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Techrights
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 06, 2024
> GNOME bluefish
> Despite the yearly hosting costs given how infrequently I published within the first year, Chamline will remain on the Ghost blogging platform for the foreseeable future for the simple facts:
> 1. I love Ghost as a blogging platform
> 2. It is a platform with tools that cater to my plans to turn the site into more than a blog.
> Other things I carry if I'm going out for the day, obviously change depending on where I'm going, but the above represents things I always have in my bag or in my pocket.
> What’s going on Internet? For day 5 of WebLogPoMo2024 I want to chat a bit about a TV series called Halt And Catch Fire. I first posted about this show back in June 2020 after finishing the first season so this is a perfect time to jump back in as part of my media theme for WeblogPoMo.
> I stood there watching and rapidly getting soaked while my grandfather ran over, grabbed the severed length of PVC pipe and force it back into place. That spigot was a single point of failure but — really — every spigot was. The water pressure was only regulated by the piping.
> WASP-43 b orbits its host star at just 1.3 million miles — a mere 1/25th the distance between Mercury and the Sun — resulting in blistering surface temperatures, earning it its "hot Jupiter" classification.
> One of my most re-read books is Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. I tend to pick it up often and read through some of the passages and often they can tell me something about what is currently happening in my life. A few days ago I happened upon a passage from Book 6.20, where he uses a gymnasium metaphor to deliver a profound insight on handling interpersonal conflicts. It’s fascinating how he draws lessons from the physical to the philosophical.
> In linguistics school one teacher said to us that “written language is just a technology”. It’s one particular finger pointing to the moon but it’s nothing to get hung about. If videos or voice messages really were a better way for people to record and convey and teach and understand things then it would be fine if it, over centuries, pushed out the written word.
> But for a book lover like me, books aren’t the be-all-end-all nor do they have to be. They’re just a stepping stone away from the internet out into the real world, the real living off-line, off-page world. Books are a kind of methadone patch to still get to read without having to read online stuff.
> I went on to have a decent career, moving mostly within the realm of Drupal, front-end development, and design systems. I didn't leave school with any ill will but over the years I heard of more and more bad things happening with not only the school itself, but the degree program I had finished. Eventually it was dropped and no longer offered. Several years later the Portland Art Institute shuttered.
> It was fitting that the dogfight took place at Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.
> I went to visit the ElevenLabs office and meet the people responsible for bringing this technology into the world. I wanted to better understand the AI revolution as it’s currently unfolding. But the more time I spent—with the company and the product—the less I found myself in the present. Perhaps more than any other AI company, ElevenLabs offers a window into the near future of this disruptive technology. The threat of deepfakes is real, but what ElevenLabs heralds may be far weirder. And nobody, not even its creators, seems ready for it.
> If I’m being totally honest, I don’t understand the Rabbit R1 at all. As a piece of hardware, it looks cool, so I understand if you want to spend $200 on a thing that will look cool on your shelf, but take away the cool physical design and I feel like you’re left with a product that’s redundant at best.
> North Yorkshire Council to phase out apostrophe use on street signs to avoid "problems with computer systems".
> I'll begin by clearing a big misunderstanding people have regarding how Large Language Models work. The assumption that most people make is that these models can answer questions or chat with you, but in reality all they can do is take some text you provide as input and guess what the next word (or more accurately, the next token) is going to be. Let's start to unravel the mystery of LLMs from the tokens.
↺ 2024-04-30 [Older] Watchdog calls out 'gaps' in how Canada conducts online intelligence operations
> According to some reports, the QR codes are also a means of preventing counterfeits. They can be used to trace money if it’s stolen, too, or track funds used to pay ransoms to criminals, making it easier to catch the perpetrators.
> When TechCentral scanned one of the new notes (a ZiG10 note) with a smartphone, three lines of plain text was returned: “Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe; ZiG10; Harare 2024.”
> In addition to security, the QR code on the ZiG banknotes can also provide convenience to users. By scanning the QR code, users can access information about the currency, such as its exchange rate, history, and features. This can be particularly useful for tourists and foreigners who are not familiar with the currency.
> When the British software developer Louis Barclay developed a software workaround to address this problem, I was intrigued. Mr. Barclay’s tool — a piece of software known as an extension, which can be installed in a Chrome web browser — was simple. Christened Unfollow Everything, it would automate the process of unfollowing each of my 1,800 friends, a task that manually would take hours. The result is that I would be able to experience Facebook as it once was, when it contained profiles of my friends, but without the endless updates, photos, videos and the like that Facebook’s algorithm generates. I could curate my feed by following only those friends and groups I really still want to see updates from.
