Engineers won't tell you this. It's not how they think. They love working on nice juicy problems, and being able to put them on their CVs.
Depending on what you do, audio recording might be an essential part of your workflow. If you want to record an important meeting or a lecture, a recording app will help you easily capture these sessions for future reference. Besides, sound recording is extremely useful for musicians using tech and software to create music.
If you are a Linux user, you might find the built-in recording app a bit too basic. However, you have the choice to install third-party audio recording apps to unlock more functionality.
Let’s look at some of the best free sound recording apps available for Linux, divided into basic and advanced categories.
Annotator, image annotation tool for Elementary OS, released version 1.2.0 today. Here are the new features and how to install guide for Ubuntu users. Annotator is a free open-source image annotation tool designed for Elementary OS, but also works in other Linux.
Suppose that you have some Linux NFS servers, which have some NFS locks, and you'd like to know which NFS client owns which lock. Since the NFS server can drop a client's locks when it reboots, this information is in the kernel data structures, but it's not exposed through public interfaces like /proc/locks. As I mentioned yesterday while talking about drgn, I've worked out how to do this, so in case someone's looking for this information, here are the details. This is as of Ubuntu 22.04, but I believe this code is relatively stable (although where things are in the header files has changed since 22.04's kernel).
This tutorial will show you how to install Fedora 38 to your desktop computer step by step with pictures.
Quick references are handy, but sometimes it’s nice to have a process demonstrated from beginning to end. In that spirit, [Darren Stone] created a video demonstrating how to model a twisted part in FreeCAD, showing the entire workflow of creating the part as a blend of surfaces and curves that get turned into a solid.
Cron jobs are an essential part of the Unix and Unix-like operating systems, allowing users to automate repetitive tasks by scheduling them to run at specific intervals. This comprehensive guide is designed to help beginners understand the basics of cron jobs, how to create and manage them, and how to troubleshoot common issues.
Yarn, a popular package manager for JavaScript projects, has become increasingly popular among developers due to its speed, reliability, and security. One of the factors contributing to Yarn's speed is its caching system, which stores previously downloaded packages to make future installations faster.
Looking to hide your important files or folders in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS then you are at the right tutorial post where we will show you the method to hide a file or folder in Ubuntu 22.04
Learn how to install Brave on Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Fedora, Arch, and more with our guide for a faster, more private browsing experience.
In this tutorial post, we will show you the step by step to reload etc/network/interfaces in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. There are multiple ways to reload etc/network/interfaces in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. We will go through each of them.
Redis is a widely used, free, and open-source data storage system that is particularly useful for fast data access and processing in a variety of applications. It's a memory-based data structure that can function as a database, cache, or message broker, with a reputation for high performance and scalability.
Golang, also known as Go, is a modern, open-source programming language developed by Google. It was designed by Robert Griesemer, Rob Pike, and Ken Thompson with the primary goal of providing a simple, efficient, and easy-to-use language for software development.
Welcome to the world of htop, an interactive process viewer for Linux and Unix systems that provides a real-time, dynamic, and colorful display of running processes. Unlike traditional process viewers like top, htop offers a more visually appealing and user-friendly interface.
A virtual machine (VM) is a software-based computer that runs different operating systems (OSs) and applications than its host computer. For example, you can run a Linux VM on a Windows computer.
The power of computers transformed the world in the last century. Today, they serve our critical infrastructure, business operations and more. Likewise, VMs have become the cornerstone of enterprise computing in the new millennium.
Standard Ubuntu installs don’t include the Linux make utility. It’s used mainly by software developers, but even non-coders may need it in some situations. Here’s how to install make on Ubuntu Linux.
Since I started using Linux in 1997, there's been one issue that has never failed to be a part of the open-source platform…the legality of playing certain multimedia codecs. It's one of the reasons why, in certain operating systems, you must install those codecs from a third party and agree to their licenses.
Just to be clear, it's not a Linux thing, it's a legal thing. And don't be mistaken, it's not illegal to play those media files on Linux, it's just that licenses must be agreed to, in order to keep things above board. And in some cases, there are no licenses to agree to…it's just the installation must be undertaken by the user.
All non-trivial Bash scripts need to make decisions. The Bash if statement lets your Linux script ask questions and, depending on the answer, run different sections of code. Here’s how they work.
Admins that use Cockpit to manage Linux servers can use the web consoles to add users, build firewalls and perform other tasks. Use these web consoles to oversee your servers.
A few things can throw you into a panic faster than trying to log into your computer and being denied entry. You click on your username, enter your password, hit Enter, and… nothing.
Unfortunately, this kind of experience is more common than you might think with Ubuntu. This is commonly known as the Ubuntu login loop issue; fret not, for it's not difficult to fix this problem, especially when you know what to do.
If your Ubuntu system is stuck in a login loop, follow along, and you will be up and running in no time.
[Emupedia]’s work to preserve computer history by way of making classic and abandoned games and software as accessible as possible is being done in a handy way: right in your browser with EmuOS.
Arch Linux is a distribution known for always giving users only cutting-edge software as soon as it becomes available. This is thanks to the rolling release model followed by the distribution. However, one of the significant exceptions to this rule is the GNOME desktop environment.
In short, despite the release of official x.0 versions of GNOME, such as 43.0, 44.0, etc., Arch is waiting for the first stable GNOME x.1 release, for example, 43.1, 44.1, etc., before including it in the distribution repositories. More about this topic can be found here.
This year’s GNOME 44, initially released version 44.0 a month and a half ago on March 22, is no exception to this rule. On April 16, its first stable update, GNOME 44.1, saw the light of day, and today, it made its way into Arch’s stable repositories.
In recent years, Linux distributions have become increasingly user-friendly, making them an appealing choice for new and experienced users alike. With so many options available, it can be challenging to determine which distribution is right for you.
