[00:00] schestowitz[TR2][00:00] schestowitz[TR2]As Thunderbirds Product Design manager, I have some good insights into whats happening and where things are going. Consider this article (and the companion video below) the first painting in a more complete mural showing where Thunderbird is headed, and why some of the things were doing might seem counterintuitive.
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Today, Thunderbird is wholly owned by MZLA Technologies, a subsidiary of Mozilla Foundation, and its actively developed and maintained by a growing group of paid employees. We have a proper organization, a roadmap, and people in charge of making smart decisions and defining directions.
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[00:01] schestowitz[TR2][00:01] schestowitz[TR2]curl is actually something which is critical, especially to our data management system. It is being used very widely across NASA.
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[00:02] schestowitz[TR2][00:02] schestowitz[TR2]I just figured out how to get my Android phone recognised by Android Debug Bridge (adb) on my MacBook, which finally allowed me to remote debug websites on Firefox Android. Just so I dont forget what I did, this is a short documentation of the steps needed to get everything to work. Hopefully it will stay relevant for a good while.
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[00:05] schestowitz[TR2][00:05] schestowitz[TR2]Large language models (LLMs) like the GPT family learn the statistical structure of language by optimising their ability to predict missing words in sentences (as in 'The cat sat on the [BLANK]'). Despite the impressive technical ju-jitsu of transformer models and the billions of parameters they learn, it's still a computational guessing game. ChatGPT is, in technical terms, a 'bullshit ge [00:05] schestowitz[TR2] nerator'. If a generated sentence makes sense to you, the reader, it means the mathematical model has made sufficiently good guess to pass your sense-making filter. The language model has no idea what it's talking about because it has no idea about anything at all. It's more of a bullshitter than the most egregious egoist you'll ever meet, producing baseless assertions with unfailing confidence because that's what it's designed to [00:05] schestowitz[TR2] do. It's a bonus for the parent corporation when journalists and academics respond by generating acres of breathless coverage, which works as PR even when expressing concerns about the end of human creativity.
[00:05] schestowitz[TR2]Unsuspecting users who've been conditioned on Siri and Alexa assume that the smooth talking ChatGPT is somehow tapping into reliable sources of knowledge, but it can only draw on the (admittedly vast) proportion of the internet it ingested at training time. Try asking Google's BERT model about Covid or ChatGPT about the latest Russian attacks on Ukraine. Ironically, these models are unable [00:05] schestowitz[TR2] to cite their own sources, even in instances where it's obvious they're plagiarising their training data. The nature of ChatGPT as a bullshit generator makes it harmful, and it becomes more harmful the more optimised it becomes. If it produces plausible articles or computer code it means the inevitable hallucinations are becoming harder to spot. If a language model suckers us into trusting it then it has succeeded in becoming the [00:05] schestowitz[TR2] industry's holy grail of 'trustworthy AI'; the problem is, trusting any form of machine learning is what leads to a single mother having their front door kicked open by social security officials because a predictive algorithm has fingered them as a probable fraudster, alongside many other instances of algorithmic violence.
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[00:11] schestowitz[TR2][00:11] schestowitz[TR2]One problem with the tests is that it will be challenging to prove they really work. It would take decades, for instance, before anyone could judge whether they accurately predicted a newborns health risks. Meyer thinks the Federal Trade Commission should keep close tabs on companies advertising claims.
[00:11] schestowitz[TR2]And if the tests do work, thats also a problem, according to Meyer and her coauthors, who include the geneticist Patrick Turley and the economist Daniel J. Benjamin. They say embryo tests could exacerbate existing inequalities in societyfor instance, if only people in certain socioeconomic groups use them to have healthier, taller, or smarter offspring.
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[00:15] schestowitz[TR2][00:15] schestowitz[TR2]The joint release is just the latest warning from U.S. government officials that ransomware attacks originating in North Korea have grown into a national security crisis. In fact, many cyber officials and lawmakers have called for additional regulations to ensure health care organizations are implementing proper cybersecurity protections to help defend against the ongoing scourge of ransom [00:15] schestowitz[TR2] ware.
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[00:15] schestowitz[TR2][00:15] schestowitz[TR2]Are the security issues we are seeing related to the use of open-source software? Does proprietary software have any more inherent safety or security benefits?
[00:15] schestowitz[TR2]The short answer is no. More and more security flaws are being found simply because there is more software being produced in the world than ever before, and more aspects of our lives are incorporating software features.
