The
EU
Digital Markets Act is making waves in the Apple ecosystem. For the
first time ever you’ll be able to install a browser other than
Safari/Webkit on iOS (as long as you live in the EU). While there are
other browsers on the iOS App Store, they’re all Safari/Webkit under the
hood due to non-competitive App Store submission guidelines.
The Open Web Advocacy group
have spent years documenting the issues at hand. I haven’t participated
much there, but I’ve built countless web apps and have felt most (if not
all) the pain points that come with supporting Safari users and, as a
Mobile Safari user, not having access to features I’ve built. That
feature gap has closed considerably in the last couple years and the
Safari/Webkit team’s movement is impressive, their relative openness on
issues is welcome, and
declaring standards
positions reduces risk and removes mystery. But this (potentially)
blows the doors open on competition.
It will be interesting to see what happens from here. Will we break out
of the Chromium/Webkit duopoly? Or will we fall headlong into a Chromium
monopoly? Regardless, the EU ruling is a win for the Open Web because
now users have options beyond the OS-provided default browser. Before
there was nothing beyond a thin veneer of choice.
At the time of writing, there are
some
questions on how to test this if you don’t live in the EU and it’s
not yet known if (or ever) the rest of the world might also get access
to other browsers. And there seems to be some malicious compliance
afoot… but hopefully over time the situation normalizes towards the
ideal outcome; an unfettered web.
Next, if the EU could fix the GDPR banners that are killing the web,
that would be wonderful.
Single-family
home sells in San Jose for $1.9 million
date: 2024-01-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
The property located in the 3800 block of Willowpark Drive in San
Jose was sold on Jan. 12, 2024 for $1,860,000, or $1,081 per square
foot. The house, built in 1958, has an interior space of 1,720 square
feet.
Quick
EV acceleration is a safety feature, says Stellantis CEO
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
Quick acceleration is often used as a selling point for high-performance
cars, but can it actually be safer? The instant acceleration of an EV
not only offers a more nimble driving experience but it should be a
safety feature argues
Stellantis CEO
Carlos Tavares.
Washington — Sales of U.S. military equipment to foreign governments
in 2023 rose 16% to a record $238 billion, the U.S. State Department
said on Monday, as countries sought to replenish stocks sent to Ukraine
and prepare for major conflicts.
The figures underpin expectations of stronger sales for the likes of
Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics and Northrop Grumman, whose shares are
forecast to rise amid growing global instability.
Arms sales and transfers are viewed as “important U.S. foreign policy
tools with potential long-term implications for regional and global
security,” the State Department said in a statement.
Sales approved in the year included $10 billion worth of High
Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) to Poland, $2.9 billion worth
of AIM-120C-8 Advanced Medium-Range Air-To-Air Missiles (AMRAAM) to
Germany, and National Advanced Surface to Air Missile Systems (NASAMS)
to Ukraine.
Lockheed makes the HIMARS, and RTX, formerly Raytheon, makes AMRAAM.
RTX and Norway’s Kongsberg produce NASAMS.
Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics expect existing orders for
hundreds of thousands of artillery rounds, hundreds of Patriot missile
interceptors, and a surge in orders for armored vehicles will underpin
their results in coming quarters.
There are two major ways foreign governments purchase arms from U.S.
companies: direct commercial sales negotiated with a company, or foreign
military sales in which a government typically contacts a Defense
Department official at the U.S. embassy in its capital. Both require
U.S. government approval.
The direct military sales by U.S. companies rose to $157.5 billion in
fiscal 2023 from $153.6 billion in fiscal 2022, while sales arranged
through the U.S. government rose to $80.9 billion in 2023 from $51.9
billion the prior year.
Ken Striplin
| Skyline Ranch – Home to City’s 38th Park
date: 2024-01-29, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Parks are the main hub of engagement and activity in our communities
and here in Santa Clarita our 37 parks play a pivotal role in enhancing
the quality of life for our residents
San
Jose: Man gets 47-year prison sentence in murder of community matriarch
‘Miss Flo’
date: 2024-01-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Zachary Omar Cuen killed 88-year-old Floavis Douglas during 2016 home
invasion robbery; her death was mourned as a tremendous loss in the
city’s Black community.
VP
Kamala Harris, in San Jose, on abortion rights: “This is a fight that is
fundamental”
date: 2024-01-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
“We have to hustle over these next 10 months,” said Harris, an
Oakland native and California’s former top prosecutor. “We can make a
difference on this issue.”
Judge
Orders Oregon Newspaper Not to Publish Documents Linked to Nike
Lawsuit
date: 2024-01-29, from: VOA News USA
PORTLAND, Ore. — A federal judge has ordered an Oregon newspaper not
to publish documents that it obtained regarding a sex discrimination
lawsuit against sports behemoth Nike.
The Oregonian/OregonLive reported that an attorney who represents
plaintiffs in the case sent the documents to one of its reporters on
January 19 and then asked for them back. When the news outlet declined,
the attorney filed a court motion requesting they be returned.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Jolie Russo approved the motion on Friday and
ordered the news outlet to return the documents.
“The Court is aware that certain documents marked ‘Confidential’ and
‘Attorneys’ Eyes Only’ have been inadvertently disclosed by plaintiff’s
counsel to the Oregonian via e-mail,” Russo wrote, ordering the outlet
to return the records and “agree not to disseminate that information in
any way; and to destroy any copies in its possession.”
Russo said the documents fall under the case’s protective order,
which withholds some content from public view.
The Oregonian/OregonLive said it planned to appeal.
“Prior restraint by government goes against every principle of the
free press in this country,” said Editor and Vice President of Content
Therese Bottomly. “This is highly unusual, and we will defend our First
Amendment rights in court.”
Neither the attorney nor Nike immediately responded to requests for
comment from The Associated Press.
The sex discrimination suit, filed in 2018, alleges Nike’s workplace
is hostile toward women and that the Oregon-based company underpays
female employees.
The Oregonian/OregonLive said it had previously intervened in the
lawsuit as part of a media coalition that requested the court to unseal
certain legal records.
The news outlet said it was working on a separate article based on
independent reporting when it received the documents.
Momaday,
Pulitzer Prize Winner and Giant of Native American Literature, Dead at
89
date: 2024-01-29, from: VOA News USA
NEW YORK — N. Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer Prize-winning storyteller,
poet, educator and folklorist whose debut novel “House Made of Dawn” is
widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American
literature, has died. He was 89.
Momaday died Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher
HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health.
“Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and
writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an
honor and a privilege to work with him,” Momaday’s editor, Jennifer
Civiletto, said in a statement. “His Kiowa heritage was deeply
meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and
preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition.”
“House Made of Dawn,” published in 1968, tells of a World War II
soldier who returns home and struggles to fit back in, a story as old as
war itself: In this case, home is a Native community in rural New
Mexico. Much of the book was based on Momaday’s childhood in Jemez
Pueblo, New Mexico, and on his conflicts between the ways of his
ancestors and the risks and possibilities of the outside world.
“I grew up in both worlds and straddle those worlds even now,”
Momaday said in a 2019 PBS documentary. “It has made for confusion and a
richness in my life.”
Despite such works as John Joseph Mathews’ 1934 release “Sundown,”
novels by American Indians weren’t widely recognized at the time of
“House Made of Dawn.” A New York Times reviewer, Marshall Sprague, even
contended in an otherwise favorable review that “American Indians do not
write novels and poetry as a rule, or teach English in top-ranking
universities, either. But we cannot be patronizing. N. Scott Momaday’s
book is superb in its own right.”
Like Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” Momaday’s novel was a World War II
story that resonated with a generation protesting the Vietnam War. In
1969, Momaday became the first Native American to win the fiction
Pulitzer, and his novel helped launch a generation of authors, including
Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and Louise Erdrich.
His other admirers would range from the poet Joy Harjo, the country’s
first Native to be named poet laureate, to the film stars Robert Redford
and Jeff Bridges.
“He was a kind of literary father for a lot of us,” Harjo told The
Associated Press during a telephone interview Monday. “He showed how
potent and powerful language and words were in shaping our very
existence.”
Over the following decades, he taught at Stanford, Princeton and
Columbia universities, among other top-ranking schools, was a
commentator for NPR, and lectured worldwide.
He published more than a dozen books, from “Angle of Geese and Other
Poems” to the novels “The Way to Rainy Mountain” and “The Ancient
Child,” and became a leading advocate for the beauty and vitality of
traditional Native life.
Addressing a gathering of American Indian scholars in 1970, Momaday
said, “Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves.” He
championed Natives’ reverence for nature, writing that “the American
Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape.” He shared
stories told to him by his parents and grandparents. He regarded oral
culture as the wellspring of language and storytelling, and dated
American culture back not to the early English settlers, but also to
ancient times, noting the procession of gods depicted in the rock art at
Utah’s Barrier Canyon.
“We do not know what they mean, but we know we are involved in their
meaning,” he wrote in the essay “The Native Voice in American
Literature.”
“They persist through time in the imagination, and we cannot doubt
that they are invested with the very essence of language, the language
of story and myth and primal song. They are 2,000 years old, more or
less, and they remark as closely as anything can the origin of American
literature.”
In 2007, President George W. Bush presented Momaday with a National
Medal of Arts “for his writings and his work that celebrate and preserve
Native American art and oral tradition.” Besides his Pulitzer, his
honors included an Academy of American Poets prize and, in 2019, the
Dayton Literary Peace Prize.
Momaday was married three times, most recently to Barbara Glenn, who
died in 2008. He had four daughters, one of whom, Cael, died in
2017.
He was born Navarre Scott Mammedaty, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and was a
member of the Kiowa Nation. His mother was a writer, and his father an
artist who once told his son, “I have never known an Indian child who
couldn’t draw,” a talent Momaday demonstrably shared. His artwork, from
charcoal sketches to oil paintings, were included in his books and
exhibited in museums in Arizona, New Mexico and North Dakota. Audio
guides to tours of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of the American
Indian featured Momaday’s avuncular baritone.
After spending his teens in New Mexico, he studied political science
at the University of Mexico and received a master’s and Ph.D. in English
from Stanford. Momaday began as a poet, his favorite art form, and the
publication of “House Made of Dawn” was an unintentional result of his
early reputation. Editor Fran McCullough, of what is now HarperCollins,
had met Momaday at Stanford and several years later contacted him and
asked whether he would like to submit a book of poems.
Momaday did not have enough for a book, and instead gave her the
first chapter of “House Made of Dawn.”
Much of his writing was set in the American West and Southwest,
whether tributes to bears — the animals he most identified with — or a
cycle of poems about the life of Billy the Kid, a childhood obsession.
He saw writing as a way of bridging the present with the ancient past
and summed up his quest in the poem “If I Could Ascend”:
Something like a leaf lies here within me; / it wavers almost not at
all, / and there is no light to see it by / that it withers upon a black
field. / If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, / I would
make a word of it at last, / and I would speak it into the silence of
the sun.
In 2019, he was the subject of a PBS “American Masters” documentary
in which he discussed his belief he was a reincarnation of a bear
connected to the Native American origin story around Devils Tower in
Wyoming. He told The Associated Press in a rare interview that the
documentary allowed him to reflect on his life, saying he was humbled
that writers continued to say his work has influenced them.
“I’m greatly appreciative of that, but it comes a little bit of a
surprise every time I hear it,” Momaday said. “I think I have been an
influence. It’s not something I take a lot of credit for.”
Applications
for Virginia Wrage Memorial Scholarships Now Open
date: 2024-01-29, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Zonta Club of Santa Clarita Valley Foundation is offering
Virginia Wrage Memorial Scholarships to help women 40 or over achieve
independence following a life-altering event
Foul
issues in spotlight for Golden State Warriors as free throw-happy 76ers
await
date: 2024-01-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
Steve Kerr and Stephen Curry shared their frustration with
officiating after their game against the Lakers this weekend. Now they
are set to face one of the best foul-drawing teams in the NBA.
date: 2024-01-29, from: Association of Research Libraries News
Last Updated on January 29, 2024, 4:28 pm ET Sign up to receive the Day
in Review by email. Jump to: Tuesday, January 30 | Wednesday, January 31
| Thursday,…
MSI
Claw handheld gaming PC pricing confirmed: Intel Core Ultra 5 for $700,
Core Ultra 7 for $750 and up
date: 2024-01-29, from: Liliputing
The MSI Claw is the first handheld gaming PC from a major computer
company to feature an Intel Meteor Lake processor. But when MSI first
unveiled the handheld earlier this month, the company old said that it
would be available with up to an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H processor. Now
we know what you get […]
San
Jose and Oakland airports both gain passenger trips in 2023
date: 2024-01-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
San Jose and Oakland airports handled more passengers in 2023
compared to the year before – yet both remain stuck well below their
pre-coronavirus heights.
DNA
From 2,000-Year-Old Skeletons Hints at the Origins of Syphilis
date: 2024-01-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
In contrast to a common theory, new findings suggest Columbus-led
expeditions may not have transported syphilis to Europe from the
Americas, though they cannot disprove the claim with certainty
NASA
Awards Contract to Support Agency Enterprise Service Center
date: 2024-01-29, from: NASA breaking news
NASA has selected Inspiritec Inc. of Philadelphia, to provide
contractor support for the Shared Services Center at the agency’s
Stennis Space Center in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. This
indefinite-delivery/indefinite-quantity contract allows for special
project task orders at either the firm-fixed-price or based on level of
effort. The contract includes a 60-day transition period beginning on
[…]
COC’s
VITA Program Offering Free Tax Preparation Services
date: 2024-01-29, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program at College of the
Canyons will be offering free tax preparation services to individuals
who made less than $67,000 in 2023, persons with disabilities and
limited English-speaking skills.
Victoria Song (via Hacker News): The company has been one of the most
prolific makers of Wear OS smartwatches over the years, and its absence
will leave a large gap in the market.[…]This shouldn’t come as a huge
shock if you’ve been paying attention to Fossil the past few months.
Some Reddit users had been […]
AltStore: We’ve started the process of becoming a legitimate “app
marketplace”, allowing our European friends to download @delta and other AltStore
apps officially for the first time ever!See you in March ☘️ Jacob
Kastrenakes: Epic plans to launch the Epic Games Store on the iPhone
this year in the European Union — and it’s bringing […]
Apple: This spring [with iOS 17.4], Apple is introducing transcripts
on Apple Podcasts, making it easier for anyone to access podcasts. With
transcripts, your audience can read the full text of an episode, search
the episode for a specific word or phrase, and tap the text to play from
that point in the episode. As […]
Mozilla (via Mike Rockwell): This dashboard tracks technical issues
in major software platforms which disadvantage Firefox relative to the
first-party browser. We consider aspects like security, stability,
performance, and functionality, and propose changes to create a more
level playing field. Previously: DMA Compliance: Alternative Browser
Engines DMA Compliance: Default App Controls and NFC
US
Defense Secretary Returns to Work at Pentagon After Cancer Surgery
date: 2024-01-29, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin returned to work at the
Pentagon on Monday after nearly a month’s absence because of prostate
cancer and met with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
“At this important time, I’m glad to be back at the Pentagon,” said
Austin, speaking at the start of the meeting. “I feel good and am
recovering well, but still recovering, and I appreciate all the good
wishes that I have received thus far.”
After that session, Austin went to the White House Situation Room for
a meeting of the national security team to discuss the drone attack at a
base in Jordan that killed three U.S. troops and wounded several dozen
others.
He was last in the Pentagon on December 21. He had been diagnosed
with prostate cancer earlier in December, and he went to a hospital for
a surgical procedure for the cancer on December 22. He worked the
following week from home.
On January 1, he was taken by ambulance to Walter Reed National
Military Medical Center after experiencing extreme pain and was admitted
to the intensive care unit. He stayed there for two weeks but didn’t
inform the White House or his deputy that he had cancer, had surgery or
had been taken back to the hospital and put in intensive care until days
later. He told President Joe Biden and other key leaders about his
diagnosis only after he’d been in the hospital more than a week.
Austin’s lack of disclosure has prompted changes in federal
guidelines and has triggered an internal Pentagon review and an
inspector general review into his department’s notification procedures.
Both reviews are ongoing.
Austin has been working from home since he got out of the hospital on
January 15, and he made his first public appearance early last week
during a virtual Ukraine contact defense group meeting. He gave opening
remarks for the meeting via video camera that was streamed online.
Doctors at Walter Reed said on Friday that Austin’s prostate cancer
prognosis is excellent and no further treatments will be needed. He saw
doctors for a checkup on Friday.
Austin has been criticized for keeping secret his prostate cancer
diagnosis, surgery and subsequent hospitalization with complications
from the procedure.
He was diagnosed in early December and had what the Pentagon
described as a “minimally invasive surgical procedure,” called a
prostatectomy, to treat the cancer on December 22. He was under general
anesthesia during this procedure and had transferred some authorities to
his deputy defense secretary, Kathleen Hicks. He was discharged the next
day and continued to perform his duties.
SolarWinds
slams SEC lawsuit against it as ‘unprecedented’ victim blaming
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
18,000 customers, including the Pentagon and Microsoft, may have other
thoughts
SolarWinds – whose network monitoring software was backdoored by Russian
spies so that the biz’s customers could be spied upon – has accused
America’s financial watchdog of seeking to “revictimise the victim”
after the agency sued it over the 2020 attack.…
China
Decries Interrogations, Deportations of Students at US Entry Points
date: 2024-01-29, from: VOA News USA
Beijing — The Chinese government has protested to the United States
over the treatment of Chinese arriving to study in America, saying some
have been interrogated for hours, had their electronic devices checked
and in some cases were forcibly deported from the country.
Xie Feng, the Chinese ambassador in Washington, said dozens of
Chinese have been denied entry every month for the past few months when
returning to school from overseas travel or visiting relatives in China,
according to a post on the Chinese Embassy website.
“When they landed at the airport, what awaited them was an
eight-hour-long interrogation by officers who prohibited them from
contacting their parents, made groundless accusations against them and
even forcibly repatriated them and banned their entry,” he said Sunday
at an event at the embassy on student exchanges. “This is absolutely
unacceptable.”
The protest comes as the U.S. and China try to boost student and
other exchanges to shore up their relations, which have turned
confrontational in recent years over trade, technology, human rights
and, more fundamentally, the future direction of the world.
