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• 'Lord of the Rings' Reunion Brings Actors, Director, Writers Together on Zoom
• Walmart Employees Complain Its Anti-Shoplifting AI Is Buggy, Inaccurate, and Dangerous
• Are Food Delivery Services Actually Losing Money?
• Linus Torvalds Argues Against 80-Column Line Length Coding Style, As Linux Kernel Deprecates It
• Protesting Mark Zuckerberg Comments About Fact-Checking, Fake News About Mark Zuckerberg Goes Viral
• 82-Year-Old Ridley Scott Shares Some Secrets About 'Alien'
• Dutch Restaurant Will Re-Open With Robot Waiters
• Microsoft Edge To Save Edits Made To PDF Files Without Saving a Copy Each Time
• Zoom's New, Stronger Encryption May Only Protect Paying Clients
• Ask Slashdot: Why is Microsoft Blocking Its Own Server Pages?
• Watch NASA Astronauts on SpaceX Crew Dragon Docking with ISS
• Waymo's Self-Driving Minivans Return to Phoenix, Detroit, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area
• Should Maintainers of Open Source Projects Be Paid?
• Microsoft Replaces Dozens of Staff With AI for News Stories on MSN

'Lord of the Rings' Reunion Brings Actors, Director, Writers Together on Zoom Posted: 31 May 2020 06:34 PM PDT "Just about the entire cast of The Lord of the Rings gathered their Zoom screens together for a reunion nearly two decades after the end of the epic fantasy film trilogy," reports CNET: io9 notes that it was comic actor-singer Josh Gad who "gathered the hobbits, the wizards, the elves, and the wicked menfolk to go to Isen — YouTube, where they joke, talk shop, reminisce, and just seem to really thoroughly enjoy each others' presence. In this stream are Elijah Wood [Frodo], Sena Astin [Sam], Ian McKellen [Gandalf], Orlando Bloom [Legolas], Viggo Mortensen [Aragorn], Liv Tyler [Arwen], and more, along with director Peter Jackson and, presumably, the kind doting ghost of J.R.R. Tolkien just off-screen." The Wrap has more details, including the fact that the event was to support No Kid Hungry, a charity in support of ending childhood hunger, and some ways they changed J.R.R. Tolkein's book for the movie: "Gandalf does not say, 'You shall not pass!' in the book," McKellen notes. "He says, 'You will not pass." [Co-writer Philippa] Boyens also notes that Gandalf's first line in the trilogy was one she came up with herself, instead of coming from Tolkien: "A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins. Nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to." Another moment from the trilogy that gained Internet immortality was Boromir's famous "One does not simply" speech, where he warns the Council of Elrond that trying to sneak into Mordor to destroy the One Ring is impossible. Jackson admits that the speech was written the day before the council scene was filmed and while Sean Bean's speech was done so well that it became a meme, he needed some help to remember it. "What Sean did, which I thought was really clever, is he got a print-out of the speech taped to his knee," Jackson said, pointing out Bean places his hand to his head to display Boromir's sense of despair. "If you watch the scene now, you'll see every time that Sean has to check his script." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Walmart Employees Complain Its Anti-Shoplifting AI Is Buggy, Inaccurate, and Dangerous Posted: 31 May 2020 04:44 PM PDT Walmart uses "Everseen" AI technology in thousands of its stores "to prevent shoplifting at registers and self-checkout kiosks," reports Wired. But some Walmart workers claim that instead it's often failed to stop actual instances of stealing, misidentified innocuous behavior as theft -- and made it harder for them to social distance: The workers said they had been upset about Walmart's use of Everseen for years and claimed colleagues had raised concerns about the technology to managers but were rebuked. They decided to speak to the press, they said, after a June 2019 Business Insider article reported Walmart's partnership with Everseen publicly for the first time. The story described how Everseen uses AI to analyze footage from surveillance cameras installed in the ceiling and can detect issues in real time, such as when a customer places an item in their bag without scanning it. When the system spots something, it automatically alerts store associates... In interviews, the workers, whose jobs include knowledge of Walmart's loss-prevention programs, said their top concern with Everseen was false positives at self-checkout. The employees believe that the tech frequently misinterprets innocent behavior as potential shoplifting, which frustrates customers and store associates, and leads to longer lines. "It's like a noisy tech, a fake AI that just pretends to safeguard," said one worker. The coronavirus pandemic has given their concerns more urgency. One Concerned Home Office Associate said they worry false positives could be causing Walmart workers to break social-distancing guidelines unnecessarily. When Everseen flags an issue, a store associate needs to intervene and determine whether shoplifting or another problem is taking place. In an internal communication from April obtained by WIRED, a corporate Walmart manager expressed strong concern that workers were being put at risk by the additional contact necessitated by false positives and asked whether the Everseen system should be turned off to protect customers and workers. Before COVID-19, "it wasn't ideal, it was a poor customer experience," the worker said. "AI is now creating a public health risk." