We explore topics including the hardware and software powering NASA’s Ingenuity Mars Helicopter; JPL's switch from Solaris to Linux; the open source projects, tools, and philosophy at JPL, ...and more.
The Linux kernel's netconsole allows you to "log kernel printk messages over UDP" to a remote system; this makes it another form of kernel (message) console, alongside the video console and serial console. I've looked into netconsole periodically and played with it a bit, and the whole experience has left me with decidedly mixed feelings and very little desire to actually use it in our environment.
The first problem with netconsole in practice is that the story on the receiving side is what you could politely call lacking. The usual advice is to send netconsole messages to either a listening syslogd or to some manual command. No one seems to have built a usable, ready to go 'netconsole server' that would reliably capture netconsole messages, put them in per-host files or the like, and so on (Facebook's netconsd could be extended into this but it doesn't ship with a file logger).
The second problem is that on the sending side, the usage case for netconsole is limited in our environment. If you want to capture normal kernel messages off the machine in normal circumstances, a remote syslog server generally works just as well. If you want to capture kernel messages in crazy situations, you're almost certainly better off with a serial console, including "serial over IPMI", because there are a lot fewer moving parts in the kernel for sending output over a serial link than there are for sending even relatively hard-coded UDP messages.
We are starting our policy from this release to support the last two minor versions of CloudNativePG. This means that the 1.15 minor version will be supported by the Community for another month after 1.17.0 is released. We are today releasing the patch version 1.15.2 for the 1.15.x branch. For details, please refer to the "Supported releases" section.
Version 1.16.0 also introduces a few enhancements in the backup and recovery area, as well as in the fencing mechanism, by removing the existing limitation that disables failover when one or more instances are fenced. It adds support for Kubernetes 1.24 and provides several bug fixes.
Such fixes have been back-ported to the 1.15 release branch and included in the 1.15.2 version.
For a complete list of changes, please refer to the release notes for 1.16.0 and for 1.15.2.
Audacious 4.2 finally goes stable! Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu users.
This release is a bit late, since the beta has been released for 5 months. As you may already known, Audacious 4.2 feature new dark theme, as well as Flat icon in both light and dark. You can enable them via ‘Files -> Settings’ dialog.
 Audacious 4.2 has been in development for almost one and a half years and adds new features like initial support for Ogg FLAC streams, as well as a built-in dark theme that uses Qt's Fusion style and a new variant of the built-in fallback icons that are dark theme-friendly.
This release also enhances the Winamp interface in Qt mode with new "Search and Select" and "Jump to Song" dialogs, and improves importing of playlists based on filename by automatically setting the title of the imported playlist, along with the ability to preselect the filename of an imported playlist when it's exported.
For this release, we had a focus on improving existing functionality. Mostly extending what was already there, but lacked a few features, knobs to tweak, or as postponed in previous releases. And yes, we fixed a few bugs too.
psDooM is a version of the open sourced DOOM… that displays running processes on your system and allows you to kill those processes (in the form of monsters you can shoot).
It is 100% ridiculous, 100% real, and 100% awesome.
Now, psDooM is not new. It started life as a proof of concept, at the University of New Mexico, back in 1999. Shortly thereafter it was enhanced and released on Sourceforge… and promptly abandoned in 2000.
Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for Linux servers. It uses the system APIs and commands to create an informative user-friendly dashboard for users.
Are looking for an easy guide on how to setup VNC on Ubuntu Server 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)?
The step-by-step guide on this page will show you how to install and configure VNC on Ubuntu Server 22.04.
VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a desktop screen-sharing feature that allows users to remotely access and control the desktop environment of a remote system using a keyboard and mouse.
Once your first electronic circuit is working and stable, sometimes you may need to move it into a printed board in order to make connections fixed and avoid cables from moving away from your breadboard. With Raspberry PI and Fritzing you can replicate your project into a digital design and send it to PCB manufacturers for live production
I installed shinobar's Grub2config in EasyOS, but it reported that it needs 'efibootmgr'. So, have compiled it in OpenEmbedded, and its dependency package 'efivar'.