> Adams told NPR on Thursday that he sent police to Columbia after learning that "one of the outside agitators' husband was arrested for federal terrorism charges."
> The northern German city of Hamburg saw a big counter-demonstration on Saturday, as people took to the streets to protest a rally called by people with links to the Islamist scene last week.
> The event last week, also in Hamburg, saw some individuals call for establishing strict Islamic law, Shariah, to replace German democracy.
> The killing and kidnapping spree by Palestinian infiltrators on a Jewish holiday morning shook the sense of security of Israelis - not least, those who had witnessed the state emerge as a safe haven after the Nazi genocide.
> EU chief Ursula von der Leyen said Monday she will press for "fair" competition with China in talks with its President Pooh-tin Jinping, who is in Paris on a state visit.
> Russian strikes on the eastern Ukrainian regions of Donetsk and Kharkiv killed three people and wounded at least a dozen more, officials said Sunday.
> Russia has added Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to its list of wanted criminals, a move Kyiv dismissed as a sign of Moscow's "desperation".
> Russian forces seem to have carried out the execution of Ukrainian soldiers as they were attempting to surrender and it has been happening since December 2023, according to a Human Rights Watch (HRW) report released Thursday. HRW investigated five instances of the apparent executions.
> Russia attacked Ukraine's Sumy region with drones and artillery overnight, the Ukrainian Air Force and the northeastern region's military administration said early on May 6.
> Russian forces say they have claimed control over an eastern Ukrainian town whose defenses they had broken through about two weeks ago, as Russian rockets killed at least three people in eastern villages.
> Anti-government protests were held in a mostly calm atmosphere in the early morning of May 5, as Georgians marked Orthodox Easter in a rainy capital city following three nights of mass rallies that were often met with violence by security forces.
> De Roos managed to sneak in by making his own fake press pass. The teen brought a phony press card he made to the hotel and stood in line to get into the room as a photojournalist. Luckily for De Roos, his fake pass worked and he managed to shoot a series of career-defining photos of the bed-in.
> The grouse, known for its colorful spring mating dance, was listed as threatened in Kansas in late 2022 by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. At the time, wildlife officials estimated that 90% of the habitat the birds once inhabited — intact tracts of native grasses — had vanished. With a multistate attempt to overturn this listing underway, the bird’s future has become even more tenuous.
> In the Seattle area, the Duwamish River has been polluted and damaged in all ways — litter clogs the shores, chemicals bioaccumulate in the fish, its channel has been constrained and flood plain cut off. Local volunteers are doing the physical cleanup of the litter; the EPA will soon complete a cleanup of the contaminants at the Superfund site, and locals worry that once the river is nice again, they’ll be priced out of the area. They’re asking that planning start to ensure the community that lives there can stay: “While the [EPA] has developed guidance for environmental justice best practices in its public engagement, it hasn’t implemented a strategy that helps to hold physical space for affordable housing or community-oriented development.”
> The EU Commission has launched an investigation into emission credit claims by Finnair and 19 other airlines. At least Norwegian, Air France, KLM, SAS and Lufthansa are also under suspicion, according to Reuters.
> The Commission demands that the air carriers clarify whether environmental claims made in their marketing are backed up by science. The companies have one month to respond.
> Why it matters: Crowded orbits and collisions between satellites raise the risk of creating dangerous space debris and making parts of the planet's orbit unusable.
> • "The industry has been saying space is becoming more congested for years, but now reality is setting in and the pressure is on to address the increasing risk in orbit," Melissa Quinn, general manager at Slingshot Aerospace said in a press release. Slingshot published its first State of Satellite Deployments & Orbital Operations report on Tuesday.
> But this legislative session, he’s wondering if those tax breaks are appropriate for all data centers, especially those with the potential to disrupt the state’s clean energy supply.
> Particularly concerning to him are plans for a mega data center on the site of the state’s only nuclear power plant. The developer is proposing an arrangement that would give it priority access to electricity generated at the plant, which would mean less carbon-free power for other users.
> It looks like it's seen plenty of action, the LCD on the dash suggested it had ran for about 9,300 hours. The standard airspeed of this machine is 65mph, so if it was in the air for those 9,300 hours then it's flown over 600,000 miles. That is further than the moon and back!