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Are Food Delivery Services Actually Losing Money? Posted: 31 May 2020 03:34 PM PDT Food delivery services like Grubhub should be thriving, especially during the pandemic. But they're not, The Markup reports: In August 2019, analysts from the investment firm Cowen estimated that Uber Eats was losing $3.36 on every order and would continue to lose money on every order for the next five years. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi acknowledged that Uber Eats is not yet profitable in an email to employees in March after its parent company laid off more than 3,700 employees.... In early March, DoorDash filed to go public despite losing an estimated $450 million in 2019, according to The New York Times. DoorDash declined to comment on that estimate or its path to profitability, but regarding the latter CEO Tony Xu told Fortune in February that "we're working our way there...." Meanwhile, other companies have been ditching the food delivery business: Yelp sold Eat24 to Grubhub, Square sold Caviar to DoorDash, and Amazon shut down its Amazon Restaurants delivery service. Grubhub, which also owns Seamless, is publicly traded and the only one of the big four that has achieved profitability. Still, it lost more than a third of its value after revenue fell below investors' expectations in the third quarter of 2019. In a letter to shareholders, the company revealed two things: Customers were "promiscuous," or not loyal to the Grubhub platform, and the delivery part of the business was fundamentally not profitable. Instead, delivery was just a "means to an end" — getting restaurants to sign up on the Grubhub platform and then upselling them on "marketing" benefits, like greater visibility in Grubhub's search results. In other words, like many tech companies, GrubHub is primarily an advertising company. "Bottom line is that you need to pay someone enough money to drive to the restaurant, pick up food and drive it to a diner. . . ," the company wrote. "At some point, delivery drones and robots may reduce the cost of fulfillment, but it will be a long time before the capital costs and ongoing operating expenses are less than the cost of paying someone for 30-45 minutes of their time." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linus Torvalds Argues Against 80-Column Line Length Coding Style, As Linux Kernel Deprecates It Posted: 31 May 2020 02:34 PM PDT "The Linux kernel has officially deprecated its coding style that the length of lines of code comply with 80 columns as the 'strong preferred limit'," reports Phoronix: The Linux kernel like many long-standing open-source projects has a coding style guideline that lines of code be 80 columns or less, but now that while still recommended is no longer going to be enforced. This stems from Linus Torvalds commenting on Friday that excessive linebreaks are bad and he is against ugly wrapped code that is strictly sticking to 80 characters per line. This is part of the broader trend that most are no longer using 80x25 terminals... This deprecation involves updating the documentation on the kernel's coding style to be more sensible and updating the checkpatch.pl script that checks patches to no longer have a max line length of 80. Instead, the check patch script is using a maximum line length of 100. Torvalds noted Friday that spreading code over multiple lines created problems for single-line utilities like grep, while longer lines "are fundamentally useful..." [H]onestly, I don't want to see patches that make the kernel reading experience worse for me and likely for the vast majority of people, based on the argument that some odd people have small terminal windows... If you or Christoph have 80 character lines, you'll get possibly ugly wrapped output. Tough. That's _your_ choice. Your hardware limitations shouldn't be a pain for the rest of us... So no. I do not care about somebody with a 80x25 terminal window getting line wrapping. For exactly the same reason I find it completely irrelevant if somebody says that their kernel compile takes 10 hours because they are doing kernel development on a Raspberry PI with 4GB of RAM. People with restrictive hardware shouldn't make it more inconvenient for people who have better resources... If you choose to use a 80-column terminal, you can live with the line wrapping. It's just that simple. "Yes, staying withing 80 columns is certainly still _preferred_," notes the official commit message for this change. "But it's not the hard limit that the checkpatch warnings imply, and other concerns can most certainly dominate. Increase the default limit to 100 characters. Not because 100 characters is some hard limit either, but that's certainly a 'what are you doing' kind of value and less likely to be about the occasional slightly longer lines.