Posted by BeauHD from Slashdot
From the final-text department: An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission clarified its net neutrality rules to prohibit more kinds of fast lanes. While the FCC voted to restore net neutrality rules on April 25, it didn't release the final text of the order until yesterday. The final text (PDF) has some changes compared to the draft version released a few weeks before the vote.
Both the draft and final rules ban paid prioritization, or fast lanes that application providers have to pay Internet service providers for. But some net neutrality proponents raised concerns about the draft text because it would have let ISPs speed up certain types of applications as long as the application providers don't have to pay for special treatment. The advocates wanted the FCC to clarify its no-throttling rule to explicitly prohibit ISPs from speeding up applications instead of only forbidding the slowing of applications down. Without such a provision, they argued that ISPs could charge consumers more for plans that speed up specific types of content. [...]
"We clarify that a BIAS [Broadband Internet Access Service] provider's decision to speed up 'on the basis of Internet content, applications, or services' would 'impair or degrade' other content, applications, or services which are not given the same treatment," the FCC's final order said. The "impair or degrade" clarification means that speeding up is banned because the no-throttling rule says that ISPs "shall not impair or degrade lawful Internet traffic on the basis of Internet content, application, or service." The updated language in the final order "clearly prohibits ISPs from limiting fast lanes to apps or categories of apps they select," leaving no question as to whether the practice is prohibited, said Stanford Law professor Barbara van Schewick.
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Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the coming-to-a-screen-near-you department: Amazon Prime Video subscribers will see new types of advertisements this broadcast year. Amazon announced today that it's adding new ad formats to its video streaming service, hoping to encourage people to interact with the ads and shop on Amazon. From a report: In January, Prime Video streams included commercials unless subscribers paid $3 extra per month. That has meant that watching stuff on Prime Video ad-free costs $12 per month or, if you're also a Prime subscriber, $18 per month. Amazon has heightened focus on streaming ads this year. Those who opted for Prime Video with commercials will soon see shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive brand trivia ads, as Amazon calls them.
Amazon said that advertisers could buy these new displays to be shown "across the vast majority of content on Prime Video, wherever it's streamed." All the new ad formats allow a viewer to place advertised products in their Amazon cart. With carousel ads, subscribers will be pushed to shop "a sliding lineup of" products during ad breaks during shows and movies, Amazon said, adding: "The ad automatically pauses so that customers can browse, and automatically resumes play when ad interaction has stopped."
Posted by from MMO Champion
Cataclysm Classic Archaeology Fixes Are Now Live
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
A few minutes ago, we deployed hotfixes to address issues with Dwarven and Night Elf archaeology projects. The following projects are now available during the Cataclysm Classic Pre-patch:
Dwarf
Silver Kris of Korl
Warmaul of Burningeye
Word of Empress Zoe
Pipe of Franclorn Forgewright
Spiked Gauntlets of Anvilrage
Scepter of Bronzebeard
The Innkeeper’s Daughter
Night Elf
Wisp Amulet
Carcanet of the Hundred Magi
Umbra Crescent
Bones of Transformation
Silver Scroll Case
We also double-checked on the Pterrordax Hatchling and found it waiting as intended in Fossil Digsites at Archaeology skill level 525.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the moving-forward department: An anonymous reader shares a report: One Raspberry Pi often leads to another. Soon enough, you're running out of spots in your free RealVNC account for your tiny boards and "real" computers. Even if you go the hardened route of SSH or an X connection, you have to keep track of where they all are. All of this is not the easiest thing to tackle if you're new to single-board computers or just eager to get started.
Enter Raspberry Pi Connect, a new built-in way to access a Raspberry Pi from nearly anywhere you can open a browser, whether to control yourself or provide remote assistance. On a Raspberry Pi 4, 5, or Pi 400 kit, you install Pi connect with a single terminal line, reboot the Pi, and then click a new tray icon to connect the Pi to a Raspberry Pi ID (and then enable two-factor authentication, of course). From then on, visiting connect.raspberrypi.com gives you an encrypted connection to your desktop. It's a direct connection if possible, and if not, it runs through relay servers in London, encrypting it with DTLS and keeping only the metadata needed for the service to work. The Pi will show a notification in its tray that somebody has connected, and you can manage screen sharing from there.
Posted by from MMO Champion
Destruction Warlock - Inferno Spell Updates
Originally Posted by Blizzard
(
Blue Tracker /
Official Forums)
Hello, Destruction Warlocks.
With the release of 10.2.7 yesterday, the scaling of Inferno became heavily reduced when Rain of Fire affects more than 5 targets. We investigated this, and found it was a change that was originally implemented with Shadowlands Season 4, and later became unintentionally broken with the launch of Dragonflight and went unnoticed.
With the release of 10.2.7, the reduced scaling was inadvertently fixed when unrelated changes were made.
Considering the timing of this, we’re going to remove the reduced scaling. In The War Within, we plan to redesign Inferno to address how Destruction scales in power in relation to target count.
Thank you for the reports regarding this issue and we hope to have the fix implemented soon.
