An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last week, a hobbyist experimenting with the new Flux AI image synthesis model discovered that it's unexpectedly good at rendering custom-trained reproductions of typefaces. While far more efficient methods of displaying computer fonts have existed for decades, the new technique is useful for AI image hobbyists because Flux is capable of rendering depictions of accurate text, and users can now directly insert words rendered in custom fonts into AI image generations. [...] Since Flux is an open model available for download and fine-turning, this past month has been the first time training a typeface LoRA might make sense. That's exactly what an AI enthusiast named Vadim Fedenko (who did not respond to a request for an interview by press time) discovered recently. "I'm really impressed by how this turned out," Fedenko wrote in a Reddit post. "Flux picks up how letters look in a particular style/font, making it possible to train Loras with specific Fonts, Typefaces, etc. Going to train more of those soon."

For his first experiment, Fedenko chose a bubbly "Y2K" style font reminiscent of those popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s, publishing the resulting model on the Civitai platform on August 20. Two days later, a Civitai user named "AggravatingScree7189" posted a second typeface LoRA that reproduces a font similar to one found in the Cyberpunk 2077 video game. "Text was so bad before it never occurred to me that you could do this," wrote a Reddit user named eggs-benedryl when reacting to Fedenko's post on the Y2K font. Another Redditor wrote, "I didn't know the Y2K journal was fake until I zoomed it." It's true that using a deeply trained image synthesis neural network to render a plain old font on a simple background is probably overkill. You probably wouldn't want to use this method to replace Adobe Illustrator while designing a document. "This looks good but it's kinda funny how we're reinventing the idea of fonts as 300MB LoRAs," wrote one Reddit commenter on a thread about the Cyberpunk 2077 font.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: People in a quiet neighborhood in Carthage, a town in Moore County, North Carolina, heard a series of six loud pops a few minutes before 8:00 p.m. on Dec. 3, 2022. A resident named Michael Campbell said he ducked at the sound. Another witness told police they thought they were hearing fireworks. The noise turned out to be someone shooting a rifle at a power substation next door to Campbell's home. The substation, operated by the utility Duke Energy Corp., consists of equipment that converts electricity into different voltages as it's transported to the area and then steered into individual houses. The shots hit the radiator of an electrical transformer, a sensitive piece of technology whose importance would likely be understood only by utility company employees. It began dumping a "vast amount" of oil, according to police reports. A subsequent investigation has pointed to a local right-wing group, one of a wave of attacks or planned attacks on power infrastructure.

By 8:10 the lights in Carthage went out. Minutes later, a security alarm went off at a Duke Energy substation 10 miles away, this one protected from view by large pine trees. When company personnel responded, they found that someone had shot its transformer radiator, too. Police found shell casings on the ground at the site and noticed someone had slashed the tires on nearby service trucks. The substations were designed to support each other, with one capable of maintaining service if the other went down. Knocking out both facilities prevented the company from rerouting power. Police described the two incidents as a coordinated attack. About 45,000 families and businesses remained dark for four days. This was a burden for area grocery stores and local emergency services. One woman, 87-year-old Karin Zoanelli, died in the hours after the shooting when the blackout caused her oxygen machine to stop operating. The North Carolina Medical Examiner's office classified the death as a homicide.

The attack on Duke's facilities in Moore County remains unsolved, but law enforcement officials and other experts suspect it's part of a rising trend of far-right extremists targeting power infrastructure in an attempt to sow chaos. The most ambitious of these saboteurs hope to usher in societal collapse, paving the way for the violent overthrow of the US government, according to researchers who monitor far-right communities. Damaging the power grid has long been a fixation of right-wing extremists, who have plotted such attacks for many years. They've been getting a boost recently from online venues such as "Terrorgram," a loose network of channels on the social media platform Telegram where users across the globe advocate violent white supremacism. In part, people use Terrorgram to egg one another on -- a viral meme shows a stick figure throwing a Molotov cocktail at electrical equipment. People on the forum have also seized on recent anti-immigration riots in the UK, inciting people there to clash with police. In June 2022, months before the Moore County shootings, users on the forum began offering more practical support in the form of a 261-page document titled "Hard Reset," which includes specific directions on how to use automatic weapons, explosives and mylar balloons to disrupt electricity. One of the document's suggestions is to shoot high-powered firearms at substation transformers.

