There's an ongoing study (started in 2004) that examines the effects of alcohol (and other common substances) on mood, performance, and behavior. Started by Dr. Andrea King, a professor of behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago, its latest result is a study called "Holding your liquor: Comparison of alcohol-induced psychomotor impairment in drinkers with and without alcohol use disorder." They found that drinkers with alcohol use disorder (or AUD, traditionally known as alcoholism) displayed less impairment on fine motor and cognitive tasks than light or heavy social drinkers after consuming a standard intoxicating dose — equivalent to four to five drinks that produce breathalyzer readings of 0.08-0.09%, i.e., the threshold for drunk driving." Yet when those drinkers with AUD consumed a higher amount akin to their usual drinking habits — equivalent to seven to eight drinks and breathalyzer readings of 0.13% — they showed significant impairment on those same tasks, more than double their impairment at the standard intoxicating dose that did not return to baseline performance three hours after drinking.

"There's a lot of thinking that when experienced drinkers (those with AUD) consume alcohol, they are tolerant to its impairing effects," said Andrea King, PhD, Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neuroscience at UChicago and senior author of the study. "We supported that a bit, but with a lot of nuances. When they drank alcohol in our study at a dose similar to their usual drinking pattern, we saw significant impairments on both the fine motor and cognitive tests that was even more impairment than a light drinker gets at the intoxicating dose..."

While they did show less overall alcohol impairment on the motor and cognitive tests, at the 30-minute interval they had similar slowing on the fine motor test as the light drinkers. They also recovered quicker to their baseline levels, supporting the notion that they had more tolerance and can "hold their liquor" better than people who don't drink as much. However, people with AUD do not often stop drinking at four or five drinks and engage in high intensity drinking. Thus, a subset of the drinkers with AUD in the study participated in a separate session where they drank a beverage more consistent with their regular drinking habits, equivalent to about seven or eight drinks. At this higher dose of alcohol, they showed more than double the amount of mental and motor impairment than after they had the standard intoxicating dose. They also never got back to their baseline level of performance, even after three hours. Their level of impairment even exceeded that of the light drinkers who consumed the standard dose, suggesting that the physical effects of the alcohol add up the more someone drinks, experienced or not.

"I was surprised at how much impairment that group had to that larger dose, because while it's 50% more than the first dose, we're seeing more than double the impairment," King said.
More than 140,000 people die from excessive alcohol use in the U.S. each year, according to figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — and 30% of traffic fatalities still involve alcohol intoxication. "I'm hoping we can educate people who are experienced high-intensity drinkers who think that they're holding their liquor or that they're tolerant and won't experience accidents or injury from drinking," said Dr. King.

"Their experience with alcohol only goes so far, and excessive drinkers account for most of the burden of alcohol-related accidents and injury in society. This is preventable with education and treatment."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader WankerWeasel for sharing the article.

SiliconANGLE reports that Red Hat's decision to limit access to RHEL sources "has sparked outrage in some circles," but observers contacted by the publication "were mostly sympathetic" to Red Hat's position: Most acknowledged that the company's explanation that it couldn't keep funding the development of software that competitors then gave away for free was reasonable. But not Bill Ottman, founder and chief executive officer of Minds Inc., a social network built on open-source code." They are completely embarrassing themselves by betraying the community and their own model," he said. "Their best bet is to immediately reverse course and apologize."

Others were more inclined to agree with Josh Amishav, founder and CEO of data breach monitoring firm Breachsense. "If we want commercial entities to support our underlying operating system, they need to find ways to be profitable," he said. "If you disagree with Red Hat's policy change, then there are plenty of excellent Linux alternatives to choose from."

Some saw the move as a consequence of pressure inside IBM to justify the $34 billion it paid to buy Red Hat nearly five years ago. "Red Hat has to change to protect its business," said Joe Brockmeier, head of community at open-source developer Percona LLC and a former Red Hat employee. "They seem to have tried to find the least harmful way to do that. It's a necessary decision, although one that could have been communicated a little better." Brockmeier agreed with Red Hat's argument that it can't continue to fund innovations and give them away for free. "Copying a company's product isn't what open source is about," he said. "The code is what allows every company and individual to run, study, modify and distribute work based on a project. The members of the community can do those things; what they are finding harder to do is to 'clone' RHEL."

