GNU/Linux

• Virtualization ☛ Advanced AI Surges on Linux

  "What makes the operating system unique is not only all the amazing theming and appearance features, instead its the Artificial Integration options that really stand out," the beta 2 release notes say. "You can communicate with AI using Voice, Widgets, Text, Web and Terminal interface, making it remarkably easy for anyone to communicate in their own preferred comfortable method, Not only to communicate with the AI, but you can control most of you computer just using your voice. To top that, the operating system also comes with a whole bunch of custom written AI applications, created by MakuluLinux to give that extra unique experience."

Leftovers

• CNX Software ☛ The SenseCAP Watcher is a voice-controlled, physical Hey Hi (AI) agent for LLM-based space monitoring (Crowdfunding)

  Seeed Studio has launched a Kickstarter campaign for the SenseCAP Watcher, a physical Hey Hi (AI) agent capable of monitoring a space and taking actions based on events within that area. Described as the “world’s first Physical LLM Agent for Smarter Spaces,” the SenseCAP Watcher leverages onboard and cloud-based technologies to “bridge the gap between digital intelligence and physical applications.”

• Science

  • LRT ☛ Partial eclipse of supermoon was visible over Lithuania – photos

    Those who got up last night to look up at the night sky were rewarded with a special sight. The Moon looked brighter and bigger than usual, and there was a partial lunar eclipse on the night between Tuesday and Wednesday.

  • Science Alert ☛ Earth Welcomes a New 'Mini-Moon' Later This Month

    It's small and cute!

  • Science Alert ☛ Largest Black Hole Jets Ever Seen Create a Galactic Structure That Will Blow Your Mind

    How does this exist?

  • Science Alert ☛ Wild Video Captures Baby Tardigrade Riding Its Predator

    "I had never seen anything quite like it."

  • Science Alert ☛ Mars Is Wibbly-Wobbly. A Third Moon Could Explain Its Squish And Bulges.

    But where did Nerio go?

  • Hackaday ☛ Creating A Twisted Grid Image Illusion With A Diffusion Model

    Images that can be interpreted in a variety of ways have existed for many decades, with the classical example being Rubin’s vase — which some viewers see as a vase, and others a pair of human faces.

  • Hackaday ☛ Upgraded Raster Laser Projector Goes RGB

    We’ve covered a scanning laser project by Ben Make’s Everything last year, and now he’s back with a significant update. [Ben]’s latest project now offers a higher resolution and RGB lasers. A couple of previous versions of the device used the same concept of a rotating segmented mirror synchronised to a pulsed laser diode to create scanlines. When projected onto a suitable surface, the distorted, pixelated characters looked quite funky, but there was clearly room for improvement.

• Hardware

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Apple's mobile chips are now made in the U.S. — TSMC produces the older A16 Bionic at its Arizona fab

    TSMC's Fab 21 in Arizona already produces A16 processors on the N4P node.

  • New York Times ☛ Why Foldable Smartphones Are Worth Considering

    New devices from Motorola and Surveillance Giant Google prove that phones with bendable screens keep getting better — and some are even becoming cheaper.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Lunar Lake laptop seemingly has 5 hours longer battery life than Fashion Company Apple M3 MacBook — Lenovo Yoga Slim 7i reaches almost 24 hours of video playback

    Lenovo has provided battery life numbers for its upcoming Lunar Lake-powered Yoga Slim 7i Aura Edition. This laptop features nearly 24 hours of video playback, 5 hours more than Apple's M2 and M3 laptops.

• Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

  • Latvia ☛ Big apple year for Latvia

    This year's apple harvest is abundant, with some places even setting records. Growers point out that, although domestic apples are very good in terms of taste, color and durability, they are often out-competed in shops by cheaper goods imported from abroad, Zemgale regional television reported on September 17.

  • Science Alert ☛ New Study Detects Microplastics in Human Brain Tissue

    We might be breathing them in.

  • Science Alert ☛ US Man Dies After Wrong Organ Removal – Surgical Errors Are A Growing Problem

    Here are some of the worst fatal mistakes.

  • Science Alert ☛ Scientists Identify New Blood Group After a 50 Year Mystery

    A medical breakthrough that could save lives.