The nonprofit American Radio Relay League — founded in 1914 — has approximately 161,000 members, according to Wikipedia (with over 7,000 members outside the U.S.)

But sometime in early May its systems network was compromised, "by threat actors using information they had purchased on the dark web," the nonprofit announced this week. The attackers accessed the ARRL's on-site systems — as well as most of its cloud-based systems — using "a wide variety of payloads affecting everything from desktops and laptops to Windows-based and Linux-based servers." Despite the wide variety of target configurations, the threat actors seemed to have a payload that would host and execute encryption or deletion of network-based IT assets, as well as launch demands for a ransom payment, for every system... The FBI categorized the attack as "unique" as they had not seen this level of sophistication among the many other attacks, they have experience with.

Within 3 hours a crisis management team had been constructed of ARRL management, an outside vendor with extensive resources and experience in the ransomware recovery space, attorneys experienced with managing the legal aspects of the attack including interfacing with the authorities, and our insurance carrier. The authorities were contacted immediately as was the ARRL President... [R]ansom demands were dramatically weakened by the fact that they did not have access to any compromising data. It was also clear that they believed ARRL had extensive insurance coverage that would cover a multi-million-dollar ransom payment. After days of tense negotiation and brinkmanship, ARRL agreed to pay a $1 million ransom. That payment, along with the cost of restoration, has been largely covered by our insurance policy...

Today, most systems have been restored or are waiting for interfaces to come back online to interconnect them. While we have been in restoration mode, we have also been working to simplify the infrastructure to the extent possible. We anticipate that it may take another month or two to complete restoration under the new infrastructure guidelines and new standards.
ARRL's called the attack "extensive", "sophisticated", "highly coordinated" and "an act of organized crime". And tlhIngan (Slashdot reader #30335) shared this detail from BleepingComputer.

"While the organization has not yet linked the attack to a specific ransomware operation, sources told BleepingComputer that the Embargo ransomware gang was behind the breach."

Under the streets of New York City, they're testing a "quantum network," reports Phys.org — where engineers from a Brooklyn company named Qunnect Inc are taking steps to "overcome the fragility of entangled states in a fiber cable and ensure the efficiency of signal delivery." For their prototype network, the Qunnect researchers used a leased 34-kilometer-long fiber circuit they called the GothamQ loop. Using polarization-entangled photons, they operated the loop for 15 continuous days, achieving an uptime of 99.84% and a compensation fidelity of 99% for entangled photon pairs transmitted at a rate of about 20,000 per second. At a half-million entangled photon pairs per second, the fidelity was still nearly 90%...

They sent 1,324 nm polarization-entangled photon pairs in quantum superpositions through the fiber, one state with both polarizations horizontal and the other with both vertical — a two-qubit configuration more generally known as a Bell state. In such a superposition, the quantum mechanical photon pairs are in both states at the same time.
"While others have transmitted entangled photons before, there has been too much noise and polarization drift in the fiber environment for entanglement to survive," the article points out, "particularly in a long-term stable network." So the Qunnect team built "automated polarization compensation" devices to correct the polarization of the entangled pairs: In their design, an infrared photon [with a wavelength of 1,324 nanometers] is entangled with a near-infrared photon of 795 nanometers. The latter photon is compatible in wavelength and bandwidth with the rubidium atomic systems, such as are used in quantum memories and quantum processors. It was found that polarization drift was both wavelength- and time-dependent, requiring Qunnect to design and build equipment for active compensation at the same wavelengths...

Qunnect's GothamQ loop demonstration was especially noteworthy for its duration, the hands-off nature of the operation time, and its uptime percentage. It showed, they wrote, "progress toward a fully automated practical entanglement network" that would be required for a quantum internet.
And Qunnect's co-founder/chief science officer says "since we finished this work, we have already made all the parts rack-mounted, so they can be used everywhere..."

Their network design and results are published in PRX Quantum.