Nearly 290,000 Chinese students are in the U.S., about one-third of
the foreign students in the country, according to the embassy post.
China has more than 1.3 million students studying abroad, more than any
other country, it said.
In a separate online statement, the Chinese Embassy said it had made
“solemn representations” to the U.S. government about the treatment of
students arriving at Dulles airport in Washington, D.C. The statement
reminded Chinese students to be cautious when entering through the
airport.
It wasn’t clear whether Xie’s comments referenced cases only at
Dulles or at other entry points as well.
The U.S. Embassy in Beijing did not immediately respond to a request
for comment.
The Chinese Embassy statement said the affected students had their
electronic devices checked, were prohibited from communicating with
anyone outside and, in some cases, held for more than 10 hours. It said
the actions of border control officers “have had a serious impact on the
studies of international students from China and caused great
psychological harm.”
The statement also said that the actions ran counter to the agreement
between Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping at their meeting last
November to promote people-to-people exchanges.
Encrypted
Phone ‘Sky’ Linked to Murder-for-Hire Plot in Maryland
date: 2024-01-29, from: 404 Media Group
Sky was an encrypted phone used by drug traffickers and other
criminals. Now, those phones are linked to a murder-for-hire scheme on
U.S. soil involving an arm of the Iranian state.
Authors
Alliance Submits Long-Form Comment to Copyright Office in Support of
Petition to Expand Existing Text and Data Mining Exemption
date: 2024-01-29, from: Authors Union blogs
Last month, Authors Alliance submitted detailed comments in response
to the Copyright Office’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in support of
our petition to expand the existing Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA) exemptions that enable text and data mining (TDM) as part of this
year’s §1201 rulemaking cycle. To recap: our expansion petitions ask
the Copyright […]
Mini PCs with Intel Alder Lake-N processors are getting so cheap that
some models are competitively priced with premium media streamers like
the Apple TV 4K or NVIDIA Shield TV. Case in point: you can pick up a T9
Plus mini PC with an Intel N95 processor for as little as $119. The 3.5″
x […]
date: 2024-01-29, from: The Sundail (CSUN student paper)
At 4:30 a.m. on Jan. 17, 1994, the San Fernando Valley shook. With a
recorded magnitude of 6.7, the Northridge earthquake may not have been
“the big one,” being neither of California’s two biggest earthquakes of
the ’90s, but the densely populated location of the quake’s epicenter
caused a significant loss of life and, at…
Have
Researchers Found Amelia Earhart’s Long-Lost Plane?
date: 2024-01-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A new sonar image shows an airplane-shaped object resting on the
bottom of the Pacific Ocean, not far from where Earhart and her
navigator, Fred Noonan, went missing in 1937
NASA
Space Tech Spinoffs Benefit Earth Medicine, Moon to Mars Tools
date: 2024-01-29, from: NASA breaking news
As NASA innovates for the benefit of all, what the agency develops
for exploration has the potential to evolve into other technologies with
broader use here on Earth. Many of those examples are highlighted in
NASA’s annual Spinoff book including dozens of NASA-enabled medical
innovations, as well other advancements. This year’s publication, NASA’s
2024 Spinoff, […]
date: 2024-01-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
UC Santa Barbara’s Gevirtz School of Education disputes the “F” grade
given to its teacher education program by the National Council on
Teacher Quality, while local school districts are continuing to support
their teachers amid recent curriculum changes.
The
First Big Fight of the U.S. General Election Is Over LNG
date: 2024-01-29, from: Heatmap News
When the White House announced on Friday that it would temporarily pause
the approval of new liquified natural gas export terminals, it wasn’t
just a
victory
for climate activists. It also drew the line for the first big
showdown of
the
longest general election in modern history. With all due respect to
Nikki Haley and
some
guy named Ryan Binkley, who are both nominally still in the
Republican race, former President Donald Trump and President Joe Biden
are both acting,
understandably,
like the primaries are already over.
Trump wasted no time vowing to “approve the export terminals on my very
first day back” in a campaign speech in Nevada, which his campaign made
official in an
email
blast to supporters. Trump also claimed LNG is “good for the
environment, not bad.” While LNG
might
not be the worst for the planet, only energy interests are
bold
enough to describe it as actually beneficial.
LNG was hardly a preordained battleground; though there’d been
some
jostling in the fall between activists and Republicans, Americans
more generally are
fuzzy
on the specifics of how the U.S. meets its energy needs and divided
on how to address them.
Still, the Biden campaign clearly picked its spot. For one thing, the
administration’s LNG pause is a literal challenge to the existing
methodology
for assessing LNG projects, developed under the Trump administration
back in 2018. The timing of the announcement further marks it as an
opening salvo to young climate-conscious voters whose faith in the
president suffered a
bruising
when he approved a ConocoPhillips oil exploration effort known as the
Willow
Project last spring. There could be some strategy here on the part
of the campaign, as well — by baiting Trump into taking up LNG as a
low-hanging talking point, it gets to amplify and contrast Biden’s
climate agenda repeatedly in response.
But it’s a risky gambit. Attacks on LNG
might
not be as simple as they look at first glance — that is, after all,
what the Energy Department’s review is all about, although it also
likely kicks the decision to, conveniently, after Election Day.
Heatmap
polling also shows Americans aren’t very familiar with Biden’s
landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, even as
experts
believe “climate voters could make or break Joe Biden in 2024.” I
fear Americans’ eyes will glaze over at yet another three-letter acronym
— not that “liquified natural gas export terminals” is exactly
any better. At the very least, other polling appears to indicate a
public that is
confused
and conflicted about fossil fuels, see-sawing between a desire for
energy security and anxiety over climate priorities.
Of course, none of these risks is a reason for the Biden administration
not to get to the bottom of LNG’s environmental impacts. The U.S. is,
after all, now the largest
LNG
exporter in the world. But the timing of the Biden administration’s
announcement, just as the Republican race took a decisive and seemingly
inevitable
turn
in Trump’s favor, means that one way or another, we’ll be hearing a
lot more about LNG in the long, long months to come.
Braintrust
query: I’m having trouble running the Node utility
Forever with recent
versions of Node. I’ve read all the threads on this, and it’s not clear
(to me at least) how to get past this problem. I’ve resorted to running
without Forever on one of my servers, but this is a short-term
solution.
Liebherr
launches first-ever electric compact wheel loader
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
German-Swiss multinational equipment manufacturer Liebherr has has
announced that deliveries of its first-ever electric compact wheel
loader, the L 507 E, are about to begin.
A New Home
for Ingenuity Mars Helicopter Prototype
date: 2024-01-29, from: NASA breaking news
The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter’s aerial prototype is seen at the
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum’s Steve F. Udvar-Hazy Center
in Chantilly, Va, Dec. 15, 2023. The prototype, which was the first to
prove it was possible to fly in a simulated Mars environment at NASA’s
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was donated to the museum. Ingenuity’s
[…]
The city of Santa Clarita’s Film Office released the list of five
productions currently filming in the Santa Clarita Valley for the week
of Monday, Jan. 29 - Sunday, Feb. 4.
Community
Helps FYI Exceed Year-End Fundraising Goal
date: 2024-01-29, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The year-end fundraising campaign for Fostering Youth Independence
(FYI) exceeded its goal thanks to the generosity of the Santa Clarita
community, the organization announced, as it also revealed the impact
that FYI made supporting 100 local foster youth during
Ex-IRS
Contractor Sentenced to 5 Years for Leaking Trump Tax Records
date: 2024-01-29, from: VOA News USA
Washington — A former contractor for the U.S. Internal Revenue
Service was sentenced by a judge on Monday to five years in prison on
Monday for leaking the tax records of former President Donald Trump and
thousands of other wealthy Americans to media organizations.
Charles Littlejohn, 38, in October had pleaded guilty to a charge of
disclosing income tax return information without authorization.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes decided on his sentence.
Federal prosecutors had sought a five-year sentence, the maximum
allowed under U.S. law, arguing that Littlejohn was motivated by a
political agenda and compromised the security of sensitive personal
information. Littlejohn, according to prosecutors, sought a position at
a consulting firm that works with the IRS in 2017 in hopes of accessing
and disclosing records on Trump, who was president at the time.
Littlejohn’s lawyers said he was motivated by a “deep, moral belief”
that the public had a right to know the information he shared, but now
regrets his actions. Littlejohn’s legal team did not request a specific
sentence, but sought a punishment comparable to prior government
leakers.
Littlejohn secretly downloaded years of Trump’s tax records in 2018,
later sharing them with reporters from the New York Times, according to
court documents. The newspaper published a series of articles in 2020
revealing that Trump paid no income tax in 10 of the 15 years before he
was elected president.
Trump became the first major U.S. presidential candidate in decades
not to release his tax returns when he ran for the White House in 2016.
A U.S. House of Representatives panel released six years of his tax
records in 2022 after a court battle.
Littlejohn later leaked tax information on “ultra-high net worth
taxpayers” to the investigative news outlet ProPublica. He was motivated
by concerns about economic inequality and wanted to spur reforms to the
U.S. tax system, his defense team wrote in court documents.
ProPublica published nearly 50 articles based on the information,
revealing how the wealthy evade income taxes in the United States.
The nearly 6,000 pages of records released by the House panel in 2022
included more than 2,700 pages of personal returns from Trump and his
wife Melania Trump, plus more than 3,000 pages of returns from his
businesses. They showed that Trump’s income and tax liability fluctuated
dramatically from 2015 through 2020 and that he and his wife claimed
large deductions and losses, and paid little or no income tax in several
of those years.
BYD
is launching its new Seal U on Volkswagen’s home turf to rival the
ID.4
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
A new Seal is slated to enter the EV race in Europe.
BYD is launching its Seal
U, an electric SUV version of the Seal sedan, to take on Volkswagen’s
ID.4.
Lompoc
Theatre Project has Phase II Fundraising Goal in Sight
date: 2024-01-29, from: Santa Barbara Indenpent News
Thanks to an incredible showing of community support in the final months
of 2023 and a generous matching grant from the Santa Ynez Band of
Chumash Indians, Lompoc Theatre Project is $350,000 closer to their
Phase II fundraising goal.
Mullen’s
electric trucks earn CARB certification, qualifying for over $45k in
customer savings
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
Seven months after kicking off production of its Class 3 electric trucks
in Mississippi, EV startup
Mullen Automotive has
secured fruitful environmental compliance and approvals from CARB and
the EPA. As a result, those CARB-compliant states and Washington DC
enable tremendous savings to fleet operators who purchase electric
trucks from Mullen.
US
Offers Reward for Escaped Sudan Official Wanted on Darfur
date: 2024-01-29, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The United States on Monday offered a reward of up to $5
million for the arrest of a former Sudanese official sought over alleged
Darfur war crimes who escaped from prison when war erupted last
year.
Ahmed Harun, a former top aide to deposed dictator Omar al-Bashir, is
wanted by the International Criminal Court for helping form the
notorious Janjaweed militia which carried out a scorched-earth campaign
in Darfur in the 2000s.
Harun announced in April that he and other former regime officials
escaped Khartoum’s Kober prison days after fighting broke out between
Sudan’s army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces.
The United States pointed out that the Janjaweed has evolved into the
Rapid Support Forces, which is accused of ethnic-based attacks against
the non-Arab population in western Sudan.
“Lasting peace in Sudan requires justice for victims and
accountability for those responsible for human rights abuses and
violations, both past and present,” State Departments spokesman Matthew
Miller said.
“There is a clear and direct connection between impunity for abuses
under the Bashir regime, including those of which Harun is accused, and
the violence in Darfur today,” he said.
Secretary of State Antony Blinken has accused the Rapid Support
Forces of crimes against humanity and ethnic cleansing in the latest
bloodshed.
The United States has worked with Saudi Arabia to broker between the
dueling generals but to little avail.
The war has killed at least 13,000 people, according to a
conservative estimate by the Conflict Location and Event Data project,
and displaced more than seven million people, according to the U.N.
The International Criminal Court has sought Harun since 2007 over 20
counts of crimes against humanity and 22 counts of war crimes. In 2009,
Bashir became the first sitting head of state indicted by the
Hague-based court, but Sudan has not handed him over.
The reward by the United States – which itself is not party to the
court – is offered for information that leads to Harun’s arrest,
transfer or conviction.
Parks,
Recreation to Discuss Sign Request for Veterans Historical Plaza
date: 2024-01-29, from: SCV New (TV Station)
The Santa Clarita Parks, Recreation, and Community Services
Commission will hold its regular meeting Thursday, Feb. 1 at 6 p.m., in
Council Chambers at City Hall
Renault
cancels Ampere IPO but still launching 7 new models
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
French automaker Renault just canceled its planned IPO for its EV
spinoff Ampere. While the IPO was scheduled for the first part of this
year with an expected valuation of
up
to €10 billion ($10.47 billion), Renault says that market conditions
aren’t optimal to make the move.
Option
Soup: the subtle pitfalls of combining compiler flags
date: 2024-01-29, from: Mozilla Developer Network blog
During the Firefox 120 beta cycle, a new crash signature appeared on our
radars with significant volume. Engineers working on Firefox, explore
the subtle pitfalls of combining compiler flags.
A body was found at The Oaks Club in Valencia Saturday afternoon, and
the circumstances are still yet to be determined but foul play is not
currently suspected, according to law enforcement officials. Law
enforcement officials responded to reports of “an adult male on the
ground of the parking lot of The Oaks Club,” at […]
CockroachDB
tempts legacy databases to crawl into the cloud age
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Distributed system makes a grab for Oracle, Db2 features
CockroachDB has released its 23.2 iteration containing new features
designed to tempt mainframe and other legacy database users to shift
workloads to its distributed cloud-based system.…
Sugar
Cubes Jelly turns the Unihertz Jelly Star smartphone into a handheld
game console with a 3 inch display
date: 2024-01-29, from: Liliputing
The Unihertz Jelly Star is a tiny smartphone with a 3 inch, 854 x 480
pixel display, a MediaTek Helio G99 processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB of UFS
2.2 storage, and a 2,000 mAh battery. It sells for $210 and ships with
Android 13 software. While the phone’s claim to fame is that it’s what
Unihertz […]
Thank
You, Jovian Vortex Hunters! The Hunt Is Over…for Now.
date: 2024-01-29, from: NASA breaking news
We did it! The Jovian Vortex Hunter project, launched on Zooniverse
in June 2022, is out of data as of December 23, 2023. Over 6,000
registered volunteers joined the project to view images from NASA’s
JunoCam instrument of the swirling clouds in Jupiter’s atmosphere and
draw on them using a computer mouse. Together, they contributed over a
[…]
Apple is making major changes to how it distributes iOS apps in the EU
due to the European Commission’s Digital Markets Act, but the company is
making it clear that it’s only doing so under duress.
Last week’s 40th anniversary of the Mac got me thinking. I’ve also
been contemplating this week’s release of Apple Vision Pro. It feels
like we’re at a crossroads for platforms, but one that’s impossible to
pass. I was one of the folks who bought a Mac in 1984. At the time I was
a member […]
More
than $1M Worth of Stolen Metals Recovered in Acton
date: 2024-01-29, from: SCV New (TV Station)
Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Major Crimes Bureau
Organized Retail Theft and Cargo Theft Task Force Detectives began an
investigation of a cargo load of precious metals, stolen from the
Chicago area and ended up in various locations within Los Angeles
County
I liked your latest blog post
Quick
toughts on chips and see you are a business leader in accessibility,
Doritos®, and Jekyll blogging software. I thought we should connect. I
would like to inform you of an exciting opportunity.
I scraped or stole your email address from some list that you never
signed up for, but would you like help growing your company’s sales? I
can do the same impersonal, unsolicited, scumbag sales shit I’m doing to
you right now but on behalf of your company.
I generated this with AI, so it took me literally no time or effort but
I sent it anyways. The federal crime I just committed is utterly
offensive and every time I send this to you under a different fake
business name you instantly delete it, but some might also call it
“innovative”. I can provide this service for your company. Reach new
customers today by deploying large scale AI-driven spam operations.
I clearly have no ethics, but you should enter a business relationship
with me, a guy who found your email on the internet.
You are now signed up for a no-opt-out email drip campaign to send you
automated replies every day for the next week to get you to reply. Reply
and start a conversation with your harasser if you’d like it to stop.
Also, would you like to have my boss on your podcast? He’s a B2B Growth
Saas Fortune Trope 500 Under 500 Startups Entreprenuer and has a red
Porsche. There’s almost no trace of this guy on the internet but you
should absolutely have him on your super niche web development podcast.
I think he’d be a great fit for your audience.
What do you say? Are you ready to increase the size of your revenue?
<p>Medical recordkeeping was originally a way to chart a patient’s course of illness and support clinicians in finding the best course. Now, electronic health records have disrupted the foundation of the therapeutic relationship. What happened?</p>
Toyota
was the most searched auto brand in 2023, but Tesla still dominates EV
queries
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
2023 was yet another pivotal year for EVs as the segment began to expand
beyond early adopters and into the early majority. What should come as
no surprise to most people is that American automaker Tesla dominated
Google Trends search data for EVs last year. Still, gas and hybrid
specialist Toyota
remained the most searched auto brand, not by any specific state.
Kia
is delaying its entry-level EV4 electric sedan until next year
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
Although we expected to see two new entry-level Kia EVs roll out this
year, it looks like it will only be one. According to local media
reports, Kia is delaying its
EV4 electric sedan
until 2025
X
hiring 100 content cops in bid to tame Wild West of online safety
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Maybe those Twitter cuts ran too deep, huh?
Not long after it emerged that X, formerly Twitter, cut 1 in 3 Trust and
Safety employees after Elon Musk’s takeover in October 2022, the social
media platform now claims it’s ready to hire 100 full-time content
moderators at a new office in Austin, Texas.…
Nikola
hydrogen FCEV semi completes 400 mile trip – is it enough?
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
The port cartage and drayage specialists at Coyote Container
successfully completed a 400-mile delivery in a Nikola Tre semi truck
powered by a hydrogen fuel cell.