I’ve used net-mgmt/nrpe3 for several years. It checks remote hosts and runs any number of predetermined commands and returns the results. It’s stable, highly configurable, and just keeps running.
Ubuntu 23.10 daily builds are now available to download. Having given the next release a magnificent mythical codename and opened the archives for development, developers have now spun up the first daily builds of Ubuntu 23.10 and made them available to download.>
As expected, these first Ubuntu 23.10 (Mantic Minotaur) daily builds are based on the previous Ubuntu release, Ubuntu 23.04 (Lunar Lobster), which arrived last month on April 20th. This means that they ship with pretty much the same core components as the previous version, especially the kernel, but also the same version of the pre-installed desktop environments and applications.
During the six-month-long development cycle, the Ubuntu 23.10 daily builds will be updated with some of the latest GNU/Linux technologies and Open Source software, such as the upcoming GNOME 45 desktop environment, Mesa 23.1 graphics stack, and Linux 6.5 kernel series.
[Evan] couldn’t find a phone he liked, so he decided to build his own. There are advantages and disadvantages, as you might expect. On the plus side, you have the ultimate control. On the negative side, it doesn’t quite have the curb appeal — at least to the average user — of a sleek new cell phone from a major manufacturer.
The phone uses a Raspberry Pi, along with a 4G modem and a 480Ãâ800 touchscreen. There’s a laser cut box that measures 90x160x30 mm. For reference, a Google Pixel 7 is about 73x156x9 mm, so a little easier on the pocket.
But not one the pocketbook. The OURPhone only costs about $200 USD to build. There are trade-offs. For example, the touchscreen is resistive, so you’ll want a stylus (there’s a slot for it in the case). On the other hand, if you don’t like something, it is all there for you to change.
Lichee Pi 4A is a single board computer (SBC) powered by Alibaba T-Head TH1520 quad-core RISC-V Xuantie C910 processor @ 1.8 GHz with an Imagination GPU and a 4 TOPS NPU for AI that can compete against the Raspberry Pi 4 in terms of performance and features.
We previously mentioned the Lichee Pi 4A (LPi4A) in our article about the Sipeed LM4A RISC-V system-on-module, but at the time we only had some benchmarks for the board and no photos and specifications about the SBC. Sipeed has now released photos, published detailed specifications, and is taking orders for the board. So let’s have a closer look.
We’ve previously tested the SNZB-02 Zigbee temperature and humidity sensor with the SONOFF NSPanel Pro smart panel, but ITEAD has now launched the SONOFF SNZB-02D that integrated the same features plus a 2.5-inch display to visualize the data.
They’ve sent us a SNZB-02 sample for review, so after listing the specifications we’ll test SONOFF’s latest Zigbee sensor with Home Assistant.
Single board computer manufacturer Orange Pi Ltd is working on a portable gaming console that will come with either a Rockchip RK3588S processor for Android/Linux gaming, or AMD Ryzen 7 7800U/6800U for Windows gaming.
The industrial design looks to be the same for all models with a 7-inch touchscreen display, a D-Pad, two joysticks, XBOX-styled ABXY buttons, two customisable buttons on the back, two microphones, stereo speakers, three USB ports including one only for charging,
Pico Technology has released PicoVNA 5 control software for their vector network analyzers for Windows x86 64-bit, Mac, Linux x86 64-bit, and Raspberry Pi 3 and greater single board computers, superseding the Windows-only PicoVNA 3 software.
As a Ubuntu user, I hate it when some hardware tool forces me to install software on Windows when there’s no Linux alternative, so any company that provides cross-platform tools is making the right move. I’m also not quite sure what a “vector network analyzer” (VNA) is, so I’ll first look into the PicoVNA 106 and PicoVNA 108 6/8.5 GHz VNAs from the company.
The Hadron Carrier is an ultra small, rugged carrier board compatible with multiple NVIDIA Jetson modules. This new product from Connect Tech comes with one GbE connector, camera support and various expansion headers.
The core structure of the kit is all laser cut wood - it’s got a distinctive smell out of the box (sort of like your grandpa’s wood workshop) that I happen to really enjoy, because it means a whopper of a fun little build is about to happen. There’s a range of laser cutting options, and these are absolutely top notch. The large pieces are almost but not completely cut (they typically have 2-3 tiny “tabs” holding them in place), and the smaller punch out holes are fully cut - you can see that some of the holes have already had their cores fall out, and the rest punch out with no effort at all. The boards are labeled, the pieces are labeled where needed (which I’ll show later), and it’s a world class example of how to do laser cut wood kits.
As he travelled overseas more and I got older, I’d hop on the MRT and check out the parts shops myself. It was a weekend introvert activity before I even knew the term, though I also had many a fun chat with the shop owners in Funan Centre and Sim Lim Square. Turns out, if you’re nice to people and slip in some local colloquialisms, you’re seen as a harmless angmoh instead of an arrogant tourist. What a concept!
After restoring an Acorn Archimedes A3010 and a Risc PC, I really wanted to try my hand at the A3000. This was the last Acorn computer to carry the BBC branding, it was in many schools and as such holds a special place in people’s hearts. The problem with that is they are often very expensive to obtain. Luckily, I manage to acquire one recently for my restoration series.
According to Robinson, the idea was to create a smartphone alternative for people looking to control their privacy. He also wanted to make a smartphone that could be easily modified and repaired, so an open-source solution was the perfect fit. The OURphone project has quite a few specs that you’ll find on many smartphones including 4G LTE internet support, GPS support, Bluetooth and WiFi capability, as well as basic phone operations like the ability to call, text and save contacts in an address book.
Here I’ll write an ode to two closely-linked FOSS projects that have, recently, absolutely floored me with their competence & quality: Sunshine and Moonlight. These are used to stream video games over a (usually local) network. Sunshine is a game streaming server: it runs on your PC as it chugs away doing all the heavy lifting of running the game itself, while Moonlight is a game streaming client that runs on whatever thin hardware exists where you want to play the game! I run Sunshine on my home office workstation and Moonlight on a NVIDIA Shield Android TV connected to a 55" screen in the living room. Some games are just best played on the couch! It’s also important if you have someone you want to share the experience with instead of sequestering yourself alone in your dark Gamer Den.