The Register's Connor Jones reports: The U.S. is suing one of its leading research universities over a litany of alleged failures to meet cybersecurity standards set by the Department of Defense (DoD) for contract awardees. Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT), commonly referred to as Georgia Tech, and its contracting entity, Georgia Tech Research Corporation (GTRC), are being investigated following whistleblower reports from insiders Christopher Craig and Kyle Koza about alleged (PDF) failures to protect controlled unclassified information (CUI). The series of allegations date back to 2019 and continued for years after, although Koza was said to have identified the issues as early as 2018.

Among the allegations is the suggestion that between May 2019 and February 2020, Georgia Tech's Astrolavos Lab -- ironically a group that focuses on cybersecurity issues affecting national security -- failed to develop and implement a cybersecurity plan that complied with DoD standards (NIST 800-171). When the plan was implemented in February 2020, the lawsuit alleges that it wasn't properly scoped -- not all the necessary endpoints were included -- and that for years afterward, Georgia Tech failed to maintain that plan in line with regulations. Additionally, the Astrolavos Lab was accused of failing to implement anti-malware solutions across devices and the lab's network. The lawsuit alleges that the university approved the lab's refusal to deploy the anti-malware software "to satisfy the demands of the professor that headed the lab," the DoJ said. This is claimed to have occurred between May 2019 and December 2021. Refusing to install anti-malware solutions at a contractor like this is not allowed. In fact, it violates federal requirements and Georgia Tech's own policies, but allegedly happened anyway.

The university and the GTRC also, it is claimed, submitted a false cybersecurity assessment score in December 2020 -- a requirement for all DoD contractors to demonstrate they're meeting compliance standards. The two organizations are accused of issuing themselves a score of 98, which was later deemed to be fraudulent based on various factors. To summarize, the issue centers around the claim that the assessment was carried out on a "fictitious" environment, so on that basis the score wasn't given to a system related to the DoD contract, the US alleges. The claims are being made under the False Claims Act (FCA), which is being utilized by the Civil Cyber-Fraud Initiative (CCFI), which was introduced in 2021 to punish entities that knowingly risk the safety of United States IT systems. It's a first-of-its-kind case being pursued as part of the CCFI. All previous cases brought under the CCFI were settled before they reached the litigation stage.

Microsoft plans to phase out Windows Control Panel, a feature dating back to the 1980s, in favor of the modern Settings app, according to a recent support page. The tech giant has been gradually shifting functions to Settings since 2015, aiming for a more streamlined user experience. However, no specific timeline for Control Panel's complete removal has been announced. Microsoft writes in the support page: The Control Panel is a feature that's been part of Windows for a long time. It provides a centralized location to view and manipulate system settings and controls. Through a series of applets, you can adjust various options ranging from system time and date to hardware settings, network configurations, and more. The Control Panel is in the process of being deprecated in favor of the Settings app, which offers a more modern and streamlined experience.

Uber and General Motors' Cruise have partnered to offer driverless rides to Uber users as early as soon as next year. CNBC reports: Both Cruise CEO Marc Whitten and Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi hailed the partnership in a press release, stressing that the companies believe autonomous vehicles can be deployed safely. "Cruise is on a mission to leverage driverless technology to create safer streets and redefine urban life," Whitten said in the release. "We are excited to partner with Uber to bring the benefits of safe, reliable, autonomous driving to even more people, unlocking a new era of urban mobility." Khosrowshahi said in the release that Uber is "thrilled to partner with Cruise and look forward to launching next year."

On Uber's most recent earnings call, analysts asked the company how the emergence of robotaxis would likely impact the ridehailing giant's business long-term. Khosrowshahi said on the call that "AV players" experience much higher utilization with Uber than they do "without a network on a first-party basis." He also predicted there will be a "pretty long hybrid period as autonomous is developing and regulators are trying to figure out exactly how to regulate it." He added, "We don't think this will be a winner-take-all market."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Dark Reading: Researchers have exploited a vulnerability in Microsoft's Copilot Studio tool allowing them to make external HTTP requests that can access sensitive information regarding internal services within a cloud environment -- with potential impact across multiple tenants. Tenable researchers discovered the server-side request forgery (SSRF) flaw in the chatbot creation tool, which they exploited to access Microsoft's internal infrastructure, including the Instance Metadata Service (IMDS) and internal Cosmos DB instances, they revealed in a blog post this week. Tracked by Microsoft as CVE-2024-38206, the flaw allows an authenticated attacker to bypass SSRF protection in Microsoft Copilot Studio to leak sensitive cloud-based information over a network, according to a security advisory associated with the vulnerability. The flaw exists when combining an HTTP request that can be created using the tool with an SSRF protection bypass, according to Tenable.

