Big games beget big leaks, especially this time of year when the gaming industry's porous promotional machinery is revving up for the E3 trade show. From a report: It happened again Thursday when eight minutes of Ubisoft's upcoming "Far Cry 6" leaked online, a day before it was supposed to appear. It was deleted in minutes, but thousands still saw it. Big video game leaks are nearly impossible to stop. Companies have tried many things to tighten the pipes, including blacklisting press outlets and suing leakers. But the more prominent the upcoming game, the more people involved, and the higher the public curiosity, the more likely the leak.

"There's just too many opportunities for a mid level employee to have their laptop open on a plane in games," former Ubisoft creative director Alex Hutchinson told Axios, citing the notorious way the name of a previously-secretive mega-game leaked in 2013. (Sometimes those open laptops are on a subway.) The "Far Cry 6" incident appears to involve confusion over a coverage embargo date. The footage was posted to YouTube by Polish YouTuber Patryk "Rojson" Rojewski, who told Axios that he had been provided the clips by Ubisoft under an agreement that said they could run on May 27. Rojewski said he had not been told that Ubisoft changed the date. "I approach my work professionally," he said. Several minutes of video of another upcoming Ubisoft game, "The Division: Heartland," leaked two weeks ago.

Rei_is_a_dumbass shares a report from The Verge: Elon Musk's Boring Company started shuttling passengers through the twin tunnels it built underneath the Las Vegas Convention Center (LVCC) this week, as part of a test to get the system ready for its full debut in June. Videos, images, and accounts shared around the internet by the people who showed up for the test offer the most coherent glimpse yet at Musk's solution for traversing the LVCC campus. It is quite literally just Teslas being driven through two 0.8-mile tunnels -- a far cry from the autonomous sled-and-shuttle ideas that Musk once proposed for The Boring Company.

The Boring Company says the Loop will ultimately turn a 45-minute walk into a two-minute ride, though it's not down to that level of efficiency yet (hence the test). In one video, one of the test riders said they had to wait about three to five minutes for a few of the rides, though even with a top speed of around 40 miles per hour, trips between stations appear to have taken about a minute to a minute-and-a-half. One of the things increasing that total travel time was the underground station. There were times when test riders pulled into the station only to run into some congestion. The drivers have to maneuver around other parked Teslas, people getting in and out, and cars queueing up to reenter the tunnels. It's a tight fit. There was also just some general confusion as people got used to how the system worked.

After years of work, Epic Games is launching early access for game developers for Unreal Engine 5, the latest version of the company's tools for making games with highly realistic 3D animations. VentureBeat reports: Unreal Engine 5, which will officially ship in 2022, is the company's crowning technical achievement. The early access build will let game developers start testing features and prototyping their upcoming games. Epic isn't saying how long this took or how many employees are working on it, but it's a safe bet that a large chunk of those devs are involved in Unreal Engine 5. It's been seven years since the last engine shipped. Unreal Engine 5 will deliver the freedom, fidelity, and flexibility to create next-generation games that will blow players' minds, said Nick Penwarden, the vice president of engineering, in an interview with GamesBeat. He said it will be effortless for game developers to use groundbreaking new features such as Nanite and Lumen, which provide a generational leap in visual fidelity. The new World Partition system enables the creation of expansive worlds with scalable content.

Developers can also download the new sample project, Valley of the Ancient, to start exploring the new features of UE5. Captured on an Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, Valley of the Ancient is a rich and practical example of how the new features included with Unreal Engine 5 early access can be used, and is the result of internal stress-testing. The demo features a woman named Echo in a deserted mountain area. The team from Quixel, which Epic acquired in 2019, went out to Moab in Utah to scan tons of rock formations, using drones and cameras. And the artists who created the demo populated the scene with Megascans assets, as opposed to using anything procedural or traditional animation tools. "We are targeting 30FPS on next-generation console hardware" at 4K output with the demo, said Penwarden. "We expect people to be targeting 60 frames per second. It's really a choice of the the gaming content itself, what you want to target, and UE5 is absolutely capable of powering 60 frames per second experiences. We chose to, in this case, absolutely maximize visual quality. And so we targeted 30fps. But we're absolutely going to support 60 frames per second experiences."