The engineer went on to state that the “third faction” posing a competitive threat to Google and OpenAI was the open-source community.
He agreed with me about the anxiety-inducing state of having hundreds of web tabs and applications open, though raised a good point about how the calculus is entirely different in mobile environments: [...]
In classical SMR, the answer to who is also simple: any server can propose a new command. This results in a surprising and powerful property: there is no primary / master / leader at the database layer. You get active-active or multi-master replication for free. Clients can contact any database server and get a linearizable / strictly serializable response. The replicated database is trivially serializable since its state corresponds to the serial execution of the commands in the SMR total order.
Learn how to program your own algorithms in R with us on June 22nd!
The slides for my talk are available as a tagged PDF (3.4MB). I am not posting the PowerPoint file as my slides have been taken and passed off as others’ work before.
I'm very pleased to announce the release of a new version of GNU PSPP. This is a test release before version 2.0.0, to allow for translations and bug reports before 2.0.0. PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data.€ It is a free replacement for the proprietary program SPSS.
[...]
GNU PSPP is a program for statistical analysis of sampled data. It is a free as in freedom replacement for the proprietary program SPSS, and appears very similar to it with a few exceptions.
When I first started learning how to program, I stumbled onto an extremely strong programming philosophy that was fairly dominant at the University of Waterloo in the 1980s.
Before I was exposed, I would struggle with crafting even simple programs. Afterward, for pretty much anything codable, including system’s level stuff like databases, operating systems, and distributed systems, building it was just a matter of being able to carve out enough time to get the work done.
Over and over again I’ve tried different ways to explain it in this blog. But I think I keep getting lost in definitions, which probably makes it inaccessible to most people.
WebGPU is the new WebGL. That means it is the new way to draw 3D in web browsers. It is, in my opinion, very good actually. It is so good I think it will also replace Canvas and become the new way to draw 2D in web browsers. In fact it is so good I think it will replace Vulkan as well as normal OpenGL, and become just the standard way to draw, in any kind of software, from any programming language. This is pretty exciting to me. WebGPU is a little bit irritating— but only a little bit, and it is massively less irritating than any of the things it replaces.
I learned a ton writing this post, especially about how HTTP2 works and how its binary format affects network performance. Hopefully you’ll learn something here as well!
If you and I care enough about making diffs efficient, we can both maintain a special kind of merkle tree called a Prolly Tree that allows us to skip large sections of shared entries and identify conflicts in logarithmic time. This “merkle syncing” capability is a powerful and versatile peer-to-peer primitive and can be used as a natural persistence layer for CRDT systems, an “rsync for key/value stores”, the foundation of a mutable multi-writer decentralized database, and much more.
Prolly Trees and their cousin Merkle Search Trees are new ideas but are already used by ATProto / BlueSky, Dolt, and others. There are some key differences that make the approach here particularly easy to implement as a wrapper around existing key/value stores.
We'll give a short overview of merkle trees in general, walk through the design of a merklized key/value store, see some example applications, introduce two reference implementations, and wrap up with a comparison to other projects.
I have been toying with the idea of generating visually pleasing maps centered on a given address, to have them printed and framed. The way I see it, it would make an original and personalised gift for the person living there. So when Marcelo de Oliveira Rosa Prates' prettymaps blew up on Reddit, I decided to try it.
The library was great and the visuals looked incredible, yet, I felt it was lacking a couple of features if I were to print the maps.
GitHub is dominant in today’s software development industry. Most professional developers interact with software created, maintained, or controlled by GitHub daily.
Their own marketing material touts that they are “The largest open source community in the world”, and indeed, the 2022 StackOverflow survey shows GitHub as the most popular version control platform by a wide margin. Many well-known open-source projects use GitHub as their source code platform of choice.
GitHub’s dominance is a risk to the software industry. Making GitHub the primary platform gives one company the power to put their needs over yours, or the industry’s. We risk leaving brilliant developers behind who don’t work well with GitHub’s paradigms. We risk being stuck with our old, technical mistakes because the underlying technology never changes. We risk losing control over our tools because they’re not actually our tools.
Tufte CSS provides tools to style web articles using the ideas demonstrated by Edward Tufte’s books and handouts. Tufte’s style is known for its simplicity, extensive use of sidenotes, tight integration of graphics with text, and carefully chosen typography.
Tufte CSS was created by Dave Liepmann and is now an Edward Tufte project. The original idea was cribbed from Tufte-LaTeX and R Markdown’s Tufte Handout format. We give hearty thanks to all the people who have contributed to those projects.
If you see anything that Tufte CSS could improve, we welcome your contribution in the form of an issue or pull request on the GitHub project: tufte-css. Please note the contribution guidelines.
Known for her many guidebooks, she helped determine what was trash and what was treasure on the BBC series that inspired the American show.
If there’s one good thing to be said about the chip shortage of 2020-2023 (and counting!) it’s that a number of us were forced out of our ruts, and pushed to explore parts that we never would have otherwise. Or maybe it’s just me.
Some say the latest public art project at Harbour City, a shopping mall in Hong Kong’s Tsim Sha Tsui district, looks like gigantic hanging portraits of death.
The biggest impact of the layoffs has not been the number of people out of work, but the widely publicised reports of the inhumane approach many of the large employers took to announcing and communicating the layoffs. Stories of people finding out they no longer have a job when they are not able to log on to their corporate account, or getting a text message from an unidentified number telling them to drop off their company equipment with no other communication have a very negative impact on the industry as a whole and psychological safety is down in almost every high tech company.