"An SSRF vulnerability occurs when an attacker is able to influence the application into making server-side HTTP requests to unexpected targets or in an unexpected way," Tenable security researcher Evan Grant explained in the post. The researchers tested their exploit to create HTTP requests to access cloud data and services from multiple tenants. They discovered that "while no cross-tenant information appeared immediately accessible, the infrastructure used for this Copilot Studio service was shared among tenants," Grant wrote. Any impact on that infrastructure, then, could affect multiple customers, he explained. "While we don't know the extent of the impact that having read/write access to this infrastructure could have, it's clear that because it's shared among tenants, the risk is magnified," Grant wrote. The researchers also found that they could use their exploit to access other internal hosts unrestricted on the local subnet to which their instance belonged. Microsoft responded quickly to Tenable's notification of the flaw, and it has since been fully mitigated, with no action required on the part of Copilot Studio users, the company said in its security advisory. Further reading: Slack AI Can Be Tricked Into Leaking Data From Private Channels

South Africa's telecoms industry body is pushing for digital content and service providers to help pay for the roll out of network infrastructure because they generate a huge part of the internet traffic. From a report: The Association of Comms and Technology (ACT) CEO Nomvuyiso Batyi said that the revenues generated by over-the-top (OTT) platforms and the continued success of the OTT model was dependent on the availability of high-quality, reliable and efficient network infrastructure. So "what we're saying is that the OTTs should contribute towards the network upgrades, the network building," she added. OTT platforms or services deliver digital content such as video, audio and messaging directly to consumers over the internet. "Fair share" arrangements ensure that OTT providers contribute to the costs of building, maintaining, and upgrading the infrastructure that supports their business.

Toyota confirmed a breach of its network after 240GB of data, including employee and customer information, was leaked on a hacking forum by a threat actor. The company has not provided details on how or when the breach occurred. BleepingComputer reports: ZeroSevenGroup (the threat actor who leaked the stolen data) says they breached a U.S. branch and were able to steal 240GB of files with information on Toyota employees and customers, as well as contracts and financial information. They also claim to have collected network infrastructure information, including credentials, using the open-source ADRecon tool that helps extract vast amounts of information from Active Directory environments.

"We have hacked a branch in United States to one of the biggest automotive manufacturer in the world (TOYOTA). We are really glad to share the files with you here for free. The data size: 240 GB," the threat actor claims. "Contents: Everything like Contacts, Finance, Customers, Schemes, Employees, Photos, DBs, Network infrastructure, Emails, and a lot of perfect data. We also offer you AD-Recon for all the target network with passwords." While Toyota hasn't shared the date of the breach, BleepingComputer found that the files had been stolen or at least created on December 25, 2022. This date could indicate that the threat actor gained access to a backup server where the data was stored. "We are aware of the situation. The issue is limited in scope and is not a system wide issue," Toyota told BleepingComputer. The company added that it's "engaged with those who are impacted and will provide assistance if needed."

Global technology giants are pushing back against attempts by India's telecom networks to bring internet services under stricter regulation, rejecting arguments that such measures are necessary to create a "level playing field" and address national security concerns. From a report: The Asia Internet Coalition (AIC), a powerful industry body that represents Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Netflix and Spotify, has forcefully argued against inclusion of the so-called over-the-top (OTT) services in the proposed regulatory framework for telecom operators. In a submission to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI), the AIC said there are fundamental differences in technology, operations and functionality between OTT services and traditional telecom operations.

[...] This resistance comes in response to a coordinated push by India's top telecom operators -- Bharti Airtel, Reliance Jio and Vodafone Idea -- to bring OTT services under a new authorization framework. Jio, India's largest telecom operator with more than 475 million subscribers, along with other telco operators have recommended that OTT providers contribute to network development costs based on their traffic consumption, turnover and user base.