You can view a demo of Unreal Engine 5 running on both the PS5 and Xbox Series X here on YouTube.

Privacy International (PI) and several other European privacy and digital rights organizations announced today that they've filed legal complaints against the controversial facial recognition company Clearview AI. From a report: The complaints filed in France, Austria, Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom say that the company's method of documenting and collecting data -- including images of faces it automatically extracts from public websites -- violates European privacy laws. New York-based Clearview claims to have built "the largest known database of 3+ billion facial images."

PI, NYOB, Hermes Center for Transparency and Digital Human Rights, and Homo Digitalis all claim that Clearview's data collection goes beyond what the average user would expect when using services like Instagram, LinkedIn, or YouTube. "Extracting our unique facial features or even sharing them with the police and other companies goes far beyond what we could ever expect as online users," said PI legal officer Ioannis Kouvakas in a joint statement.

Crypto giant Coinbase on Thursday launched its own media operation. The company is calling it "Fact Check" -- and giving it a dedicated section on its blog. In a blog post, Coinbase Founder and CEO Brian Armstrong said the firm, which recently went public, will use Fact Check to combat misinformation and mischaracterizations about Coinbase or crypto being shared in the world.

"Unfortunately, we also see misinformation published frequently as well, whether in traditional media, social media, or by public figures. This doesn't always come from negative intentions. Our business, and crypto, can be difficult to understand, and often people are rushed to post first impressions online, making mistakes in the process. At other times, misinformation comes from people pushing their own agenda, or from those who have a conflict of interest," wrote Armstrong, who in the post outlines in detail his thinking behind launching Fact Check. An excerpt from the blogpost: In the future, we will need to move beyond fact checking, and start creating more of our own original content to communicate with our audience, and tell the stories of crypto that are happening all over the world. Many of these stories are not being told by traditional media. Fact checking is still largely reactive, but we need to move to a more proactive stance on content creation to have a true media arm. Distribution of our content will happen through podcasts, YouTube, our blog, Twitter, and every other channel we own. But in the future, it will also likely move to more crypto native platforms, like Bitclout, or crypto oracles. Long term, the real source of truth will be what can be found on-chain, with a cryptographic signature attached.

So, what would it feel like to fall into a black hole? From a report: "Well, at the moment you crossed the horizon, you wouldn't feel anything -- there would be nothing dramatic," Peter Galison, co-founder of the Black Hole Initiative at Harvard University, says over the phone. Huh. Doesn't sound too bad. "But inevitably, you would be pulled towards the centre," he continues. "There's no going back; everything that falls into a black hole just keeps falling; there's no resisting that pull and things don't end well."

Ah. Go on. "Physicists have an expression called 'spaghettification' because if you were falling in feet first, your feet would be more attracted towards the centre than your head, and your sides would be pushed towards your middle and this process would extend and compress you." Right. So, terrifying, then. Especially when Galison adds with cosmic understatement: "In the long term that's not a good survival event." We are talking about his documentary film, Black Holes: The Edge of All We Know, four years in the making and available on Netflix from 1 June, which follows two scientific collaborations to understand the most mysterious objects in the universe. Among the highlights is being a fly on the wall as the late Stephen Hawking tries to figure them out.

It is Hawking's voice, that instantly recognisable computer speech synthesiser, that opens the film: "A black hole is stranger than anything dreamed up by science fiction writers. It's a region of space where gravity is so strong that nothing can escape. Once you are over the edge, there's no way back." City-sized black holes form when certain stars run out of fuel to burn and collapse under the force of their own gravity. Supermassive black holes -- millions or billions of times bigger than our sun -- are found at the centre of almost every galaxy including our own, the Milky Way.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The original 2007 video "Charlie Bit My Finger," a standard-bearer of viral internet fascination, has sold as a nonfungible token for $760,999, and the family who created it will take down the original from YouTube for good. The original video, which has close to 900 million views, features Charlie Davies-Carr, an infant in England, biting the finger of his big brother, Harry Davies-Carr, and then laughing after Harry yells "OWWWW." The owner will also be able to create their own parody of the video featuring Charlie and Harry Davies-Carr.

