC noted, violate trade union and alleged human rights, monopolize media and technology, exacerbate the climate catastrophe and try to privatize public services in a way that "protects and expands [their] own profits by undermining democracy." "These companies deploy complex lobbying operations to undermine popular will and disrupt existing or nascent global policy that could hold them accountable," ITUC wrote. The desire for greater corporate power, the Confederation added, invariably puts corporate interests in bed with anti-democratic political movements like the modern far-right. Right-wing politicians, ITUC noted, tend to lower taxes, undercut higher wages for workers, crack down on trade unions, and the like - all things sure to please the likes of corporations like Amazon, Tesla, and Meta as evidenced by plenty of prior reporting and research. For Amazon, the ITUC criticized the company for becoming "notorious for its union busting and low wages, monopoly in e-commerce, egregious carbon emissions through its AWS [datacenters], corporate tax evasion and lobbying."

Meta was accused of exploiting user data, undermining privacy laws, manipulating global information, and failing to regulate harmful content on its platforms. "Meta's algorithms can quite literally alter humanity's perceptions of reality," ITUC said. "Its revenue model exploits trillions of personalized data points to deliver highly effective advertising." Some have referred to the company as "a foreign state, populated by people without sovereignty, ruled by a leader with absolute power."

As for Tesla, it was condemned for poor labor practices, anti-union politics, unsafe working conditions, human rights violations, and environmental damage in its supply chain. "The world's most highly-valued automaker has quickly become known as one of its most belligerent employers. Tesla's rapid market success has been outpaced only by the descent of its corporate leaders into anti-democratic, anti-union politics."