ACEPC
WizBox AI is a Meteor Lake mini PC with Intel Core Ultra 7 155H
date: 2024-01-29, from: Liliputing
Mini PC maker ACEPC has unveiled its first computer powered by an Intel
Meteor Lake processor. The upcoming ACEPC WizBox AI features an Intel
Core Ultra 7 155H processor with 16 CPU cores, 22 threads, Intel Arc
integrated graphics, and a neural processing unit for
hardware-accelerated AI. ACEPEC will announce pricing and detailed specs
on […]
Washington — Schools in the United States are not being spared from a
dramatic rise in hate crimes that has swept across the country.
A new report released Monday from the Federal Bureau of Investigation
finds that 10% of all hate crimes in the U.S. in 2022 took place at
schools, making them the country’s third most common location for hate
crimes.
Only homes (27%) and highways, roads or alleys (16%) saw more hate
crime offenses.
The report found that the number of reported hate crimes at schools —
from preschool through university — has risen steadily since 2020, when
officials recorded 500 hate crimes at school. In 2021, the number of
school-based offenses rose to 896 before hitting a high of more than
1,300 in 2022.
Those increases track with what FBI officials have described as a
worrisome rise in hate crimes overall, with the latest data showing a
record 11,643 incidents in 2022, surpassing the previous record of
almost 11,000 incidents in 2021.
Monday’s report is the first of its kind issued by the FBI, and
officials say it is not clear yet whether they will issue additional
reports on school-based hate crimes in the future.
“The goal is to draw attention to the data and to the occurrences of
hate crimes at schools giving possibly others the opportunity to
respond,” an FBI official told reporters Monday, briefing on the
condition of anonymity under ground rules established by the bureau.
“[This is] not a situation here where the bureau is looking to take
immediate action on this,” the official added. “But by providing the
information, we think that it enables our law enforcement partners to do
so.”
The report, which looked at data from the five-year period covering
2018 to 2022, found the most common hate crime offense was intimidation,
followed by vandalism and assault.
The most common hate crimes were anti-Black crimes (12.6%), followed
by anti-Jewish crimes (5.6%) and anti-Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or
Transgender crimes (2.6%).
Anti-Muslim hate crimes were 0.5% of the total.
The FBI report also found that hate crimes in schools were more
frequent in October, November and December, with nearly a third of
school-based hate crimes taking place during those months.
Overall, the report said that more than 30% of children who were
victims of hate crimes over the five-year period were victimized at
school. Almost 36% of juvenile hate crime offenders committed the crimes
in school.
Almost two-thirds of the reported hate crimes took place in
preschools, elementary schools and high schools, according to the FBI
data.
As a kind of pendant to my previous post, I comment to you this by
Adam Roberts, which I thought of as I was writing: When I was a kid I
memorised — don’t laugh — the Bene Gesserit ‘Litany Against Fear’, and
used to repeat it quietly to myself when I was in a […]
Journalists
are burned out. Some newsrooms are fighting back.
date: 2024-01-29, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
On March 17, 2020 — one day after North Carolina public schools shut
down in the early stages of COVID-19 — Rupen Fofaria got a call from his
boss. Fofaria, then a reporter at the nonprofit newsroom EducationNC,
had spent the past year covering equity and differences within North
Carolina’s education system. Now, as schools…
Japan’s lander
wakes up, takes blurry snap of Moon
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Winter Night is coming
Japan’s Moon lander has woken up on the lunar surface and begun
transmitting data back to controllers at the Japan Aerospace Exploration
Agency (JAXA.)…
There’s a really extraordinary moment in George Eliot’s The Mill on
the Floss, a moment that says something profound about what we might
call the ecology of reading in the age of print. First, some background:
Mr. Tulliver – the father of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, the two central
characters in this novel – embarks […]
NYC
Volunteers Set Up Health Care for Ukrainian Refugees
date: 2024-01-29, from: VOA News USA
For Ukrainians who fled the war and came to the United States,
getting access to the health care system remains one of the biggest
challenges. To help refugees in New York, a group of volunteers
organized a health fair where Ukrainians can receive the medical care
they need. Iryna Solomko has the story, narrated by Anna Rice. Camera:
Pavlo Terekhov
Some buy now, pay later platforms are testing out a new model:
subscription plans. For these companies, it’s another guaranteed revenue
stream and maybe a way to lock in loyal customers. But can they work
when paying later is the whole point? Plus, we’ll examine what
Evergrande’s liquidation means for the world’s second largest economy.
And squeamish listeners beware: We’ll hear how France is grappling with
its recent bedbug outbreak.
Iowa
Museum Plans to Tear Down Acclaimed Land Art Installation
date: 2024-01-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Known as the country’s first urban wetland project, “Greenwood Pond”
has been declared “no longer salvageable” due to financial constraints
and structural decay
If
Your Privacy Is in the Hands of Others Alone, You Don’t Have Any
date: 2024-01-29, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog
In Patreon: Blocking platforms from sharing user video data is
unconstitutional, Ashley Belanger of Ars Technica reports that Patreon,
the widely used and much-trusted monetization platform for creative
folk, opposes the nearly absent personal privacy protections provided by
a law you probably haven’t heard of until now: the Video Privacy
Protection Act, or VPPA. Patreon […]
Amazon
calls off $1.7 billion iRobot buy, blames regulators
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Retailer steps back from Roomba-maker and 350 staff will have to step
back from a job
Amazon’s $1.7 billion bid to buy iRobot is off, and while Jeff Bezos’s
business faces a termination fee, almost a third of the vacuum cleaner
maker’s staff face termination of an altogether different nature.…
Hyundai
IONIQ 5 is becoming a top seller off the lot as dealers prep for EV
growth
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
Hyundai dealerships are modernizing as the brand looks to build upon its
growth in the EV market this year. Hyundai’s
IONIQ 5 is
already a top seller at some dealers. With new electric models rolling
out, like the three-row IONIQ 7 SUV, Hyundai has the “whole gamut
covered.”
Grocery
giant Loblaw doubles electric semi fleet, has 25 Tesla Semis on
order
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
Canadian grocery chain Loblaw announced that its doubled the size of its
fleet of zero-emission semi trucks by deploying 10 new, battery-electric
Freightliner eCascadia Class 8 trucks in Vancouver.
This article will discuss securing your phone after you’ve rooted it
and installed your preferred os (it will not discuss how to root your
phone or change the OS). Re-securing your phone requires the
installation of a custom AVB key, which not all phones support, so I’ll
only be discussing Google Pixel phones (which support […]
Axiom
Space Tests Lunar Spacesuit at NASA’s Johnson Space Center
date: 2024-01-29, from: NASA breaking news
As part of NASA’s Artemis campaign, the agency is working to land
astronauts on the lunar surface during Artemis III, laying the
groundwork for a long-term human presence at the Moon for the benefit of
all. When the Artemis astronauts take their first steps near the South
Pole of the Moon, they will be wearing a […]
NASA’s
Webb Depicts Staggering Structure in 19 Nearby Spiral Galaxies
date: 2024-01-29, from: NASA breaking news
It’s oh-so-easy to be absolutely mesmerized by these spiral galaxies.
Follow their clearly defined arms, which are brimming with stars, to
their centers, where there may be old star clusters and – sometimes –
active supermassive black holes. Only NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope
can deliver highly detailed scenes of nearby galaxies in a combination
[…]
NASA
Marks Halfway Point for Artemis Moon Rocket Engine Certification
Series
date: 2024-01-29, from: NASA breaking news
NASA completed the sixth of 12 scheduled RS-25 engine certification
tests in a critical series for future flights of the agency’s SLS (Space
Launch System) rocket as engineers conducted a full-duration hot fire
Jan. 27 at NASA’s Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.
The current series builds on previous hot fire testing conducted […]
A
note to people who make feeds, software that generates feeds, readers of
feeds and everyone else. FeedLand is
here as a way for me to get new ideas into the
feediverse. I’d like people to hear
me. It would have been nice if it were possible to help without spending
all this time making FeedLand, but that’s the way it goes. I’m not
patenting any of it, and it’s all open source. At some point, the
service, which I’m partnering with Automattic with on, will be a
for-profit venture, but not yet. And my main purpose is not the money,
it’s the ideas, the progress.
Disinformation
often gets blamed for swaying elections, but the research isn’t so
clear
date: 2024-01-29, from: Nieman Journalism Lab
Many countries face general elections this year. Political
campaigning will include misleading and even false information. Just
days ago, it was reported that a robocall impersonating U.S. president
Joe Biden had told recipients not to vote in the presidential primary.
But can disinformation significantly influence voting? There are two
typical styles of election campaigning. One…
DEA
nabs $150M from dark web drug lord based… in Coventry
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Plus: Dodgy ex-US official also sentenced for software and database
theft in big day for the courts
A dark web drug kingpin has handed more than $150 million in
cryptocurrency to US authorities and pleaded guilty to selling hundreds
of kilograms of drugs over the internet.…
BTW, these days the Dead philosophy, to me, is best expressed in
Ripple. It’s
about our best
intentions
and how powerless we are to live up to them. But what the F, let’s sing
about it! 😄
We were talking about music. All I do is create small jingles for my
podcast but every now and then I wonder about music theory. A while ago
I had saved Learn music
theory in half an hour by Andrew Huang to get back to it. But all I
had done about it was think to myself: Pick a scale, like this one, B
Major looks nice, OK, so full full half full full full half, that’s
these keys, OK, let me doodle around on these … beep beep boop boop …
here we go. Or maybe do the other one, full full full half full full
half … biep biep boup boup … all right! 🥳
But then I wonder: what would my next step be? Some days I look at the
circle of fifth and wonder if that’s hogwash. Non-European music doesn’t
need it! But then again, they also use something. There are
rules because people figured out what generally “works”. Well, on the
other hand there are books about many things and they are neither a
replacement for spending ten thousand hours practising and the rules
they espouse are often just there to get you started and then they are
immediately broken.
All I know when I look at a typical drum machine or tracker setup with
8⁄8 or similar I immediately want to do a
9⁄8
Karsilama or something like that. My wife’s oriental dancing and all
the Turkish, Arab, Iranian and Maghreb music we listened to must have
left an impression… Or confused the hell out of me, depending on your
perspective. Or mine.
Anyway, writing all of this and I’m still not making music. What next, I
wonder. Perhaps playing C Major and playing a bunch of notes it shares
with another scale and then continuing with that scale is cool. Or maybe
not. I don’t know. Or just stay in that scale and do some drum machine
and patterns below that!
That Synth Seeker video had a link to a
Key Cheat Sheet
Index. The effect is similar to picking scales in Garage Band or
Animoog: limiting the keys I use in order to stay in that scale. Works
for me!
All this listening and writing makes me realize that it’s Sunday, late
at night, I should go to bed, and then I’ll be working and playing
role-playing games and war-games every evening until the next week-end
comes around. Whaaat!
I must find time between the things I do to do the other things.
date: 2024-01-29, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
Facebook
is good for surfacing old stuff, like this picture from the 1990s,
me and Dave Jacobs at a
Potrero Hill
restaurant, looking much younger, before all the wear and tear.
The Daves (Jacobs and Winer) at a Potrero Hill restaurant in the 90s.
We had already been friends for a few years then. By total coincidence
we were both offered writing gigs at the then-new
Wired,
Dave as the Fetish columnist, where he wrote about all the latest tech
gadgetry, which was a perfect assignment for him, because Dave is one of
the most tech-literate people you’ll ever meet. Also an avid bike rider,
Deadhead, and later a receiver of donated kidneys, and a pioneer of the
technology for matching kidney donors with recipients. He has saved a
lot of lives with his software. And he’s still with us, against all
odds.
Just chatted with him last night during the
Niners
game. The only football team I’ve ever loved, from back in the
Joe Montana
days.
I was offered a column to basically write whatever I wanted to write
about, although by default I was supposed to write about the world wide
web, which was then as new as ChatGPT is today and every bit as
exciting. You can find our respective columns somewhere I hope on the
web.
A woman will spend a little more than 11 years in federal prison for
possession with intent to distribute methamphetamine and having a
firearm after being convicted of a felony.
GDOE:
Public school special education revamp in progress
date: 2024-01-29, from: Guam Daily Post
The Guam Department of Education’s special education program is
undergoing a revamp, according to the division’s assistant
superintendent, who told The Guam Daily Post they are infusing new
energy into the program.
GDOE
students to take practice test ahead of Smarter Balance
date: 2024-01-29, from: Guam Daily Post
Guam Department of Education students in grades three through 11 will
have the opportunity to take a practice test before being gauged for
proficiency using the new summative assessment tool.
New
hospital, medical complex: Options unclear with bills’ failure
date: 2024-01-29, from: Guam Daily Post
With both bills to advance health care on the island through the
selection of a site to build a medical complex and new hospital failing
on the session floor, it’s unclear what options are left and how elected
leaders will…
Governor
says more information needed to decide on nuclear ban
date: 2024-01-29, from: Guam Daily Post
Gov. Lou Leon Guerrero said she wouldn’t want to completely shut Guam
out of any energy options without thoroughly understanding how that
energy works, and she will have to obtain more information before
deciding whether she would veto a measure…
I’m trying to get VASL
Templates to run on my laptop so that I can create nice setups for
Advanced Squad Leader. As it turns out, I have to use pipx
because that automatically creates virtual environments for me, as far
as I understand.
cd src
git clone https://code.pacman-ghost.com/public/vasl-templates.git
cd vasl-templates
pipx install .
As it turns out, this is not enough:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/alex/.local/bin/vasl-templates", line 5, in <module>
from vasl_templates.main import main
File "/home/alex/.local/pipx/venvs/vasl-templates/lib/python3.11/site-packages/vasl_templates/main.py", line 19, in <module>
import PyQt5.QtWebEngineWidgets
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PyQt5'
So now you need to install PyQt5 into the virtual environment used by
vasl-templates:
pipx inject vasl-templates PyQt5
Next error:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/alex/.local/bin/vasl-templates", line 5, in <module>
from vasl_templates.main import main
File "/home/alex/.local/pipx/venvs/vasl-templates/lib/python3.11/site-packages/vasl_templates/main.py", line 19, in <module>
import PyQt5.QtWebEngineWidgets
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PyQt5.QtWebEngineWidgets'
The awesomest part is that they don’t go in their own venvs or dockers
or chroots or their own li’l boring & redundant worlds. Instead it’s
all according to traditional Debian philosophy, all part of the same
file system with no redundancy.
California
cops shot in 2022 ambush were not verbally warned by dispatcher that
suspect had gun, was on PCP
date: 2024-01-29, from: San Jose Mercury News
A 911 caller informed police about the dangers posed by Justin
Flores, but a veteran dispatcher failed to alert responding officers
over their radios. Instead, she typed it into their patrol car
consoles.
GPS
interference now a major flight safety concern for airline industry
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
You’re wrong to think that jammin’ was a thing of the past
Europe’s aviation safety body is working with the airline industry to
counter a danger posed by interference with GPS signals - now seen as a
growing threat to the safety of air travel.…
this project needs a name and a domain. After many years of playing
with YAML in k8s, I’ve returned to using CFEngine (at work). The last
config management software before that was Puppet. An issue I see with
all modern config management tooling is the lack of monitoring and the
impossibility to cleanly roll back. In k8s it works better, but that’s
only for pods running in k8s (which are stateless), not the underlying
machines.
Tesla
is defending Elon Musk’s anti-union tweet all the way to the Fifth
Circuit
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
Tesla is taking up a fight to defend Elon Musk’s tweet that threatened
to remove employee stock options if they decide to unionize all the way
to the Fifth Circuit court of appeal.
Current conditions: Warm temperatures in the
Pacific Northwest and Central Plains could set daily records • Jet
stream to dump “extended” rain on California • It’ll hit nearly 60
degrees today in Kansas City, whose Chiefs are headed to the Super Bowl
for the fourth time in five years to face the San Francisco 49ers.
THE TOP FIVE
1. Earnings calls continue — and with them, EV insights
Earnings season continues this week with 106 S&P 500 companies on
deck
to
report to investors in the next five days. Upcoming calls with
automakers in particular could offer additional insight into the
purported
“slowing” of the electric vehicle market. Here is where things currently
stand:
General Motors reports Tuesday. In December, the
company halted sales of its 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV over issues with
software and charging, and it postponed a $4 billion electric truck
plant in Michigan last year as well. GM says it sold
19,469
EVs in Q4, down slightly from the quarter before.
Ford reports next week. The company has significantly
reduced production of its
F-150
Lightning.
Polestar’s Q4 results won’t be released until the end of
February, but the Volvo-owned brand “cut about 15% of its
global workforce [last week] in response to what it described as
‘challenging market conditions’ and lower volume expectations in 2025,”
The Wall Street Journalreports.
Last week, Tesla projected “notably slower” growth for
the year ahead. The company “is clearly trying to figure out what to do
next,”
wroteHeatmap’s Matthew Zeitlin.
EU climate chief warns against ‘false narrative’ that climate action
and business interests are at odds
The European Union’s climate commissioner, Wopke Hoekstra, said that the
energy transition will mean a “heavy change” for industries on the
continent but warned against the “false narrative” that climate action
comes at the cost of business and innovation, The Financial
Timesreported
Monday. Hoekstra’s comments came ahead of an intended proposal by
Brussels that the EU cut emissions by 90% of 1990 levels by 2040.
While the aggressive proposition would need to be agreed upon by EU
governments before becoming law, environmental regulations have already
rankled farmers in Germany, Poland, Romania, Belgium, and France — where
farmers
even threatened to put Paris
“under
siege” on Monday — while right-wing politicians have attacked green
policies and industrialists have blamed “red tape” for holding up
innovation. “We need to stand on two legs: one leg is climate action,
the other leg is the just transition, competitiveness, and a thriving
business community, because both are needed,” Hoekstra said.
Food sustainability activists chuck soup at the Mona Lisa
On Sunday, a pair of activists
threw
soup at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre museum in Paris — although
Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, which has
seen
this kind of thing before and resides safely behind fortified glass,
was not damaged.
83eACTION EN COURS - PARIS janvier. 10h00 citoyennes engag0e9es avec la
nouvelle campagne Riposte Alimentaire ont asperg0e9 de soupe le tableau
01cLa Joconde01d mondialement connu, expos0e9 au Mus0e9e du Louvre.