In this tutorial, we’re going to show you how to install Pip (Python) on CentOS. This tutorial will work for CentOS 7, CentOS 8, and even Fedora.
You upgraded to Shift Pro and you now have 16 layouts, but what if you want to edit them or create new layouts ? In this video I show the users how to create and save their own layouts. Its a very easy process and i try go into as much detail as possible.
The last maintenance release of the 22.04 series is out fixing issues with proxy clips, render panel parameters and timeline scrolling among other minor bugs. Oversized icons on Windows should be normal now and speech to text is working again in the Flatpak version.
In the previous Zorin OS tutorial chapters we have looked at what distributions are, how to choose the best Linux distribution and desktop environment for your needs, how to download Zorin OS, how to create a Zorin OS Live USB stick in Windows or in macOS, how to use Zorin OS without installing on a PC or on a Mac and how to install Zorin OS on a PC or Mac, we finally reached the moment you were waiting for: we can have a first look at what Zorin OS is, how it looks, and what it can do. So let’s start using Zorin OS for the first time.
IBM today announced that it acquired Databand, a startup developing an observability platform for data and machine learning pipelines. Details of the deal weren’t disclosed, but Tel Aviv-based Databand had raised $14.5 million prior to the acquisition.
Canonical has, over the years, often talked about how it has improved the startup time of Snap apps yet, for many of us, those improvements have been …theoretical at best.
But in its latest ‘update’ on efforts being made to improve Firefox Snap performance the company may, at last, deliver a real-world speed boost to back those claims up.
Startup time of the Firefox Snap is up to 50% faster on fresh installs than before.
The first key improvement is courtesy of Mozilla developers who have tweaked the browser’s behaviour to only load one locale (aka language pack) on first start, based on system settings, rather than loading in all languages available.
The beauty of Arduino development boards is that they let you jump right into prototyping. Just connect the sensors, buttons, LEDs, or whatever other hardware you require to the Arduino’s I/O pins, code and flash a sketch, and you’re in business. But you might come to a stage where you want something more polished than a breadboard or perfboard. When you reach that stage, you can follow along with YouTuber Upir’s LED volume knob project to learn how to design your first PCB.
Upir chose to use an Arduino Leonardo board for this project because its ATmega32U4 microcontroller’s built-in USB HID functionality. That means that it can be configured to show up as a USB mouse or keyboard when plugged into any computer, regardless of the operating system or software that computer runs. In this case, that makes it easy to send keyboard shortcuts that adjust the computer’s volume.
The Mozilla Firefox web browser is finally beginning to catch up in a market where every competitor has an online language translation service feature. Firefox recently debuted its long-awaited privacy-preserving on-device translation service.
The built-in integration with Google Translate has been one of the Google Chrome browser’s leading advantages over its competitors. The translation service grants you effortless access to international content in languages you don’t understand. It gives you access to more of the web.
I attribute much of Google’s pan-European success to its translation services. Why would you want to switch to Chrome from a competitor like Firefox? Well, you can effortlessly access more of the web with Chrome than with Firefox.
This anniversary completely slipped me by, if one can call it that. I was still on WordPress in June 2012, and I made the decision to turn off web comments permanently.
I wrote that it was due to spam, which certainly was escalating on my tiny self-hosted site at the time. But trolls were the real reason. I was tiring of cleaning up the mess they defaced my pages with, and didn’t want to deal with moderation queues.
[...]
Still though, is a phrase with two words. I kinda miss inline blog comments, but nowhere near enough to turn such a feature back on, however that may be implemented.
This is a bugfix release for gnunet 0.17.1.
One thing that’s bothered me for a while is that I don’t keep the score and comments for Hackernews entries up to date in a timely manner. So far, I’ve been going back and re-reading last month’s entries but this means that the daily view generally isn’t up-to-date.