There is a realistic argument that the layoffs were a sensible response to the changing economic climate and that for many companies it is about right-sizing rather than down-sizing, however the way they were communicated to the impacted staff and to the world at large has resulted in a loss of trust and reduction of employee engagement across the industry. Rebuilding a generative culture will be difficult, but can be done with care and deliberate design.
Lightfoot’s song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” — about the 1975 sinking of the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald in the frigid waters of Lake Superior, killing all 29 crew members — has played an outsized role in the programming and number of people who visit the historic site north of Two Harbors, Minn.
Although there is speculation that the Fitzgerald broke in half on the surface as the bow and stern rode the crests of the two large waves that struck the Anderson earlier, the Coast Guard’s final report suggests the Fitzgerald instead nose dived into a large wave, was unable to recover because it had lost so much buoyancy, and plunged to the bottom of Lake Superior in seconds. As the heavy cargo shifted forward quickly while the Fitzgerald was going down, the bow of the ship hit the bottom with such force that the vessel snapped in two.
Sakhr Alhuthali reveals how foreign researchers are paid by universities to lie about their main affiliation and boost their position on the influential Shanghai Ranking
With only two space stations in orbit around Earth today in the form of the International Space Station and the Chinese Tiangong (‘Sky Palace’) station, it’s easy to forget how many space stations were launched in the previous century. And the Soviet Union launched by far the most, as part of the Salyut (Russian for ‘salute’ or ‘fireworks’) program. Although the program entailed both military (Orbital Piloted Station, or OPS) and civilian (Durable Orbital Station, or DOS) stations, it was the civilian stations that saw the most success, as well as the most daring rescue attempt with the recovering of the Salyut 7 space station.
When something is described as “Low Noise”, it is by the nature of the language a relative phrase. The higest quality magnetic tape is low noise compared to its cheaper sibling for example, but still has noise many would consider unacceptable. In instrumentation however, “Low Noise” has to really mean just that, with a range of specialist techniques to produce circuitry with a truly low noise level for the most demanding of signal applications. As an example [Floydfish] has created a low noise instrumentation amplifier that should serve as a learning exercise for anyone interested in pushing low noise circuitry to the limit.
On its face, 3D printing is pretty simple — it’s basically just something to melt plastic while being accurately positioned in three dimensions. But the devil is in the details, and there seems to be an endless number of parameters and considerations that stand between the simplicity of the concept and the reality of getting good-quality prints.
Emulators are easy and convenient, but for some retrocomputing enthusiasts nothing comes close to running classic software on actual era-appropriate hardware. This can become a problem, though, for those into vintage PC gaming: old PCs and their monitors are notoriously large and heavy, meaning that even a modest collection will quickly fill up a decent family home. There is a solution however, as [The Eric Experiment] demonstrates in his latest video. He designed and built a 3D-printed mini PC that runs on an actual 486 processor.
Streacom plans to showcase its SG10, a PC chassis that can dissipate up to 600W of thermal energy without usage of any fans at Computex in late May. The case was developed in collaboration with Calyos, which specializes on advanced thermal solutions relying on loop heat pipe (LHP) technology. An avid reader will probably recall that a couple of years ago Streacom already teased a case capable of dissipating 600W. That chassis has never made it to the market, but the SG10 is expected to become a product that will be available in retail.
Did we create a 'new normal'?
According to new research published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research, virtual consultation is a novel and developing contribution to environmentally sustainable health care.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the shift to virtual consulting, leading to its growing use. As health systems across the world strive to achieve net-zero carbon emissions, a critical question arises: what is the impact of virtual consulting on environmental sustainability in health care?
Assessment of available surveillance indicators found that COVID-19 hospital admission levels were concordant with COVID-19 Community Levels. COVID-19–associated hospital admission rates lagged 1 day behind case rates and 4 days behind percentages of COVID-19 emergency department visits and positive SARS-CoV-2 test results. National Vital Statistics System trends in the percentage of COVID-19 deaths strongly correlated with, and were 13 days timelier, than aggregate death count data.
You know that feeling when you go to a public toilet and the seat is still warm from the last customer...?
As well as having to tighten the headset, adjust the eye separation, and make sure the lenses are clean - you have to make sure the unit is wiped down. No, really wiped down. Like with proper cleaning fluid.
As commodity virtual reality (VR) systems become more common, they are rapidly gaining popularity for entertainment, education, and training purposes. VR utilizes headsets which come in contact with or close proximity to the user’s eyes, nose, and forehead. In this study, the potential for these headsets to become contaminated with bacteria was analyzed. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to address the potential for microorganisms to be transmitted via VR headsets. The data discussed herein were collected roughly one year prior to the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. We feel it is important to be clear that this study focuses exclusively on bacteria, as opposed to viruses like those responsible for the present pandemic.
Geoffrey Hinton, widely known as one of the "godfathers of AI", recently announced he had quit Alphabet after a decade at the firm, saying he wanted to speak out on the risks of the technology without it affecting his former employer.
Hinton's work is considered essential to the development of contemporary AI systems. In 1986, he co-authored the seminal paper "Learning representations by back-propagating errors", a milestone in the development of the neural networks undergirding AI technology. In 2018, he was awarded the Turing Award in recognition of his research breakthroughs.
The BTS ARMY complaints about HYBE’s dynamic pricing began while purchasing tickets for BTS member Suga’s solo concert in the US. While fans initially assumed Ticketmaster’s policy was to blame for the fluctuation in prices, they would be shocked to discover it was a policy that HYBE had recently implemented.
“I paid 2.5 million KRW (~1,876 USD) for the ticket alone,” one fan commented. “I didn’t buy it from a scalper. I bought it directly from the source. I first slandered Ticketmaster, but now I see the lowest (of HYBE).”
“After paying $22 to sign up for a paid membership, I got the rights to buy a ticket through a lottery,” explains another. “But on the day of ticketing, the ticket — which cost $400 for a floor ticket — soared every time I clicked on it. It soared all the way up to $1,800 for a floor ticket, and I eventually gave up. In the end, only those with big pockets will be able to go to concerts.”
