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Techrights
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 22, 2024
> GNOME bluefish
> We're back from Austin, with interviews and stories to share. Plus, it's Gentoo week and we take our first look at Fedora 40.
> These are not isolated facts, but proof that traditional games have established themselves as a leisure activity option among people in their 20s and 30s, something that few could have foreseen. We are told of a youth absorbed in the screens that would eventually lose all human contact but, all of a sudden, a bunch of kids under 20 are sitting at a table in a bar and one of them takes some cards out of his backpack and they all get into a game of something as unfashionable as Chinchón or Brisca (both popular Spanish card games).
> The brain is both negatively and positively affected by listening to music while completing tasks like studying or doing homework.
> Many students have different preferences about music when it comes to schoolwork.
> Go back to the roots: experience. An expert is someone who has repeatedly solved the concrete problem you are encountering. If your toilet leaks, an experienced plumber is an expert. An expert has a track record and has had to face the consequences of their work. Failing is part of what makes an expert: any expert should have stories about how things went wrong.
> Over the past eight years I’ve held a trilogy of presentations over at NLNOG covering the working life and career of technical people. This is around two hours of video and slides (with notes), but I’ve heard from people who binge-watched all of it in one go. The presentations have been online for ages, but you had to know where to look for them. On this page I bring them all together, with some context.
> All presentations were held at events hosted by the most wonderful NLNOG foundation. And this also would be my first tip if you want to improve your technical career: visit events where peers from the industry meet, and exchange experiences.
> The 29-year-old chess supremo is hoping to raise $1 million (€937,500) for children's education in Africa.
> The record attempt began on Wednesday and continued for 60 hours, through to 12:40 a.m. on Saturday.
> Tunde is the founder of Chess in Slums Africa. The organization aims to support the education of at least 1 million children in slums across the continent.
> Jonathan Haight’s book The Anxious Generation sent parents (and grandparents) into a justified tailspin this spring, not least because millions of us can see the behavioural horrors he diagnoses in their own homes every day as a result of exposure to social media.
> His preoccupation is the phone, but the tablet does the same damage with the same platforms. For children, they are like “hooking up your eyes and ears to a gigantic fire hose and pumping them full of garbage all the time” as Haidt said on Bill Maher’s Real Time HBO show last month.
> What is going on when Penny hides under the duvet with her iPad, loses her temper when she can’t find it, or shuns the healthy light of day for the dim light of the screen?
> Like Gollum with the Ring, the iPad encourages deception and a split personality.
> At the start of Children’s Mental Health week, there are concerns about what this excessive screen use is doing to children’s brains and psychological wellbeing. So what can we do to protect them?
> Since the AI awakening in November 2022, the spending climate for enterprise tech has transformed. Customers are scraping money from other budgets to fund AI and running experiments in the desperate race for monetization. Names that were virtually unknown in early 2022 – such as OpenAI, Meta Llama and Anthropic PBC, are vying with the cloud-scale companies to get a piece of the pie. And notably, based on the latest Enterprise Technology Research survey data, though Google remains a distant third in cloud computing spend overall, it has dramatically accelerated its position in the all-important AI sector, closing the gap with Amazon Web Services Inc.
> In this abbreviated Breaking Analysis, we’ll show you how the spending patterns have changed since early 2022, prior to the launch of ChatGPT, and we’ll share where customers are putting their bets on AI platforms.
> That line blurred in the digital age. Many foreign nationals rely on American providers such as Google and Meta, which route or store data in the United States, raising questions as to whether the rules apply to where the targets are or where their data is collected. In 2008, Congress addressed that conundrum with Section 702. Instead of requiring the government to seek court orders for each foreign target, that provision requires yearly judicial approval of the rules that govern the program as a whole. That way, the government can efficiently obtain from communication providers the calls and messages of large numbers of foreign targets — 246,073 in 2022 alone.
> Police in the French capital Paris have given rail company SNCF and transport operator RATP authorization to conduct surveillance tests at four different train stations near two large events this weekend as a way to fine-tune their abilities ahead of this summer's Olympics.
> The companies will have access to images from more than 100 cameras. Those images will then be analyzed using artificial intelligence to run "intelligent and algorithm-based technology" that will surveil crowds attending a pop concert by the Black-Eyed Peas as well as a soccer match between Paris Saint-Germain and Olympique Lyon.