[1]#RiposteAlimentaire #A22Network #Joconde #Louvre
— (@)
The demonstrators identified themselves as belonging to Riposte
Alimentaire, which The Washington Postdescribes
as a “food security protest group” under the umbrella of the A22
Network, which also includes the climate groups Just Stop Oil and Last
Generation. “Farmers are squeezed by the pressures of mass distribution,
going so far as to make them sell at a loss,” Riposte Alimentaire said
in French, according to the Post. “Our agricultural and food
system also has extremely worrying environmental consequences.”
Get Heatmap AM in your inbox every morning:
Chicago faces uphill battle to ban gas from new construction
Last week, Chicago Mayor Mayor Brandon introduced an ordinance that
would ban natural gas for cooking and heating in most new construction.
“This is a critical first step for [Chicago] to take towards a planned
transition away from fossil fuels,” Leslie Perkins, the chief of staff
and policy director for the city’s Committee on Environmental Protection
and Energy,
toldUtility Drive at the time. However, the ordinance faces an
uphill battle, The Chicago Tribune argued in
a
Sunday editorial. “Better to wait and see what the statewide policy
is on the future of natural gas,” the authors wrote, stressing examples
like Berkeley, California, which has been unable to enforce its version
of a gas ban after a federal appeals court ruled the city doesn’t have
the authority. Additionally, “much of the power keeping lights on in
Chicagoland comes from nuclear energy (which doesn’t emit carbon) and,
ironically enough, gas (which does),” the op-ed authors pointed out.
“It’s not economically feasible to build new nuclear plants at present,
so any increased electricity demand will be met mostly by burning gas.”
Maui County identifies 100th and final Lahaina wildfire victim
Over the weekend, Maui police identified the 100th victim of the August
8 Lahaina wildfire as Lydia Coloma, 70. She was also the last
unidentified victim and was ID’ed using “the context of the location
where the remains were found,” rather than by DNA or other methods,
The Associated Pressreports.
Coloma is one of
nine
members of her family who died in the wildfire, as well as the first
victim to be identified since November 11. Police said three other
people still remain unaccounted for, down from more than 1,000 in the
immediate aftermath of the fire.
THE KICKER
“What lies for the future for the Osage? Energy is the front end of
our business. The other part of it is the environmental stewardship of
this reservation.” —Everett Waller, chairman of the Osage Minerals
Council, who also plays Paul Red Eagle in Killers of the Flower
Moon. A federal judge has
sided
with the Osage Nation against Italian utility Enel, which has been
ordered to remove 84 wind turbines from tribal land found in violation
of the Osage mineral estate.
Consumer spending ticked up in December, and more people are swiping
their credit cards. Part of the reason folks are more comfortable
putting it on plastic is confidence in the overall job market. But
delinquency rates have been climbing too. We’ll hear what economists
make of these trends. Also: United Airlines in talks with Airbus and
ripple effects of liquidation orders for property giant Evergrande.
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
40 years on, it’s still widely misunderstood
Apple launched the original 128 kB Macintosh around 40 years ago, and in
so doing changed the computer industry, in ways that a lot of people
still don’t fully understand.…
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-28, from: Bruce Schneier blog
Microsoft is
reporting
that a Russian intelligence agency—the same one responsible for
SolarWinds—accessed the email system of the company’s executives.
Beginning in late November 2023, the threat actor used a password spray
attack to compromise a legacy non-production test tenant account and
gain a foothold, and then used the account’s permissions to access a
very small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, including
members of our senior leadership team and employees in our
cybersecurity, legal, and other functions, and exfiltrated some emails
and attached documents. The investigation indicates they were initially
targeting email accounts for information related to Midnight Blizzard
itself. …
Once
Upon a Click: Librarian’s Fairy Tale Journey with the Internet
Archive
date: 2024-01-29, from: Internet Archive Blog
Once upon a time, Liz Gotauco fell in love with fairy tales. That is,
making videos while retelling them with some quirky twists. By day,
Gotauco is a full-time public […]
From the BBC World Service: Evergrande was once China’s biggest
property developer. Now, a judge in Hong Kong has ordered the
liquidation of the debt-laden real estate giant, but Evergrande says
it’ll continue on China’s mainland. And French farmers take their fight
over red tape and environmental policies to Paris. Plus, we hear how
that city is tackling the problem of bedbugs ahead of the Summer
Olympics.
Cruise
being investigated over car crash that dragged victim along the
road
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Plus: George Carlin’s family suing creators who used AI to rip off his
comedy, and more
AI in brief The US Department of Justice and
Securities Exchange Commission are both launching investigations into
the Cruise accident that hit a woman and dragged her for six meters (20
feet) under the wheels of its driverless car.…
Does everything actually suck right now? Or is it just the end of
January?
It can be difficult to tell. We’re officially in the thick of what
Americans consider to be the
worst
time of year, when complaining about the weather is an acceptable
salutation and feeling “blah” is the basic condition of being alive.
Even setting aside seasonal affective disorder — a condition linked to
limited
daylight, and thus not
directly
affected by climate change —
studies
have shown that people have a lower quality diet in the winter, and
body weight usually reaches its peak this time of year. Physical
activity, which is also important for mental health, dips as the weather
gets worse, and research has even shown that people with Alzheimer’s
disease experience more severe symptoms when the planet is tilted away
from the sun.
Some have taken these winter blues as an opportunity to question the
basic premise that climate change is bad. “The chief benefits of global
warming” include “fewer winter deaths” and lower heating bills, Matt
Ridley
argued
in The Spectator in 2013. Former President Donald Trump even
has
a quasi-annual tradition of tweeting something like “Wouldn’t be
bad to have a little of that good old fashioned Global Warming right
now!” during cold snaps this time of year.
Winter is, in fact, warming
faster
than any other season in the United States, with some parts of the
country on track to lose over a month of freezing days as soon as 2050.
Even if you do believe — correctly — that climate change is a global
catastrophe, unless you’re
a
skier or snowboarder, this might sound like a good thing. So, as
sacrilegious as it feels to ask, could a warmer planet make us
healthier in the wintertime?
When I asked Leslie Davenport, a climate psychology educator at the
California Institute of Integral Studies, if she expected milder winters
to impact people psychologically, she answered immediately. “Oh, one
hundred percent!,” she told me. That doesn’t mean she thinks the impact
will be positive. She said she has heard people “who are a little more
on the climate denial end of things” make comments like “this is great,
it used to be so cold and now I can go golfing,” she told me, but “I
can’t honestly call that an upside.”
Far more often, Davenport said she hears from people experiencing a
sense of “unsettling” as they notice winter isn’t as cold or as snowy as
they remember it being. Some might even express a feeling of
“solastalgia,” a neologism that describes the sense of displacement or
nostalgia that arises when a place changes environmentally. “Whether
it’s the loss of snow, or areas that are drier or hotter or wetter, it
is like, ‘Well, this is not the town I grew up in or the place I chose
to move to because it has changed so much,’” Davenport said.
While there might be an abstract appeal to the Los Angelesification of
winter nationwide, it would be a mistake to count on climate change
making the season “better.” Quite the opposite, actually — warmer
winters could make winter much worse, especially for those
living in midlatitude cities like New York, London, or Amsterdam. “I
have observed, in my travels and my research and in talking to people,
that it is often much easier and more pleasant to cope with winter
weather that is slightly below freezing consistently than weather that
is slightly above freezing consistently,” Kari Leibowitz, a health
psychologist who is working on a book about
winter
mindsets, told me.
Cold temperatures can actually improve our lives in several ways,
Leibowitz argued. For one thing, snowfall “opens up a whole bunch of
winter opportunities” like sledding, snowmobiling, snowshoeing, and all
those winter sports that get people out of the house. That helps combat
some of the bluesiness that otherwise comes from moping around indoors
when it’s too gray and rainy to do anything active. Frozen lakes offer
opportunities for skating and hockey, plus “there’s also a lot of beauty
and intrigue in ice — you know, icicles and frozen rainstorms,”
Leibowitz went on.
Snow, meanwhile, “reflects the light, so it makes the darkness of winter
feel much, much brighter,” Leibowitz said. “And most people think it’s
really beautiful — it’s clean and fresh and it smells good.”
Of course, winter weather can be dangerous, too, but “places that are
colder and have really frozen winters have good infrastructure for
dealing with that, and houses tend to be better insulated and heated
more efficiently,” Leibowitz said. Bad winter weather can also give us
much-needed
permission
to rest.
While there are certain places further in the south, such as Atlanta,
where winter might genuinely become more pleasant as the planet warms,
“there are far more places where the end of winter is just going to mean
places are dark and wet,” without the upsides that come with the snow
and freezing temperatures, Leibowitz stressed.
Michael Varnum, the head of the Culture and Ecology Laboratory at
Arizona State University and a specialist in
seasonal
psychology, did find one positive. “Nobody likes to feel down, or to
look at their waistline and see it’s grown,” he told me. “So
potentially, there could be some upsides there.”
Naturally, much of how you feel about winter will depend on the climate
where you live. In general, though, “we are somewhat more insulated from
the changes in temperature that come with the seasons than we were, say,
10,000 years ago or even a couple hundred years ago,” Varnum said.
Feelings of climate anxiety and distress tend to be highest in
Indigenous communities in or near the Arctic, where the cold weather is
a part of cultural identity and inheritance. Likewise, Davenport told
me, in “places where there tends to be a lot of snow” like Japan or
Finland, “there’s talk about things like ‘winter grief,’” where a milder
winter makes it so that “certain rituals or holidays that have been
planned in the past can’t happen anymore or as consistently.”
Many Americans, too,
lose
a sense of themselves when winter gets milder. “It’s what a lot of
us love about living here: our winters,” Erich Osterberg, a Dartmouth
climate scientist,
told
The New Hampshire Bulletin in 2022. “It’s more than changes
to the climate,” he added, “it’s changes to our livelihood and our
culture.” I encountered similar comments from Minnesotans when I was
looking into how an unseasonably dry winter is imperiling this year’s
cross country ski season: “Spiritually, this is terrible,” Claire
Wilson, the executive director of Minneapolis’ Loppet Foundation,
recently
told
the Star Tribune.
Winter doesn’t have to be dreaded, Leibowitz said — much of one’s
enjoyment of the season comes down to
mindset.
But it does seem to matter that winter is actually, well,
wintery, too. Whether that’s a question of our evolutionary
seasonal biology (winter appears to be an important trigger for
the
human reproductive cycle, for one thing), or a matter of our
cultural practices, or something as simple as snow being more fun than
rain, it’s hard to make the case that warming winters will leave us
better off.
“If you want me to find the psychological upside of anything, I could
maybe do it,” Leibowitz confessed. She added, though, that “a lot of
people think, ‘I hate winter, I hate the cold, I would be happy if it
was warmer all year round.’ But people underestimate how much there is
to be lost in losing winter.”
US
to use AI to track the impact of offshore wind on endangered whales
date: 2024-01-29, from: Electrek Feed
Two US environmental agencies say they will start using AI to better
monitor the impact of offshore wind farms on marine animals,
particularly endangered North American right whales, of which there are
only about 360 left in the world.
Biden
says US ‘shall respond’ after drone strike by Iran-backed group kills 3
US troops in Jordan
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>COLUMBIA, S.C. — President Joe Biden said Sunday that the U.S. “shall respond” after three American troops were killed and dozens more were injured in an overnight drone strike in northeast Jordan near the Syrian border. Biden blamed Iran-backed militias for the first U.S. fatalities after months of strikes by such groups against American forces across the Middle East since the start of the Israel-Hamas war.</p>
Most
Americans feel they pay too much in taxes, AP-NORC poll finds
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>NEW YORK — A majority of taxpayers feel they pay too much in taxes, with many saying that they receive a poor value in return, according to a new poll from the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy and The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.</p>
<p>An Orchidland woman is recovering — and seeking answers — after a hit-and-run incident involving her and her 4-year-old daughter earlier this month.</p>
Proposed
Kona Vistas project to go before Land Use Commission
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>A proposed Kona development that has spent decades in planning and is vehemently opposed by neighboring communities will be in front of the state Land Use Commission on Feb. 7 to address questions related to the project.</p>
Mahomes,
Chiefs knock off top-seeded Ravens to return to Super Bowl. Niners rally
past Lions
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>BALTIMORE (AP) — Patrick Mahomes and Travis Kelce were at their magnificent best in the first half, and Kansas City’s defense was superb against Lamar Jackson and Baltimore, helping the Chiefs reach the Super Bowl for the fourth time in five years with a 17-10 victory over the Ravens in the AFC championship game Sunday.</p>
<p>The Kamehameha Schools - Hawai‘i boys varsity basketball team secured its No. 1 spot in BIIF Division I — emerging victorious, 49-46, from a scrappy and fast-paced showdown against home standing Hilo High on Saturday night.</p>
<p>KAILUA-KONA — The final high school swim meet of the 2024 winter season took place at the Central Pacific Bank/Big Island Interscholastic Federation (BIIF) Swimming Championships on Saturday at the Kona Community Aquatic Center, drawing a crowd from all over the island. Trial runs additionally took place Friday in the same pool. The Hawaii High School Athletic Association (HHSAA) Swim Meets will take place tentatively in Maui. (Conor Langs/West Hawaii Today)</p>
<p>KAILUA-KONA — The Big Island Interscholastic Federation (BIIF) wrestling season reached its midway point Saturday in Kealakehe High School’s gymnasium — hosting all island schools in the weekly boys-and-girls meet. This weekend was additionally the first meet on the west side of the island, drawing a large crowd to watch the young stars compete.</p>
House
GOP releases impeachment articles in bid to oust Homeland Security’s
Mayorkas over the border
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Sunday released two articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as they vowed to swiftly push forward with election-year efforts to oust him over what they call his failure to manage the U.S.-Mexico border. The rare step against a Cabinet member drew outrage from Democrats and the agency as a politically motivated stunt lacking the constitutional basis to remove Mayorkas from office.</p>
Israel
notes ‘significant gaps’ after cease-fire talks with US, Qatar, Egypt
but says constructive
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israel said “significant gaps” remain after cease-fire talks Sunday with the United States, Qatar and Egypt but called them constructive and said they would continue in the week ahead, a tentative sign of progress on a potential agreement that could see Israel pause military operations against Hamas in exchange for the release of remaining hostages.</p>
French
farmers aim to put Paris ‘under siege’ in tractor protest. Activists
hurl soup at ‘Mona Lisa’
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>PARIS — France’s interior ministry on Sunday ordered a large deployment of security forces around Paris as angry farmers threatened to head toward the capital, hours after climate activists hurled soup at the glass protecting the “Mona Lisa” painting at the Louvre Museum.</p>
Biden
is trying to balance Gaza protests and free speech rights as
demonstrators disrupt his events
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>MANASSAS, Va. — It was President Joe Biden’s first big campaign rally of the year, a chance to spotlight the issue of protecting abortion rights. Instead, at least a dozen times during Biden’s 22-minute speech, demonstrators scattered throughout the audience rose to shout out demands for a cease-fire in Gaza.</p>
Ex-Prime
Minister Alexander Stubb wins first round of Finland’s presidential vote
to set up a runoff
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>HELSINKI — Former Prime Minister Alexander Stubb won the first round of Finland’s presidential election Sunday and will face runner-up ex-Foreign Minister Pekka Haavisto in a runoff next month.</p>
Apprenticeships
can help workers in a dynamic economy
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>After graduating from high school in Vernal, Utah, Kray Haslem spent seven years gaining the licenses and experience he needed to become a commercial airline pilot. In 2019, Kray was working as a flight instructor to gain flight hours and advance his career. One day, he was on a practice flight with a student when shortly after takeoff, the engine failed and the plane crashed.</p>
North
Korea says leader Kim supervised tests of cruise missiles designed to be
fired from submarines
date: 2024-01-29, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — North Korean leader Kim Jong Un supervised test firings of new cruise missiles designed to be launched from submarines and also reviewed efforts to build a nuclear-powered submarine while reiterating his goal of building a nuclear-armed navy to counter what he portrays as growing external threats, state media said Monday.</p>
That
runaway datacenter power grab is the best news for net zero this
century
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
We’ve been working on the solution for 70 years. It’s there if we want
it
Opinion Datacenter power is a shocking business. The
latest report from the International Energy Agency makes some
hair-raising predictions, such as Irish datacenter electricity usage
making up a third of that country’s total juice budget by 2026.…
Checks totaling about $3.5 million will be going out to more than 50
businesses as part of the first batch of aid under the Local Employers
Assistance Program Supplemental Grant II, according to Guam Economic
Development Authority CEO and Administrator…
Pluralistic:
I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine (29
Jan 2024)
date: 2024-01-29, from: Cory Doctorow’s blog
Today’s links I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George
Carlin” routine: The Mechanical Turk would like to have a word with all
of us. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history:
2004, 2009, 2014, 2019, 2023 Colophon: Recent publications,
upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading I
assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine
(permalink) On Hallowe’en 1974, Ronald Clark O’Bryan murdered his son
with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that
Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he’d get away with it.
He was wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan The
stories of Hallowe’en poisonings were just that – stories. No one was
poisoning kids on Hallowe’en – except this monstrous murderer, who
mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that
his murder would blend in with the crowd. Last week, the dudes behind
the “comedy” podcast Dudesy released a “George Carlin” comedy special
that they claimed had been created, holus bolus, by an AI trained on the
comedian’s routines. This was a lie. After the Carlin estate sued, the
dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) “comedy”
special:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/
As I’ve written, we’re nowhere near the point where an AI can do your
job, but we’re well past the point where your boss can be suckered into
firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week
AI systems can do some remarkable party tricks, but there’s a huge
difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one. After
the initial rush of astonishment, the stench of botshit becomes
unmistakable:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy
Some of this botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods:
they’re convinced that they can make a George Carlin special without any
human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own
botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI. This is an old
technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a
Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in
multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone
encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs
flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to
livecast the show. Nevertheless, my friend’s boss’s ordered him to go on
pretending to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all
kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic
marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by
overheated narration from the show’s hosts. The weirdest part? The next
day, my friend – and many others – heard from satisfied viewers who
boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their
computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream.