[00:15] schestowitz[TR2]In fact, open-source software has been at the forefront of this technological transformation, giving anyone in the world the access and opportunity to develop functionality and products that would have been infeasible without free access to such resources.
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[00:31] schestowitz[TR2][00:31] schestowitz[TR2]Organizations are leaving Twitter, but will they make the wrong choice and choose something that requires nonfree software? Now's the time to tell your government and other groups you are a part of to make the right move to a freedom-respecting platform.
[00:31] schestowitz[TR2]The recent erratic and abusive behavior Twitter has displayed toward its users has resulted in a strong push toward federated social media like Mastodon and other services utilizing the ActivityPub specification as its backbone. We hope that governments, citizen's groups, and nonprofit organizations will be among those leaving. All groups seeking an easy solution for disseminating information need [00:31] schestowitz[TR2] to be careful not to replace Twitter with something worse. Requiring constituents to run nonfree JavaScript to view important information or government statements is an affront to user freedom.
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[00:34] schestowitz[TR2][00:34] schestowitz[TR2]This tool is going to be the most powerful tool for spreading misinformation that has ever been on the [Internet], said Gordon Crovitz, a co-chief executive of NewsGuard, a company that tracks online misinformation and conducted the experiment last month. Crafting a new false narrative can now be done at dramatic scale, and much more frequently its like having A.I. agents c [00:34] schestowitz[TR2] ontributing to disinformation.
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[00:36] schestowitz[TR2][00:36] schestowitz[TR2]ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing are trying to enforce toxicity and censorship to create a sanitized world where thought is controlled and people are not permitted to insult corporations.
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[00:37] schestowitz[TR2][00:37] schestowitz[TR2]Real-time NetBlocks metrics indicate that Facebook, Telegram and TikTok have been restricted on state internet provider Ethio Telecom, with aggregated reachability statistics collected from an initial set of 20 vantage points. This class of disruption can be worked around using VPN services, which are able to circumvent government internet censorship measures.
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[00:38] schestowitz[TR2][00:38] schestowitz[TR2]According to Ilta-Sanomat's editor-in-chief, Johanna Lahti, "Russia's actions are clearly intentional: it does not want Paananen to report on what is happening in the country. By preventing Paananen's entry into the country, Russia is practically underlining how exceptionally good a journalist and troublesome critic of Vladimir Putin's Russia she is perceived to be in Russia."
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[00:39] schestowitz[TR2][00:39] schestowitz[TR2]Alp Toker, the director of NetBlocks, said Wednesday that the coordinated nature of the block suggested that it was likely the result of a government order. He said network data indicated that the block was being done with software installed by telecommunications providers that can prevent specific websites and services from loading.
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[00:40] schestowitz[TR2][00:40] schestowitz[TR2]Real-time NetBlocks metrics indicate that Twitter has been restricted by means of SNI filtering on major internet providers TTNet and Turkcell, and subsequently by other operators, with aggregated reachability statistics collected from an initial set of 40 vantage points. This class of disruption can be worked around using VPN services, which are able to circumvent government internet censorship m [00:40] schestowitz[TR2] easures.
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[00:43] schestowitz[TR2][00:43] schestowitz[TR2]Around half of the redundancies will come from Colchester-based consumer and B2B magazine publisher Aceville, which DC Thomson acquired in 2018, where all of its print titles will be closed. It has titles in the crafts, lifestyle and food, education and business sectors.
[00:43] schestowitz[TR2]The other five magazines set to close are: Platinum, a monthly magazine for women aged over 55 that launched in 2019, free luxury lifestyle quarterly Living, teen girls magazine Shout, and childrens magazines Animal Planet and Animals and You. They are all based in Dundee.
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[00:47] schestowitz[TR2][00:47] schestowitz[TR2]As the deployment of IPv6 networks continues to grow, one challenge that has emerged is that some DNS zones are only served by IPv4-only authoritative servers. This can cause problems for IPv6-only iterative resolvers that do not have access to an IPv4 network, resulting in the inability to resolve all DNS zones.
[00:47] schestowitz[TR2]At the recent DNS-OARC 39 conference, Toyota Yasunobu and I presented research on this issue. We discussed how the deployment of IPv6 single-stack networks with a NAT64 service can be facilitated by using an IPv6-only capable resolver that uses NAT64. In this blog post, we summarize the key points of our presentation and explain how resolvers can be IPv6-only capable.