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Protesting Mark Zuckerberg Comments About Fact-Checking, Fake News About Mark Zuckerberg Goes Viral Posted: 31 May 2020 01:34 PM PDT "I don't think that Facebook or internet platforms in general should be arbiters of truth," CEO Mark Zuckerberg said Thursday. Since then, Vice reports, "Fake news about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is being shared widely on the internet, including on his own social network..." Zuckerberg's quote is particularly confusing because Facebook does fact-check some news posts, and uses a byzantine, third-party system to do so. Nonetheless, Donald Trump later quoted Zuckerberg's favorable response in a tweet. Now, two satirical articles by websites with Australian domain names are going viral on Facebook, spreading misinformation about Zuckerberg and calling attention to his stance against fact checking by social media companies. The first article, posted on Thursday by a site called The Chaser, is titled "'Social media should not fact check posts,' says child molester Mark Zuckerberg," which also baselessly alleges that the CEO likes black jellybeans. It has more than 200,000 interactions on Facebook, according to the Facebook-owned analytics platform Crowdtangle. This article has also gone viral on Twitter, where The Chaser's tweet has amassed more than 4,000 retweets. Another article, also posted on Thursday from a site called The Shovel, is titled "Mark Zuckerberg — Dead at 36 — Says Social Media Should Not Fact Check Posts." This post has nearly 50,000 interactions on Facebook and is also viral on Twitter. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

82-Year-Old Ridley Scott Shares Some Secrets About 'Alien' Posted: 31 May 2020 12:34 PM PDT Ridley Scott was the fifth choice to direct the 1979 film Alien, remembers the Los Angeles Times, "meaning that no one was expecting the film to become as important and influential as it now is." This week they chronicled some more remembrances about the film from 82-year-old Ridley Scott: The central role of Ellen Ripley — also portrayed by Sigourney Weaver in three subsequent sequels — was originally written as a man... "I think it was Alan Ladd [then president of 20th Century Fox] who said, 'Why can't Ripley be a woman?' And there was a long pause, that at that moment I never thought about it. I thought, why not, it's a fresh direction, the ways I thought about that. And away we went... I found Sigourney by word of mouth. Somebody had been told that Siourney was on an off-Broadway stage doing something, that I should meet. And I did," Scott said. "And there it was, she was perfect. In terms of scale, size, intelligence, her acting is just fantastic. And so it was made for her, really." The film's notorious chest-burster scene, in which an alien creature emerges from within actor John Hurt's chest, is now among the classic scenes in modern horror cinema. It was shot with multiple cameras because Scott could only really perform the full effect once, "because once I blew blood all over that set, there was no cleaning it up... I kept it very much from the actors and I kept the actual little creature, whatever that would be, from the actors. I never wanted them to see it," Scott said. "Remember there was no digital effects in those days at all. I'm going to somehow bring that creature out of his chest...." Scott recalled the influence that Star Wars had on him at the time, noting, "It opened the gate for me feeling comfortable that science fiction was no longer silly fantasy but actually had a reality to it... So I was blown away... My hat still comes off to George," Scott said of Lucas for the first Star Wars. "Without question his was by far the best, still." Scott directed the 2017 film Alien: Covenant, the Times notes, "And he may not be done yet. "What I always thought when I was making it, the first one, why would a creature like this be made and why was it traveling in what I always thought was a kind of war-craft, which was carrying a cargo of these eggs. What was the purpose of the vehicle and what was the purpose of the eggs? That's the thing to question — who, why, and for what purpose is the next idea, I think." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Dutch Restaurant Will Re-Open With Robot Waiters Posted: 31 May 2020 11:34 AM PDT When Dutch restaurants open tomorrow, one will be using two shiny white-and-red robot waiters, reports the Associated Press: "Hello and welcome," the robots say — in a voice best described as pre-programmed. Their duties will include greeting customers, serving drinks and dishes and returning used glasses and crockery. It's unclear whether diners will be expected to tip. One thing the robots will certainly do is see that social distancing rules are respected. "We will use them to make sure the five feet we need during the corona crisis sticks," Leah Hu said. "I've had negative reactions," she said, "such as saying it makes it impersonal." But it may prove just what customers crave when Dutch restaurants are allowed to reopen Monday as lockdown restrictions are further eased. In a stab at quasi-human panache, one robot wears a chiffon scarf around its neck.... And in the southern Zeeland province, the Hus don't want to hear any complaints about the robots robbing young people