To be clear, nobody is entitled to free cloud hosting, and there is nothing wrong with a business choosing not to offer it. Moreover, the 90-day grace period Mattermost is providing for the transition is better than one often sees when a company shuts down a product or free plan. And unlike users of fully proprietary software, Mattermost’s customers have the option to self-host the product as an alternative to paying $10/user/month, or moving to another platform.
But Mattermost is breaking the “free forever” promise made to its customers, and without any acknowledgement or apology. The “free forever” note was quietly removed from Mattermost’s website in the month leading up to the announcement, and is never mentioned in the email Mattermost sent to affected customers. Surely, one can expect better than that from a company whose stated principles include “customer obsession” and “earn trust”.
At the same time, if you’re already using spot instances you may have noticed your savings start to dry up. I know I did! So naturally I went out and tried to measure it. Is this spike in spot prices just a blip in the radar, or have macroeconomic conditions also had an effect on spot pricing?
In this Breaking Analysis we look at a number of sources, including the experiences of 37signals, which has documented its departure from public clouds. We’ll also examine the relationship between repatriation and SRE Ops skill sets. As always we’ll look at survey data from our partners at ETR, a recent FinOps study published by Vega Cloud and revisit the Cloud Repatriation Index, which we believe is breaking a three-year trend.
Folders containing sensitive information were published on Twitter by a group claiming to have hacked into Socrates Academy in Matthews and Movement School.
The hackers, which Queen City News has decided not to name, first posted proof of their hack, promising more to come if school officials didn’t cooperate.
Midway through Q1 the winds of progress shifted, and we observed a material increase in attacks on large enterprises that achieved levels of impact that we had not observed since before the Colonial Pipeline attack in May 2021. In 2019 and 2020 it was fairly common to see large enterprises become completely paralyzed by ransomware encryption. This evolved in the quarters that followed the Pipeline attack. We highlighted the key reasons for ransom payment contraction last quarter, which focused on enterprises realizing a return on security & incident response training investments, law enforcement activity, and the compounding nature of contracting unit economics within the cyber extortion industry. These factors were countered by behavioral shifts from the threat actors towards more fluid operations. These we highlighted in Q2 2022, to show how ransomware actors were treading more lightly in response to better security and LE takedowns.
On April 28, NextGen submitted a breach notification to the Montana Attorney General’s Office. Thinking it would be a report linked to the ransomware attack by AlphV (BlackCat) in January, DataBreaches prepared to write an update.
Ukrainian state networks have fallen victim to data wiping by Russian state-sponsored hackers, who erased data after exploiting VPNs and using malware abusing the common [Windows program]...
Macs are known for their security, but that doesn't mean they're safe from viruses and other threats. IT teams can look into third-party antivirus tools to bolster macOS security.
But a new report from Amnesty International has examined the use of a novel facial recognition technology system known as Red Wolf, which has been deployed at military checkpoints in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron since 2022. It scans the faces of Palestinians, often denies them entry and adds them to massive Israeli government databases without their consent.
Facial recognition technology is increasingly being used to stalk Palestinians, keeping them under near-constant observation. The surveillance is accomplished with a ubiquitous network of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras mounted on lampposts, the sides of buildings, surveillance towers and rooftops.
A new report by Amnesty International documents how the Israeli government is using an experimental facial recognition system to track Palestinians and control their movements. The findings are part of “Automated Apartheid,” which reveals an ever-growing surveillance network of cameras in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron and in East Jerusalem — two places […]
It is amazing how fast we get used to giving away our privacy in exchange for convenience, safety, curiosity, etc. ðŸËâðŸË²
As noted in a prior post, New York’s Attorney General (“NYAG”) has made enforcement of the New York SHIELD Act an enforcement priority. The SHIELD Act requires organizations handling personal information related to New York residents to maintain reasonable safeguards to protect that information. Maintaining its focus on this area, the NYAG recently released a guide to help organizations strengthen their data security programs and “to put [them] on notice that they must take their data security obligations seriously, and at a minimum, take the reasonable steps outlined” in the NYAG’s guide (the “Guide”).
The Guide is based on the NYAG’s experiences in investigating and prosecuting organizations in the wake of data incidents. It states that the NYAG received 4,000 data breach notifications in 2022 and penalized organizations millions of dollars for failing to comply with their data security obligations.
In the Guide, the NYAG recommends action in nine areas.
Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) has had numerous breaches in the past 15 years, including one ransomware incident that affected more than 170,000 former and current employees and students. Here’s a recent incident that just showed up on a state attorney general’s website.
In a sign of European concern, Britain, France and Germany have warned Iran they would trigger a return of U.N. sanctions against Tehran if it enriched uranium to the optimal level for a nuclear weapon, three European officials said.
The threat, made last year in a previously unreported letter sent by the countries' foreign ministers, underscores Western fears that Iran could produce bomb-grade uranium of 90% purity.
“So there’s a series of informal conversations now taking place in the industry — all informal — about what would the rules of A.I. safety look like,” said Mr. Schmidt, who has written, with former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, a series of articles and books about the potential of artificial intelligence to upend geopolitics.
The law allows the government, on the proposal of the National Security Commission, to deny entry to foreign nationals “who intend to or have crossed the state border at not-designated places or at places designated for the purpose but in violation of the border crossing procedure”.
The removal of Twitter’s verification mark creates fresh obstacles for the platform as it was a symbol of authenticity that distinguished genuine accounts from fraudulent ones. However, removing the verification mark from thousands of accounts while offering primary subscription services introduces several complications for the platform, particularly in combatting misinformation. The recent fake news coming from Sudan is a testament to this. A fake but verified twitter account of the ‘Rapid Support Forces’ – a paramilitary force fighting in Sudan – tweeted about the death of its leader, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, otherwise known as ‘Hemedti’ during the combat. As per Twitter’s own statistics, the tweet was seen by one million users. Surprisingly, the account claiming the death had a blue tick, whereas the actual account of the ‘Rapid Support Force’ was no longer verified.