  • Science Alert ☛ Drinking Coffee And Tea Each Day Could Be Protecting Your Heart

    Great news – multiple cups!

  • Off Guardian ☛ Atlantic mag admits “pandemic” FAILED to brainwash people into “unifying”

    This article in the Atlantic by Establishment Drone Director of the National Institutes of Health, Francis S. Collins, should interest us.

  • Federal News Network ☛ A new tool for medical care providers working to prevent suicide

    "It's essentially an opportunity to to practice skills that they may not have many chances to use on a regular basis," Dr. David Riggs said.

• Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

  • Miles Ross released by Activision as a consequence of latest Microsoft layoffs

    On September 19, the British caster and commentator Miles "MilesTheRoss" Ross announced that Activision let him go as a consequence of Microsoft's most recent layoff wave, according to a post on his personal X account.

    Although his post mentioned that the layoffs also affected more CDL team members, their names haven't been mentioned.

  • Microsoft inflates its stock price through a $60B buyback of shares in the shadow of 650 layoffs

    Corporate America has once again proven itself to be the full mask-off villain it’s lampooned as: After a memo found that Microsoft was preparing to lay off another 650 employees from its gaming division last week, the company announced this week that it will be spending $60B of its own money to buyback some of its own stocks.

    In addition to the buyback announcement, which has no expiration date and can be cancelled at any time, the company also announced that it will increase its dividend payout by 10 percent. These reveals ended up seeing the stock raise by two percent on Wall Street and by 0.8 percent on Nasdaq early Tuesday morning.

  • Dolphin Publications B V ☛ IBM quietly conducting large round of layoffs

    Many long-serving employees at IBM have been laid off. That’s according to numerous reports online. Although IBM CEO Arvind Krishna made no bones about the fact that thousands of jobs would be lost at his company over the next few years, this fresh round of layoffs has commenced without notice.

    Evidence of this could already be found on the online forum TheLayoff.com, often a bellwether for large layoff rounds. However, The Register received confirmation through anonymous sources that this is more than a sporadic development. Thousands of jobs appear to be disappearing, even though such figures amount to single-digit percentages among IBM’s employee base of 288,000.

• Security

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • APNIC ☛ [Podcast] Privacy and DNS Client Subnet

      Geoff discusses EDNS0 client subnet signaling, how it affects traffic steering by the CDN, and the labs measurements.

• Defence/Aggression

  • Silicon Angle ☛ International task force shuts down Ghost crime app

    An international law enforcement task force has shut down Ghost, an encrypted communications app that was used by criminals to coordinate their activities. Europol, which led the task force, announced the takedown today.

  • New York Times ☛ Israel’s Pager Attack Was a Tactical Success Without a Strategic Goal, Analysts Say

    By targeting so many pagers at the same time, Israel demonstrated technical prowess and partly restored the aura of its intelligence agencies. But its long-term intent is unclear.

  • New York Times ☛ How Israel Built a Modern-Day Trojan Horse: Exploding Pagers

    The Israeli government did not tamper with the Hezbollah devices that exploded, defense and intelligence officials say. It manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse.

  • France24 ☛ US says Iran cyber hackers offered Trump 'stolen, non public' material to Biden team

    US officials say Iranian hackers targeted Joe Biden's campaign with hacked information from Donald Trump’s electoral team in late June and early July, according to the FBI and intelligence agencies. The unsolicited emails were sent before Biden dropped out of the presidential race, with no evidence recipients responded to the messages.

• Environment

  • Energy/Transportation

    • Hackaday ☛ Trees Turned Into Wind Turbines, Non-Destructively

      Trees and forests are an incredibly important natural resource not only for lumber and agricultural products, but also maintain a huge amount of biodiversity in the various types of forests across the globe, stabilize their local environments, and can be protective against climate change as a way to sequester atmospheric carbon. But the one thing they don’t do is make electricity. At least, not directly. [Concept Crafted Creations] is working on solving this issue by essentially turning an unmodified tree into a kind of wind turbine.

• AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

  • Atlantic Council ☛ What Washington needs to know about the makeup of the next European Commission

    The new appointments show the European Union to be an increasingly capable and willing trade and security partner to the United States.