Not everyone buys the argument that IBM needed to wring more revenue out of its subsidiary. "Considering IBM's gross profit for [fiscal 2022] was $32.863 billion, this certainly wasn't a make-or-break decision for IBM's profitability," said Kadan Stadelmann, chief technology officer at Komodo, developer of a cryptocurrency and blockchain platform. And there's some risk to Red Hat in closing down source code access. "By totally removing free and open-source software, Red Hat may not necessarily increase revenues that much while alienating its large community of open-source developers," Stadelmann said.

There's evidence that's already happening, at least for now. Red Hat's action has both energized and elevated the profiles of some open-source alternatives.

r/malefashionadvice, one of the biggest Reddit communities that's still private as part of the Reddit protest, is encouraging its users to move to Discord and Substack. The subreddit has more than 5 million subscribers. The Verge reports: Specifically, the Discord lets members of the community chat amongst themselves and post about things like fits and inspiration, while the Substack hosts a lot of guides. "One of the other mods writes "I will never go back, it's way better on Discord,' and that sentiment is pretty shared," the mod, who asked to go by Zach, says in an email to The Verge. "The community does a lot better job of self-moderating, owing largely to the fact that the ratio of existing regulars to new people is currently extremely high."

The Substack isn't intended to "be a subscription-based thing"; instead, it was a good place to bring over the subreddit's guides and maintain formatting, Zach says. The biggest guide, Building a Basic Wardrobe, is at more than 2,000 views that came "almost entirely from Discord." That said, both the Discord and Substack are far smaller than r/malefashionadvice's subscriber base: the Discord has north of 2,000 users, while the Substack has nearly 560 subscribers.

Reddit seemingly isn't happy that r/malefashionadvice is still private. On Thursday, the subreddit's moderators received the following message from a Reddit admin (employee) telling the team they would be replaced if they don't reopen the community [...]. Despite the message, the moderation team plans to stick around until they are removed. "We expect that we will be removed from [r/malefashionadvice] as a mod team relatively soon based on communications from the admins," Walker wrote in a message on the Discord. "We'd like to take this time to thank everyone who has contributed so much time and effort over almost 14 years of the sub's history."

If Reddit installs new mods that reopen the community, Zach believes that while many people will go back, "most of the regulars probably won't return," he says. "Dozens of bots (and human bad actors) plague [r/malefashionadvice] on the daily, and without proper mod tools, it'll get even harder to keep them out." More than 2,000 subreddits are still dark in protest, according to the Reddark tracker.

Texas's ban on TikTok at state institutions violates the First Amendment, claims a lawsuit filed Thursday by a group of academics and civil society researchers. CNN reports: The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed the lawsuit on behalf of the Coalition for Independent Technology Research, which works to study the impact of technology on society. The lawsuit specifically challenges Texas' TikTok ban in relation to public universities, saying it compromises academic freedom and impedes vital research. "The ban is not just ineffective but counterproductive. It's impeding researchers and scholars from studying the very things that Texas says it's concerned about -- like data-collection and disinformation," Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Institute, told CNN.

The lawsuit cites the example of a University of North Texas researcher who studies young people's use of social media, who has been forced to abandon research projects that rely on university computers and to remove material about TikTok from her courses. The Knight Institute lawsuit notes that Texas has not imposed a ban on other online platforms that collect similar user data, such as Meta and Google. It further argues that a ban doesn't "meaningfully" constrain China's ability to collect sensitive data about Americans, because this data is widely available from other data brokers.