The HN API is hosted on Firebase and thus has the ability to get real-time data, but there’s no Perl interface to it, and I really don’t have time to tinker with an entire async setup for a page that’s updated every hour at most.
We pejoratively talk about “copy and paste programming” as something done by incompetent programmers who don’t know how to write code from scratch.
I’ve been using the tail command for about 25 years, so you might think I’d know something about it. But last week, as I was putting together a short shell script (not this one), I opened the man page for tail and learned something new. Two things, actually, which surprised me, as tail doesn’t really do that much.
How did Kubernetes push git to its limit? Some stories from my time (2016-2019) working on Kubernetes.
No atomicity across subprojects – In 2016, Kubernetes was still a monorepo. Everything was developed in a single repository. This meant that developers could reuse CI infrastructure easily and ensure that changes to the different components (e.g., kube-proxy, kube-apiserver, kubelet) would work together.
However, downstream projects needed to build on the API. That meant vendoring parts of Kubernetes or separating API specifications from the code.
Transitioning to different subproject repositories wasn't easy. It happened gradually and painfully. The plan was to continue developing the libraries in the monorepo (under a special staging subfolder) and sync the changes to new project repositories. But, of course, this led to all sorts of problems – unreliable syncs, missing commit history, different commit SHAs, and more.
The solution might seem simple, but even simple problems become difficult at scale, especially when many different people and organizations are involved.
A system that could record atomic commits across projects or a better submodule experience would have allowed for more flexible developer organization, especially as the project grew to a new scale.
No benevolent dictator to merge patches – While the Linux kernel successfully scaled on git, Kubernetes had a different governing model. There was no Linus Torvalds to collect patches and manually apply them.
A Git repository is an append-only filesystem. You can add snapshots of files and directories, but you can't modify or delete anything. Git commands sometimes purport to modify data. For example git commit --amend suggests that it amends a commit. It doesn't. There is no such thing as amending a commit; commits are immutable.
Rather, it writes a completely new commit, and then kinda turns its back on the old one. But the old commit is still in there, pristine, forever.
In a Git repository you can lose things, in the sense of forgetting where they are. But they can almost always be found again, one way or another, and when you find them they will be exactly the same as they were before. If you git commit --amend and change your mind later, it's not hard to get the old ⸢unamended⸣ commit back if you want it for some reason.
If your goal is to prevent insecure software from being developed, the worst thing you can do is to dictate a bunch of increasingly arcane-sounding requirements to developers working against a tight deadline then shame them when they fuck it up.
A much better strategy is to give developers a tool, with minimal fuss and dependencies, that’s tuned for security out-of-the-box and always does The Right Thing for them.
Even better is if you introduce it as a write-less, do-more tool that saves developers time and frustration. This incentivizes them to use it over a quick-and-dirty, error-prone, artisanal approach to solving the same problems.
If you aren’t familiar with it, the FOSS for Spectroscopy web site lists Free and Open Source Software for spectroscopic applications. The collection is of course never really complete, and your package suggestions are most welcome (how to contribute). My methods for finding packages are improving and at this point the major repositories have been searched reasonably well.
A few days ago I pushed a major update, and at this point Python packages outnumber R packages more than two to one. The update was made possible because I recently had time to figure out how to search the PyPi.org site automatically.
The company behind GPT-3, OpenAI, hasn't released the non-public datasets or model, but they are all trivially recreated without much issue.
You only need about $12 million to train the model from scratch. And you don't even need to do that anymore.
There are plenty of open-sourced models to pick from. There's GPT-J from a set of independent researchers. Meta is open-sourcing OPT-175B. Stanford researchers are open-sourcing their model, Diffusion-LM.
When you work with trace dataââ¬Å —ââ¬Å data that emerge when people interact with technologyââ¬Å —ââ¬Å you will notice that such data often have properties that open up questions about statistical modelling. I currently work with browsing records, obtained at several times from the same users (i.e., a panel data set). A first typical characteristic of such data: Browsing behaviors are skewed. If you’re interested in people reading politically extreme web sites, you will find a few people doing it a lot, and most people doing little to none.