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[00:50] schestowitz[TR2][00:50] schestowitz[TR2]Thats why the New York Public Library (NYPL) has been reviewing the U.S. Copyright Offices official registration and renewals records for creative works whose copyrights havent been renewed, and have thus been overlooked as part of the public domain.
[00:50] schestowitz[TR2]The books in question were published between 1923 and 1964, before changes to U.S. copyright law removed the requirement for rights holders to renew their copyrights. According to Greg Cram, associate general counsel and director of information policy at NYPL, an initial overview of books published in that period shows that around 65 to 75 percent of rights holders opted not to renew their [00:50] schestowitz[TR2] copyrights.
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[12:26] schestowitz[TR2][12:26] schestowitz[TR2]I decided to write a Game Boy emulator: a program that would run old Game Boy games on my computer. This seemed hard but achievable, and I thought it would dazzle my friends for at least a few seconds. The internals of the Game Boy seemed well-documented enough to be accessible, but poorly-documented enough to feel like Id be the one doing the work. Id never made anything like it bef [12:26] schestowitz[TR2] ore, and I loved the idea of running Pokemon Blue and catch a Pidgey using a program Id written myself. I called the project Gamebert because it was a Game Boy and my name is Robert.
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[13:27] schestowitz[TR2][13:27] schestowitz[TR2]This is a list of English websites you can read and subscribe to in 2023 whose topics are about news, reviews, buyer advices and tutorials of GNU/Linux and Free Libre Open Source Software (FOSS) and branded hardware devices around them. This list includes our beloved Ubuntu Buzz and of course along with many other similar and useful sources. You can subscribe to each news via web browser a [13:27] schestowitz[TR2] s well as news reader application such as Ubuntu built-in Thunderbird. Finally, we make this to help newcomers learn and old timers revisit again our community and we hope you will like it. Happy reading!
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[13:31] schestowitz[TR2][13:31] schestowitz[TR2]We want to inform our dear readers that System76 just launched their latest laptop model, Pangolin, preinstalled with Pop!_Os or Ubuntu operating system and powered by AMD Ryzen 7. It is dubbed as "The AMD-powered, all-around powerful laptop.", shipping worldwide via UPS, and come with Free/Libre Open Source Software (FOSS) built-in.
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[13:48] schestowitz[TR2][13:48] schestowitz[TR2]If this trend is carried to the year 2200, more than a quarter of the global diatom population could be lost. That would pose a problem equivalent to removing the oxygen production and carbon sequestration of the entire Canadian boreal forest. In other words, a major die-off of phytoplankton could potentially lower atmospheric oxygen levels by as much as 20-25%.
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[13:50] schestowitz[TR2][13:50] schestowitz[TR2]With the looming macroeconomic uncertainties that are affecting growth, companies are trying to control their costs by downsizing their staff and reducing their infrastructure costs. One way to reduce infrastructure costs is repatriating workloads from public clouds, which we refer to by cloud repatriation. According to a 2021 survey by 451 Research, 48% of respondents repatriated some of th [13:50] schestowitz[TR2] eir workloads from cloud providers. A percentage that echoes Gartners prediction that more than 50% of data migration initiatives will exceed their budget and timelineand potentially harm the businessbecause of flawed strategy and execution.
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[13:51] schestowitz[TR2][13:51] schestowitz[TR2]No matter how you slice it, we are now seeing the largest number of layoffs in the history of the computer industry with numbers that are blowing the Dot Com Bubble Burst out of the water.
[13:51] schestowitz[TR2]Back in mid-January I reported on the continuing trend of major layoffs at Tech companies and predicted that this trend would continue (and escalate significantly) well into 2023.
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[13:53] schestowitz[TR2][13:53] schestowitz[TR2]While the school later reinstated the art exhibit, it wasn't without caveats. Now, pages of construction paper are posted on the glass gallery doors to block the work from view, along with a "content warning." The incident is yet another example of university administrators caving into unreasonable student demands and setting a troubling precedent that paves the way for further censorship.
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[13:53] schestowitz[TR2][13:53] schestowitz[TR2]he National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC) today demanded that officials in a western Michigan school district investigate whether their superintendent secretly ordered the removal of books, violating a policy that requires a formal review before a book is banned. They also pointed officials to an audio recording in which a man who has been identified as Daniel Behm, the Forest Hills Public S [13:53] schestowitz[TR2] chools superintendent, acknowledges that he instructed Assistant Superintendent Scott Haid to find where they are, pull em out, get rid of em. [...]
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