"It's entirely legitimate for government officials to be concerned about social media platforms' data-collection practices, but Imposing broad bans on Americans' access to the platforms isn't a reasonable, effective, or constitutional response to those concerns," Jaffer told CNN. "Like it or not, TikTok is an immensely popular communications platform, and its policies and practices are influencing culture and politics around the world," said Dave Karpf, a Coalition for Independent Technology Research board member and associate professor in the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. "It's important that scholars and researchers be able to study the platform and illuminate the risks associated with it. Ironically, Texas's misguided ban is impeding our members from studying the very risks that Texas says it wants to address."

Twitter has started sending out the first payouts to creators on the platform who are part of the company's revenue sharing program. The largest payout reported thus far was to Billy Markus, the co-creator of the Dogecoin cryptocurrency, which amounted to a whopping $37,050. TechCrunch reports: Users who subscribe to Twitter Blue and have earned more than 5 million tweet impressions each month for the last 3 months are eligible to join. According to owner Elon Musk, the first round of creator payouts will total $5 million, and will be cumulative from the month of February onward. These payouts will be delivered via Stripe. [...] Twitter's payouts are determined by tweet impressions. Babylon Bee writer Ashley St. Clair (710,000 followers) said that she earned $7,153, and according to her "napkin math," she had around 840 million impressions from February through July. That would make her rate about $0.0085 CPM (cost per mille), or $8.52 per million impressions. It's not clear whether or not individual CPMs change from user to user.

An Ohio plastic surgeon lost her medical license after the state medical board investigated her for livestreaming operations on TikTok and surgical complications reported by patients. From a report: The State Medical Board of Ohio voted at a hearing on Wednesday to permanently revoke Dr. Katharine Roxanne Grawe's medical license and to fine her $4,500 "based on her failure to meet standard of care." At the hearing, doctors on the board said that Dr. Grawe, known online as "Dr. Roxy," had previously been cautioned about protecting patient privacy on social media. They also spoke about her treatment of three unnamed patients who had reported complications from procedures, including one whose surgery Dr. Grawe had broadcast a part of on social media.

Dr. Jonathan B. Feibel, vice president of the medical board, recommended that Dr. Grawe's license be revoked because of the "life altering, reckless treatment" provided to those patients. "These outcomes were not normal complications like those that exist in the routine practice of medicine, but were rather caused by recklessness and disregard for the rules governing the practice of medicine in Ohio," he said.

Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, the parent company of Redbox, has partnered with TikTok to stream the platform's short-form videos on screens atop approximately 3,000 Redbox kiosks across the United States. Deadline reports: Third-party brands will also have their ads run alongside the TikTok videos via Chicken Soup's ad platform Crackle Connex. The agreement covers roughly 10% of the total network of Redbox kiosks, which are generally located outside of grocery, convenience and big box retail stores. The out-of-home ad deal is part of a growing effort across the industry to identify alternatives to linear TV and place brand messages in venues like gas stations, elevators and other locations. "TikTok is the go-to destination for short-form video consumption by over a billion people globally," said Philippe Guelton, chief revenue officer of Crackle Connex. "This new partnership provides advertisers a unique opportunity to reach new audiences and drive engagement. Our Redbox kiosks are in high-traffic locations where millions of people frequently shop, such as grocery stores or value retailers. We look forward to working with TikTok on expanding this partnership as our DOOH network expands."

Mark Zuckerberg has used Meta's might to push Threads to a fast start -- but that may only work up to a point. Mike Isaac, writing at The New York Times: A big tech company with billions of users introduces a new social network. Leveraging the popularity and scale of its existing products, the company intends to make the new social platform a success. In doing so, it also plans to squash a leading competitor's app. If this sounds like Instagram's new Threads app and its push against its rival Twitter, think again. The year was 2011 and Google had just rolled out a social network called Google+, which was aimed as its "Facebook killer." Google thrust the new site in front of many of its users who relied on its search and other products, expanding Google+ to more than 90 million users within the first year.

But by 2018, Google+ was relegated to the ash heap of history. Despite the internet search giant's enormous audience, its social network failed to catch on as people continued flocking to Facebook -- and later to Instagram and other social apps. In the history of Silicon Valley, big tech companies have often become even bigger tech companies by using their scale as a built-in advantage. But as Google+ shows, bigness alone is no guarantee of winning the fickle and faddish social media market.