Posted by Willa Rowe from Kotaku
On May 7,
Microsoft closed down four first-party development studios it had acquired from
Zenimax Media in 2021 including Tango Gameworks, developer of
The Evil Within series and 2023’s surprise hit
Hi-Fi Rush. It’s the latest
round of layoffs and closures that the gaming industry, and Xbox specifically, has seen in…
< This article continues on their website >
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the confronting-new-realities department: Researchers should not be using tools like ChatGPT to automatically peer review papers, warned organizers of top AI conferences and academic publishers worried about maintaining intellectual integrity. From a report: With recent advances in large language models, researchers have been increasingly using them to write peer reviews -- a time-honored academic tradition that examines new research and assesses its merits, showing a person's work has been vetted by other experts in the field. That's why asking ChatGPT to analyze manuscripts and critique the research, without having read the papers, would undermine the peer review process. To tackle the problem, AI and machine learning conferences are now thinking about updating their policies, as some guidelines don't explicitly ban the use of AI to process manuscripts, and the language can be fuzzy.
The Conference and Workshop on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) is considering setting up a committee to determine whether it should update its policies around using LLMs for peer review, a spokesperson told Semafor.
At NeurIPS, researchers should not "share submissions with anyone without prior approval" for example, while the ethics code at the International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), whose annual confab kicked off Tuesday, states that "LLMs are not eligible for authorship." Representatives from NeurIPS and ICLR said "anyone" includes AI, and that authorship covers both papers and peer review comments. A spokesperson for Springer Nature, an academic publishing company best known for its top research journal Nature, said that experts are required to evaluate research and leaving it to AI is risky.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the how-about-that department: Several large-scale, human-driven changes to the planet -- including climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the spread of invasive species -- are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals and plants, according to a new study. From a report: Scientists have documented these effects before in more targeted studies that have focused on specific diseases and ecosystems. For instance, they have found that a warming climate may be helping malaria expand in Africa and that a decline in wildlife diversity may be boosting Lyme disease cases in North America. But the new research, a meta-analysis of nearly 1,000 previous studies, suggests that these patterns are relatively consistent around the globe and across the tree of life.
"It's a big step forward in the science," said Colin Carlson, a biologist at Georgetown University, who was not an author of the new analysis. "This paper is one of the strongest pieces of evidence that I think has been published that shows how important it is health systems start getting ready to exist in a world with climate change, with biodiversity loss." In what is likely to come as a more surprising finding, the researchers also found that urbanization decreased the risk of infectious disease. The new analysis, which was published in Nature on Wednesday, focused on five "global change drivers" that are altering ecosystems across the planet: biodiversity change, climate change, chemical pollution, the introduction of nonnative species and habitat loss or change.
Posted by msmash from Slashdot
From the leap-forward department: Researchers have hailed another "leap forward" for AI after Google DeepMind unveiled the latest version of its AlphaFold program, which can predict how proteins behave in the complex symphony of life. From a report: The breakthrough promises to shed fresh light on the biological machinery that underpins living organisms and drive breakthroughs in fields from antibiotics and cancer therapy to new materials and resilient crops. "It's a big milestone for us," said Demis Hassabis, the chief executive of Google DeepMind and the spin-off, Isomorphic Labs, which co-developed AlphaFold3. "Biology is a dynamic system and you have to understand how properties of biology emerge through the interactions between different molecules."
Earlier versions of AlphaFold focused on predicting the 3D structures of 200m proteins, the building blocks of life, from their chemical constituents. Knowing what shape a protein takes is crucial because it determines how the protein will function -- or malfunction -- inside a living organism. AlphaFold3 was trained on a global database of 3D molecular structures and goes a step further by predicting how proteins will interact with the other molecules and ions they encounter. When asked to make a prediction, the program starts with a cloud of atoms and steadily reshapes it into the most accurate predicted structure. Writing in Nature, the researchers describe how AlphaFold3 can predict how proteins interact with other proteins, ions, strands of genetic code, and smaller molecules, such as those developed for medicines. In tests, the program's accuracy varied from 62% to 76%.
After shutting down multiple Bethesda studios, Xbox and Bethesda leadership held a town hall meeting with staff to discuss the closures, explaining that the company’s studios had been spread too thin and that it wanted to focus on fewer projects moving forward. 
Hades 2 arrived via Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store on May 6 and already it’s been stirring up a ton of excitement. If you’re looking to take its Greek-mythos-inspired roguelike action-RPG gameplay on the go with the Steam Deck, there are a few settings you may wish to tweak. 
Earlier this week, Xbox announced that it would be shuttering several studios it had attained as part of its $7.5 billion purchase of Bethesda, including Arkane Austin, Tango Gameworks, Alpha Dog Games, and Roundhouse Studios, the last of which is being absorbed into another team. Collectively, the studios’ produced… 
WB’s multi-franchise fighting game, MultiVersus,returns later this month and it’s adding Batman’s archnemesis, The Joker, to the game’s large roster of characters. And the iconic character is once again being voiced by Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill. 
There’s really no gentle way to ease you into this situation so I’ll just be blunt: Yoda got removed from Fortnite because an emote inspired by Zoidberg from Futurama was turning the little Jedi master into a nasty monster that crashed people’s games. What a world we live in? 
Electronic Arts, the publisher of most sports games on the market, Battlefield, Mass Effect, and plenty of other huge franchises, is considering putting ads inside its video games as another source of revenue. This isn’t the first time the company has done this, but given how poorly it’s gone in the past, I’m… 