> Footage from the incident captured the terrifying moment when the elephant charged at the safari vehicle, ultimately flipping it over. Vetter commended the professionalism of the driver, noting that his actions likely prevented further injuries or loss of life.
> With the welcome passing of Henry Kissinger last year, the team released all six episodes of their Kissinger series as a two-parter (one, two). There is so much going on, but I think is probably the most important point to understand why he was so dangerous: [...]
> As of December last year, the company had nearly 800 full-time employees in the U.S., Germany, Sweden, India and China.
> But the order doesn't stop Trump from talking about the allegations against him or commenting on the judge or the elected top prosecutor. And despite a recent Trump remark, it doesn't stop him from testifying in court if he chooses.
> As he fights the felony charges against him while running for president, Trump has at times stirred confusion about what he can and can't do in the case. He has pleaded not guilty.
> So what does the order do, what doesn't it and where did it come from?
> Exxon was aware of climate change, as early as 1977, 11 years before it became a public issue, according to a recent investigation from InsideClimate News. This knowledge did not prevent the company (now ExxonMobil and the world’s largest oil and gas company) from spending decades refusing to publicly acknowledge climate change and even promoting climate misinformation—an approach many have likened to the lies spread by the tobacco industry regarding the health risks of smoking. Both industries were conscious that their products wouldn’t stay profitable once the world understood the risks, so much so that they used the same consultants to develop strategies on how to communicate with the public.
> Big Oil companies have engaged in a “long-running greenwashing campaign” while raking in “record profits at the expense of American consumers,” the Democratic-led House Oversight Committee has found after a year-long investigation into climate disinformation from the fossil fuel industry.
> The committee found the fossil fuel industry is “posturing on climate issues while avoiding real commitments” to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Lawmakers said it has sought to portray itself as part of the climate solution, even as internal industry documents reveal how companies have avoided making real commitments.
> Major oil companies have misled Americans for decades about the threat of human-caused climate change, according to a new report released Tuesday by Democrats in Congress.
> The 65-page report was the result of a three-year investigation and was made public hours before a Senate Budget Committee hearing about the role that oil and gas companies have played in global warming.
> • Documents demonstrate for the first time that fossil fuel companies internally do not dispute that they have understood since at least the 1960s that burning fossil fuels causes climate change and then worked for decades to undermine public understanding of this fact and to deny the underlying science. In fall 2015, blockbuster reporting by Inside Climate News and the Los Angeles Times revealed that Big Oil companies such as Exxon knew that burning fossil fuels was a major contributor to climate change. Companies publicly rejected the reporting at the time, but new documents corroborate the reporting and show that fossil fuel companies internally did not dispute the findings but tried to dismiss them as “hyperbolic” and “journalistic malpractice.”
> • Big Oil’s deception campaign evolved from explicit denial of the basic science underlying climate change to deception, disinformation, and doublespeak. The fossil fuel industry evolved from denying climate science to spreading disinformation and perpetuating doublespeak about the safety of natural gas and its commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. New documents demonstrate that Big Oil companies: [...]
> The revelations, based on hundreds of newly subpoenaed documents, illustrate how oil companies worked to greenwash their image while fighting climate policy behind the scenes.
> But we now know that for the past half-century, the oil and gas industry has invested billions of dollars in dishonest, deceptive marketing campaigns, designed to sow doubt in climate science and convince people that fossil fuels have a place in a net-zero future.
> So, in a world of climate pledges and greenwashing campaigns, how can we tell if companies are telling the truth? And are their actions aligning with their words?
> Unfortunately, when we look past industry’s marketing campaigns and into the details of their pledges, we see the oil and gas industry’s idea of sustainability doesn’t come close to the change we need.
> That’s why we’re calling out Big Oil’s climate deception. Here are some tools to help spot the deception yourself and stop oil and gas industry misinformation.
> The turmoil came ahead of parliamentary elections in October seen as a test of Georgia’s democracy. Critics of the “foreign influence” bill say it resembles Russian legislation used to silence dissent.
> First Amendment law isn’t as clear around gag orders. “Most people don’t try to piss off their judge,” one litigator said of the unprecedented nature of Trump’s conduct in trials.
> Al Jazeera’s English broadcast, the AP reported, often resembles other major networks, but its Arabic version often publishes verbatim video statements from Hamas and other militant groups in the region.