This is the challenge that Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook, now faces as he tries to dislodge Twitter and make Threads the prime app for real-time, public conversations. If tech history is any guide, size and scale are solid footholds -- but ultimately can only go so far. What comes next is much harder. Mr. Zuckerberg needs people to be able to find friends and influencers on Threads in the serendipitous and sometimes weird ways that Twitter managed to accomplish. He needs to make sure Threads isn't filled with spam and grifters. He needs people to be patient about app updates that are in the works.

In late 2021, VanMoof claimed to be "the most funded e-bike company in the world" after raising a total of $182 million in the two years prior -- a figure that would later surpass $200 million. Now, according to multiple sources spoken to by TechCrunch, the Dutch e-bike company's strategy and momentum "appear to have steered dangerously off course." From the report: Our sources tell us that VanMoof is working on securing a bridge round that will help it stay afloat. Sources also claim that senior staff, including the CEO and a co-founder, as well as the president (who is also an investor) have left executive roles in the business. The company has refused to provide any on-the-record comment on its status until later this week. But the facts are plain: The company has, as of June 29 and by its own admission, stopped taking orders. VanMoof also filed paperwork, revealed in January, of its need to raise money to stave off bankruptcy.

Customers, annoyed with the pauses and other delays in servicing existing bikes on the road, have turned to social media like Reddit and Twitter to air their complaints and debate whether the company is going bust or not. The first recent, visible cracks in the company appeared in late June when potential customers discovered its online ordering system was no longer working. [...] The story changed again a few days later. In response to TechCrunch's questions about the ordering system, a spokesperson said that the pause was actually intentional (a feature not a bug!). Despite the summer period being the peak season for the cycling market, a VanMoof spokesperson claimed it would be pausing orders to catch up on production and delivery. The company didn't answer any of TechCrunch's multiple questions about why VanMoof was behind on orders (supply chain issues? lacking funds?), what the company's current capacity was, how many orders were outstanding, or when VanMoof hoped to begin sales again. As of the time of publication, the sales pause was going on 12 days.

Despite the pause and the other details, VanMoof had been sending out communications that imply it's business-as-usual at the e-bike company. On June 27 it announced that KwikFit NL, the car maintenance chain, would be a new service partner. The day before that it issued a firmware update and a video was posted of a panel that co-founder Taco Carlier participated in. But there have been a number of warning signs in plain sight for months that tell a different story. [...]

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Australian user data is accessible to TikTok employees based in China on a "very strict basis," the company's head of data security, Will Farrell, has said. In their first public appearance before Australian members of parliament since the government joined Canada, the US and the UK in banning TikTok from government-owned devices amid concerns about the company's connections to China, TikTok executives were questioned at length by a parliamentary committee examining foreign interference on social media. Liberal senator and chair of the committee James Paterson, who has led the opposition's push against the app, questioned how many times Australian user data had been accessed by TikTok staff based within China. Farrell could not provide the number immediately, but admitted it did happen.

Farrell said there were "a number of protections in place", including that employees only get the minimum amount of access to data to do their job, and when they access that data they need to provide a business justification that needs to be approved by their manager and the database owner within TikTok. If the data is being accessed across a national border, it has to be approved by the global security team based in the US, which also monitors all data access. "Employees can't get access without a clear justification and levels of approval," Farrell said. A similar security review would apply if an employee based in China tried to change the recommendations algorithm, he said.