Many duplicates of the video remain online, including one apparently rebranded by the family itself in anticipation of the auction. But the auction allowed bidders to "own the soon-to-be-deleted YouTube phenomenon" and be the "sole owner of this lovable piece of internet history." The market for ownership rights to digital art, ephemera and media, known as NFTs, continues to grow and bring attention to widely viewed videos and memes that many people have long forgotten. NFT buyers are not usually acquiring copyrights, trademarks or the sole ownership of whatever they purchase. They're mostly bought with the idea that their copy is authentic.

During anNFT sale, computers are connected to a cryptocurrency network. They record the transaction on a shared ledger and store it on a blockchain, sealing it as part of a permanent public record and serving as a sort of certification of authenticity that cannot be altered or erased. There were 11 active bidders in the war for the NFT that was driven mainly between two bidders named 3fmusic and mememaster, who ultimately was outbid by 3fmusic by $45,444. The bidding closed on Sunday.

Florida on Monday became the first state to regulate how companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter moderate speech online, by imposing fines on social media companies that permanently bar political candidates in the state. From a report: The law, signed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, is a direct response to Facebook's and Twitter's bans of former President Donald J. Trump in January. In addition to the fines for barring candidates, it makes it illegal to prevent some news outlets from posting to their platforms in response to the contents of their stories. Mr. DeSantis said signing the bill meant that Floridians would be "guaranteed protection against the Silicon Valley elites."

"If Big Tech censors enforce rules inconsistently, to discriminate in favor of the dominant Silicon Valley ideology, they will now be held accountable," he said in a statement. The bill is part of a broader push among conservative state legislatures to crack down on the ability of tech companies to manage posts on their platforms. The political efforts took off after Mr. Trump was barred after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Lawmakers around the country have echoed Mr. Trump's accusations that the companies are biased against conservative personalities and publications, even though those accounts often thrive online. More than a hundred bills targeting the companies' moderation practices have been filed nationwide this year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many of the bills have died, but a proposal is still being debated in Texas.

For over an hour on Saturday, retired Microsoft OS developer David Plummer answered questions from his viewers on YouTube.

Long-time Slashdot reader destinyland writes: He began with an update on a project to test the performance of the same algorithm using 30 different programming languages, and soon tells the story of how he was inspired to apply for his first job at Microsoft after reading Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire.

I decided that this is where I wanted to work, because these guys sound like me, they act like me, they are what I want to be when I grow up. And holy cow, they pay them well, apparently. So I wrote to everybody that I could find that had a Microsoft email address, which was about four people, because I had a software product people had been regisering on the Amiga. And one guy, Alistair Banks... responded and he hooked me up with a hiring manager directly in Windows that had an open slot that was hiring... And a couple of interview slots later, I wound up as an intern at MS-DOS working for Ben Slivka.

So you would think, "Oh, an intern on MS-DOS. What'd you do? Format disks?" No — it's amazing to me, actually. They give you as much work as they believe that you are capable of, and — they get you for all that you're worth, basically. They had me write a bunch of major features, like the Smart Drive cache for CD-ROMs was the first thing I wrote. Then I wrote DISKCOPY, making it work, single pass, bunch of features in MS-DOS. I re-wrote Setup to work on a single floppy disk by using deltas and patching in place, DOS 5 to turn it into DOS 6, something like, or maybe it was DOS 6 into 6.2... A whole bunch of features, within the span of, like, three months, which to me was fairly impressive at the time, I thought. And that only got me an interview...

Later he says that he'd like to see most of 16-bit Windows and all of MS-DOS open sourced, along with some select application code from that era.

I don't think there's any reason to hold back any of MS-DOS at this point. They have absolutely no reason to open source any of it, really — other than PR, because all it brings them is potential liability, complaints and angst, and probably nothing positive for putting the code out there and exposing it to ridicule. Because it's ancient code at this point. It's like, "Ha! Look what Microsoft did!" Well, yeah, I know Linux is cool now, but go look at Linux code from 1991 — and I worked on some of that code. Well, '93 I did. It's not the same as what you see today.

So yeah, MS-DOS probably looks archaic — although it's super tight, it doesn't have many bugs. It's just written differently than you would write code today, because you're targetting something that is a very different CPU and memory system and PC as a whole, and it's so much more limited that everybody's sacred, every cycle matters. That kind of thing that you don't worry about now. But I'd still like to see all the code from back then that's not embarrassing released.