of a job. They say it's hard enough anyway to find staff in a rural region without any major city close by... "We are often busy and cleaning tables and the robots give us an extra hand." It also frees up the human staff for some more personal contact. "We are not disappearing. We are still here. They will always need people in this industry," she said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Edge To Save Edits Made To PDF Files Without Saving a Copy Each Time Posted: 31 May 2020 10:34 AM PDT techtsp quotes The Windows Club: In a major breakthrough, Microsoft Edge now supports Native File System API, which will take progressive web apps and their usage to a whole new level. An official roadmap entry points towards the new development, which only means one thing: Bridging the native app gap using modern web technologies... This is exactly where Microsoft Edge's Native File System API support comes into play, and Edge is already rolling out a native PDF editing support that uses this Native File System API. In the future, Microsoft Edge users can easily save edits made to PDF documents back to the file instead of saving a copy each time... Starting in Google Chrome 83, a new origin trial has started for the Native File System API for all desktop platforms including Windows, Linux, and macOS. We saw it in action in the text editor demo.... Over the last few years, the web has evolved into an incredibly powerful platform in itself, and with the introduction and significant adoption of Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), the cross-device software delivery became much easier. But no matter how great PWAs are, they have certain limitations that we can't possibly ignore. And these limitations prevent users from replacing native apps with progressive web apps. In short, PWAs can't do everything that native apps can do. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Zoom's New, Stronger Encryption May Only Protect Paying Clients Posted: 31 May 2020 09:34 AM PDT "Zoom plans to strengthen the encryption of its service for paying customers," reports Newsweek, "but the upgrade will not be available to users of its free service." Zoom security consultant Alex Stamos later confirmed the details of the reported move in an interview with Reuters, which first reported the changes on Friday. But he also told the news outlet that Zoom's plans could still change. "The CEO is looking at different arguments," Stamos said. "The current plan is paid customers plus enterprise accounts where the company knows who they are." In the wake of privacy concerns, he added that Zoom was making significant efforts to upgrade safety and trust on its platform. In an emailed statement to Newsweek, a Zoom spokesperson said: "Zoom's approach to end-to-end encryption is very much a work in progress — everything from our draft cryptographic design, which was just published last week, to our continued discussions around which customers it would apply to." The tech company's plans to boost the encryption of video calls on its platform have been revealed a month after it was reported that half a million Zoom account credentials were being sold on the Dark Web. Zoom's increased usage during lockdowns brought increase scrutiny, reports CNET, which "revealed several Zoom security problems and the fact that an earlier Zoom boast of end-to-end encryption was baseless." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ask Slashdot: Why is Microsoft Blocking Its Own Server Pages? Posted: 31 May 2020 08:34 AM PDT Long-time Slashdot reader lpq writes: I followed a link that pointed at a Microsoft security advisory about ".lnk" files. The original link, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/technet/security/advisory/2286198.mspx, produced this message: Your request has been blocked. This may be due to several reasons. 1. You are using a proxy that is known to send automated requests to Microsoft. Check with your network administrator if there is any proxy and what User-Agent they are sending in the request header. 2. Your request pattern matches an automated process. To eliminate, reduce the volume of requests over a period of time. 3. Reference ID: 41.70790b91.4823110533.409105b4 It turns out the advisory number doesn't matter, just the extension for "Active Microsoft Server Page" (https.../.mspx) at the end. I guess there were too many security advisory lookups for MS to handle! *snort*! The .mspx extension indicates a page using a special internal Microsoft rendering framework with a custom web handler (built in ASP.Net). But I ran some tests Saturday, and observed the exact same glitch described above using three different browsers — Firefox, Edge, and Brave. Anyone have a theory about what's going on? Leave your thoughts in the comments. Why is Microsoft blocking its own server pages? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Watch NASA Astronauts on SpaceX Crew Dragon Docking with ISS Posted: 31 May 2020 07:11 AM PDT "We're less than 10 meters away..." "@AstroBehnken and @Astro_Doug are suited up, strapped in their seats and ready to be welcomed by the crew aboard the @Space_Station," NASA tweeted an hour ago. They're now just 135 meters away from the space station, and you can watch the docking live on YouTube. 