A second characteristic relates to the panel nature of the data. If you’re looking at people’s visits to online shops, they do not change their habits much over timeââ¬Å —ââ¬Å at least these within-person differences are not as great as the differences across people. Panel data lend itself to hierarchical modelling, for example with (1) fixed effects (FE) or (2) random-effects multilevel modelling (RE). For commonalities and differences between these two modelling approaches, see for example Gelman and Hill (2006).[1] The amount of within-person variation relative to between-person variation has important implications for these two approaches.
Below, I simulate the performance of FE vs. RE models, with these data characteristics in mind. I am mainly interested in the statistical power of each model, although my code can be easily adapted to examine, for example, bias and the RSME. The code builds on two sources: Conceptually, on the paper “Should I Use Fixed or Random Effects?” by Clark and Linzer (2015)[2]. In terms of code architecture, on the R package simhelpers, and its documentation.[3]
It might seem that, we don’t have much choice, because the most popular languages in data science are R and Python or if you prefer Python and R. But today we are not talking about these languages!
During the useR!2022 conference, we can meet with English, Spanish and French. Because of the fact that only English is close to us we created our workshops and papers in this language. But! Is it possible to organize a workshop in another language?
Yes, it can be done and we did it! We submitted workshop in 5 languages in parallel (English, Spanish, Polish, Turkish and Vietnamese)!
How to Calculate Relative Frequencies in R?, The relative frequencies/proportions of values in one or more columns of a data frame can frequently be calculated in R.
IT WAS AN IDEA born of frustration, or at least that’s how Charles Babbage would later recall the events of the summer of 1821. That fateful summer, Babbage and his friend and fellow mathematician John Herschel were in England editing astronomical tables. Both men were founding members of the Royal Astronomical Society, but editing astronomical tables is a tedious task, and they were frustrated by all of the errors they found. Exasperated, Babbage exclaimed, “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.” To which Herschel replied, “It is quite possible.“
Babbage and Herschel were living in the midst of what we now call the Industrial Revolution, and steam-powered machinery was already upending all types of business. Why not astronomy too?
A computer algorithm can use a technique called "ghost imaging" to reconstruct objects from a person's brainwaves that the person themselves can't see
Artificial intelligence can use your brainwaves to see around corners. The technique, called “ghost imaging”, can reconstruct the basic details of objects hidden from view by analysing how the brain processes barely visible reflections on a wall.
Food fraud is a global problem that typically involves the dilution or mislabeling of food products, or ingredient substitution. In 2013, horse meat was found in many supermarket meals in Europe that claimed to contain beef, for example, while milk has often been found to be watered down in India to increase profits.
A 2021 study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization cited a 2018 European Commission finding that estimated " the cost of food fraud for the global food industry is approximately EUR 30 billion" (about $30.5 billion) each year.
While chemical analyses can be carried out in a lab to authenticate food, traditional methods are often expensive, time-consuming, and require technical expertise. That is why researchers are aiming to develop new tools that harness artificial intelligence (AI) to enable rapid, inexpensive screening of food and beverages.
"It would be a very exciting scenario to have AI help us expand the reach and impact of chemical analyses," says Patrick Ruch, a research staff member at IBM Research in Zurich, Switzerland. "All of the intelligence can be on a smartphone or in the cloud."
Ruch and his colleagues have been working on a system to authenticate beverages called HyperTaste that uses a small, portable device called an electronic tongue (e-tongue), combined with machine learning. The e-tongue contains 16 sensors made of conductive polymers that can be thought of as taste buds; when dipped into a drink, the sensors pick up chemical information in the liquid that can be converted into a unique digital fingerprint measured as a time series of voltages. "We know that the signal that we're measuring is a unique indicator of what's inside the liquid because these polymers are interacting with all of the small molecules inside," says Ruch.
Researchers develop tools to help data scientists make the features used in machine-learning models more understandable for end users.