And when asked what he misses most about being a Microsoft developer, he answers:

I miss going for lunch with the people that I went for lunch with, and talking to the people that I worked with. Because they were a lot like me, they had similar interests, they had similar abilities, they were people like me. We went for lunch, we ate food, it was awesome, and then we talked about cool things. And we did that every day. And now I don't get to do that any more. I get to do it rarely, because I take guys out for lunch and stuff, but it's not the same. So that's really what I miss.

And I miss somebody always feeding me something interesting to do. Because now I have to go out and find something that's interesting to do on my own. And I can't make everything be monetarily remunerative...

Python's creator Guido van Rossum shared his opinions on other programming languages during a new hour-long interview with Microsoft's principle cloud advocate manager. Some of the highlights:

• Rust: "It sounds like it's a great language — for certain things. Rust really improves on C++ in one particular area — it makes it much harder to bypass the checks in the compiler. And of course it solves the memory allocation problem in a near perfect way... if you wrote the same thing in C++, you could not be as sure, as compared to Rust, that you've gotten all your memory allocation and memory management stuff right. So Rust is an interesting language."

• Go and Julia: "I still think that Go is a very interesting language too. Of all the new languages, Go is probably the most Python-ic — or at least the general-purpose new languages. There's also Julia, which is sort of an interesting sort of take on something Python-like. It has enough details that look very similar to Python that then when you realize, 'Oh, but all the indexing is one-based and ranges are inclusive instead of exclusive,' you think, 'Argh!' Nobody should ever try to code in Julia and in Python on the same day.
  
  "My understanding is that Julia is sort of much more of a niche language, and if you're in that niche, it is superior because the compiler optimizes your code for you in a way that Python probably never will. On the other hand, it is much more limited in other areas, and I wouldn't expect that anybody ever is going to write a web server in Julia and get a lot of mileage out of it. And I'm sure in five minutes that will be on Hacker News with a counterexample."

• TypeScript: "TypeScript is a great language. You might have noticed that in the past six or seven years, we've been adding optional static typing to Python, also known as gradual typing. I wasn't actually aware of TypeScript when we started that project, so I can't say that we were inspired by TypeScript initially. TypeScript, because it sort of jumped on the JavaScript bandwagon — and because Anders is a really smart guy — TypeScript did a few things that Python is still waiting to figure out. So nowadays, we definitely look at TypeScript for examples. We have a typing SIG where we discuss extensions of the typing syntax and semantics and the type system in general for Python, and we definitely sometimes propose new features because we know that certain features were also originally initially lacking in TypeScript, and then added to TypeScript based on user demand, and [became] very successful in TypeScript. And so now we can see we are in that same situation.
  
  "Because JavaScript and Python are relatively similar... Much more so than Python and say C++ or Rust or Java. So we are learning from TypeScript, and occasionally, from my conversations with Anders, it sounds like TypeScript is also learning from Python, just like JavaScript has learned from Python in a few areas."

The Telegraph reports: Video-sharing platform YouTube has announced changes in its terms of services, which confer the company the right to monetise all content on its platform by placing advertisements along its videos from channels that are not covered by its partner programme. From June onwards, content created by those who have not enrolled for the YouTube partner programme will also run advertisements curated by YouTube.

The creators/uploaders will not earn any revenue from these promotions...

"You grant YouTube the right to monetise your content on the service (and such monetisation may include displaying ads on or within content or charging users a fee for access)," said the updated terms of service. "This agreement does not entitle you to any payments...." This was already in effect in the U.S. from November last year and will now be extended across other geographies effective from June. According to industry observers, the change in terms of service is motivated by the fast growing revenue channels from YouTube advertisements. For the March quarter of 2021, Alphabet, Google's parent, earned a revenue of $6 billion from YouTube advertising, posting a year on year growth of 49 per cent...

Philipp Schindler, senior vice president and chief business officer, Google explained to the analysts on what is driving such growth... "Advertisers are using YouTube now to reach the audiences they can't find anywhere else. And remember, more 18-to-49-year-olds are actually watching YouTube than all linear TV combined...." According to official figures, over 2 billion logged in users visit YouTube every month and every day people watch over a billion hours of video on the platform...