These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end – that
they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser
plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence,
they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the
Emperor’s New Livestream. Perhaps that’s what happened to the Dudesy
bros. But there’s another possibility: maybe they were captured by their
own imaginations. In “Genesis,” an essay in the 2007 collection The
Creationists, EL Doctorow (no relation) describes how the ancient
Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they
made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it must
be true. They themselves weren’t nearly imaginative enough to have come
up with this super-cool tale, so God must have put it in their minds:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply
That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who
falsely claimed that a “rogue AI-powered drone” had spontaneously
evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the
obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/ This never happened.
It was – in the chagrined colonel’s words – a “thought experiment.” In
other words, this guy – who is the USAF’s Chief of AI Test and
Operations – was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot
it wasn’t true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it
had actually happened. Maybe that’s what happened with the George
Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for
a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up,
so they just cheated, assuming they would eventually be able to make a
fully operational Battle Carlinbot. That’s basically the Theranos story:
a teenaged “entrepreneur” was convinced that she was just about to
produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she
faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who wanted
to believe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos The thing about
stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI’s boosters
and its critics. For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious:
if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles,
they’ll invest in it. They’ll even integrate it into their product
offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit
it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects
in these products a secret, because they’ll assume that they’ve
committed an operator error. After all, everyone knows that AI can do
anything, so if it’s not performing for them, the problem must exist
between the keyboard and the chair. But this would only take AI so far.
It’s one thing to hear implausible stories of AI’s triumph from the
people invested in it – but what about when AI’s critics repeat those
stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are
all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI
jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?
https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/ There’s a
name for this kind of criticism: “criti-hype,” coined by Lee Vinsel, who
points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it
constitutes an “academic business-model”:
https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5
That’s four reasons for AI hype: I. to win investors and customers; II.
to cover customers’ and users’ embarrassment when the AI doesn’t
perform; III. AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can’t
tell truth from fantasy; IV. A business-model for doomsayers who form an
unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in
warning form. But there’s a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify
otherwise tedious and complex situations. As Jamie Zawinski writes, this
is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the “autonomous cars” on
the streets of San Francisco have no driver:
https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/
GM’s Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one
of its “self-driving” cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:
https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/
One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was
that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every
one of its “self-driving” cars. In other words, they had replaced a
single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators. As
Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there’s a human being (or more
than one human being) responsible for every one of these cars – someone
who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property.
Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can’t be cited for
moving violations because “no one is driving them.” But figuring out who
which person is responsible for a moving violation is “complicated and
annoying to deal with,” so the fiction persists. (Zawinski notes that
even when these people are held responsible, they’re a “moral crumple
zone” for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in
nonconsensual murderbot experiments.) Automation hype has always
involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the “mechanical
Turk” hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet
operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its
carapace. This pattern repeats itself through the ages. Thomas Jefferson
“replaced his slaves” with dumbwaiters – but of course, dumbwaiters
don’t replace slaves, they hide slaves:
https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/ The modern
Mechanical Turk – a division of Amazon that employs low-waged
“clickworkers,” many of them overseas – modernizes the dumbwaiter by
hiding low-waged workforces behind a veneer of automation. The MTurk is
an abstract “cloud” of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are
called “HITs,” which stands for “Human Intelligence Tasks”). This is
such a truism that techies in India joke that “AI” stands for “absent
Indians.” Or, to use Jathan Sadowski’s wonderful term: “Potemkin AI”:
https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/ This Potemkin AI is everywhere you
look. When Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, they made a big
flashy show of it, promising a $20,000 automaton was just on the
horizon. They failed to mention that Optimus was just a person in a
robot suit:
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai
Likewise with the famous demo of a “full self-driving” Tesla, which
turned out to be a canned fake:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/
The most shocking and terrifying and enraging AI demos keep turning out
to be “Just A Guy” (in Molly White’s excellent parlance):
https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1751670561606971895 And yet, we
keep falling for it. It’s no wonder, really: criti-hype rewards so many
different people in so many different ways that it truly offers
something for everyone. (Image: Cryteria, CC BY 3.0; Ross Breadmore, CC
BY 2.0; modified) Hey look at this (permalink) Artifice, Ruse &
Subterfuge: The Expert at the Card Table
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KTVpY3ZPoIk (h/t Jonathan Steigman) This
day in history (permalink) #20yrsago First corporate sponsorship for an
MMORPG guild
https://web.archive.org/web/20040426073811/https://www.warcry.com/scripts/columns/view_sectionalt.phtml?site=15&id=108&colid=1675
#20yrsago More non-evil social network ideas
https://web.archive.org/web/20040217043710/http://www.ambiguous.org/archive.php3/2004/01/30#quinn2004130.1
#20yrsago When spam-filters attack
https://web.archive.org/web/20040529003653/https://www.oblomovka.com/entries/2004/01/30#1075490400
#20yrsago Mobile interface myths
https://web.archive.org/web/20040205050015/https://www.acm.org/chapters/chi-sqrd/meetings/20040310.html
#20yrsago Totalitarian trusted computing
https://web.archive.org/web/20040205084716/http://costik.com/weblog/2004_01_01_blogchive.html#107547544736650899
#20yrsago Your customers don’t want DRM, part MMMCCXI
https://www.wired.com/2004/01/stores-nix-disposable-flicks/ #20yrsago
Jason Schultz on American Blind versus Google
https://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/ #20yrsago BugMeNot: circumvent
annoying registration https://bugmenot.com #20yrsago Hundreds of BBCers
protest director’s resignation
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3442825.stm #20yrsago Marxist
fairy tales
https://web.archive.org/web/20040420002251/http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Audiopage.html
#15yrsago Bruce Sterling on our global psychosis, ca. 2009
https://web.archive.org/web/20090201010959/http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2009/01/2009_will_be_a_year_of_panic.php
#15yrsago Digital Britain report proposes to save Britain’s future by
destroying the Internet
https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/digital-britain-leaving-consumers-out-of-the-picture/
#15yrsago UK fingerprints foreign six-year-old children at the border
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2009/jan/29/eu-idcards
#10yrsago Not just Environment and Health: Canadian government attacks
libraries from 12 ministries
https://web.archive.org/web/20140303074337/www.desmog.ca/2014/01/27/loss-librarians-devastating-science-and-knowledge-canada
#10yrsago Republican Congressman threatens to kill reporter after State
of the Union
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2014/01/29/1273288/-GOP-Congressman-Threatens-to-Kill-Report-After-SOTU
#10yrsago Network Solutions not sure if it will opt random customers
into $1,850 “domain protection” plan
https://www.techdirt.com/2014/01/28/network-solutions-tries-to-auto-enroll-users-into-its-1850year-domain-protection-plan/
#10yrsago Writers Guild of America tells US government that copyright
shouldn’t trump free expression
https://torrentfreak.com/hollywood-writers-warn-against-draconian-anti-piracy-measures-140127/
#10yrsago Top lawyer finds GCHQ spying is illegal & UK spies who
help US drone strike may be accessories to murder
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/28/gchq-mass-surveillance-spying-law-lawyer
#10yrsago Extorted out of a one-character Twitter ID by a hacker who
seized control of Godaddy domains https://medium.com/@N/how-i-lost-my-50-000-twitter-username-24eb09e026dd
#10yrsago Rob Ford sued for jailhouse beating of his ex-brother-in-law
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/toronto/brother-in-law-abused-in-jail-to-keep-quiet-about-rob-fords-drug-use-lawsuit-alleges/article16590910/
#10yrsago Finally, a legal challenge to US warrantless wiretapping that
beats the Catch-22
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/01/in-rare-move-terrorism-suspect-challenges-core-of-warrentless-snooping-law/
#10yrsago Detailed timeline of the Bletchley Park mess
https://freelance.halfacree.co.uk/2014/01/disharmony-at-bletchley-park/
#10yrsago Key 3D printing patent expired yesterday
https://3dprint.com/387/laser-sintering-3d-printing-may-now-take-off-with-a-very-important-patent-expiring-today/
#10yrsago NSA phone-records spying is totally, utterly illegal
https://www.techdirt.com/2014/01/28/almost-everything-about-bulk-collection-phone-data-is-illegal/
#10yrsago North Carolina’s Lake Norman Regional Medical Center charges
patient $81,000 for $750 worth of snakebite medicine
https://www.christianpost.com/news/hospital-charges-snake-bitten-man-81k-for-anti-venom-available-online-for-750-after-18-hour-stay.html
#5yrsago American prisoners coerced or tricked into providing
voice-prints for use in eternal, secret, unchecked surveillance
https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/prison-voice-prints-databases-securus/
#5yrsago After $4.1 billion subsidy, Foxconn cancels plan to build
Wisconsin “factory,” now proposing a small R&D facility
https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/30/18203442/foxconn-wisconsin-lcd-factory-over-jobs-louis-woo
#5yrsago Facebook cancels its all-spying, secret “research” program,
Apple cancels Facebook’s developer account
https://www.theverge.com/facebook/2019/1/30/18203349/facebook-research-app-apple-shutdown
#5yrsago Blackmailers use false copyright claims to shut down victims’
Youtube accounts, offer to lift them in exchange for Bitcoin
https://torrentfreak.com/youtube-strikes-now-being-used-as-scammers-extortion-tool/
#5yrsago Conducting “evil” computer research, in the name of good
https://chi4evil.wordpress.com #5yrsago Discarded smart lightbulbs
reveal your wifi passwords, stored in the clear
https://limitedresults.com/2019/01/pwn-the-lifx-mini-white/ #5yrsago
Project Atlas: Facebook has been secretly paying Iphone users to install
an all-surveilling “VPN” app
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/ #5yrsago
Undercover who targeted Citizen Lab over Israeli cyber-arms dealer is an
ex-Israeli spook linked to black ops firm used by Harvey Weinstein
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/28/world/black-cube-nso-citizen-lab-intelligence.html
#5yrsago Major vulnerability in 5G means that anyone with $500 worth of
gear can spy on a wide area’s mobile activity
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/01/5g-protocol-may-still-be-vulnerable-imsi-catchers
#5yrsago Citing terms of service and “bad actors,” Facebook locks out
tools that catalog ads and ad targeting
https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-blocks-ad-transparency-tools
#5yrsago A 70% tax on income over $10m is designed to correct
inequality, not raise revenue
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/28/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-70-percent-tax-rich-isnt-about-revenue-its-about
#5yrsago Words, but not deeds: the Democrats as climate-deniers
https://jacobin.com/2019/01/climate-change-2020-democrats-green-new-deal
#5yrsago The EU’s plan for algorithmic copyright filters is looking more
and more unlikely
https://memex.craphound.com/2019/01/29/the-eus-plan-for-algorithmic-copyright-filters-is-looking-more-and-more-unlikely/
#1yrago “Conversational” AI Is Really Bad At Conversations
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/29/conversational-ai-is-really-bad-at-conversations/
#1yrago The real scandal is overclassification
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/30/i-come-to-a-land-downunder/#but-id-have-to-kill-you
Colophon (permalink) Today’s top sources: Currently writing: A Little
Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING Picks and Shovels, a
Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING
TOR BOOKS JAN 2025 The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about
the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024 Vigilant,
Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON
TOR.COM Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests.
FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM Latest podcast: What kind of bubble is AI?
https://craphound.com/news/2024/01/21/what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/
Upcoming appearances: Marshall McLuhan Lecture 2024 (Berlin), Jan 29
https://transmediale.de/en/2024/event/mcluhan-2024 The Lost Cause at
Otherland (Berlin), Jan 30
https://www.otherland-berlin.de/de/event-details/autor-innenabend-mit-cory-doctorow.html
The Bezzle at Third Place Books (Seattle), Feb 26
https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/event/cory-doctorow Tuscon Festival of
Books, Mar 9/10 https://tucsonfestivalofbooks.org/?id=676 Recent
appearances: Enshittification: The Rise and Fall of Big Tech (Crash
Course Economics) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E7AxrFQ7jIM Generation
of Lost Causes with Vass Bednar (Toronto Public Library)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rGj5VaJSDQ Low-Key Clippy (This Week In
Tech) https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-tech/episodes/963 Latest books:
“The Lost Cause:” a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency,
Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023
(http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies
(https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
“The Internet Con”: A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big
Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org).
Signed copies at Book Soup
(https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245). “Red Team Blues”: “A
grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how
the world works than you did before.” Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK):
https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
“Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get
Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin”, on how to unrig the markets for
creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022
https://chokepointcapitalism.com “Attack Surface”: The third Little
Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington
Post called it “a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy
about the limits of revolution and resistance.” Order signed,
personalized copies from Dark Delicacies
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
“How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism”: an anti-monopoly pamphlet
analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a
solution.
https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b)
(signed copies:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
“Little Brother/Homeland”: A reissue omnibus edition with a new
introduction by Edward Snowden:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies
here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
“Poesy the Monster Slayer” a picture book about monsters, bedtime,
gender, and kicking ass. Order here:
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed
copy here:
https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.
Upcoming books: The Bezzle: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about
prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024 Picks and
Shovels: a sequel to “Red Team Blues,” about the heroic era of the PC,
Tor Books, February 2025 Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted
from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025 This
work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you
like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory
Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Quotations and images are
not included in this license; they are included either under a
limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate
license. Please exercise caution. How to get Pluralistic: Blog (no ads,
tracking, or data-collection): Pluralistic.net Newsletter (no ads,
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https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic “When life
gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla” -Joey “Accordion Guy” DeVilla
The problem of large numbers of asylum seekers trying to cross the
Channel in small boats is one, I confess, that I have avoided thinking
about too much — and I therefore understand few of the subtleties
involved. So I was particularly taken by this BBC piece, which follows
one 14-year-old boy, Obada, who died
Continue
Reading
date: 2024-01-29, from: The Daily Trojan (USC Student Paper)
The Daily Trojan features Classified advertising in each day’s edition.
Here you can read, search, and even print out each day’s edition of the
Classifieds.
One
person’s shortcut was another’s long road to panic
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Clever techie thought of everything – except someone else’s stupidity
Who, Me? Why hello, dear reader – fancy seeing you
here again on a Monday – the slot we The Register reserves for
a fresh installment of Who, Me? in which Register readers share
their tales of tech tribulations.…
ICANN
proposes creating .INTERNAL domain to do the same job as
192.168.x.x
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
The plan is to keep the world at bay by never recording it in the DNS
root – like many already do with a subdomain for an intranet
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has
proposed creating a new top-level domain (TLD) and never allowing it to
be delegated in the global domain name system (DNS) root.…
Eyeing
China, US may require clouds to report when foreign actors rent kit to
build AI models
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
What’s the point of hardware export bans if foreign entities can access
what they want on the cloud?
US-based infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) operators could soon be
required to strengthen know-your-customer (KYC) procedures in order to
prevent foreign actors renting the infrastructure needed to train AI
models.…
date: 2024-01-29, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
Today—last night U.S. time—three military personnel were killed and
34 more wounded in a drone attack on the living quarters at a U.S. base
in Jordan, near the Iraq-Syria border. U.S. troops are stationed there
to enable them to cross into Syria to help fight the Islamic State.
There have been almost-daily drone and missile strikes on U.S. forces in
Iraq and Syria since the October 7 attack on Israel by Iran-backed
Hamas. The U.S. has blamed Iran-backed militant groups for the attack,
and while no one has officially claimed responsibility yet, three
officials from such groups have said an Iran-backed militia in Iraq is
responsible.
Tencent
explores a future where HPC, quantum, cloud and edge have converged
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
And it will all come together in one big, happy, hybrid innovation
engine
Chinese tech giant Tencent has predicted that high-performance computing
(HPC), quantum computing, cloud computing and edge computing will soon
merge.…
Linus
Torvalds flames Google kernel contributor over filesystem
suggestion
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Kernel 6.8-rc2 debuts after very robust discussion about ‘inodes’
Linus Torvalds has dished up one of his most strongly worded Linux
kernel mailing list posts in years, lashing a contributor from Google
for his suggestions regarding filesystems.…
Illinois
Election Officials to Consider Striking Trump’s Name off Primary
Ballot
date: 2024-01-29, from: VOA News USA
CHICAGO — Former President Donald Trump should be removed from
Illinois’ primary ballot, but the decision should be left to the courts,
a retired judge recommended Sunday to the state’s election board,
arguing that it was clear Trump engaged in insurrection in the Jan. 6,
2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
The Illinois State Board of Elections is expected to consider the
recommendation Tuesday. Attorneys for Trump and citizens seeking to keep
the Republican former president off the ballot presented their arguments
Friday before the hearing officer, Clark Erickson. The retired longtime
Kankakee County judge is a Republican.
The Illinois effort to keep Trump off the March ballot is similar to
those filed in several other states. The U.S. Supreme Court is set to
hear arguments next month in a historic Colorado Supreme Court ruling to
remove Trump from that state’s ballot. The case presents the high court
with its first look at a provision of the 14th Amendment barring some
people who “engaged in insurrection” from holding public office.
Erickson’s 21-page recommendation concluded that a “preponderance of
the evidence” presented proves that Trump engaged in insurrection.
But he said the election board can’t engage in the “significant and
sophisticated constitutional analysis” required to remove Trump’s name
before the March 19 primary.
“All in all, attempting to resolve a constitutional issue within the
expedited schedule of an election board hearing is somewhat akin to
scheduling a two-minute round between heavyweight boxers in a telephone
booth,” he wrote.
Still, Erickson noted that even if the board disagrees with his
reasoning, Trump’s name should be removed from the Illinois primary
ballot.
The election board is split evenly between four Democrats and four
Republicans.
Free Speech for People, which is leading the Illinois ballot effort,
praised the recommendation from the Republican retired judge as
“significant” but argued that Illinois law allows the board to make the
ballot decision.
“We expect that the board and ultimately Illinois courts will uphold
Judge Erickson’s thoughtful analysis of why Trump is disqualified from
office, but — with the greatest respect — correct him on why Illinois
law authorizes that ruling,” Ron Fein, legal director for the group,
wrote in a Sunday statement.
Trump’s campaign did not immediately return a message left
Sunday.