Researchers show they can control the properties of lab-grown plant material, which could enable the production of wood products with little waste.
[...]
Each year, the world loses about 10 million hectares of forest — an area about the size of Iceland — because of deforestation. At that rate, some scientists predict the world’s forests could disappear in 100 to 200 years.
In an effort to provide an environmentally friendly and low-waste alternative, researchers at MIT have pioneered a tunable technique to generate wood-like plant material in a lab, which could enable someone to “grow” a wooden product like a table without needing to cut down trees, process lumber, etc.
These researchers have now demonstrated that, by adjusting certain chemicals used during the growth process, they can precisely control the physical and mechanical properties of the resulting plant material, such as its stiffness and density.
They also show that, using 3D bioprinting techniques, they can grow plant material in shapes, sizes, and forms that are not found in nature and that can’t be easily produced using traditional agricultural methods.
While quantum computers offer many novel possibilities, they also pose a threat to internet security since these supercomputers make common encryption methods vulnerable. Based on the so-called quantum key distribution, researchers at TU Darmstadt have developed a new, tap-proof communication network. Their results have now been presented in the renowned journal “PRX Quantum”.
The new system is used to exchange symmetric keys between parties in order to encrypt messages so that they cannot be read by third parties. In cooperation with Deutsche Telekom, the researchers led by physics professor Thomas Walther succeeded in operating a quantum network that is scalable in terms of the number of users and at the same time robust without the need for trusted nodes. In the future, such systems could protect critical infrastructure from the growing danger of cyberattacks. In addition, tap-proof connections could be installed between different government sites in larger cities.
The system developed by the Darmstadt researchers enables the so-called quantum key exchange, providing several parties in a star-shaped network with a common random number. Individual light quanta, so-called photons, are distributed to users in the communication network in order to calculate the random number and thus the digital key. Due to quantum physical effects, these keys are particularly secure. In this way, communication is particularly highly protected, and existing eavesdropping attacks can be detected.
Precisely sculpted sound waves have been used to levitate components and tiny droplets of quick-setting glue to build complex structures piece by piece in mid-air. The approach may have practical engineering and medical applications.
Asier Marzo at the Public University of Navarre, Spain, and his colleagues have developed a system called LeviPrint, which uses a robot arm that can create very specific sound waves. The arm’s movement and acoustic levitation abilities mean that it can carry components to assemble an object from them without touching any parts.
By sculpting sound waves, the machine is able to levitate, rotate and move droplets of glue or resin and small sticks, and by combining these, it can create complex structures. The glue is set almost immediately using a beam of ultraviolet light. Small droplets of resin can also be added to parts and cured in the same way, allowing the device to function similarly to a 3D printer.
Recent advances in neural science, robotics, and software have enabled scientists to develop a robotic system that responds to muscle movement signals from a partially paralyzed person relayed through a brain-machine interface. Human and robot act as a team to make performing some tasks a piece of cake.
Two robotic arms – a fork in one hand, a knife in the other – flank a seated man, who sits in front of a table, with a piece of cake on a plate. A computerized voice announces each action: “moving fork to food” and “retracting knife.” Partially paralyzed, the man makes subtle motions with his right and left fists at certain prompts, such as “select cut location”, so that the machine slices off a bite-sized piece. Now: “moving food to mouth” and another subtle gesture to align the fork with his mouth.
In less than 90 seconds, a person with very limited upper body mobility who hasn’t been able to use his fingers in about 30 years, just fed himself dessert using his mind and some smart robotic hands.
Hypotheses that can be wrong are the cornerstone of science. We must be able to run experiments to collect evidence that proves or disproves our theories. Karl Popper, one of the most influential philosophers of science, originally drew the distinction between science and non-science as falsifiability.
The U.S. may never regain its dominance as a destination for international students. Here’s why that matters.
American higher education has long prided itself on being a brilliant beacon, attracting generations of students from around the globe.