"Today there are two models in place - either the subscriber pays or the advertiser pays. It is inevitable that all platforms will follow one or the other and viewers and content creators have to accept that," said a media and entertainment industry analyst requesting anonymity.
YouTube reminds users that its Terms of Service also "already state that you cannot collect any information that might identify a person without their permission. While this has always included facial recognition information, the new Terms make that explicitly clear."

Do gamers need a dedicated browser? Opera sure thinks so. Two years after launching Opera GX, a browser aimed at gamers, on desktop, the company has started to beta test Opera GX on iOS and Android. From a report: So what sets it apart from regular browsers? For starters, Opera GX features a control panel that lets you set limits on CPU, RAM and network bandwidth. Mobile users can also utilize the fast action button to quickly access functions like search and to open and close tabs. Exporting elements from the world of gaming, the button also uses vibrations and haptic feedback. You can also sync the mobile browser with the desktop version by scanning a QR code. Doing this will allow you to transfer across files of up to 10MB, links, YouTube videos, photos and various ephemera. The company says it expects Opera GX for iOS and Android to leave beta in a few weeks.

Today, Google and Samsung announced that they are merging Wear OS and Tizen in an effort to better compete against Apple's watchOS. "The resulting platform is currently being referred to simply as 'Wear,' though that might not be the final name," notes The Verge. From the report: Benefits of the joint effort include significant improvements to battery life, 30 percent faster loading times for apps, and smoother animations. It also simplifies life for developers and will create one central smartwatch OS for the Android platform. Google is also promising a greater selection of apps and watch faces than ever before. "All device makers will be able to add a customized user experience on top of the platform, and developers will be able to use the Android tools they already know and love to build for one platform and ecosystem," Google's Bjorn Kilburn wrote in a blog post.

Wired has more details on what's to come, including the tidbit that Samsung will stick with its popular rotating bezel on future devices -- but it's finished making Tizen-only smartwatches. There will also be a version of Google Maps that works standalone (meaning without your phone nearby) and a YouTube Music app that supports offline downloads. Oh, and Spotify will support offline downloads on Wear smartwatches, as well. Samsung confirmed that its next Galaxy Watch will run on this unified platform. And future "premium" Fitbit devices will also run the software.

The New York Times reports on misinformation that's further inflaming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: In a 28-second video, which was posted to Twitter this week by a spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip appeared to launch rocket attacks at Israelis from densely populated civilian areas.

At least that is what Mr. Netanyahu's spokesman, Ofir Gendelman, said the video portrayed. But his tweet with the footage, which was shared hundreds of times as the conflict between Palestinians and Israelis escalated, was not from Gaza. It was not even from this week. Instead, the video that he shared, which can be found on many YouTube channels and other video-hosting sites, was from 2018. And according to captions on older versions of the video, it showed militants firing rockets not from Gaza but from Syria or Libya.

The video was just one piece of misinformation that has circulated on Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, WhatsApp and other social media this week about the rising violence between Israelis and Palestinians, as Israeli military ground forces attacked Gaza early on Friday. The false information has included videos, photos and clips of text purported to be from government officials in the region, with posts baselessly claiming early this week that Israeli soldiers had invaded Gaza, or that Palestinian mobs were about to rampage through sleepy Israeli suburbs. The lies have been amplified as they have been shared thousands of times on Twitter and Facebook, spreading to WhatsApp and Telegram groups that have thousands of members, according to an analysis by The New York Times.

The effect of the misinformation is potentially deadly, disinformation experts said, inflaming tensions between Israelis and Palestinians when suspicions and distrust have already run high.

America's leading social media companies "pledged to put warning labels on COVID-19 and COVID vaccines posts to stop the spread of falsehoods, conspiracy theories and hoaxes that are fueling vaccine hesitancy in the USA," reports USA Today.

"With the exception of Facebook, nearly all of them are losing the war against COVID disinformation." That's the conclusion of a new report shared exclusively with USA TODAY. As the pace of the nation's immunizations slows and public health agencies struggle to get shots in arms, Advance Democracy found that debunked claims sowing unfounded fears about the vaccines are circulating largely unfettered on Twitter and TikTok, including posts and videos that falsely allege the federal government is covering up deaths caused by the vaccines or that it is safer to get COVID-19 than to get the vaccine.