Smonster writes: The maker of the Snoo, a popular high-tech bassinet, touched off a firestorm of outrage after requiring a paid subscription to use several key features. Most new parents are looking for a way to reclaim even a hint of the sleep they used to get pre-infant. So a smart bassinet that uses sensors to detect when a crying baby needs pacifying, simulating the sounds and rhythms of the womb, offers an irresistible promise to sleep-strapped parents: another hour or two of shut-eye. The dream doesn't come cheap: One of the more popular models, the Snoo retails for $1,700, though enterprising parents can score one secondhand from friends, neighbors or relatives whose own children have outgrown it.

But last month, that hand-me-down network was dealt a blow when Happiest Baby, the company that makes Snoo, began charging for access to some of the bassinet's premium features -- features that used to be available to Snoo users indefinitely, at no extra cost. Now, access to the app needed to lock in the bassinet's rocking level, to track the baby's sleep and to use the so-called weaning mode, among other features, will cost parents $20 a month. The change has angered secondhand users and original buyers alike. On Reddit, the new subscription model has prompted review bombs, group brainstorms for collective action and detailed instructions for outraged parents seeking recourse. Some have taken to filing complaints with the Federal Trade Commission, Better Business Bureau and state-run consumer protection offices.

17,000 AT&T workers from the CWA union went on strike Friday. NPR notes the strike affects workers in nine states: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee. A North Carolina newspaper says the union will remain on strike until they believe AT&T "begins to bargain over a new contract in good faith" after their previous contract expired back on August 3.

And meanwhile, their article notes that the strike comes as some AT&T customers in North Carolina's Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area "report prolonged internet outages." Saturday afternoon, AT&T also reported internet outages within a circle of northern Charlotte neighborhoods. "As far as the impact, the trained, experienced CWA members who are on strike do critical work installing, maintaining and supporting AT&T's residential and business wireline telecommunications network," CWA communications director Beth Allen said. "Customers should be aware that these workers will not be available to respond to service calls during the strike."

Since at least Wednesday, AT&T internet customers in Durham have reported being without residential service. According to the company's website, outages have been detected across a wide section of the city, including downtown and around Duke University.

AT&T has alerted some affected residents in southwest Durham their internet service "should be online" by Tuesday morning.
An AT&T spokesperson told the newspaper that "We have various business continuity measures in place to avoid disruptions to operations and will continue to provide our customers with the great service they expect."

A union executive said in a statement that AT&T's contract negotiators "did not seem to have the actual bargaining authority required by the legal obligation to bargain in good faith. Our members want to be on the job, providing the quality service that our customers deserve. It's time for AT&T to start negotiating in good faith so that we can move forward towards a fair contract."

"I've been somewhat okay about backing up our home data," writes long-time Slashdot reader 93 Escort Wagon.

But they could use some good advice: We've got a couple separate disks available as local backup storage, and my own data also gets occasionally copied to encrypted storage at BackBlaze. My daughter has her own "cloud" backups, which seem to be a manual push every once in a while of random files/folders she thinks are important. Including our media library, between my stuff, my daughter's, and my wife's... we're probably talking in the neighborhood of 10 TB for everything at present. The whole setup is obviously cobbled together, and the process is very manual. Plus it's annoying since I'm handling Mac, Linux, and Windows backups completely differently (and sub-optimally). Also, unsurprisingly, the amount of data we possess does seem to be increasing with time.

I've been considering biting the bullet and buying an NAS [network-attached storage device], and redesigning the entire process — both local and remote. I'm familiar with Synology and DSM from work, and the DS1522+ looks appealing. I've also come across a lot of recommendations for QNAP's devices, though. I'm comfortable tackling this on my own, but I'd like to throw this out to the Slashdot community.

What NAS do you like for home use. And what disks did you put in it? What have your experiences been?
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo asks "Have you considered just building one?" while suggesting the cheapest option is low-powered Chinese motherboards with soldered-in CPUs. And in the comments on the original submission, other Slashdot readers shared their examples:

• destined2fail1990 used an AMD Threadripper to build their own NAS with 10Gbps network connectivity.
• DesertNomad is using "an ancient D-Link" to connect two Synology DS220 DiskStations
• Darth Technoid attached six Seagate drives to two Macbooks. "Basically, I found a way to make my older Mac useful by simply leaving it on all the time, with the external drives attached."

But what's your suggestion? Share your own thoughts and experiences. What NAS do you like for home use? What disks would you put in it?