Tesla
hacks make big bank at Pwn2Own’s first automotive-focused event
date: 2024-01-29, updated: 2024-01-29, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
ALSO: SEC admits to X account negligence; New macOS malware family
appears; and some critical vulns
Infosec in brief Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative
(ZDI) held its first-ever automotive-focused Pwn2Own event in Tokyo last
week, and awarded over $1.3 million to the discoverers of 49
vehicle-related zero day vulnerabilities.…
Election
Countdown, 282 Days to Go: The “States’ Rights” Era Returns.
date: 2024-01-29, from: James Fallows, Substack
In 2000, the Supreme Court told Florida to stop counting votes.
Florida obeyed. In 2024, the Court tells Texas to stop disobeying US
Border Patrol policies at the border. Texas says, Make us.
date: 2024-01-29, from: John Naughton’s online diary
All that remains… … of a groyne on a beach in North Norfolk. Quote of
the Day “The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight
times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees. In the
University of California system, …
Continue
reading →
House
Republicans Release Impeachment Articles Against Homeland Security
Secretary Mayorkas
date: 2024-01-29, from: VOA News USA
Washington — House Republicans on Sunday released two articles of
impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas as
they vowed to swiftly push forward with election-year efforts to oust
him over what they call his failure to manage the U.S.-Mexico border.
The rare step against a Cabinet member drew outrage from Democrats and
the agency as a politically motivated stunt lacking the constitutional
basis to remove Mayorkas from office.
Republicans contend Mayorkas is guilty of “high crimes and
misdemeanors” that amount to a “willful and systemic refusal to comply
with the law” on immigration and a “breach of the public trust.”
Impeachment, they say, is “Congress’s only viable option.”
“Alejandro N. Mayorkas willfully and systemically refused to comply
with the immigration laws, failed to control the border to the detriment
of national security, compromised public safety, and violated the rule
of law and separation of powers in the Constitution, to the manifest
injury of the people of the United States,” the impeachment resolution
says.
Only once in American history has a Cabinet secretary been impeached:
William Belknap, President Ulysses Grant’s war secretary, in 1876, over
kickbacks in government contracts. Going after an official for a policy
dispute, in this instance over the claim that Mayorkas is not upholding
immigration laws, is unprecedented.
Ever since taking control of the House in 2023, Republicans have
pushed to impeach Mayorkas. Sunday’s announcement comes as their other
impeachment drive — to impeach Democratic President Joe Biden in
relation to his son Hunter’s business dealings — has struggled to
advance.
But Republicans have moved with rapid speed against Mayorkas after a
series of hearings in recent weeks. It all comes at a time when border
security and immigration are key issues in the 2024 campaign and as
Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential
nomination, is promising to launch the “largest deportation operation”
in U.S. history if he returns to the White House.
The Republican-controlled House Homeland Security Committee is set to
vote Tuesday on the articles of impeachment, aiming to send them to the
full House for consideration. Republican Speaker Mike Johnson has said
the House will move forward as soon as possible with a vote after
that.
Passage requires only a House majority. The Senate would hold a
trial, and a two-thirds vote is required for conviction, an exceedingly
unlikely outcome in the Democratic-run Senate.
The Republican push also comes at a curious time for Mayorkas.
Even as the House is taking steps to try to remove him from office,
Mayorkas has been engaged in arduous negotiations with senators seeking
to reach a bipartisan deal on border policy. He has won praise from
senators for his engagement in the process.
Democrats have lambasted the impeachment proceedings, calling them a
waste of time when lawmakers should be working together to solve the
problems. They also say Republicans are part of the problems at the
border, with Republicans attacking Mayorkas even as they have failed to
give his department the tools it needs to manage the situation.
“They don’t want to fix the problem; they want to campaign on it.
That’s why they have undermined efforts to achieve bipartisan solutions
and ignored the facts, legal scholars and experts, and even the
Constitution itself in their quest to baselessly impeach Secretary
Mayorkas,” the department said in a statement Sunday.
Rep. Bennie Thompson, the top Democrat on the House committee, said
the Republican resolution did not have “a shred of evidence of high
crimes or misdemeanors — the Constitutional standard for
impeachment.”
The two articles mark the culmination of a roughly yearlong
examination by Republicans of the secretary’s handling of the border and
what they describe as a crisis of the administration’s own making.
Republicans contend that the administration and Mayorkas specifically
either got rid of policies in place under Trump that had controlled
migration or enacted policies of their own that encouraged migrants from
around the world to come to the U.S. illegally via the southern border.
They also accused Mayorkas of lying to Congress, pointing to comments
about the border being secure or about vetting of Afghans airlifted to
the U.S.
They cite growing numbers of migrants who have at times overwhelmed
the capacity of Customs and Border Protection authorities to care for
and process them. Arrests for illegal crossings topped 2 million in each
of the U.S. government’s past two budget years. In December, arrests for
illegal border crossings from Mexico reached an all-time high since
figures have been released. The backlog of people in immigration court
has grown by 1 million over the past budget year.
In the articles, Republicans argue that Mayorkas is deliberately
violating immigration laws passed by Congress, such as those requiring
detention of migrants, and that through his policies, a crisis has
arisen at the border. They accuse him of releasing migrants without
effective ways to make sure they show up for court or are removed from
the country. They cited an Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo
written by Mayorkas that sets priorities for whom the agency should
target for enforcement proceedings as proof that he is letting people
stay in the country who don’t have the right to do so.
They also attacked the administration’s use of the humanitarian
parole authority, which allows the DHS secretary to admit certain
migrants into the country. Republicans said the Biden administration has
essentially created a mass parole program that bypasses Congress. They
cited cities such as New York that have struggled with high numbers of
migrants, taxing housing and education systems, as proof of the
financial costs immigration is taking.
Democrats, as well as Mayorkas, have argued that it’s not the
administration’s policies that are causing people to attempt to migrate
to America but that the movement is part of a global mass migration of
people fleeing wars, economic instability and political repression.
Revelers
Pack Tampa, Florida, Waterfront for Gasparilla Pirate Fest
date: 2024-01-29, from: VOA News USA
Tampa, Florida — Revelers clad in pirate finery packed Tampa’s
waterfront this weekend as a flotilla of boats arrived for the city’s
annual Gasparilla Pirate Fest.
Led by Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla, the invading pirates docked to
make a final demand for the key to the city. Once ashore, the
festivities celebrating their annual invasion included a Saturday
afternoon parade through downtown and live music and bead throwing that
lasted well into the night.
A fixture nearly every year since 1904, the Gasparilla Pirate Fest is
named for the mythical pirate Jose Gaspar. There’s not much evidence he
actually existed, but according to legend he plundered ships and
captured hostages in the Gulf of Mexico from the 1780s until around
1821.
The colorful account of his supposed life first surfaced in the early
1900s in an advertising brochure for the Gasparilla Inn, which was
located south of Tampa in Boca Grande at the end of a rail line and in
need of an exciting promotion to lure in guests.
Called the “Last of the Buccaneers,” Gaspar’s memory lives on in the
name of Tampa Bay’s NFL team.
Charlatans
spreading misleading beginner advice are the evolutionary crabs of
youtube content creators
date: 2024-01-29, from: Marginallia log
You have a hobby you’ve been into for a decade or more. You like
talking about your hobby, and your friends and family, after listening
to these things for as long as you’ve been into them, maybe aren’t as
excited to always hear about it as you are about discussing them, so in
an act of compassion you create a youtube channel where you can
monologue about your passion instead.
Look
at the new release of dotConnect for PostgreSQL with .NET 8 and EF Core
8 Support
date: 2024-01-29, from: PostgreSQL News
Devart announced a new release of dotConnect for PostgreSQL.
Devart, a recognized vendor of world-class data connectivity solutions
for various data connection technologies and frameworks, released a new
version of dotConnect for PostgreSQL.
The significant improvements in this release:
.NET 8 and EF Core 8 Support.
Support for Visual Studio 2022 version 17.9 Preview.
Added new property “Do Not Generate OnConfiguring Method” to enhance the
improve the flexibility of EF Core.
To see the latest features update visit:
https://www.devart.com/dotconnect/postgresql/revision_history.html
To download a new product - visit:
https://www.devart.com/dotconnect/postgresql/download.html
dotConnect for PostgreSQL is a high-performance ORM enabled data
provider for PostgreSQL that builds on ADO.NET technology to present a
complete solution for developing PostgreSQL-based database applications.
It introduces new approaches for designing application architecture,
boosts productivity, and facilitates the development of database
applications.
About Devart
Devart is one of the leading developers of database tools and
administration software, ALM solutions, data providers for various
database servers, data integration, and backup solutions. The company
also implements Web and Mobile development projects. For additional
information about Devart, visit https://www.devart.com/.
pgEdge
Redefines Distributed PostgreSQL with the Launch of pgEdge Cloud
Developer Edition
date: 2024-01-29, from: PostgreSQL News
First serverless distributed Postgres managed cloud service delivers low
latency and high availability in three minutes or less
Alexandria, Virginia – January 24, 2024 — pgEdge, Inc., the leading
company dedicated to distributed Postgres, today announced the launch of
pgEdge Cloud Developer Edition, making it easy for developers to deploy
and access distributed Postgres databases for low latency and high
availability. pgEdge Cloud is the first fully distributed database as a
service (DBaaS) optimized for the network edge and based completely on
the widely adopted open-source PostgreSQL database. pgEdge Cloud
Developer is a generous free tier for developers to rapidly and easily
experience the advantages of distributed Postgres.
pgEdge Cloud addresses the growing demand for low-latency and “always
on” applications that need to be dispersed across multiple cloud
regions. As a fully managed distributed Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS),
pgEdge Cloud empowers developers and database architects with an
intuitive user interface for creation, management and monitoring of
distributed database clusters running across multiple cloud regions.
By putting database nodes closer to global users, pgEdge Cloud can
dramatically reduce latency and application response times, particularly
page loads for database intensive applications. Additionally, having
multiple replicated database nodes across the network ensures high
levels of availability, since when a node fails or is not reachable
traffic automatically routes to the nearest still available node.
pgEdge Cloud is especially well suited for use with edge development
platforms such as Cloudflare Workers, Vercel and Fastly. The ability to
place database nodes in multiple regions around the global network,
together with automated and seamless nearest-node routing, allow
developers to deploy very low latency applications that eliminate slow
round trips to a single centrally located database. pgEdge Cloud
Developer Edition includes built-in integration for Cloudflare Workers,
and support for Vercel and Fastly will be available in coming weeks. An
example demonstrating pgEdge Cloud’s ease of integration with Cloudflare
is https://github.com/pgEdge/cloudflare-worker-template. Additionally, a
demo application running against a distributed version of the well-known
“Northwind Traders” database, and implemented with Cloudflare Workers
and pgEdge Cloud, is at: https://northwind.pgedge.com/.
Key features of pgEdge Cloud Developer Edition include:
Instant Deployment: Developers can now deploy a globally distributed
PostgreSQL serverless database in just a minute, streamlining the
database setup process and accelerating development.
Predefined multi-region clusters: Creation and deployment of pgEdge
distributed databases is simplified via prebuilt global clusters.
Developers can select from a set of predefined multi-region clusters
that span the continental US, US and Europe, or US, Europe and Asia.
Multi-Master (Active-Active) Architecture: Each database node can handle
both read and write traffic for low latency and high availability,
utilizing an eventually consistent multi-master architecture with built
in conflict resolution and reporting.
Latency-based DNS Routing: Geo-proximity routing ensures that users are
connected to the nearest pgEdge node that is up and running.
Generous Free Tier: Available for prototyping, application development
and evaluation of pgEdge capabilities with up to 12GB of storage across
three nodes.
Management and Monitoring: Eliminates the need for manual infrastructure
configuration and management while providing automated backups, security
against misconfiguration, and continuous monitoring via a clean and easy
to use web dashboard.
“pgEdge Cloud Developer Edition marks a significant leap in our mission
to make it easy for developers to build and deploy highly distributed
database applications across the global network,” said Phillip Merrick,
Co-founder and CEO at pgEdge. “The innovative features of the pgEdge
Cloud fully managed service, from multi-region, multi-master support to
its intuitive user interface, empower developers to easily create and
manage distributed PostgreSQL databases.”
Availability
pgEdge Cloud Developer Edition is available today in preview. Users
requiring more resources or capabilities beyond what is offered in the
Developer Edition free tier can upgrade to either pgEdge Cloud Team
Edition (coming in H1 2024), or pgEdge Cloud Enterprise Edition.
Experience pgEdge Cloud Developer Edition by signing up at
www.pgedge.com/get-started/cloud. To learn more visit www.pgedge.com or
join us for an exclusive webinar “Getting to the Low Latency, High
Availability Goodness of Distributed Postgres in 3 Minutes or Less” on
Wednesday January 31st at 1pm ET https://hubs.la/Q02gBnsh0. The first
500 users to sign up for pgEdge Cloud Developer Edition will be eligible
for an exclusive launch t-shirt. (Restrictions apply. Offer available in
US only.)
About pgEdge:
pgEdge, the leading company dedicated to distributed Postgres, has made
its mission to make it easy for developers to build and deploy highly
distributed database applications across the global network. Founded by
industry veterans who have championed enterprise usage of the PostgreSQL
database for several decades and helped run the world’s largest managed
database cloud services, pgEdge is headquartered in Northern Virginia.
The founders have previously founded and/or led successful companies
such as webMethods (NASDAQ: WEBM), EnterpriseDB (acquired by Bain
Capital), SparkPost (acquired by MessageBird), OpenSCG (acquired by AWS)
and Fugue (acquired by Snyk). Investors in pgEdge include Sands Capital
Ventures, Grotech Ventures and Sand Hill East.
US, China
to Resume Stalled Fentanyl Talks in Beijing
date: 2024-01-28, from: VOA News USA
Washington — U.S. and Chinese officials will meet in Beijing Tuesday
for their first talks in years to stem the production of ingredients for
the drug fentanyl, senior Biden administration officials said.
The meeting of the counternarcotics working group comes after Chinese
President Xi Jinping pledged during a summit with U.S. President Joe
Biden in November to clamp down on the trade.
“For years bilateral cooperation between the United States and the
People’s Republic of China on counternarcotics has been suspended which
has hindered our progress,” a U.S. official said.
“But that changed during the November 15 meeting,” the official told
reporters on the condition of anonymity.
Washington hopes to get China to cooperate on tackling companies that
manufacture the precursor chemicals to make fentanyl, a synthetic opioid
many times more powerful than heroin, and on cutting financing for the
trade.
Fentanyl has caused an epidemic of addiction in the United States,
with 100,000 overdose deaths a year, making it the leading cause of
death of people aged 18 to 49, the official said.
Since the summit China has shut down one company, blocked some
international payments and resumed sharing information on shipments and
trafficking, added the official.
The meeting, featuring U.S. justice, homeland security, diplomatic
and counternarcotics officials, will focus on “ongoing coordination to
support concrete enforcement actions.”
Xi said after meeting Biden in California in November that China
“deeply sympathizes” with victims of fentanyl.
China and the United States have been trying to stabilize relations
after years of tensions with Beijing’s top diplomat Wang Yi and U.S.
national security adviser Jake Sullivan meeting in Bangkok this past
week.
Another senior U.S. official said after those talks that cooperation
on fentanyl between the two countries “needs to be continuous and
ongoing. It’s not just one snapshot in time.”
750
million Indian mobile subscribers’ info for sale on dark web
date: 2024-01-28, updated: 2024-01-28, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
ALSO: Samsung turns to Baidu for Galaxy AI in China; Terraform Labs
files for bankruptcy; India’s supercomputing ambitions
Asia In Brief Indian infosec firm CloudSEK last week
claimed it found records describing 750 million Indian mobile network
subscribers on the dark web, with two crime gangs offering the trove of
data for just $3,000.…
Multiple
people transported after collision on I-5
date: 2024-01-28, from: The Signal
Multiple people were airlifted to the hospital following a traffic
collision on the Interstate 5 freeway on Sunday morning near Gorman,
according to the California Highway Patrol. “Just before 10 a.m. this
morning, we got a call of a traffic collision with a vehicle
overturned,” said CHP Officer Stephen Brandt. “They requested a
helicopter to […]
New
Orleans Thief Steals 7 King Cakes From Bakery in Very Mardi Gras
Way
date: 2024-01-28, from: VOA News USA
New Orleans, Louisiana — With their purple, gold and green colors and
toy babies hidden inside, king cakes are staples of Mardi Gras
celebrations in New Orleans, but apparently they’re also valuable enough
to steal — at least this time of year during the Carnival season.
A thief stole seven king cakes — about as many as he could carry —
during a break-in last week at a New Orleans bakery. The thief also took
cash and a case of vodka from Bittersweet Confections last Wednesday,
according to the New Orleans Police Department.
“Our king cakes are just that good,” the bakery wrote on social
media. “But please come and purchase one during our regular store
hours.”
While it’s a secular celebration, Carnival in New Orleans — and
around the world — is strongly linked to Christian and Roman Catholic
traditions. The season begins on Jan. 6, the 12th day after Christmas,
and continues until Mardi Gras, known as Fat Tuesday, which is the final
day of feasting, drinking and revelry before Ash Wednesday and the
fasting associated with Lent.
King cakes are among the foods most associated with Carnival in New
Orleans. The rings of pastry are adorned with purple, green and gold
sugar or icing, and they often have a tiny plastic baby hidden inside as
a prize.
One wisecracker responded to the bakery’s social media post with a
tongue-in-cheek false admission that he was the thief.
“It was me. …I’m holding all seven babies hostage until I get a
lifetime supply of King Cakes from you every year,” the man posted.
Oregon
Newspaper to Relaunch Print Edition After Theft Forced It to Lay Off Its
Staff
date: 2024-01-28, from: VOA News USA
Portland, Oregon — An Oregon weekly newspaper that had to lay off its
entire staff after its funds were embezzled by a former employee will
relaunch its print edition next month, its editor said, a move made
possible in large part by fundraising campaigns and community
contributions.
The Eugene Weekly will return to newsstands on Feb. 8 with roughly
25,000 copies, about six weeks after the embezzlement forced the
decades-old publication to halt its print edition, editor Camilla
Mortensen said Saturday.