Twitter began labeling tweets that include misleading or false information about COVID-19 vaccines in March. It also started using a "strike system" to eventually remove accounts that repeatedly violate its rules. Yet none of the top tweets on Twitter using popular anti-vaccine hashtags like #vaccineskill, #novaccine, #depopulation and #plandemic had labels as of May 3, according to Advance Democracy, a research organization that studies disinformation and extremism. What's more, when USA TODAY searched these hashtags on Twitter, unlabeled posts were served up along with advertisements for major consumer brands including Cheetos, Volvo, CVS, even Star Wars...

After coming under fire for its slow response to COVID-19 misinformation, Facebook has made significant progress in labeling COVID-19 posts, according to Daniel Jones, president of Advance Democracy... As of May 3, all of the top 10 posts discussing COVID-19 vaccines that used the #vaccineskill hashtag were labeled, compared to only two of the top 10 on March 28, Advance Democracy found... Facebook told USA TODAY it has removed more than 16 million pieces of content on Facebook and Instagram for violating its COVID and vaccine policies since the beginning of the pandemic....

As of May 3, TikTok failed to consistently apply labels to anti-vaccination hashtags used in videos with millions of views, the report said. Nine of the top 10 videos related to COVID-19 vaccines using the hashtag #NoVaccine did not have a label. Videos with the #NoVaccine label racked up 20.5 million views...

The Advance Democracy research did not look at vaccine-related content on Facebook-owned Instagram or Google's YouTube.
"Promises to address public health misinformation online are only consequential if there is action and follow through..." Jones told USA Today.

"This pandemic is not over, and with the rate of vaccinations on the decline, directing users to reliable information on vaccines is more important than ever," Jones said.

This afternoon Elon Musk tweeted a special URL allowing viewers outside the U.S. to simultaenously livestream his 90-minute appearance on Saturday Night Live for the first time in more than 100 countries, starting at 11:30 p.m. EST. The A.V. Club had a sardonic reaction to the livestreaming on YouTube: Good news for anyone looking at tonight's upcoming broadcast of Saturday Night Live — in which labor-busting vaccine skeptic Elon Musk will be given a platform to broadcast his techno-dystopian brain contents to the world — and thought, "Wow, there's not enough Google involved here." Well, not anymore.
Musk has already appeared in a two promos for the show. (Though CNN quips that the tonight's live show means NBC is "relying on Musk to filter his thoughts in real time, despite little evidence, historically, of him holding back on just about anything he wants to say — even when under scrutiny by federal regulators.") And the rest of the world is getting ready too. While Tesla brought the Cybertruck prototype to its New York City store, Lucid Air made plans to broadcast an ad for its coming 500-mile-range electric car that will compete with cars from Musk's Tesla.

Meanwhile, Bleeping Computer reports that Twitter scammers have been hacking into verified Twitter accounts and changing the profiles to impersonate SNL's, then replying to Musk's tweets with URL's lead to cryptocurrency giveaway scams. "We have determined that the scammers have made at least $97,054.62 over the past two days. The Ethereum giveaway scams also earned them $13,758." And the Dogecoin scammers netted at least $42,456.

And this week Slate also noted a spike in the price of Dogecoin. The joke cryptocurrency based on a shiba inu meme is up — uh, let me check — about 20 percent since this time Tuesday, has just about doubled in price since April 27, and as of this moment is up about 26,000 percent for the year (lol). It's trading around 64 cents as I type this... [I]t's probably not worth overthinking this. We're living in the stonks era. Elon is going on a sketch comedy show and is hinting that he might bring up a dumb digital token that everyone finds inherently funny. Now CNBC is hauling on experts to illuminate what the hell is going on, and members of the financial media are having to write earnest explainers about why you should invest in the dog money with caution, as if a single sane person would think otherwise.