And what have your experiences been?

A federal judge blocked the launch of Venu, a sports streaming joint venture by Disney, Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery, due to concerns it would substantially lessen competition and harm FuboTV. Variety reports: Fubo launched in 2015 as a start-up focused on streaming sports programming. [...] Venu, expected to launch in late August ahead of the start of the NFL's coming fall season and priced at an initial price tag of $42.99 per month, was to carry all of the sports offerings of ESPN, Fox Sports 1 and 2, and TNT for a price that is seen as more than a regional sports network but less than a full programming package available via YouTube TV or Hulu + Live TV. The three parent companies are targeting a new generation of consumers who disdain the high costs of traditional cable packages are more at home with signing up for streaming venues that are relatively easy to get in and out of based on the availability of favorite entertainment programs or sporting events.

Judge Garnett found that once Venu launches, FuboTV would face "a swift exodus" of large numbers of subscribers, and indicated she felt "that Fubo's bankruptcy and delisting of the company's stock will likely soon follow. These are quintessential harms that money cannot adequately repair." Fubo alleged that Venu's launch "will cause it to lose approximately 300,000 to 400,000 (or nearly 30%) of its subscribers, suffer a significant decline in its ability to attract new subscribers, lose between $75 and $95 million in revenue, and be transformed into a penny stock awaiting delisting from the New York Stock Exchange, all before year-end 2024," the judge said in her decision. "We respectfully disagree with the court's ruling and are appealing it," Disney, Fox and Warner Bros. Discovery said in a statement. "We believe that Fubo's arguments are wrong on the facts and the law, and that Fubo has failed to prove it is legally entitled to a preliminary injunction. Venu Sports is a pro-competitive option that aims to enhance consumer choice by reaching a segment of viewers who currently are not served by existing subscription options."

AT&T and Verizon are urging the FCC to reject SpaceX's plan to offer cellular service with T-Mobile, arguing that it would cause harmful interference to terrestrial mobile networks. Ars Technica reports: Filings urging the Federal Communications Commission to deny SpaceX's request for a waiver were submitted by AT&T and Verizon this week. The plan by SpaceX's Starlink division also faces opposition from satellite companies EchoStar (which owns Dish and Hughes) and Omnispace. SpaceX and T-Mobile plan to offer Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS) for T-Mobile's cellular network using SpaceX satellites. As part of that plan, SpaceX is seeking a waiver of FCC rules regarding out-of-band emission limits.

AT&T's petition to deny the SpaceX waiver request said the FCC's "recent SCS order appropriately recognized that SCS deployments should not present any risk to the vital terrestrial mobile broadband networks upon which millions of Americans rely today. The Commission authorized SCS as secondary to terrestrial mobile service, correctly explaining that the SCS framework must 'retain service quality of terrestrial networks, protect spectrum usage rights, and minimize the risk of harmful interference.'" AT&T said SpaceX's requested "ninefold increase" to the allowable power flux-density limits for out-of-band emissions "would cause unacceptable harmful interference to incumbent terrestrial mobile operations. Specifically, AT&T's technical analysis shows that SpaceX's proposal would cause an 18% average reduction in network downlink throughput in an operational and representative AT&T PCS C Block market deployment." Verizon's opposition to the waiver request similarly said that SpaceX's proposal "would subject incumbent, primary terrestrial licensee operations in adjacent bands to harmful interference." Wireless phone performance will suffer, Verizon said [...]. SpaceX and T-Mobile told FCC staff that their plan will not harm other wireless operations and predicted that competitors will make misleading claims. SpaceX also argued that the FCC's emissions limit is too strict and should be changed.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Sonos laid off approximately 100 employees this morning, a source familiar with the situation tells The Verge. Those affected -- I'm told the marketing division took a significant hit -- abruptly lost access to the company's internal network. Sonos is also in the process of winding down some of its customer support offices, including one in Amsterdam that will close later this year.

Sonos confirmed the layoffs to The Verge on Wednesday afternoon, providing a statement from CEO Patrick Spence. [...] These latest cuts come as Sonos continues to grapple with the fallout from its disastrous mobile app redesign. On Sonos' earnings call last week, CEO Patrick Spence stressed that fixing the app is the company's number one priority -- so much so that two hardware launches planned for later this year have now been delayed to keep all focus on the app. Further reading: Sonos' $30M App Fail is Cautionary Tale Against Rushing Unnecessary Updates.