The company's local head of public policy, Ella Woods-Joyce, said China's 2017 national security law -- which requires companies to give the government any personal data relevant to national security -- would apply to any company that had operations and staff in China. When asked on what ground TikTok would refuse to comply with the law, Woods-Joyce said TikTok had never been asked for personal data by the Chinese government and would refuse if asked. [...] It was revealed in December that employees had used the app to attempt to identify the source of a leak to journalists. Hunter told the committee that he stood by the sentiments expressed in his original article, and blamed "rogue employees" who had since been fired from the company for accessing the data. He said "serious misconduct from these rogue employees" had taken place. He said GPS location information was not collected in Australia.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon doesn't want to comply with Europe's Digital Services Act, and to avoid the rules the company is arguing that it doesn't meet the definition of a Very Large Online Platform under EU law. Amazon filed an appeal at the EU General Court to challenge the European Commission decision that Amazon meets the criteria and must comply with the new regulations. "We agree with the EC's objective and are committed to protecting customers from illegal products and content, but Amazon doesn't fit this description of a 'Very Large Online Platform' (VLOP) under the DSA and therefore should not be designated as such," Amazon said in a statement provided to Ars today.

The Digital Services Act includes content moderation requirements, transparency rules, and protections for minors. Targeted advertising based on profiling toward children will no longer be permitted, for example. Amazon argued that the new law is supposed to "address systemic risks posed by very large companies with advertising as their primary revenue and that distribute speech and information," and not businesses that are primarily retail-based. "The vast majority of our revenue comes from our retail business," Amazon said. Amazon also claims it's unfair that some retailers with larger businesses in individual countries weren't on the list of 19 companies that must comply with the Digital Services Act. The rules only designate platforms with over 45 million active users in the EU as of February 17.

Amazon said it is "not the largest retailer in any of the EU countries where we operate, and none of these largest retailers in each European country has been designated as a VLOP. If the VLOP designation were to be applied to Amazon and not to other large retailers across the EU, Amazon would be unfairly singled out and forced to meet onerous administrative obligations that don't benefit EU consumers." Those other companies Amazon referred to include Poland's Allegro or the Dutch Bol.com, according to a Bloomberg report. Neither of those platforms appears to have at least 45 million active users. A summary of the appeal provided by Amazon claimed the designation "is based on a discriminatory criterion and disproportionately violates the principle of equal treatment and the applicant's fundamental rights." In response, the EC said that "it would defend its position in court and added that Amazon still must comply with the rules by end of August, regardless of the appeal," Bloomberg wrote.

"The scope of the DSA is very clear and is defined to cover all platforms that expose their users to content, including the sale of products or services, which can be illegal," the commission said in statement reported by Bloomberg. "For marketplaces as for social networks, very wide user reach increases the risks and the platforms' responsibilities to address them."

Burger King is causing a stir in Thailand with its new offering: a burger with no meat and a jaw-dropping amount of cheese. From a report: This week, the Thai operator of the fast food chain introduced what it calls the "real cheeseburger," a bun filled with as many as 20 slices of American cheese. The item launched on Thai menus Sunday, at a reduced price of 109 Thai baht ($3.1), compared with the usual price of 380 baht ($10.9). It quickly went viral on social media in Thailand, with many users on TikTok posting videos of them trying the new sandwich.

"This is no joke. This is for real," Burger King said in a Sunday social media post. At one Burger King branch in Bangkok on Tuesday, a shift manager was overheard saying the outlet had to stop taking delivery orders so they could have enough stock left for walk-in diners.

Tencent's WeChat said on Tuesday that iPhone maker Apple had opened a store on its social media platform, marking an expansion of the U.S. firm's retail channels in the world's second largest economy. From a report: The announcement by WeChat, China's dominant messaging app which also provides e-commerce, livestreaming and payment services, said users would be able to buy Apple products including iPhones, iPads and Macs from the store. The move by Apple comes as Chinese consumers increasingly turn to social media platforms such as WeChat and ByteDance's Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, to shop.

Last week, Meta's new Twitter competitor, Threads, was launched to the public and achieved an impressive milestone by surpassing 30 million sign-ups in less than 24 hours. This made Threads the fastest app to reach the 1 million users mark, beating ChatGPT's record. In a recent update, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the social media app has now exceeded 100 million users, just days after its initial launch. The Verge reports: Instagram head Adam Mosseri also posted about it, likewise noting that it took just five days to get there. Users aren't just signing up: they're posting, too. As of Thursday, my colleague Alex Heath reported that there have already been more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes shared on the app.