> Israel has long had a strained relationship with Al Jazeera, accusing it of anti-Israel bias and collaborating with Hamas. The decision was enabled by a law granting the government the authority to close down foreign news outlets operating in Israel if deemed a threat to national security.
> Though Al Jazeera Media Network is a private business, the broadcaster has retained some Qatari government funding, which its critics often cite when questioning its editorial independence from Doha.
> Netanyahu announced the decision on X, formerly Twitter, but details on the implications of the step on the channel, when it would go into effect or whether the measure was permanent or temporary were not immediately clear.
> There was no immediate comment from the channel headquarters in Doha, Qatar. An Al Jazeera correspondent on its Arabic service said the order would affect the broadcaster's operations in Israel and in east Jerusalem, where it has been doing live shots for months since the Oct. 7 attack that sparked the war in Gaza.
> According to a press release from Republican congressman Chris Smith last Thursday, the Hong Kong Economic Trade Office would be forced to state its address as “1 Jimmy Lai Way” in reference to “the renowned Hong Kong human rights defender who remains unjustly imprisoned by Hong Kong authorities.”
> Many people are still asking why this draft law is dangerous for Georgia. We will try to explain briefly and simply.
> This year’s World Press Freedom Day takes place against a backdrop that experts say is concerning for journalists around the world.
> “Media freedom is under siege,” U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said Friday in a statement. “Without facts, we cannot fight mis- and dis-information. Without accountability, we will not have strong policies in place. Without press freedom, we won’t have any freedom. A free press is not a choice, but a necessity.”
> Politico founder Robert L. Allbritton has announced that he has committed $20 million to launch the Allbritton Journalism Institute (AJI), a non-profit educational organization and newsroom that will train aspiring reporters to produce fact-based, non-partisan journalism on government and politics.
> Owner Robert Allbritton will stay on as publisher of Politico and its stablemate, the tech publication Protocol. The publications’ editorial and management will remain as is and they’ll operate separately from Insider and Morning Brew, Axel Springer’s other US publications. Politico Europe was already a 50-50 joint venture between Axel Springer and Politico; the Berlin-based company will now own all of it. The sale is expected to close in the last quarter of 2021.
> “Big newspapers where reporters used to get training are kind of gone,” he said. “There’s got to be a track where we can provide opportunities for bright folks, and maybe do it in a way that’s more deliberate.”
> He continued: “You can teach a certain amount in the classroom, but a lot of learning how to be a great reporter is doing it and working with people who can show you moves and enhance your thinking and enhance your writing.”
> This type of fraud involves a criminal claiming to be a law enforcement officer to pressure victims into paying a large sum of money — usually with a false claim they have missed a fake court date and now face an arrest warrant unless they pay the fine, or some other made-up story.
> Thanks to the teller, the bank customer alerted the actual police, who found and arrested the scammer.
> Players who do not have a TPM 2.0 module have two options to continue playing LoL: revert their computer to Windows 10 or buy new hardware. The former can be a huge hassle, while the latter involves spending hard-earned cash. So, it is usually more convenient to downgrade the operating system — further exacerbating Microsoft’s issue with Windows 11 losing market share to Windows 10.
> There have also been reports of Vanguard bricking some computers. Fortunately, it wasn’t an issue with the anti-cheat software; it was more about where Windows 11 was installed. Most TPM 2.0 activations require your computer to use UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface), which requires that your operating system be installed on a GUID partition table (GPT) instead of the standard BIOS that uses Master Boot Record (MBR). If you switch to UEFI without moving your OS from MBR to GPT, it will simply refuse to boot. Thankfully, Microsoft has an easy solution for that.
> Everything is a subscription these days, be it streaming services or apps. After seeing price increases across a number of my services I took stock and decided to cancel a few. It’s easy to sign up and then get into the habit of watching the same stuff or playing the same games without realising it.
> Advocates, lawmakers and political strategists from both parties say these parents have become a political force comparable to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, the movement that originated in the 1980s to strengthen drunk driving laws. They’ve done so in a much more politically polarized era, they add, making the effort more unusual and significant.
> “To me, it has felt very much like the modern-day MADD where these parents are sounding the alarm in grief,” said Shelby Knox, campaign director of online safety at the advocacy group ParentsTogether Action.
> Political operatives say the cross-partisan turn against social media platforms is an outgrowth of the broader push against Big Tech companies, including technology monopolies.
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