> The proposal would renew the program, which permits the U.S. government to collect without a warrant the communications of non-Americans located outside the country to gather foreign intelligence. The reauthorization faced a long and bumpy road to final passage Friday after months of clashes between privacy advocates and national security hawks pushed consideration of the legislation to the brink of expiration.
> Israel’s leaders are fiercely pushing back against U.S. plans to withhold American assistance from an Israeli unit accused of human rights abuses.
> Axios and Israeli news outlets reported over the weekend that Secretary of State Antony Blinken intends to ban U.S. support to Israel’s Netzah Yehuda unit, the country’s all-male, ultra-Orthodox battalion at the center of several controversies in the West Bank that go back years. Netzah Yehuda has been repeatedly accused of shooting and assaulting civilians, including in a 2022 case in which several commanders handcuffed, gagged and left for dead an elderly Palestinian-American man in Israel’s West Bank.
> At least 10 people were killed when Israeli forces raided the Nur Shams refugee camp, an episode that illustrated the territory’s continuing violence.
> Democratic Senator Mark Warner, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on Sunday that TikTok could be used as a propaganda tool by the Chinese government, noting that "many young people" use TikTok to get news.
> "The idea that we would give the Communist Party this much of a propaganda tool as well as the ability to scrape 170 million Americans' personal data, it is a national security risk," he told CBS News.
> These critics also say TikTok is subservient to Beijing and a conduit to spread propaganda. China and the company deny these claims.
> The bill, which could trigger the rare step of barring a company from operating in the US market, now goes to the Senate for a vote next week. It passed the House on Saturday with strong bipartisan support, by a margin of 360 to 58.
> In Tuesday's budget documents, the federal government indicated that it's "exploring new measures to expand access" to financing methods such as "halal mortgages."
> Two laptops, several cellular phones and documents, including jihadi books were seized and suspects were being interrogated, Nugroho said.
> National Police spokesperson Trunoyudo Wisnu Andiko said the arrests were the result of information obtained from 59 suspected militants detained in Oct. 2023.
> “Terry was deeply committed to on-the-ground eyewitness reporting and demonstrated great bravery and resolve, both in his journalism and during his years held hostage. We are so appreciative of the sacrifices he and his family made as the result of his work.” - Julie Pace, senior vice president and executive editor of the AP.
> Nixon and Anderson were both extremely controversial figures, but Feldstein proves remarkably calm and even-handed throughout the book, even while discussing some of the men's lowest moments (Nixon's resignation in 1974; Anderson's inexplicable decision to censor his own expose on the Iran-Contra scandal). Feldstein has remarkable narrative skills -- if the names weren't so familiar, and the setting weren't decades ago, you could almost think you're reading a dystopian political thriller. And though the book deals in scandal, it's never lurid; Feldstein is engaging, but never sensationalistic. He writes with the kind of restraint and responsibility that always evaded his two main subjects, and the result isn't just interesting -- it's an absolutely essential book for anyone interested in American political history.
> We knew the administration was offering arms to the most deadly terrorist of them all, Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and published columns protesting that Khomeini, not Gadhafi, was behind most terrorist acts against the United States.
> "At some point down the road, they're going to do this at a big enough scale to trigger some sort of climate impact," Talati says. "It can be done in an effective, globally governed way, or it can be done by two crazy people in California, and it can look horrible for a lot of people."
> Google Doodle treated viewers to a one-minute video showcasing the process of selecting nature images from around the globe to transform Google's logo for this Earth Day tribute.
> Eight gunny bags full of trash, the heaviest weighing about 8 kilograms was what the 1.5 hour long clean-up drive fetched from Kukrail picnic spot on the Earth Day on Sunday.
> The first is that it’s telling people think it’s a problem in the first place. We’ve built our economic systems to be growth dependent, meaning we need an ever-expanding population to make and buy things to merely break even. If we acknowledge Earth is a closed system with finite resources, and that economists can’t (in fact) bend the laws of physics, this can’t continue indefinitely.
> In a paper due to be published this summer in the journal SIAM Review, Mason Porter, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, and his students used tools from topology to do just that. Abigail Hickok, one of the paper’s coauthors, conceived the idea after seeing images of long lines in Atlanta. “Voting was on my mind a lot, partly because it was an especially anxiety-inducing election,” she said.