They come for education and for opportunity. Many, having established ties to America, return home to take roles in academe, business, or government. No country has trained more foreign leaders than the United States.
The Lumina is a webcam, the first product from a company of the same name. They offered me one to test and write about. So, take that into account (#ad?), but none of these links are affiliate and my darned honesty prevents me from lying for money.
[...]
The software is okay, but not perfect. The Lumina control panel is a Qt application, so in my opinion it’s better than an Electron app. But doesn’t feel as native as a Mac application like Camo.
Covid continues to pummel the health system. Interest rates are going up and the energy crisis rages. The new government has its work cut out. One of the most acute challenges is in healthcare, where Labor has always dreamed big, writes Mark Sawyer.
Australians pride themselves on their health system. The envy of the world, we like to think. And with the party that gave us Medicare back in power, things are likely to get even better. Alas, the reality looks different.
Last summer, Northwestern University scientists introduced the first-ever transient pacemaker — a fully implantable, wireless device that harmlessly dissolves in the body after it’s no longer needed. Now, in a study published in the journal Science, they unveil a new, smart version that is integrated into a coordinated network of four soft, flexible, wireless, wearable sensors and control units placed around the upper body.
The work was led by Northwestern’s John Rogers, PhD, the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querrey Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering; Igor R. Efimov, PhD, professor at the McCormick School of Engineering; and Rishi Arora, MD, professor of Medicine in the Division of Cardiology.
The sensors communicate with each other to continuously monitor the body’s various physiological functions, including body temperature, oxygen levels, respiration, muscle tone, physical activity and the heart’s electrical activity.
The system then uses algorithms to analyze this combined activity in order to autonomously detect abnormal cardiac rhythms and decide when to pace the heart and at what rate. All this information is streamed to a smartphone or tablet, so physicians can remotely monitor their patients.
Yesterday, we discussed Microsoft’s growing control of the Linux and Open Source world. Purchasing influence and power over large portions of the FOSS world (which, until very recently, Microsoft regarded as Enemy #1).
I posited that these actions by Microsoft bear a striking resemblance to both the “Embrace” and “Extend” portions of the famous “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy that Microsoft has used, in the past, to defeat other competition.
Well, it appears that the “Extinguish” phase has begun.
Back in May, the 2022 edition of “Linux Sucks” — the latest installment of the “Linux Sucks” series which has been watched millions of times — was recorded live. Exclusively for the subscribers of The Lunduke Journal.
A hacker (or group of hackers) claims to have stolen data on a billion Chinese citizens from a Shanghai police database. According to Bloomberg, the hacker is attempting to sell 23 terabytes of data for 10 bitcoin, which is worth just over $198,000 at the time of writing.
The data includes names, addresses, birthplaces, national IDs and phone numbers. The Wall Street Journal reports that the hacker provided a sample of the data, which included crime reports dating as far back as 1995. Reporters confirmed the legitimacy of at least some of the data by calling people whose numbers were listed.
It's not yet clear how the hacker infiltrated the police database, though there have been suggestions that they gained access via an Alibaba cloud computing company called Aliyun, which was said to host the database. Alibaba said it's investigating the matter.
A new computer model uses publicly available data to predict crime accurately in eight cities in the U.S., while revealing increased police response in wealthy neighborhoods at the expense of less advantaged areas.
Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning have sparked interest from governments that would like to use these tools for predictive policing to deter crime. However, early efforts at crime prediction have been controversial, because they do not account for systemic biases in police enforcement and its complex relationship with crime and society.
University of Chicago data and social scientists have developed a new algorithm that forecasts crime by learning patterns in time and geographic locations from public data on violent and property crimes. It has demonstrated success at predicting future crimes one week in advance with approximately 90% accuracy.
The National Institute of Standards and Technology announced the first series of quantum-resistant computer algorithms, a major development to secure digital information in a post-quantum world.
Announced on Tuesday, NIST officials identified four encryption tools specifically designed to withstand future hacking by a quantum machine. Cybersecurity in the age of viable quantum computers has been of paramount concern, with its computing power strong enough to break through conventional algorithms and access sensitive data.