That said, Threads is still in its infancy, and we'll have to wait and see if it captures the same cultural cachet that Twitter once did. Meta isn't specifically targeting trying to replace Twitter, according to Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and the company isn't going to actively encourage politics and hard news on the platform, but it could end up being the place people go for a conversation-based social media platform. And while Meta "couldn't be more psyched" about how the launch week has gone, "we don't even know if this thing is retentive yet," Mosseri said.

Although the numbers aren't directly comparable, as of last November Twitter had around 260 million monetizable daily active users, per a tweet from owner Elon Musk at the time. More recently, The Wall Street Journal reports it's been telling advertisers that it has around 535 million monetizable monthly active users.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The European Commission today decided it is safe for personal data to be transferred from the European Union to US-based companies, handing a victory to firms like Facebook and Google despite protests from privacy advocates who worry about US government surveillance. The commission announced that it "adopted its adequacy decision for the EU-US Data Privacy Framework," concluding "that the United States ensures an adequate level of protection -- comparable to that of the European Union -- for personal data transferred from the EU to US companies under the new framework. On the basis of the new adequacy decision, personal data can flow safely from the EU to US companies participating in the Framework, without having to put in place additional data protection safeguards."

In May, Facebook-owner Meta was fined 1.2 billion euros for violating the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) with transfers of personal data to the United States and was ordered to stop storing European Union user data in the US within six months. But Meta said at the time that if the pending data-transfer pact "comes into effect before the implementation deadlines expire, our services can continue as they do today without any disruption or impact on users." The data-transfer deal "is expected to face a legal challenge from European privacy advocates, who have long said that the US needs to make substantial changes to surveillance laws," a Wall Street Journal report said today. "Transfers of data from Europe to the US have been in question since an EU court ruled in 2020 that a previous deal allowing trans-Atlantic data flows was illegal because the US didn't give EU individuals an effective way to challenge surveillance of their data by the US government."

The EC's announcement said the new framework has "binding safeguards to address all the concerns raised by the European Court of Justice, including limiting access to EU data by US intelligence services to what is necessary and proportionate, and establishing a Data Protection Review Court (DPRC), to which EU individuals will have access." The new court "will be able to order the deletion" of data that is found to have been collected in violation of the new rules. The framework will be administered and monitored by the US Department of Commerce and the "US Federal Trade Commission will enforce US companies' compliance," the EC announcement said. EU residents who challenge data collection will have free access to "independent dispute resolution mechanisms and an arbitration panel." US companies can join the EU-US framework "by committing to comply with a detailed set of privacy obligations, for instance the requirement to delete personal data when it is no longer necessary for the purpose for which it was collected, and to ensure continuity of protection when personal data is shared with third parties," the European Commission said. The latest deal is expected to get challenged, according to the WSJ. European Parliament member Birgit Sippel, who is in Germany's Social Democratic Party, said the "framework does not provide any meaningful safeguards against indiscriminate surveillance conducted by US intelligence agencies," according to The New York Times.

The Computer & Communications Industry Association, which represents major tech companies like Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta, said: "Today's decision means that EU and US businesses will soon have full legal certainty again to transfer personal data across the Atlantic... Data flows are vital to transatlantic trade and the EU-US economic relationship, which is worth 5.5 trillion euros per year. Nevertheless, the two economies had been left without guidelines for data transfers after an EU Court ruling invalidated the previous framework back in 2020."

We've just had the world's first press conference with AI-enabled, humanoid social robots. Click here to jump straight to Slashdot's transcript of all the robots' answers during the press conference, or watch the 40-minute video here.

It all happened as the United Nations held an "AI for Good" summit in Geneva, where the Guardian reports that the foyer was "humming with robotic voices, the whirring of automated wheels and limbs, and Desdemona, the 'rock star' humanoid, who is chanting 'the singularity will not be centralised' on stage backed by a human band, Jam Galaxy."