> Topologists study the underlying properties and spatial relations of geometric shapes under transformation. Two shapes are considered topologically equivalent if one can deform into the other via continuous movements without tearing, gluing, or introducing new holes.
> Computer hardware company Mega Networks is planning to set up a factory by the third quarter of the ongoing fiscal 2024-2025 to locally manufacture artificial intelligence servers, its chief executive said.
> The apps were removed from the store Friday after Chinese officials cited unspecified national security concerns.
> Their removal comes amid elevated tensions between the U.S. and China over trade, technology and national security.
↺ 2024-04-12 [Older] CoE Committee of Ministers urges Turkey to comply with ECtHR decision on Kavala
> A diss track featuring the apparent vocals of rapper Kendrick Lamar made its rounds on social media earlier this week, escalating the beef between him and Aubrey "Drake" Graham.
> Now a 23-year-old musician who goes by the moniker Sly the Rapper has come forward, alleging he's behind the viral track, which was titled simply "Freestyle." And guess what? He says it was AI-generated.
> That's impressive, because it fooled plenty of people into believing it was the real thing.
> That ride began with the Santa Barbara News Press Controversy in 2006 and ended when Ampersand, the company McCaw created to hold the paper’s bag of assets (which did not include its landmark building downtown, which McCaw kept), filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy in late July of last year. Here are stories about the death of the paper in three local news journals that have done a great job of taking up the slack left when the News-Press began to collapse, plus one in the LA Times: [...]
> Anderson, who chronicled his abduction and torturous imprisonment by Islamic militants in his best-selling 1993 memoir “Den of Lions,” died on Sunday at his home in Greenwood Lake, New York, said his daughter, Sulome Anderson.
> Under pressure from the media and the U.S. hostages' families, the Reagan administration negotiated a secret and illegal deal in the mid-1980s to facilitate arms sales to Iran in return for the release of American hostages. But the deal, known as the Iran–Contra affair, failed to gain freedom for any of the hostages.
> Terry Anderson, the American journalist who had been the longest-held Western hostage in Lebanon when he was finally released in 1991 by Islamic militants after more than six years in captivity, died on Saturday at his home in Greenwood Lake, N.Y., in the Hudson Valley. He was 76.
> It wasn’t so different from the kind of reporting Koebler had done for years at his previous employer, Vice’s Motherboard. But this time, he was doing it for 404 Media, a new publication that he, along with his three coeditors, don’t just work for, they own.
> “I didn’t realize how important it would feel that the articles I do belong to me,” Koebler told CJR. “It gives me a sense of agency that I don’t think I ever had.”
> Philosopher Jason Read discusses his new book on the politics of work, in which he draws insights from Marx, Spinoza, and elements of popular culture to tackle an urgent question: Why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation?
> Calls for the head of the Metropolitan police, Sir Mark Rowley, to resign or to be fired were issued by the CAA, the former home secretary Suella Braverman and other Ministers because of the handling of the protests. Braverman stated “[t]wo-tier policing has now reached the stage where a Jewish person cannot cross the road. We’ve had countless mistakes & apologies. We don’t need more speeches. Enough is enough. Someone needs to take responsibility.”
> Soma Pourmohammadi is a member of the board of the socio-cultural organisation Nojîn (also Nozhin), which is based in Sine. The organisation offers lessons in Kurdish literature and language and promotes other civil society and educational initiatives, especially in remote regions without schools. In this way, even disadvantaged children receive basic education that will help them on their future path in life. However, this commitment is a thorn in the side of the Iranian regime, which has systematically discriminated against Kurds for decades.
> “It’s going to be a very, very, very healing experience to be able to see the salmon come back, to have our religion come back, and to be able to live as Karuk people,” he said in a video recorded after the release. “It’s like a new beginning.” Advertisement Hornbrook, CA - February 28: The Klamath River runs free through the former Iron Gate Reservoir, cutting through sediments to the river's original course on Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2024 in Hornbrook, CA. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
> Leaders of the Shasta Indian Nation and the Quartz Valley Indian Tribe also watched as the salmon headed downstream.
> It was the first major release of coho salmon into the Klamath since the removal of four dams began last year.