The war has been a disaster for Ukraine, but also a calamity for the world. This brief article provides a concise overview of the war’s profound global effects, beginning with the combatants’ cost in lives and treasure. Beyond this it assesses the war’s impact on global trade and economy; energy and food price inflation and their effects on poverty, hunger, and mortality; the redirection of humanitarian and official development assistance; the total sum of aid to the Ukrainian war effort, and the estimated cost of postwar reconstruction and recovery. Also examined is the war’s effect on global defense spending. The article also provides copious citations to support further inquiry.
Ukraine’s Security Service reports that it has charged, in absentia, all members of Russia’s Federation Council who supported the “unification” with Russia of Ukraine’s occupied regions with encroaching on Ukrainian territory and waging an aggressive war. Security Service representatives also note that the prosecutor general’s office has collected “a large evidentiary base” about 170 Russian senators who contributed to the occupation of Ukrainian territory.
Russia and Ukraine conducted a prisoner exchange during which 45 people returned to Ukraine, reports presidential adviser Andriy Yermak.€
Evgeny Prigozhin, head of the Wagner Group paramilitary cartel, says he’s been in touch with head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov’s team about transferring positions in Bakhmut.€ €
A car bombing outside of Nizhny Novgorod injured Russian nationalist politician and writer Zakhar Prilepin. Telegram channel Baza reports that Prilepin’s daughter was riding in the car with him, but that she got out of the car before the explosion.
Russia’s top investigative agency on Saturday said the suspect in a car bombing that injured a prominent pro-Kremlin novelist and killed his driver has admitted acting at the behest of Ukraine’s special services. The blast that hit the car of Zakhar Prilepin, a well-known nationalist writer and an ardent supporter of Russia’s war in Ukraine, was the third explosion involving prominent pro-Kremlin figures since the start of the conflict. It took place in the region of Nizhny Novgorod, about 400 kilometers (250 miles) east of Moscow. Russia’s Investigative Committee said the suspect was a Ukrainian native and had admitted under questioning that he was working under orders from Ukraine. The Foreign Ministry in turn blamed not only Ukraine but the United States as well.
Zakhar Prilepin, who himself fought in eastern Ukraine, has long advocated an imperialist foreign policy by Moscow.
New DNA evidence helped confirm that a man who went by John Damon and died in Australia in 2010 was actually William Leslie Arnold, a convicted killer and escaped inmate from Nebraska.
Violence erupted over a question of who gets to claim special tribal status.
The pro-Kremlin writer and political activist Zakhar Prilepin was wounded in a car bombing in the city of Nizhny Novgorod on May 6, the state-run TASS news agency reported.
Ukraine’s air force claims to have downed a Russian hypersonic missile over Kyiv using newly acquired American Patriot defense systems, the first known time the country has been able to intercept one of Moscow’s most modern missiles
Ukraine is feeling short-term pressure from its Western backers for success in a looming counteroffensive. Vladimir Putin seems to be operating on a longer timeline.
The air force said it intercepted the hypersonic missile with a newly delivered U.S.-made Patriot air-defense battery. U.S. officials confirmed the strike.
The chief of the Russian paramilitary group Wagner on Saturday asked Moscow to let him hand over his positions in the hotspot city of Bakhmut to Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov.
There are currently more than 15,000 Russian citizens living in Lithuania, many of whom have arrived recently, fleeing Vladimir Putin’s regime. Some of them hope to join the Ukrainian ranks in the fight against Russia.
Ukrainian and Russian authorities separately disclosed an apparent exchange of prisoners on May 6, with Kyiv saying 45 of its personnel were being returned while Moscow said three of its pilots were brought back to Russia.
Ukraine has claimed it has shot down a Russian hypersonic missile and suggested that a U.S. Patriot air-defense missile system was used to do it.
Representatives of Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and the UN were unable to reach an agreement on the continuation of Ukrainian grain exports from Black Sea ports, a UN spokesman said on May 5.
Six explosives experts with Ukraine’s emergency services were killed by Russian shelling while conducting a demining operation in the Kherson region, the head of the State Emergency Service (SES) said on May 6.
New York's attorney general announced tougher measures Friday to "end the fraud and dysfunction that have become the hallmarks of cryptocurrency," a move likely to bring more focus nationally on the multi-billion dollar [cryptocurrency] industry.
The Biden administration wants to impose a 30 percent tax on the electricity used by cryptocurrency mining operations, and it has included the proposal in its budget for the fiscal year of 2024. In a blog post on the White House website, the administration has formally introduced the Digital Asset Mining Energy or DAME excise tax. It explained that it wants to tax cryptomining firms, because they aren't paying for the "full cost they impose on others," which include environmental pollution and high energy prices.
While crypto assets are virtual, the energy consumption tied to their computationally intensive production is very real and imposes very real costs, as highlighted in a chapter of this year’s Economic Report of the President (entitled “Digital Assets: Relearning Economic Principles”). Recent reporting by the New York Times highlighted the scale of the power consumption associated with 34 of the largest cryptomining operations, which they calculated as equal to the power used by the surrounding 3 million homes. As shown in Figure 1, the amount of electricity used in cryptomining in the United States in 2022 was similar to what is used to power all the country’s home computers or residential lighting.
The Digital Asset Mining Energy excise tax – DAME for short – would require American firms to pay a tax equal to 30 percent of the electricity bill consumed by computers used to make digi-dollars after a phase-in period that begins at the start of 2024.
In 2024, businesses engaged in digital asset mining would pay 10 percent of their bill in tax, before the rate rises to 20 percent in 2025 and hits 30 percent in 2026.