"T-Mobile will be shutting down their 2G network beginning next month, making older phones obsolete," writes Slashdot reader Dustin Destree. From the Mobile Report: Most phones today use 4G and 5G, and T-Mobile's 2G service somehow managed to outlive the company's 3G service, which was killed off in 2022. Nonetheless, after postponing a previous shutdown date of April 2nd, we seem to finally have a date for T-Mobile sunsetting its 2G service, and it's pretty soon. T-Mobile has added a date for when its 2G service's capacity and coverage is "expected to change." The service should begin shutdown on September 1st, 2024. The date was quietly added without a major announcement, and it was added sometime after August 5th, as a former Google cache of the page (which has now also been updated) previously showed.

Starting today, users of the social magazine app Flipboard can follow any federated accounts, "meaning those that participate in the social network of interconnected servers known as the fediverse," writes TechCrunch's Sarah Perez. "This now includes Threads accounts in addition to Mastodon accounts and others." From the report: With the update, which deepens Flipboard's connection with the ActivityPub social graph, any Flipboard user can follow user profiles from any other federated service. If their Flipboard account is also federated, they can interact with those users' posts and participate in conversations, as well. Flipboard's user base, however, is currently undisclosed. [...] The Flipboard app supports full fediverse integration, but the company hasn't yet allowed all users to turn on federation as it's a phased rollout. We're told the goal is to make federation a setting users can select later this year, similar to how Threads added a "fediverse sharing" option in June. When federation is enabled, people will be able to not only share to the fediverse but also see and engage with conversations around their Flipboard posts that are taking place in the fediverse.

With Tuesday's update on Flipboard, people can find and follow others in the fediverse across three areas of its app: Search, Explore and Community. In search results, Flipboard will surface federated accounts and profile results in a new section, "Fediverse Accounts." Editorial recommendations can also be found in the app's "Explore" tab under "Fediverse," and every week a new selection of accounts will be featured in the Community section. Activity from the fediverse will also be displayed in the Flipboard notifications panel, allowing people to engage and follow others in the fediverse directly from their notifications. For Flipboard users, that means they can now follow user profiles from Threads and Mastodon in the Flipboard app, including high-profile users like President Joe Biden (POTUS) and former President Barack Obama on Threads, as well as various creators, like Marques Brownlee, and journalists, like Kara Swisher.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Over the past few days, a software package called Deep-Live-Cam has been going viral on social media because it can take the face of a person extracted from a single photo and apply it to a live webcam video source while following pose, lighting, and expressions performed by the person on the webcam. While the results aren't perfect, the software shows how quickly the tech is developing -- and how the capability to deceive others remotely is getting dramatically easier over time. The Deep-Live-Cam software project has been in the works since late last year, but example videos that show a person imitating Elon Musk and Republican Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance (among others) in real time have been making the rounds online. The avalanche of attention briefly made the open source project leap to No. 1 on GitHub's trending repositories list (it's currently at No. 4 as of this writing), where it is available for download for free. [...]

Like many open source GitHub projects, Deep-Live-Cam wraps together several existing software packages under a new interface (and is itself a fork of an earlier project called "roop"). It first detects faces in both the source and target images (such as a frame of live video). It then uses a pre-trained AI model called "inswapper" to perform the actual face swap and another model called GFPGAN to improve the quality of the swapped faces by enhancing details and correcting artifacts that occur during the face-swapping process. The inswapper model, developed by a project called InsightFace, can guess what a person (in a provided photo) might look like using different expressions and from different angles because it was trained on a vast dataset containing millions of facial images of thousands of individuals captured from various angles, under different lighting conditions, and with diverse expressions.

During training, the neural network underlying the inswapper model developed an "understanding" of facial structures and their dynamics under various conditions, including learning the ability to infer the three-dimensional structure of a face from a two-dimensional image. It also became capable of separating identity-specific features, which remain constant across different images of the same person, from pose-specific features that change with angle and expression. This separation allows the model to generate new face images that combine the identity of one face with the pose, expression, and lighting of another.