The four algorithms contribute to NIST’s ongoing post-quantum cryptographic standard, and will be finalized in roughly two years. They are available on NIST’s website, and are referred to as Crystals-Kyber, Crystals-Dilithium, Falcon and SPHINCS+.
“Today’s announcement is an important milestone in securing our sensitive data against the possibility of future cyberattacks from quantum computers,” said Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. “Thanks to NIST’s expertise and commitment to cutting-edge technology, we are able to take the necessary steps to secure electronic information so U.S. businesses can continue innovating while maintaining the trust and confidence of their customers.”
I was on my way back home today with my wife, Shelly, when she asked me if I could explain to her more about this €«swindler€» device that has become the talk of the town.
I replied to her that it is not €«swindler€» but network sniffer.
In this blog post I will try to explain what is a network sniffer device or software? But before we understand that there a few things we should become familiar with.
I think most of the Internet users today know that every device connected to the Internet is identified by a string of numbers called the IP address. A phone number is the identifier of a physical telephone. Phone numbers allow calls to be made among fixed telephones and mobile phones. Similarly, devices connected to the Internet are able to find each other and initiate communication protocols using the IP addresses of each device.
[...]
The former CEO of Mauritius Telecom, S. Singh, stated in a radio programme on Friday 1st July 2022 at 17h00, that the Prime Minister of Mauritius, asked him to allow a third-party to install a network sniffer in the premises of the ISP.
New technology that allows airborne drones to locate aquatic robots is taking off at Dartmouth.
Researchers from the HealthX and Reality and Robotics Labs, led by computer scientists Xia Zhou and Alberto Quattrini Li, created Sunflower, an aerial sensing system that uses laser light to peer past the water’s surface and detect robots underwater.
For years, there’s been a cardinal rule for flying civilian drones: Keep them within your line of sight. Not just because it’s a good idea — it’s also the law.
But some drones have recently gotten permission to soar out of their pilots’ sight. They can now inspect high-voltage power lines across the forested Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia. They’re tracking endangered sea turtles off Florida’s coast and monitoring seaports in the Netherlands and railroads from New Jersey to the rural West.
In response, famed cryptographer Matthew Green, who I'm told HODLs ZCash and is involved in a blockchain startup, posted In defense of crypto(currency), basically arguing against regulating cryptocurrencies because, although their current state is rife with crime and is cooking the planet, better technology is possible.
Bruce Schneier responded with On the Dangers of Cryptocurrencies and the Uselessness of Blockchain. Below the fold, I argue that both of them have missed the most important point.
Smart contracts deployed to Ethereum are, in theory, immutable. Bytecode is uploaded, a constructor function is executed, and the resulting code is stored on the blockchain and cannot be updated.
Between rising inflation, fear of a recession, the return of Covid, the war in Ukraine, and the relentless supply chain disruptions, the global markets are in a state of fear, and are assuming defensive positions.
This has also reflected on the Bitcoin (opens in new tab) blockchain, whose activity has “reduced modestly” over recent weeks, according to a new report by Glassnode. The on-chain market intelligence firm says network activity is now at levels similar to those occurring during the “deepest bear phase” in 2018 and 2019.
t's lucky Siobhan Joseph likes the cold, because she can't afford to turn on her heater.
The 57-year-old is paying more than 80 per cent of her JobSeeker benefit on rent for her Marrickville home in Sydney's inner-west.
Ms Joseph gets about $770 per fortnight from JobSeeker and other support payments, and spends about $600 of that on rent.
"So I have about $174 left over for everything else," she said.
Ms Joseph has had to learn how survive on a single income since the death of her husband in 2020, and the wider battle began against the rising cost of living.
Airport, customer and capacity chaos is besetting Qantas, with industrial action now in the wings, writes Michael Sainsbury.