What makes the whole rally uniquely amusing, compared with, say, the rise of Bitcoin, is that it's a willfully dumb affront not just to traditional finance, but also to the broader crypto community — which has, shall we say, mixed feelings about Dogecoin, mostly because they think it makes their project, which they tend to treat with self-righteous seriousness, look very silly... Dogecoin is the, well, underdog of the crypto world, the currency that was looked down upon by much of the Bitcoin- and Ethereum-boosting elite. Except now it has an $82 billion market cap. The dogecoiners — basically the sweet, dumb, bong-ripping frat of the crypto world — find all this hilarious.
So what will happen tonight? Ultimately castmember Michael Che, who co-hosts the show's parody newscast segment Weekend Update, joked that while some of the show's performers objected to Musk's appearance, he saw the selection of Musk as both "polarizing" and "exciting."

"You know, what's funny is that I would say I know about 20 to 25% of the white people that get to host the show anyway. So Elon, I was like, 'Oh, I know who he is at least.'"

Share your own reactions in the comments.

The New York Times reports on surprising silver linings of the global chip shortage: Even as a chip shortage is causing trouble for all sorts of industries, the semiconductor field is entering a surprising new era of creativity, from industry giants to innovative start-ups seeing a spike in funding from venture capitalists that traditionally avoided chip makers. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company and Samsung Electronics, for example, have managed the increasingly difficult feat of packing more transistors on each slice of silicon. IBM on Thursday announced another leap in miniaturization, a sign of continued U.S. prowess in the technology race. Perhaps most striking, what was a trickle of new chip companies is now approaching a flood.

Equity investors for years viewed semiconductor companies as too costly to set up, but in 2020 plowed more than $12 billion into 407 chip-related companies, according to CB Insights. Though a tiny fraction of all venture capital investments, that was more than double what the industry received in 2019 and eight times the total for 2016. Synopsys, the biggest supplier of software that engineers use to design chip, is tracking more than 200 start-ups designing chips for artificial intelligence, the ultrahot technology powering everything from smart speakers to self-driving cars. Cerebras, a start-up that sells massive artificial-intelligence processors that span an entire silicon wafer, for example, has attracted more than $475 million. Groq, a start-up whose chief executive previously helped design an artificial-intelligence chip for Google, has raised $367 million.

"It's a bloody miracle," said Jim Keller, a veteran chip designer whose resume includes stints at Apple, Tesla and Intel and who now works at the A.I. chip start-up Tenstorrent. "Ten years ago you couldn't do a hardware start-up...."

More companies are concluding that software running on standard Intel-style microprocessors is not the best solution for all problems. For that reason, companies like Cisco Systems and Hewlett Packard Enterprise have long designed specialty chips for products such as networking gear. Giants like Apple, Amazon and Google more recently have gotten into the act. Google's YouTube unit recently disclosed its first internally developed chip to speed video encoding.

And Volkswagen even said last week that it would develop its own processor to manage autonomous driving.

"A ghostly hum has been echoing across the plains of Mars' Jezero Crater," reports Business Insider.

Slashdot reader quonset writes: NASA has released a short video of Ingenuity's fourth flight on Mars. However, a bountiful side effect is they were able to hear the hum of its rotors.

Perseverance's microphone was turned on during the flight, and despite Ingenuity being over 260 feet away, it was able to capture both sight and sound of the historic event.

While the majority of sound is Martian wind rustling against the microphone, NASA enhanced the sound to make the rotor sounds more audible. They are most apparent when Ingenuity returns to its takeoff spot and the rotor hum dies down when the blades come to a halt.
"We had carried out tests and simulations that told us the microphone would barely pick up the sounds of the helicopter, as the Mars atmosphere damps the sound propagation strongly," said NASA's science lead for the Perseverance rover's microphone.

"We have been lucky to register the helicopter at such a distance. This recording will be a gold mine for our understanding of the Martian atmosphere."

"It never occurred to me that a Facebook-appointed panel could avoid a clear decision about Donald Trump's heinous online behavior," writes a New York Times technology reporter. "But that is what it's done..."

They call the board's decision "kind of perfect, actually, since it forces everyone's hand — from the Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to our limp legislators in Congress..."