That’s partly because they’re cute—or ugly-cute. But experts say it also has to do with the medium itself.
“People resonate with these videos as they add human-like captions for the animals,” Julia Lee Cunningham, associate professor at the University of Michigan and a National Geographic Explorer writes in an email.
These videos inspire us to care about wildlife. But they may have hidden harms, too, as more people seek out exotic animals as pets.
Linghu Changbing will be 23 this year. Even before the pandemic hit China, he was already starting to feel that the traditional goals of marriage, a mortgage and kids were beyond his reach.
"I had no time to find a girlfriend back in China, because I was working from eight in the morning to 10 at night, sometimes even till 11.00 p.m. or midnight, with very little time off," said Linghu, who joined the "run" movement of people leaving China in 2022.
The death toll from flash floods and landslides in eastern Congo has risen beyond 200, with many more people still missing, according to local authorities in the province of South Kivu. Thomas Bakenge, administrator of Kalehe territory, the worst-hit area, told reporters on the scene Saturday that 203 bodies had been recovered so far, but that efforts to find others were continuing. In the village of Nyamukubi, where hundreds of homes were washed away, rescue workers and survivors dug through the ruins Saturday looking for more bodies in the mud.
Jim Chalmers’ long-awaited tweaks to the PRRT are the itsy-bitsyest “reforms” about, the equivalent of recycling old Christmas presents with a fancy new bow. Michael West reports on how the Treasurer is merely returning a couple of billion in gas sector subsidies, and only for a while.
“Chalmers slaps $2.4bn tax hit on oil and gas,” cried Murdoch’s The Australian. “$2.4bn gas tax hit on energy giants,” declared the AFR. Santos chief Kevin Gallagher was nowhere to be heard with his “Soviet-style” scaremongering. Is Australia still going the way of Venezuela and Nigeria, Kevin?€
Some House Republicans are fretting about whether they'd be able to pass a watered-down version of their debt ceiling bill once the terms are negotiated with Senate Democrats and the White House, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: House moderates say House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and GOP leadership aren't doing enough to tamp down expectations with the right-wing Freedom Caucus — harming the chances for any compromise bill.
Founded in 2015 by Iddo Gino, RapidAPI built a platform that helps businesses find and integrate third-party APIs, as well as manage their own usage of their own internal APIs. In March of 2022, it raised $150 million in a Series D round led by SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2. Other backers include Qumra, Andreessen Horowitz, M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Viola Growth, Green Bay Ventures, and Grove Ventures.
Some€ South€ Africans are calling for Britain to return the world's largest diamond, known as the Star of€ Africa, which is set in the royal sceptre that King Charles III held at his coronation on Saturday.
As the coronation of Charlie-boy approaches, the Royal household thought it would be nice to offer the British public the opportunity to€ swear their allegiance€ to King Charles III and declare themselves his slave.
Affected employees have already been advised, via email, if they still have a job. Everyone will receive a minimum of 16 weeks severance plus a week for every year they worked at the company.
Public transit shouldn’t be a roller coaster ride but, if you follow New York City’s Metropolitan Transit Authority on Twitter, the past week may have felt like one. The MTA, which runs the U.S.’s largest rapid transit network, is back to posting real-time service alerts and updates on the social media platform.
A multipart investigation by The Wall Street Journal has revealed prominent people who met multiple times with Jeffrey Epstein.
Investing legends Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger on Saturday urged the U.S. and China to settle their widening differences, arguing the superpowers have a "mutual interest" in continuing cooperation.
There are real issues with disinformation, online hate, privacy, competition, and a host of other online concerns that require various forms of regulation. But the government’s current approach suggests that it believes the ends justify even potentially unconstitutional means. It sounds extreme, but the slippery slope that starts with media intervention expands to investigations into critics, truth oversight bodies, and restrictions on press freedoms. Yet we must be honest with ourselves and see that this is where we are today with current and future policies that risk turning Canada into a dangerous model that more repressive regimes may cite with approval to justify their own anti-democratic measures. I don’t know what else to say other than this feels like uncharted territory. It must stop.
Iranian agents arrested Cha'ab in 2020 when he left Sweden for Turkey, taking him to Tehran without disclosing any other details.
Habib Chaab, a founder and former leader of a separatist group called the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz (ASMLA), had been sentenced to death for being "corrupt on earth,” a capital offense under Iran’s strict Islamic laws.
The Ukrainian Security Service (SBU) arrested Gonzalo Lira, a US-Chilean national residing in Kharkiv, on suspicions of harbouring pro-Russian sentiments. This marks the second time Lira has been apprehended by the SBU. Lira, an author and filmmaker who relocated to Kharkiv years ago and married a Ukrainian, was initially detained in April 2022 but was released after a week without charges. He was subsequently instructed not to leave the city and prohibited from discussing his arrest.
An Istanbul court handed journalist Bülent Mumay a suspended one year and eight months prison sentence over publishing information about a construction company, defying a court order.
To His Majesty King Charles III, On the coronation of my liege, I thought it only fitting to extend a heartfelt invitation to you to commemorate this momentous occasion by visiting your very own kingdom within a kingdom: His Majesty’s Prison Belmarsh. You will no doubt recall the wise […]
I’ve read a lot of smear since Fox News dismissed Tucker Carlson as its premier evening news presenter late last month. How could I not? It was everywhere, and more fecal matter is being flung Carlson’s way as we speak.
The current Supreme Court conservative majority is certainly not shy about tearing down the liberal precedents set by the Warren Court. Floyd Abrams, one of the US’s most famous press lawyers, told the podcast So to Speak (2/23/23) that the judges who want to overturn Sullivan “are offended by…the press reportage about really public matters, which I think Sullivan was absolutely right about and has served the public well.” Floyd doesn’t believe the court has the five votes needed to undo Sullivan yet. But there are at least two justices—Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch—that have their eye on the case, and possibly one or two more.