1,024,406 people are already watching... "NASA astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken reported that the capsule was performing beautifully, as they closed in for the docking," reports the Associated Press. "The gleaming white capsule was easily visible from the station, its nose cone open exposing its docking hook, as the two spacecraft zoomed a few miles apart above the Atlantic, then Africa, then Asia." It's the first time a privately built and owned spacecraft is carrying crew to the orbiting lab. Hurley, the Dragon's commander, prepared to take manual control for a brief test, then shift the capsule into automatic for the linkup, 19 hours after liftoff. In case of a problem, the astronauts slipped back into their pressurized launch suits for the docking. The three space station residents trained cameras on the incoming capsule for flight controllers at SpaceX headquarters in Hawthorne, California, as well as NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. UPDATE: At 7:16 PST, soft capture was successfully completed. We are now "moments away" from their boarding, with an official "welcoming ceremony" expected to happen soon. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Waymo's Self-Driving Minivans Return to Phoenix, Detroit, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area Posted: 31 May 2020 06:34 AM PDT Digital Trends reports: Waymo is planning to relaunch its fleet of self-driving minivans into Bay Area streets on June 8, according to an email acquired by The Verge. However, instead of transporting passengers, the vehicles will instead focus on delivering packages for non-profit organizations #DrawTogether, which gives art kits to children, and Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired... The pending return to the Bay Area follows Waymo's restart of its testing program in Phoenix, as lockdown restrictions were eased earlier this month... The autonomous vehicles will also soon also make their way back in Detroit and Los Angeles. The Verge argues that Waymo "is the latest autonomous vehicle operator to discover that doing deliveries allows it to sidestep restrictions that would otherwise require them to keep their autonomous vehicles off the road." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Should Maintainers of Open Source Projects Be Paid? Posted: 31 May 2020 03:34 AM PDT Matt Asay, a former COO of Canonical now working at AWS, writes "Over the last few weeks I've interviewed a range of open source project maintainers, most of which don't directly get paid for supporting their projects... Is this a bad thing?" It's not completely clear. Linux Foundation executive Chris Aniszczyk has been an outspoken opponent of open source "tip jars" that seek to sustain projects with donations. "These [open source developers] should be encouraged to start businesses or your business should hire them directly," he argues. But many such developers don't want a 9-to-5 corporate job, preferring the independence of contract work. Open source sustainability, in other words, is messy. Most open source project maintainers with whom I've spoken got started because it was a "fun" way to spend their free time. They had a variety of personal "itches" they needed to scratch. Exactly none started coding because they were hoping to get paid for that work. In fact, in some cases, it was specifically to create space from their employer that they started the project. For Datasette founder Simon Willison, for example, he "wanted a creative outlet." That is, a project that he got to have complete control over. In some ways, he said, it was perhaps "a way of blowing off steam," but really it was a place where he could express his creativity without a corporate overlord steering that creativity. See the problem...? Aniszczyk reasonably suggests that the most sustainable source of funding is a paycheck, but that's precisely what many of these developers don't want. Or, at least, they don't want a paycheck that comes with restrictions on their ability to code freely... [O]pen source sustainability will never have one, meta answer for all of open source. It's always a project-by-project analysis and, really, a founder-by-founder (or community-by-community) decision. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Replaces Dozens of Staff With AI for News Stories on MSN Posted: 31 May 2020 12:34 AM PDT "Workforce automation is about to cost dozens of news contractors their jobs," writes Engadget: The Seattle Times and The Guardian report that Microsoft is letting go of dozens of news contractors (about 50 in the US, 27 in the UK) after June 30th due to a shift to AI news production on MSN. The workers were responsible for choosing, editing and curating stories. The work included identifying trending news stories, planning content, and rewriting headlines, according to the Seattle Times. "It's been semi-automated for a few months but now it's full speed ahead,'' one of the terminated contractors tells them. "It's demoralizing to think machines can replace us but there you go.'' Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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