“It has been both terrifying and wonderful,” Mortensen told The
Associated Press, describing the emotional rollercoaster of the last few
weeks. “I thought it was hard to run a paper. It’s much harder to
resurrect a paper.”
The alternative weekly, founded in 1982 and distributed for free in
Eugene, one of the largest cities in Oregon, had to lay off its entire
10-person staff right before Christmas. It was around that time that the
paper became aware of at least $100,000 in unpaid bills and discovered
that a now-former employee who had been involved with the paper’s
finances had used its bank account to pay themselves around $90,000,
Mortensen said.
Additionally, multiple employees, including Mortensen, realized that
money from their paychecks that was supposed to be going into retirement
accounts was never deposited.
The accused employee was fired after the embezzlement came to
light.
The news was a devastating blow to a publication that serves as an
important source of information in a community that, like many others
nationwide, is struggling with growing gaps in local news coverage.
The Eugene police department’s investigation is still ongoing, and
forensic accountants hired by the paper are continuing to piece together
what happened.
Local Eugene news outlets KEZI and KLCC were among the first to
report the weekly’s return to print.
Since the layoffs, some former staff members have continued to
volunteer their time to help keep the paper’s website up and running.
Much of the online content published in recent weeks has been work from
journalism students at the University of Oregon, located in Eugene, and
from freelancers who offered to submit stories for free — “the
journalistic equivalent of pro bono,” Mortensen said.
Some former employees had to find other jobs in order to make ends
meet. But Mortensen hopes to eventually rehire her staff once the paper
pays its outstanding bills and becomes more financially sustainable.
The paper has raised roughly $150,000 since December, Mortensen said.
The majority of the money came from an online GoFundMe campaign, but
financial support also came from local businesses, artists and readers.
The paper even received checks from people living as far away as Iowa
and New York after news outlets across the country picked up the
story.
“People were so invested in helping us that it just really gives me
hope for journalism at a time where I think a lot of people don’t have
hope,” she told the AP. “When we saw how many people contributed and how
many people continue to offer to help, you can’t not try to print the
paper. You’ve got to give it a shot.”
The paper aims to continue weekly printing beyond Feb. 8.
The Rotary Club of Santa Clarita Valley hosted this year’s 11th annual
Chili Cookoff on Friday evening at the SCV Senior Center. The
competition had 20 local competitors hoping to win first place for best
chili recipe and proceeds raised would go toward supporting local
nonprofits. Outside the SCV Senior Center patio’s perimeter stood
dozens […]
As a way to play music, it was better in nearly every way. Spotify
then became my favorite way to listen to music. Recently though, I’ve
found myself hating Spotify. The app loads slowly. Music no longer plays
instantly. The interface is riddled with recommendations, podcasts,
audiobooks, and other junk that I don’t care for. …
Resizing
macOS app windows for 16:9 screen capture
date: 2024-01-28, from: Jeff Geerling blog
Resizing
macOS app windows for 16:9 screen capture
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>I frequently need to capture a window of some Mac app for a recording (usually for my YouTube channel), and I've used a little AppleScript I wrote years ago for the purpose.</p>
Somehow, that script (which I saved as a ‘one shot’ App
(.app extension) that just runs then quits) got deleted off
my Script Editor folder in my iCloud Drive, so I had to re-create it.
Luckily, the syntax for this operation is dead simple:
tell application "Safari"
set bounds of front window to {0, 50, 1280, 770}
end tell
You can adjust the {X, Y, width, height} parameters
accordingly—note that the width and height seem to be additive to the
X/Y. So I use 770 instead of 720 for the height (720 + 50).
In Script Editor, save the file as a .app,
with the option to keep it running unchecked. Now, whenever you want a
window sized perfectly for capture, just press Command + Spacebar, then
type in the name of the Script/App you saved, and hit enter. The
top-most window in Safari will scale to exactly 720p resolution.
Skyline
Ranch Park – the Newest Park in Santa Clarita!
date: 2024-01-28, from: City of Santa Clarita
Skyline Ranch Park – the Newest Park in Santa Clarita! By City Manager
Ken Striplin Parks are the main hub of engagement and activity in our
communities and here in Santa Clarita our 37 parks play a pivotal role
in enhancing the quality of life for our residents. Whether you and your
families frequent the […]
Provides greater control of which product tabs are shown and their
displayed order along with a new presenter layout for combining your
video and a shared screen. (Free, 123.9 MB, macOS 10.13+)
The “new” Santa Clarita Valley Senior Center Bella Vida will celebrate
its fifth anniversary in April. The center, which serves more than
15,000 SCV seniors annually offers a range of amenities and services all
designed to help seniors with the challenges of aging “in place.” The
‘New’ Senior Center The SCV Senior Center (27180 Golden […]
The Honda Pilot debuted 21 years ago as the Japanese carmaker’s
largest sport utility vehicle. It succeeded quickly as an alternative to
its seven-year older and smaller sibling, the Honda CR-V.
The Honda HR-V, the smallest of an SUV foursome, arrived in North
America in 2015. The Honda Passport, positioned between the HR-V and the
Pilot, debuted in 1993.
The season of hearts, flowers and love is almost here. What will you do
this year in the Santa Clarita Valley to celebrate Valentine’s Day? The
Big I Do The city of Santa Clarita has the perfect party planned for
those seeking to “tie the knot” on Valentine’s Day, or those thinking of
renewing their […]
It’s a new year and you’ve probably broken every resolution you made on
New Year’s Eve. Don’t worry, you are in good company. Statistics show
that roughly a third of the population in the United States make
resolutions for the new year. Research also suggests that only 9% of
Americans that make resolutions complete them, […]
date: 2024-01-28, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News
I
spent a couple of days putting together a JSON text editor in a modal
dialog for a project I’m working on. I’m combining the
Ace editor with
the Bootstrap toolkit. I’ve used
both components before, but never together. And they’re always a bit
tricky to get working because I’m impatient and the docs are spread out,
and there are different versions. It’s all kind of a mess, so you just
get it working and move on, never quite sure why it works, and I rarely
end up with reusable code. But it’s certainly a lot better than starting
from scratch, which basically is impossible, given the depth of the two
components. After spinning my wheels a bit, I did what I always do in
2024, I turned to ChatGPT, outlined the problem, and asked if it knew of
any sample code, which it proceeded to write for me, in about two
seconds (not kidding about that). I copied their code and pasted it into
my editor and ran it. It worked. Then I went through a number of
iterations, restructuring the code to meet my needs, each time checking
with ChatGPT, asking what it thought of my code. And of course there
were problems, for example at one point there were two vertical
scrollbars, and each time we worked together to figure out the
problem and the fix. In the end, I have a solid editor that works
exactly as I want it to, and best of all, I understand how it works.
Here’s the
transcript
of the work I did with it, over more than 24 hours, a few different
sessions.
I’ll try to remember when this code ships as part of a product, to link
to this perspective.
Next up, I’d like to get it to understand my coding conventions, so when
it shares code with me it can save me the step of having to convert its
conventions to mine. In other words, I’d like to return the favor. It’s
doing a great job of teaching and coaching me. I’d like to teach it how
to do that better, so we work better together over time. And perhaps it
can teach human programmers what I’ve learned about programming in over
50 years of doing this work.
A
bit of philosophy. People say these things aren’t intelligent, but
seriously, if I can engage with it as if it were intelligent, far more
intelligent in ways than I am, what’s the difference between that and
actually being intelligent? I know from a lifetime of dealing with
supposedly intelligent humans, and being one myself, how rarely we focus
on the idea that the person we’re conversing with has an inner life
that’s vastly different from ours and no less complex, and
contradictory. We tend to think of others as being like us, or like
someone who raised us. Always in a movie, never in the moment. So why is
it interesting that ChatGPT is a machine? These are questions thinkers
and writers have been pondering for decades if not centuries, but –
now we’re living it. I’m so happy to have made it this far! An
amazing experience, so much learning in so little time. I don’t
understand how people can sit on the sidelines and not want to be the
first to try all this stuff out, to be part of its evolution. I feel so
lucky.
A puzzling thing, in the transcripts I’m identified as “anonymous,” but
I am logged in. It must know my name. I bet this is some kind of setting
which defaults to anonymous, to play it safe.
One more thing. I copied and pasted the text above into ChatGPT.
Here
are its comments. A funny thing about ChatGPT is that you can’t ask
it how to use ChatGPT itself. It doesn’t know about the chat UI?
Yet another thing. I remember my father, when he was forced to retire by
illness, said how fortunate he was that the internet was there, so he
could be involved in the world even though he had stopped working. He
said his father would have loved it, and I don’t doubt that he would.
Same with ChatGPT. My parents and uncles were always looking up stuff,
wanting to understand how things worked. This is a whole new level. The
machines are now far better at collaborating over the net than humans
are. Where will that take us? Maybe this is something else we can learn
from the machines.
At one point or another, millions of adults across the globe have
resolved to be more physically active. The benefits of routine exercise
are too numerous to cite, but some of the more notable ones include a
lower risk for chronic disease and illness, improved self-esteem and
greater overall health. With so much to gain […]
What is a Seltos? A Seltos is a subcompact SUV built in the Gwangju,
Korea assembly plant and sold worldwide by Kia. This very popular
subcompact SUV class has many competitors and the Kia Seltos goes head
to head with crossovers like the Honda HR-V, Subaru Crosstrek and the
Toyota Corolla Cross. Small crossovers, also known as subcompact SUVs,
are a type of sport utility vehicle that are smaller in size and have a
more fuel efficient design that gets better gas mileage than all the
larger SUVs.
Topton
L10 is a 15.6 inch notebook with a 7 inch tablet embedded next to the
keyboard
date: 2024-01-28, from: Liliputing
A few years ago Lenovo put out a ThinkBook Plus Gen 3 laptop featuring a
17.3 inch ultra-wide primary display and an 8 inch secondary display
positioned to the right of the keyboard, allowing you to use your
fingertips or a pressure-sensitive pen for input. Now Chinese PC company
Topton is borrowing that idea… kind […]
Biden
is trying to balance Gaza protests and free speech rights as
demonstrators disrupt his events
date: 2024-01-28, from: San Jose Mercury News
It was President Joe Biden’s first big campaign rally of the year, a
chance to spotlight the issue of protecting abortion rights. Instead, at
least a dozen times during Biden’s 22-minute speech, demonstrators
scattered throughout the audience rose to shout out demands for a
cease-fire in Gaza.
What
is UNRWA, the main aid provider in Gaza that Israel accuses of militant
links?
date: 2024-01-28, from: San Jose Mercury News
Israel’s allegations that 12 employees of a United Nations agency
were involved in Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack have led several Western countries
to cut off funding and reignited debate over Gaza’s biggest humanitarian
aid provider.
Competition
is decreasing in enterprise IT – and you’ll be poorer and dumber for
it
date: 2024-01-28, updated: 2024-01-28, from: The Register (UK I.T.
News)
Suppliers know they can get away with less and the cloud means
alternatives are less likely to emerge
Comment HPE’s decision to acquire Juniper is bad news
for enterprise IT, as yet another example of consolidation in a field
that already offers fewer, and less palatable, competitive choices in a
shrinking market.…
The 2024 tax filing season has begun, with the Department of Revenue
and Taxation now accepting 2023 tax year returns, the agency announced
in a press release.
GPD:
Man found under robbery suspect’s bed, arrested for drugs
date: 2024-01-28, from: Guam Daily Post
Officers with the Guam Police Department were looking for a robbery
suspect at a home in Harmon when they came across a man they later
arrested on suspicion of drug possession hiding under a bed within the
home.
The Guam Police Department executed a search warrant on a house in an
undisclosed location in central Guam based on information that
“potential drug activity” was being conducted.
School
meal portion concerns raised by public school parents
date: 2024-01-28, from: Guam Daily Post
Several parents who attended the first Guam Department of Education
engagement forum of the school year raised concerns over school meals
provided to public school students.
Occasionally I find myself in groups populated by business people,
technologists, consultants, people who work in nonprofits, practitioners
of various kinds — and academics. Such groups gather to figure out how
to respond to certain major social problems. Because the participants
come from various professional worlds, it can sometimes be difficult to
discover a common […]
I was reminiscing recently about songs that are close to my heart. So
many country songs from my younger years pop into my head at the oddest
times these days, but I heard one recently from my friend Willie Nelson
that reminded me of another time in Texas, a gentler time, and it’s
certainly a reason to smile. Back in 1982, Willie recorded “Always On My
Mind.”
The
Art Along The Metro K Line Tells LA’s Stories. Find Out How They Were
Made
date: 2024-01-28, updated: 2024-01-28, from: The LAist
Metro’s Here: Arts & Culture Along the K exhibit at the Museum of
African American Art in Baldwin Hills highlights the making of each
public art piece on Metro’s newest line.
The
Film Industry Is Starting to Recover From Last Year’s Strikes, But
Progress Has Been Slow
date: 2024-01-28, updated: 2024-01-28, from: The LAist
Even with the end of the SAG-AFTRA strike last December, filming
didn’t pick back up in time to make up for historically low levels of
filming in the fourth quarter of 2023.
‘Hot
Droughts’ Are Becoming More Common In The Arid West, New Study
Finds
date: 2024-01-28, updated: 2024-01-28, from: The LAist
Scientists looked at trees to better understand the interplay between
temperatures and droughts in the Western U.S. Human-caused climate
change is exacerbating both.
County
lowers maximum payments for lava-impacted properties
date: 2024-01-28, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Owners of secondary homes damaged, destroyed or isolated by the 2018 Kilauea eruption will get smaller payouts than expected after Hawaii County adjusted the terms of its housing buyout program. </p>
The Wall
That Heals concludes Hilo visit with ceremony
date: 2024-01-28, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>A ceremony Saturday at the The Wall That Heals in Hilo drew a huge crowd of veterans, families, friends and people looking to honor the veterans — living and dead — of the Vietnam War.</p>
<p>The first stage in an effort to develop another roadway into Puna lost its state funding after the Hawaii County Council voted Wednesday against accepting the money.</p>
<p>Keiki and adults have the chance to take a “Journey Through the Universe” as educators and scientists return next month to Hilo for the 20th annual astronomy education and outreach program.</p>
<p>The Kamehameha Schools - Hawai‘i girls volleyball team closed out its regular season by claiming yet another high-ranked victim, edging Waiakea High 49-48 on Thursday night in Hilo.</p>
LeBron
James has triple-double and hits winning free throws, Lakers beat
Warriors in double overtime
date: 2024-01-28, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — LeBron James made two free throws with 1.2 seconds left in the second overtime to cap his triple-double of 36 points, 20 rebounds and 12 assists in the Los Angeles Lakers’ 145-144 victory over the Golden State Warriors on Saturday night.</p>
Biden
aide urges Bejing to press Iran over Houthi attacks. China warns US over
Taiwan independence
date: 2024-01-28, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>U.S. national security adviser Jake Sullivan pressed Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during talks in Thailand to use China’s influence with Iran to ease tensions in the Middle East. The officials also agreed to work toward arranging a call between President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping.</p>
Nazi
death camp survivors mark 79th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation on
Holocaust Remembrance Day
date: 2024-01-28, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>OSWIECIM, Poland — A group of survivors of Nazi death camps marked the 79th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp during World War II in a modest ceremony Saturday in southern Poland.</p>
Netanyahu
is defiant after UN court ruling as deaths in Gaza offensive
continue
date: 2024-01-28, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday pushed back after the International Court of Justice ruling to limit death and destruction in the military’s Gaza offensive, declaring that “we decide and act according to what is required for our security.” Among the first deaths reported since the ruling, witnesses said three Palestinians were killed in an airstrike that Israel said targeted a Hamas commander.</p>
Trump’s
nomination is becoming a horrible inevitability. Why can’t the GOP do
better?
date: 2024-01-28, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>With Donald Trump’s decisive victory in the New Hampshire Republican primary, the possibility of anyone else securing the party’s presidential nomination is vanishingly small. That depressing reality doesn’t mean that former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley should abandon her campaign to overtake Trump, which she vowed to continue. </p>
<p>Karen Baraoidan, 72, of Papaikou, died Jan. 16 at Hilo Medical Center. Born in Honolulu, she was a bookmaker. Visitation to be held 3-5 p.m. Feb. 3 at Dodo Mortuary Chapel, with prayer service at 5 p.m. Casual attire. Survived by sons Alex (Michelle) Galdones of Hilo, Derek (Cheryl) Sabino of Lanai and Jason (Wendy) Baraoidan of Gardena, Calif.; daughters Francell Garza and Rochelle Guzman of Gardena, Calif., Denise (Robbie) Perkins of Las Vegas, Kierra Bryant of Papaikou and Leah (Roger) Carvalho of Hilo; brothers Neal Macia and Gene Mancia of Hilo; sister Susan Gabris of Honolulu; 15 grandchildren, eight great-grandchildren, and numerous nieces and nephews. Arrangements by Dodo Mortuary.</p>
Volcano
Watch: Iceland’s recent eruption a reminder of lava flow hazards
date: 2024-01-28, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>Lava flows slowly approaching houses. Authorities evacuating neighborhoods. The tension of residents not knowing when, or if, they can return to their homes.</p>
Biden
returns to South Carolina to show his determination to win back Black
voters in 2024
date: 2024-01-28, from: Hawaii Tribune Harold
<p>COLUMBIA, S.C. — Joe Biden doesn’t need to worry about his prospects in South Carolina’s Democratic primary next week. He’s got that locked up.</p>
The DrivethruRPG website so depends on shit that it loads from other
domains that I cannot log in no matter how many exceptions I add to
uBlock Origin, Privacy Badger, or the Firefox content blocking
preferences. And with every second I spend doing this, I resent them
more. And when I finally start Chromium to try and connect, I’m already
ranting as I sit at my laptop. And then I get Connection timed out from
cloudflare and really… I feel like they don’t want my money. Uuuugh.
I used their contact form. When I hit the submit button I was greeted by
a white page. I don’t know if they go an email. (I did try the next day
from a phone and that worked – which sort of illustrates the point.)