The ranking is an eight-place improvement of the region’s score from 2022, but RSF notes that Hong Kong is facing an “unprecedented setback” since the introduction of a national security law in 2020.
Introduced following widespread anti-government protests, the security law prohibits acts that include secession, subversion and foreign collusion, none of which is clearly defined. Hong Kong authorities have used that and a colonial-era sedition law to arrest and jail anti-government dissidents, including journalists.
The Writers Guild is on strike. Hollywood is closed for business. The union's bargaining documents reveal a cartel of studios that refused to negotiate on a single position. This could go on for a long-ass time: [...]
Students nationally rallied on May 3rd for the Freedom to Learn, taking action to challenge censorship, book banning and voter suppression sweeping the country. They are demanding the right to learn their history and that of their forebears, even if it makes others “uncomfortable.” The day of protest fell on an auspicious anniversary. Sixty years earlier, on May 3rd, 1963, thousands of young people risked their lives in Birmingham, Alabama, on the second day of what became known as The Children’s Crusade. Images of the march shocked people worldwide, as Black children and teens engaging in non-violent protest were brutalized with police dogs, clubs and water cannons.
I recently came across a tweet from Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s architect of the absolutely unconscionable family separation policy at the border. The tweet reads, “Joe Biden is the trafficker-in-chief. No one on earth is responsible for more child trafficking than Joe Biden.”
Child abuse prevention month ended at the end of March. But in the Florida Legislature, every day is child abuse day. Not prevention. Perpetration, with almost every Republican legislator institutionalizing a system of predation that makes clergymen’s unzipped prowls seem monastic in comparison.
Conservative legal activist Leonard Leo has gotten a lot of attention for his work to reshape the U.S. judicial system.
Two defendants arrested in March during a€ music festival against ‘Cop City’€ were€ again denied bond€ Wednesday in DeKalb County Magistrate Court, while a third was granted $25,000 bond with conditions. The defendants, all of whom are facing domestic terrorism charges for their alleged participation in the€ movement against the […]
However, relations between Iran and Sweden were already tense, because Sweden handed down a life prison sentence to a former Iranian official for his part in the mass executions of political prisoners in Iran in 1988.
Right now, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is going on strike to secure better compensation and equity structures for TV and film writers across Hollywood. As parts of the efforts to draw attention to their cause, writers are picketing at various studio lots on both the east and west coasts. Even though it’s only been a few days since the strike started, their efforts appear to be working, as the upcoming MTV Movie Awards have been fairly hobbled by the striking.
The trend is undeniable. Cellphone data suggests that Canadian cities are now about half as full of people during the workday compared with before the pandemic. That's well up from under 10 per cent observed at various points since 2020, when the pandemic began and lockdowns were implemented.
Newton N. Minow, who as Federal Communications Commission chair in the early 1960s famously proclaimed that network television was a “vast wasteland,” died at home in Chicago Saturday. He was 97.
The CMA’s ruling is unusual in antitrust, because its judgment was based on what the merger would mean for an industry that’s still only at a nascent stage. Data from research company Omdia puts sales of cloud-enabled services at $5.1 billion in 2022, compared to nearly $35 billion in conventional console game sales. The regulator, though, argues that cloud gaming is growing fast, that Microsoft’s scale and power would give it a huge head start, and that it would have a strong commercial incentive to make all Activision titles exclusive to its platforms—stifling competition.
Researchers have used GPT-style machine learning architecture to decode human thoughts by analyzing their functional MRI (fMRI) brain scans. That’s right – we’re talking mind reading. The AI was initially trained trained by exposing participants to 16 hours of narrative stories while recording their brain activity.€ And, once trained,€ the AI was able to accurately describe the content of their thoughts.€ Of some interest, the AI was better at identifying concepts and meaning rather than the actual words at issue.
While this technology has the potential to revolutionize communication for individuals with disabilities or neurological conditions, it also raises some privacy concerns that could involve both reading thoughts and writing them.
Liverpool Crown Court has sentenced a 54-year-old reseller of pirated IPTV subscriptions to five years in prison. City of London Police applauds the verdict but also calls on the public for help, as the former IPTV salesman has reportedly fled the country with his dog.
I found myself agreeing with much of the PERMACOMPUTER letter, though I can't sign it because I do not agree with the first sentence of the first of the conclusions at the end of the letter. I think this may point to a slight ideological difference between myself and the letter's authors, which has prompted me to outline my own views here in response.
In my opinion, what this letter points to and describes is the dysfunction of capitalism. The technique of generative modeling is largely a threat because it imperils the livelihoods of millions of people, who still need to work in order to live decent lives.€¹ These millions still need to work in order to live decent lives because capitalism requires the imposition of artificial scarcity, to the benefit of the rentier class. There can be no capitalism, no rentiers, without the enclosure of the commons, after all.€²
For a very long time I have wished that my computer, tablet, and phone all had the same operating system. I have read that it was possible to put some GNU/Linux distros on phones and tablets but (and this will make me lose geek cred) I am a little uncomfortable with doing that. I am not a rich guy and I am afraid of bricking my tablet and/or phone. I have thought about putting Android on a flash drive and booting my computer into Android but the biggest thing that I do with my computer is draft plans. Alas, the best drafting program that I have found for Android is barely even usable. So I figured this little was never going to happen.
Off and on for nearly 20 years I have been playing with Emacs. I will use it for a long time and then hit a bump in the road and rage quit Emacs and go back the world of easy to use and privacy compromising tools. I will stay gone for just long enough to forget the common key commands that anybody who uses Emacs should know and then return and start relearning the whole thing over again.
I have my class assignments and everything. I'll be running two of the intro to CS classes and the intro mathematical logic class.
This simple error message has causes that range from simple to sometimes pretty tricky. Most often it's that there is invisible junk on the filename, usually a newline or carriage return. Periodic reminder to include the filename in the error message to help surface such details.
* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It's like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.