It’s a time-worn Qantas tactic: distracting the mainstream and industry media from its problems with whiz-bang announcements and all-expenses paid trips for pet journalists to exotic destinations.
As chaos swirls around the company and its chief executive, Alan Joyce, Qantas has used both its chunky advertising budget and its ‘coming soon’ aircraft from its new main supplier Airbus and the opening of a new direct route to Rome from Perth (replete with new menu designed by celebrity chef Neil Perry) to swamp unfavourable media coverage.
“As soon as there’s bad news, you can bet your bottom dollar there’s an announcement,” Transport Workers’ Union secretary Michael Kaine told MWM. “The most recent example of that was the day after the three Federal Court judges on the full bench backed-in the illegality of the outsourcing, Joyce went out to the media and announced that he was going to buy $38 billion worth of new planes.”
In a year GDP contracted 7.7 per cent, and as we brace for another round of ‘reverse’ migrations, and as the farmers wait unheeded at the gates of Delhi, Indian billionaires reached record levels of wealth
Elon Musk will try to bail on his $44 billion agreement to buy Twitter, claiming that the social media company hasn't met its contractual obligations, according to a statement filed with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission.
Why it matters: This could set up a massive legal fight between Musk and Twitter, with a Delaware court as the deal's ultimate arbiter.
Behind the scenes: Musk largely waived due diligence before agreeing to buy Twitter at a price that seemed high even before the broad decline in tech stocks.
The UK's Intellectual Property Office has decided artificial-intelligence systems cannot patent inventions for the time being. Patents assign the ownership of a new invention to its creator.
A recent IPO consultation found many experts doubted AI was currently able to invent without human assistance.
Current law allowed humans to patent inventions made with AI assistance, the government said, despite "misperceptions" this was not the case.
Hello from the other side - these characters are now written from Madrid, Spain!
This past month was hectic: even though we felt ready, once we were faced with the surprising news of our visas being ready, we realized we still had several things to solve in Mexico! Additionally, once we arrived in Madrid, we have had another set of issues to overcome, combined with a lot of movement (walking, running, biking) and exploration. Hence, not a lot of time to sit down and write, until today.
Today is the beginning of the 2022 Old Computer Challenge, for a week I am not restricted to one hour of Internet access per day.
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So far, it's easy to remember I don't have Internet all the time, but with my Internet usage it works fine. I use the script to "start" Internet, check my emails, read IRC channels and reply, and then I disconnect. By using small amount of time, I can achieve most of my needs in less than a minute. However, that wouldn't be practical if I had to download anything big, and people with a fast Internet access (= not me) would have an advantage.
My guess about this first day being easy is that as I don't use any streaming service, I don't need to be connected all the time. All my data are saved locally, and most of my communication needs can be done asynchronously. Even publishing this blog post shouldn't consume more than 20 seconds.
I wrote a bunch about social media in the past few years, and I sort of stopped trying to "convince" anyone to stop using it (be it entirely, or even just partially), but I still remark on the dangers of the services out there. I like what Drew DeVault had to say about the toxicity of Mastodon, too, as he is 100% spot on.
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Anyway, I still support (or sometimes just tolerate) that people still use social networks, but more people are probably leaving them (all of them) at this point, and that can only be a good thing. It's always up to the individual, though. No one will do it for them.
Today I'm releasing NewsWaffle, a Gemini gateway to (almost) any news websites, allowing you to get lists of current news articles, and read those news articles, all from inside Gemini.
A lot of essayists wanting to push the square peg of open source software into the round peg of quid-pro-quo market capitalism.
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That’s great, and that can and does happen sometimes, and that’s appreciated, but I’d rather see the change go in the other direction. UBI, free money, food, shelter. Artificial scarcity didn’t make sense during the good years and makes even less sense now that the world is on fire.
We should be moving away from a world run by Facebook, Apple, Google etc, not towards a world where they financially control the means of production. Please don’t misinterpret this as me trying to snatch the livelihood away from any one contributor to FOSS, be it a five star repo or a one line fix.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.