> The UAW won a stunning 73% of the vote at VW after losing elections in 2014 and 2019. It was the union's first win in a Southern assembly plant owned by a foreign automaker.
> As Finland plans to raise the age of retirement, the assumption is that people will continue to work longer. But at the same time, people over 50 face increasing age discrimination. Melin said that a change in attitude is needed.
> Historically known for its eco-friendly remote work policies, Dell is now asking all those employees who live within an hour’s commute to come down to office 3 days a week.
> An American video game company, Activision Blizzard faced the flak for its return-to-office mandate, with concerns about potential layoffs.
> On one side, IBM has issued a relocation ultimatum to its US managers and on other side, citing collaboration and security concerns, Rockstar enforced in-office requirements.
> Following suit, HCL Technologies and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) have emphasized in-office work for various roles.
> And mobile phones store a lot of that honor in the form of personal images and confidential information, even if these images are neither explicit nor revealing.
> “Widespread IT illiteracy amongst women and their reliance on strangers to set up their emails or fix their devices makes them prone to extortionists,” said activist Mokhtar Abdel Al-Moez, founder of Sanad, a nonprofit organization with around 400 volunteer digital experts offering support to cybercrime victims since March 2020.
> Ultimately, Warda gave up, joining the ranks of many women who go for months, even years, without mobile phones because they’re unable to fix technical mishaps that can befall any device, and are unable to buy new ones.
> A technology industry urban legend claims that Kildall went flying rather than meet with IBM, thus causing IBM to market Microsoft's inferior operating system, changing the course of computer history. The story is untrue.
> Gary created the first Operating System for the microprocessor, CP/M. The most advanced current version of CP/M in 1999 is IMS Ltd. REAL/32. CP/M also serves as the basis of all modern DOS versions including the outstanding Caldera DR DOS and other derivitaves including PC-DOS from IBM, and MS-DOS from Microsoft, whose position in the computer industry is based on its unauthorized 1981 "cloning"of Dr. Gary Kildall's Digital Research CP/M, which gave birth to the IBM PC standard upon which Microsoft MS-DOS, Windows CE, Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows 00 (now 2000, formerly NT) are based today.
> Kildall was bitter. He said DOS, which Microsoft bought from Seattle Computer Products, copycatted all the best features in CP/M, and that Gates then made DOS just different enough to be incompatible with CP/M. He threatened to sue, but never did. Particularly galling for Kildall was having to compete in the IBM-compatible market with a clone of what he saw as his own work. This MS-DOS substitute, which Digital Research called DR-DOS, never dented Microsoft's sales.
> As a kid in the 1980s, I would watch The Computer Chronicles every chance I got. I even had some episodes recorded to VHS — which I would watch repeatedly. Gary (along with Stewart) helped to inspire and foster a deep passion for all of computing.
> Back in 2017, I had the honor of spending a little time with Gary’s friend, Stewart Cheifet. The topic, naturally, drifted towards Gary. I will always be thankful to Stewart for the time he shared.
> Working in the tool shed behind his home in Pacific Grove, Kildall “loaded my CP/M program from paper tape to the diskette and ‘booted’ CP/M from the diskette, and up came the prompt: *. This may have been one of the most exciting days of my life, except, of course, when I visited Niagara Falls,” [2] he exclaimed, “We now had the power of an IBM S/370 [mainframe computer] at our fingertips.” [1] This is going to be a “big thing” they told each other. There is no record of the precise date of this event, but Torode recalls that it was before he moved to Chicago in the fall of 1974. [3]
> Creating a Large Language Model (LLM) requires a lot of data – as implied by the name, LLMs need voluminous input data to be able to function well. Much of that content comes from the Internet, and early models have been seeded by crawling the whole Web.
> This now widespread practice of ingestion without consent is contentious, to put it mildly. Content creators feel that they should be compensated for providing this input data, or at least have a choice about whether it is used; AI advocates caution that without easy access to input data, their ability to innovate will be severely limited.
> The Premier League wants domain registrar GoDaddy to identify people connected to dozen of pirate sports streaming domains that broadcast live football matches. The information, including IP-addresses and payment information, could assist with enforcement efforts. In addition, the Premier League would like GoDaddy to take action against these infringements but, as far as we know, that hasn't happened yet.
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