But the Associated Press describes how one UN agency had "assembled a group of robots that physically resembled humans at a news conference Friday, inviting reporters to ask them questions in an event meant to spark discussion about the future of artificial intelligence. "The nine robots were seated and posed upright along with some of the people who helped make them at a podium in a Geneva conference center... Among them: Sophia, the first robot innovation ambassador for the U.N. Development Program, or UNDP; Grace, described as a health care robot; and Desdemona, a rock star robot."

"I'm terrified by all of this," said one local newscaster, noting that the robots also said they "had no intention of rebelling against their creators."

But the Associated Press points out an important caveat: While the robots vocalized strong statements - that robots could be more efficient leaders than humans, but wouldn't take anyone's job away or stage a rebellion - organizers didn't specify to what extent the answers were scripted or programmed by people. The summit was meant to showcase "human-machine collaboration," and some of the robots are capable of producing preprogrammed responses, according to their documentation.
Two of the robots seemed to disagree on whether AI-powered robots should submit to stricter regulation. (Although since they're only synthesizing sentences from large-language models, can they really be said to "agree" or "disagree"?)

There were unintentionally humorous moments, starting right from the beginning. Click here to start reading Slashdot's transcript of the robots' answers:

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A decentralized group of safe streets activists in San Francisco realized they can disable Cruise and Waymo robotaxis by placing a traffic cone on a vehicle's hood, and they're encouraging others to do it, too. The "Week of Cone," as the group is calling the now-viral prank on Twitter and TikTok, is a form of protest against the spread of robotaxi services in the city, and it appears to be gaining traction with residents who are sick of the vehicles malfunctioning and blocking traffic. The protest comes in the lead-up to a hearing that will likely see Waymo and Cruise expand their robotaxi services in San Francisco. The California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) is set to approve the expansion of both Cruise's and Waymo's autonomous vehicle passenger service deployments in San Francisco on July 13. The agency doesn't give companies permission to operate their AVs on public roads -- that's the Department of Motor Vehicles' domain. But it does grant companies the authority to charge passengers a fare for that service, which is an essential ingredient to scaling robotaxi and autonomous delivery operations sustainably. In May, the CPUC posted draft resolutions approving the expansion, despite mounting opposition from city agencies and residents.

Opponents called out the string of AVs that have impeded traffic, public transit and emergency responders, and asked that the CPUC move cautiously, set up workshops, collect more data, prohibit robotaxi deployment downtown and during peak hours, and limit the expansion of fleet sizes. Other opponents like the San Francisco Taxi Workers Alliance and the Alliance for Independent Workers have protested the spread of robotaxis, which they say will eliminate the need for taxi and ride-hail drivers. Safe Street Rebel's cone campaign is a bid to raise awareness and invite more pissed-off San Franciscans to submit public comments to the CPUC before next week's hearing. "These companies promise their cars will reduce traffic and collisions, but instead they block buses, emergency vehicles and everyday traffic," reads one video posted on social media. "They even un-alived a person and a dog. And they're partnering with the police to record everyone all the time without anyone's consent. And most importantly they require streets that are designed for cars, not people or transit. They exist only for profit-driven car companies to stay dominant and make it harder for transit to stay afloat."

While the above statement is a bit hyperbolic, there are nuggets of truth. [...] Nonetheless, the group brings up a common concern about unleashing autonomous vehicles onto public roads -- the lack of input from everyday people who have to deal with the vehicles on the ground. Congressional efforts to regulate self-driving cars have lagged for several years, so most regulation comes from state departments of transportation and departments of motor vehicles. The group is inviting others to follow its lead and disable the vehicles by "gently placing" cones on a driverless -- meaning, empty -- car's hood. Some people are apparently sending in submissions, but it's unclear how many people have sent images to Safe Street Rebel. "Not only is this understanding of how AVs operate incorrect, but this is vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways," Waymo said in a statement. "We will notify law enforcement of any unwanted or unsafe interference of our vehicles on public roadways."