• Censorship/Free Speech

  • JURIST ☛ India Supreme Court orders Wikipedia to remove name and photo of victim in Kolkata rape-murder case

    The Supreme Court of India directed Wikipedia on Tuesday to immediately remove the name and photograph of the victim involved in the RG Kar Medical College Hospital rape and murder case.

• Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

  • Press Gazette ☛ David Knowles: Telegraph journalist who made huge impact in a short life

    Remembering the life of a journalist who inspired many with his daily Ukraine podcast.

• Civil Rights/Policing

  • JURIST ☛ Canada BC watchdog criticizes government reparation plan for Doukhobor internment victims

    Canada’s British Columbia (BC) Ombudsperson welcomed 0n Tuesday the government’s commitment to compensate for survivors of the province’s internment of a Doukhobor sect in the 1950s. However, the office raised concerns about the compensation plan, citing inadequate consultation with survivors and unclear eligibility criteria.

  • JURIST ☛ EU condemns Iran’s oppression of women on anniversary of Mahsa Jina Amini’s death

    The Council of the EU condemned the systemic oppression of women in Iran in a Monday statement. Monday marks the anniversary of the death of Mahsa Jina Amini, who died in custody following her arrest for allegedly not properly covering her hair.

• Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

  • Science Alert ☛ The Internet Is a Dumpster Fire. Here's How We Just Might Be Able to Save It.

    It wasn't always this bad.

Monopolies/Monopsonies

• European Commission ☛ Commission takes note of the withdrawal of referral requests by Member States concerning the acquisition of certain assets of Inflection by Microsoft

  European Commission Press release Brussels, 18 Sep 2024 The European Commission takes note of the withdrawal of the initial referral requests by seven Member States to review under Article 22 of the EU Merger Regulation (‘EUMR') the acquisition of certain assets of Inflection AI, Inc. (‘Inflection') by Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Corporation (‘Microsoft).

• Patents

  • Dennis Crouch/Patently-O ☛ Announcing FRAND: German Case Law and Global Perspectives

    As readers of this blog are aware, organizations such as the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), IEEE, and others promulgate standards that enable products such as smartphones and other complex technological devices to interoperate.  These standard-setting organizations (SSOs) encourage their members to commit to licensing patents that may be essential to the practice of the relevant standards on fair, reasonable, and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms.  Because SSOs do not define the meaning of FRAND, however, when the owners of these standard-essential patents (SEPs) and the companies that implement them fail to reach terms, litigation is often the result.  And because patents are territorial rights, FRAND litigation often spans the globe—though because of its importance to the European market, Germany has been home to many of the most important FRAND cases over the past decade.

• Trademarks

  • TTAB Blog ☛ TTAB Renders Split Decision in MRS. CLAUS Section 2(d) Appeal

    The USPTO refused to register the marks MRS. CLAUS, MRS. CLAUS COOKIES, and MRS. CLAUS COOKIE COMPANY [COOKIES and COOKIE COMPANY disclaimed] for, inter alia, bakery goods and candy (including chocolate for confectionery and bread) in Class 30 and for educational services in the field of culinary arts in Class 41, finding confusion likely with the registered mark MRS. CLAUS for "Yeast; Baking powders; Baking spices; Confectionery chips for baking." The Board affirmed the refusal as to applicant's goods but not as to the services. In re Mrs. Claus Cookie Company, LLC, Serial Nos. 97550335, 97550357, and 97550571 (September 16, 2024) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Elizabeth A. Dunn).

• Gemini* and Gopher

  • Technology and Free Software

    • presence, not id

      The Internet. I sat here, thinking of saying/doing a thing, realizing I used to think I SHOULD say/do a thing, when I realized: online (life), as I see it, is at most (and, in fact, exactly) presence, not id.

      A blog, naming of blog, username, alias, OUTLET, channel name, et al, monikers and handles that name a media presence. Not THE person. Hell, I wouldn't tell my neighbors what my online handle(s) were if they bribed me with food!

      A medium, a communication through-put, offers (but only) this. Not platform. The Internet is media (a medium) such as radio or TV, albeit less "formal", but it is ONLY (a) media. Personal/sacred tie-in's (re: id) should not be bought into. It ends (and starts with, is?) hurt.