The editor of the conservative National Review adds: If Facebook had set out to demonstrate that it has awesome power over speech in the United States, including speech at the core of the nation's political debate, and is wielding that power arbitrarily, indeed has no idea what its own rules truly are or should be, it wouldn't have handled the question any differently... The oversight board underlines the astonishing fact that in reaching its most momentous free-speech decision ever in this country, in determining whether a former president of the United States can use its platform or not, Facebook made it up on the fly. "In applying this penalty," the board writes of the suspension, "Facebook did not follow a clear, published procedure." This is like the U.S. Supreme Court handing down decisions in the absence of a written Constitution, or a home-plate umpire calling balls and strikes without an agreed-upon strike zone...
John Samples, a member of the Oversight Board, has even said explicitly that their decision was not about former president Trump — but about Facebook itself. The Washington Post reports: Samples said the board found that Facebook enforced a rule that didn't exist at the time. Trump was suspended indefinitely, rather than permanently or for a specific period of time, as defined by the company's own rules. "In a sense we were being tough with them," Samples said.

Other members said the board's call should reassure anyone concerned that Facebook wields too much control over online speech. "Anyone who's concerned about Mark Zuckerberg's power and his company's power over our speech online should actually praise this decision," Julie Owono, executive director of Internet Sans Frontières, said at a virtual event hosted by the Stanford Cyber Policy Center. "The board refused to support an arbitrary suspension..."

The flurry of media appearances marked a critical moment in the board's existence, as it tries to prove its legitimacy, define its powers and establish its relationship with Facebook.
NPR notes that former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt, a board co-chair, even called Facebook "a bit lazy" for failing to set a specific penalty in the first place... "What we are telling Facebook is that they can't invent penalties as they go along. They have to stick to their own rules," Thorning-Schmidt said in an interview with Axios. The board's criticism didn't stop at Facebook's imposing what it called a "vague, standardless penalty." It slammed the company for trying to outsource its final verdict on Trump. "Facebook has a responsibility to its users and to its community and to the broader public to make its own decisions," Jamal Greene, another board co-chair and constitutional law professor at Columbia, said Thursday during an Aspen Institute event. "The board's job is to make sure that Facebook is doing its job," he said.

Tensions between the board's view of the scope of its role and Facebook's were also evident in the board's revelation that the company wouldn't answer seven of the 46 questions it asked about the Trump case. The questions Facebook refused to answer included how its own design and algorithms might have amplified the reach of Trump's posts and contributed to the Capitol assault. "The ones that the company refused to answer to are precisely related to what happened before Jan. 6," Julie Owono, an oversight board member and executive director of the digital rights group Internet Sans Frontières, said at the Aspen Institute event.

"Our decision says that you cannot make such an important decision, such a serious decision for freedom of expression, freedom of speech, without the adequate context."

Video site LiveLeak, best known for hosting gruesome footage that mainstream rivals wouldn't touch, has shut down after fifteen years in operation. In its place is "ItemFix," a site that bans users from uploading media containing "excessive violence or gory content." The Verge reports: In a blog post, LiveLeak founder Hayden Hewitt did not give an explicit reason for the site's closure, saying only that: "The world has changed a lot over these last few years, the Internet alongside it, and we as people." In a video posted on his YouTube channel Trigger Warning, Hewitt offered no further details, but said that maintaining LiveLeak had become a struggle, and that he and his team "just didn't have it in us to carry on fighting." "Everything's different now, everything moves on," says Hewitt, before adding in an aside to the camera: "I don't fucking like it. I liked it much better when it was the Wild West."

LiveLeak has been a mainstay of internet culture for many years, its name synonymous with footage of murder, terrorism, and everyday incidents of crime and violence. A sinister doppelganger to sites like YouTube, LiveLeak was founded in 2006 and grew out of a culture of early internet "shock sites" like Ogrish, Rotten.com, and BestGore: websites that hosted violent and pornographic content with the express aim of disgusting visitors.

[D]emand for such extreme content will always exist, even if individual sites like LiveLeak come and go. In his farewell blog post, the site's founder Hayden Hewitt emphasized the importance of the site's community. "To the members, the uploaders, the casual visitors, the trolls and the occasionally demented people who have been with us. You have been our constant companions and although we probably didn't get to communicate too often you're appreciated more than you realize," he writes. "On a personal level you have fascinated and amused me with your content. Lastly, to those no longer with us. I still remember you."