"Cruise's fleet provides free rides to late-night service workers without more reliable transportation options, has delivered over 2 million meals to food insecure San Franciscans, and recovers food waste from local businesses," said Cruise in a statement. "Intentionally obstructing vehicles gets in the way of those efforts and risks creating traffic congestion for local residents."

Yolanda Diaz, Spain's Labor Minister and candidate for Prime Minister with the progressive platform Sumar, has proposed a scheme to tackle social inequality by giving every young person in the country 20,000 euros (roughly $21,776) to spend on school, training or starting a business once they reach the age of 18. The Guardian reports: According to Diaz's Sumar platform, which announced the policy before Spain's snap general election on 23 July, the initiative would cost 10 billion euros, which would be raised by taxing the rich. Sumar said the aim was to guarantee "equality of opportunity" regardless of people's family backgrounds or earnings. The payments, which would begin at the age of 18 and continue until the age of 23, would be accompanied by administrative support to help people study, train or establish their own business.

DÃaz confirmed that the policy -- called the "universal inheritance" -- would be available to all young Spaniards regardless of their economic circumstances and would be funded by taxing people earning more than 3 million euros a year. Sumar estimates it would cost 0.8% of Spain's GDP. The minister, who was raised in a staunchly communist household, said she had been unable to follow her own dreams of becoming an employment inspector because there was not enough money for her to spend years studying. "Becoming an employment inspector in Spain would have taken about five years," she said. "I'm not an employment inspector because I'm the daughter of working-class parents and I could never have allowed myself to do that. This is a redistributive measure that will allow the young people of our country to have a future regardless of their surname."

The FBI's primary tool for monitoring social media threats is the same contractor that labeled peaceful Black Lives Matter protest leaders DeRay McKesson and Johnetta Elzie as "threat actors" requiring "continuous monitoring" in 2015. From a report: The contractor, ZeroFox, identified McKesson and Elzie as posing a "high severity" physical threat, despite including no evidence that McKesson or Elzie were suspected of criminal activity. "It's been almost a decade since the referenced 2015 incident and in that time we have invested heavily in fine-tuning our collections, analysis and labeling of alerts," Lexie Gunther, a spokesperson for ZeroFox, told The Intercept, "including the addition of a fully managed service that ensures human analysis of every alert that comes through the ZeroFox Platform to ensure we are only alerting customers to legitimate threats and are labeling those threats appropriately."

The FBI, which declined to comment, hired ZeroFox in 2021, a fact referenced in the new 106-page Senate report about the intelligence community's failure to anticipate the January 6, 2021, uprising at the U.S. Capitol. The June 27 report, produced by Democrats on the Senate Homeland Security Committee, shows the bureau's broad authorities to surveil social media content -- authorities the FBI previously denied it had, including before Congress. It also reveals the FBI's reliance on outside companies to do much of the filtering for them. The FBI's $14 million contract to ZeroFox for "FBI social media alerting" replaced a similar contract with Dataminr, another firm with a history of scrutinizing racial justice movements. Dataminr, like ZeroFox, subjected the Black Lives Matter movement to web surveillance on behalf of the Minneapolis Police Department, previous reporting by The Intercept has shown.

After surpassing 10 million sign-ups in the first seven hours, Meta's new Twitter rival, Threads, has reached a new milestone: 30 million sign-ups in less than 24 hours. TechCrunch reports: Threads passed 2 million signups in its first two hours live in the App Store and shows no signs of slowing down. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg noted the milestone on his Threads account. Threads was available for "preorder" through iOS, notifying users who were alerted of its existence through a flashy Instagram cross-promotion. Threads is deeply tied into Instagram and Instagram accounts now display a Threads user number so the counting is both transparent and happening in real time. Users who opted into the Threads pre-launch received a push notification when Threads went live on Wednesday afternoon and could immediately hop into Meta's latest app. Threads is also now the fastest app to cross the 1 million users mark, beating ChatGPT's record.

Further reading: Twitter Threatens To Sue Meta Over Threads