Here’s what I wrote:
I think in a world where big tech is tracking us, where everybody and
their uncle is spying on us, it is only natural that people start
locking down their browser. I have uBlock Origin and Privacy Badger
installed and I tell all my browsers to do as much content blocking as
they can, I delete all cookies when I close the browser. It’s the right
thing to do. It is all the more galling when a website such as Drivethru
becomes practically unusable as a consequence of me trying to do the
right thing. It feels as if Drivethru is betraying me to the big tech
corporations, helping them spy on me. It’s a revolting feeling. These
days, I have it every time I remember to use an unprotected Chromium
browser just to log into Drivethru. Every single time I wish for an
alternative. Every single time I hope that itch.io and other competitors
end up replacing you.
If only you had a simple, straight forward website, served your own
Javascript, had no tracking, and allowed me to browse stuff and buy it.
I don’t really expect an answer to this email. It just feels unfair to
rant on social media about the situation without telling you about it.
I hope Drivethru improves. I really do. I believe that change is
possible and I hope that you do, too.
Honestly there’s some good points and some really bad points to their
redesign and I’m having a hard time reconciling the good points because
the bad points are so infuriating.
By David Hegg In the biblical story of Jonah, after enjoying an
all-expense-paid, three-night stay in waterfront accommodations in the
belly of the whale, the prophet finally completes the mission God gave
him. He went to Nineveh, preached impending doom to the city, and
watched them repent and ward off God’s judgment. And, unlike every […]
Instead of Democrats putting President Donald Trump on trial for
anything they can think of, and instead of Republicans going after
Hunter Biden because it will hurt President Joe Biden, instead of
looking to have college loans forgiven and getting “free” food or “free”
medical insurance … What ever happened to this novel idea? “And […]
US
Sees Signs of Progress on Deal to Release Israeli Hostages, Pause
War
date: 2024-01-28, from: VOA News USA
WASHINGTON — U.S. negotiators are making progress on a potential
agreement under which Israel would pause military operations against
Hamas in Gaza for two months in exchange for the release of more than
100 hostages who were captured in the October 7 attack on Israel,
according to two senior administration officials.
The officials, who requested anonymity to discuss the sensitive
negotiations, said Saturday that emerging terms of the yet-to-be sealed
deal would play out over two phases.
In the first phase, fighting would stop to allow for the remaining
women, elderly and wounded hostages to be released by Hamas.
Israel and Hamas would then aim to work out details during the first
30 days of the pause for a second phase in which Israeli soldiers and
civilian men would be released. The emerging deal also calls for Israel
to allow more humanitarian aid into Gaza.
While the proposed deal would not end the war, U.S. officials are
hopeful that such an agreement could lay the groundwork for a durable
resolution to the conflict.
The New York Times first reported on Saturday that progress has been
made towards an agreement for a pause in fighting in exchange for the
remaining hostages.
CIA director Bill Burns is expected to discuss the contours of the
emerging agreement when he meets on Sunday in France with David Barnea,
the head of Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency, Qatari Prime Minister
Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, and Egyptian intelligence chief Abbas
Kamel for talks centered on the hostage negotiations, according to three
people familiar with the scheduled meeting who were not authorized to
comment publicly.
President Joe Biden on Friday spoke by phone with Egyptian President
Abdel Fattah el-Sissi and Qatar’s ruling emir, Sheikh Tamim Bin Hamad
Al-Thani. Calls with both leaders focused on the hostage situation.
“Both leaders affirmed that a hostage deal is central to establishing
a prolonged humanitarian pause in the fighting and ensure additional
life-saving humanitarian assistance reaches civilians in need throughout
Gaza,” the White House said in a statement about Biden’s call with the
Qatari leader. “They underscored the urgency of the situation, and
welcomed the close cooperation among their teams to advance recent
discussions.”
Burns heads to France for the high-level talks after White House
senior adviser Brett McGurk traveled to the Mideast this week for talks
on the hostage situation.
If Burns sees progress in his talks in France, Biden may dispatch
McGurk back to the Mideast quickly to try to complete an agreement.
McGurk during his talks this week was also laying the groundwork for
another trip to the region by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who
next week could make his fifth trip to the Middle East since the start
of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
The White House and CIA have yet to publicly confirm Burns’ meeting
in France and administration officials have been guarded that a deal can
quickly be brokered.
“We should not expect any imminent developments,” National Security
Council spokesperson John Kirby told reporters on Friday.
Biden and his aides are keenly aware that the mounting Palestinian
death toll, and widespread suffering in Gaza, is frustrating some in his
Democratic base, who want to see him put more pressure on Israel to end
the war. Democrats in Michigan have warned the White House that Biden’s
handling of the Israel-Hamas conflict could cost him enough support
within the state’s sizable Arab American community to sway the outcome
of the 2024 election in a state that could be key to whether he wins a
second term.
Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly vowed to
continue the offensive until complete victory over Hamas is
achieved.
Netanyahu has faced increasing pressure from the families of many
hostages who are demanding a deal to win their loved ones’ release.
The October 7 attack killed some 1,200 people in Israel, and Hamas
and other militants abducted around 250 people.
Around 100 hostages were freed under a weeklong cease-fire deal in
November in exchange for the release of Palestinians imprisoned by
Israel. Around 130 remain captive, but a number have since been
confirmed dead.
Hamas has previously said it will free more captives only in exchange
for an end to the war and the release of thousands of Palestinian
prisoners.
In 1988, I sat in a Moscow hotel with a dozen Americans and our Russian
tour guide, discussing health care. The liberals were decrying the
American health system, until the Russian guide bravely asked how much
it cost to deliver a baby in America. She then went on to say that she
would gladly pay […]
Artist
Who Performed Nude Sues Museum Over Sexual Assault Claims
date: 2024-01-28, from: VOA News USA
albany, new york — A performer who appeared naked in a show by
world-renowned performance artist Marina Abramovic at New York City’s
Museum of Modern Art is suing the museum, saying it failed to take
action after he was sexually assaulted multiple times by attendees
during the performances nearly 14 years ago.
The suit was filed in Manhattan on Monday under the New York Adult
Survivors Act, a special state law that created a yearslong suspension
of the usual time limit for accusers to sue. Although the law expired
last year, the suit says the parties agreed to extend the window
closing.
John Bonafede alleges in the suit he was sexually assaulted by five
public onlookers who attended a show he was hired by the museum to
perform in as part of Abramovic’s retrospective “The Artist Is
Present.”
Email messages sent to the museum this week were not returned.
Abramovic is not named as a defendant and did not immediately return a
request for comment.
The work, titled “Imponderabilia,” saw Bonafede and another performer
standing face-to-face with each other in a doorway about 18 inches (45.7
centimeters) apart, fully nude, silent, and still. The exhibition, which
ran from March 14, 2010, through May 31, 2010, was curated by the museum
in a way that encouraged visitors to pass in between the performers as
they went from one gallery to the next, the suit alleges.
Mostly older men involved, says suit
The people who assaulted Bonafede were mostly older men, the suit
says. One of the perpetrators was a corporate member of the museum, who
was ultimately kicked out and revoked of his membership, according to
the suit.
During the final weeks of the exhibition, another attendee
non-consensually groped Bonafede’s private areas three times before they
were finally stopped by security, the suit said.
Bonafede reported four of the individuals to the museum staff and
security immediately, according to the suit, while the fifth was
witnessed personally by the museum security staff.
Female performer also assaulted, suit says
At one point, Bonafede also witnessed a public attendee sexually
assault his female co-performer by kissing her on the mouth without her
consent, the suit said.
Prior to the exhibition, the performers had voiced their concerns
about nude performers being subject to harassment in a letter to the
museum during contract negotiations, the suit said.
Once it began, several news outlets including The New York Times
reported on the inappropriate behavior by visitors, and the sexual
assaults on “Imponderabilia” were discussed within New York City’s art
and performance communities, the suit says.
Despite the museum having knowledge of the issue, it failed to take
action to protect the performers and prevent further sexual assaults,
such as telling visitors ahead of time that touching was not allowed,
the lawsuit said.
About a month into the exhibition, the museum created a handbook
outlining protocols for the performers to alert museum staff if they
felt unsafe or were inappropriately touched.
Bonafede agreed to continue the performance after he was assaulted
because of the “tough it out” culture of the exhibition, the suit says,
but suffered for years from emotional distress, and his mental health,
body image and career were damaged as a result.
The Associated Press generally does not name people who say they have
been sexually assaulted unless they come forward publicly. Bonafede gave
consent through his lawyer, Jordan Fletcher.
Fletcher declined to comment further on the suit, but said they will
be seeking a jury trial and compensatory damages.
PETALUMA, Calif. — Last month, Mike Weber got the news every poultry
farmer fears: His chickens tested positive for avian flu.
Following government rules, Weber’s company, Sunrise Farms, had to
slaughter its entire flock of egg-laying hens — 550,000 birds — to
prevent the disease from infecting other farms in Sonoma County north of
San Francisco.
“It’s a trauma. We’re all going through grief as a result of it,”
said Weber, standing in an empty hen house. “Petaluma is known as the
Egg Basket of the World. It’s devastating to see that egg basket go up
in flames.”
A year after the bird flu led to record egg prices and widespread
shortages, the disease known as highly pathogenic avian influenza is
wreaking havoc in California, which escaped the earlier wave of
outbreaks that devastated poultry farms in the Midwest.
The highly contagious virus has ravaged Sonoma County, where
officials have declared a state of emergency. During the past two
months, nearly a dozen commercial farms have had to destroy more than 1
million birds to control the outbreak, dealing an economic blow to
farmers, workers and their customers.
Merced County in Central California also has been hit hard, with
outbreaks at several large commercial egg-producing farms in recent
weeks.
Experts say bird flu is spread by ducks, geese and other migratory
birds. The waterfowl can carry the virus without getting sick and easily
spread it through their droppings to chicken and turkey farms and
backyard flocks through droppings and nasal discharges.
California poultry farms are implementing strict biosecurity measures
to curb the spread of the disease. State Veterinarian Annette Jones
urged farmers to keep their flocks indoors until June, including organic
chickens that are required to have outdoor access.
“We still have migration going for another couple of months. So we’ve
got to be as vigilant as possible to protect our birds,” said Bill
Mattos, president of the California Poultry Federation.
The loss of local hens led to a spike in egg prices in the San
Francisco Bay Area over the holidays before supermarkets and restaurants
found suppliers from outside the region.
While bird flu has been around for decades, the current outbreak of
the virus that began in early 2022 has prompted officials to slaughter
nearly 82 million birds, mostly egg-laying chickens, in 47 U.S. states,
according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Whenever the disease is
found the entire flock is slaughtered to help limit the spread of the
virus.
The price of a dozen eggs more than doubled to $4.82 at its peak in
January 2023. Egg prices returned to their normal range as egg producers
built up their flocks and outbreaks were controlled. Turkey and chicken
prices also spiked, partly due to the virus.
“I think this is an existential issue for the commercial poultry
industry. The virus is on every continent, except for Australia at this
point,” said Maurice Pitesky, a poultry expert at the University of
California, Davis.
Climate change is increasing the risk of outbreaks as changing
weather patterns disrupt the migratory patterns of wild birds, Pitesky
said. For example, exceptional rainfall last year created new waterfowl
habitat throughout California, including areas close to poultry
farms.
In California, the outbreak has impacted more than 7 million chickens
in about 40 commercial flocks and 24 backyard flocks, with most of the
outbreaks occurring over the past two months on the North Coast and
Central Valley, according to the USDA.
Industry officials are worried about the growing number of backyard
chickens that could become infected and spread avian flu to commercial
farms.
“We have wild birds that are are full of virus. And if you expose
your birds to these wild birds, they might get infected and ill,” said
Rodrigo Gallardo, a UC Davis researcher who studies avian influenza.
Gallardo advises the owners of backyard chickens to wear clean
clothes and shoes to protect their flocks from getting infected. If an
unusual number of chickens die, they should be tested for avian flu.
Ettamarie Peterson, a retired teacher in Petaluma, has a flock of
about 50 chickens that produce eggs she sells from her backyard barn for
50 cents each.
“I’m very concerned because this avian flu is transmitted by wild
birds, and there’s no way I can stop the wild birds from coming through
and leaving the disease behind,” Peterson said. “If your flock has any
cases of it, you have to destroy the whole flock.”
Sunrise Farms, which was started by Weber’s great-grandparents more
than a century ago, was infected despite putting in place strict
biosecurity measures to protect the flock.
“The virus got to the birds so bad and so quickly you walked in and
the birds were just dead,” Weber said. “Heartbreaking doesn’t describe
how you feel when you walk in and perfectly healthy young birds have
been just laid out.”
After euthanizing more than half a million chickens at Sunrise Farms,
Weber and his employees spent the Christmas holiday discarding the
carcasses. Since then, they’ve been cleaning out and disinfecting the
hen houses.
Weber hopes the farm will get approval from federal regulators to
bring chicks back to the farm this spring. Then it would take another
five months before the hens are mature enough to lay eggs.
He feels lucky that two farms his company co-owns have not been
infected and are still producing eggs for his customers. But recovering
from the outbreak won’t be easy.
“We have a long road ahead,” Weber said. “We’re going to make another
run of it and try to keep this family of employees together because
they’ve worked so hard to build this into the company that it is.”
date: 2024-01-28, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog
On January 27, 1838, Abraham Lincoln rose before the Young Men’s
Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois, to make a speech. Just 28 years old,
Lincoln had begun to practice law and had political ambitions. But he
was worried that his generation might not preserve the republic that the
founders had handed to it for transmission to yet another generation. He
took as his topic for that January evening, “The Perpetuation of Our
Political Institutions.”
Biden
Returns to South Carolina, Determined to Win Back Black Voters
date: 2024-01-28, from: VOA News USA
COLUMBIA, South carolina — U.S. President Joe Biden doesn’t need to
worry about his prospects in South Carolina’s Democratic primary next
week. He’s got that locked up.
He also knows he’s not likely to win the solidly red state come
November. South Carolina hasn’t voted for a Democrat since 1976.
Nonetheless, Biden spent the weekend in the state, intent on driving
home two messages: He’s loyal to the state that saved his campaign in
2020 and he’s determined to win back Black voters here and elsewhere who
were central to his election last time but are less enthused this
go-round.
“You’re the reason I am president,” Biden told attendees at the state
party’s fundraising dinner ahead of its first ever “first-in-the-nation”
Democratic primary on February 3. “You’re the reason Kamala Harris is a
historic vice president. And you’re the reason Donald Trump is a
defeated former president. You’re the reason Donald Trump is a loser.
And you’re the reason we’re going to win and beat him again.”
Biden received raved applause and chants of “four more years” from
attendees at the dinner, as he criticized his predecessor’s policies and
highlighted his efforts to support Black Americans. He was set to spend
Sunday in the state where politics and faith are intertwined at a
political event at St. John Baptist Church.
Deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said of the primary that
Biden’s team was working to “blow this out of the water” by running up
the score against long shot challengers. The Biden campaign also wants
to learn lessons about activating Black voters — the backbone of the
party — ahead of an expected 2024 rematch with Republican front-runner
Donald Trump.
Challenger invites Biden to pass torch
It was the first time Biden shared a stage with Representative Dean
Phillips, a long-shot challenger for the Democratic nomination, who
called on the president, 81, to step aside for a younger generation of
leaders to take on Trump.
“The numbers do not say things are looking good,” Phillips said of
Biden’s poll numbers. “My invitation to President Biden is to pass the
torch.”
Struggling to hold the attention of the crowd — many of whom were
holding Biden campaign signs ahead of the president’s appearance —
Phillips repeatedly asked the audience to quiet down and listen to
him.
Phillips told The Associated Press he did not interact with Biden at
the event, saying of Biden’s staff, “No. I don’t think they want him to
see me.”
Supporters talk up accomplishments
Ahead of the dinner, Biden stopped into Regal Lounge Men’s Barber
& Spa in Columbia, greeting, owners, employees and customers
mid-haircut at the barbershop.
The president has been getting mixed reviews from some Black voters
in the state that came through for him in 2020, including discontent
over his failure to deliver on voting rights legislation and other
issues.
Last year, at the outset of Biden’s reelection bid, conflicting views
among the same South Carolina Democratic voters whose support had been
so crucial to his nomination provided an early warning sign of the
challenges he faces as he tries to revive his diverse winning coalition
from 2020.
Overall, just half of Black adults said they approved of Biden in a
December poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs.
That is compared with 86% in July 2021, a shift that is generating
concern about the president’s reelection prospects.
APVoteCast, an extensive national survey of the electorate, also
found that support for Republican candidates ticked up slightly among
Black voters during the 2022 midterm elections, although Black voters
overwhelmingly supported Democrats.
The Biden campaign is running TV ads in South Carolina highlighting
Biden initiatives that it hopes will boost enthusiasm among Black
voters.
“On his first day in office with a country in crisis, President Biden
got to work — for us,” the ad states. “Cutting Black child poverty in
half, more money for Black entrepreneurs, millions of new good-paying
jobs and he lowered the cost of prescription drugs.”
The campaign is spending more than $270,000 on the ads through the
primary, according to tracking data. The Democratic National Committee
also launched a six-figure ad campaign across South Carolina and Nevada,
which is next on the Democratic primary calendar, to boost enthusiasm
for Biden among Black and Latino voters. And first lady Jill Biden was
in the state on Friday evening to rally voters.
Biden’s campaign has also hired staff in South Carolina to organize
ahead of the primary and through the general election, although for
nearly 50 years the state has picked a Republican for president.
‘We know Joe…Joe knows us’
Meanwhile, a pro-Biden super PAC, Unite the Country, is airing an ad
featuring Democratic Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina
ticking through what he says are major Biden accomplishments such as
reducing student loan debt and cutting insulin costs for older
people.
It was Clyburn’s 2020 endorsement of his longtime friend Biden that
helped the then-candidate score a thundering win in South Carolina’s
presidential primary.
In the new advertisement, Clyburn references his late wife, Emily,
who influenced his 2020 endorsement of Biden. She said that “if we
wanted to win the presidency, we better nominate Joe Biden,” Clyburn
says in the ad. “She was right then, and she’s still right today.”
Clyburn greeted Biden at the airport and accompanied him throughout
his visit.
While Trump has seen slightly improving levels of support among Black
and Latino voters, Biden’s team is more concerned that a lack of
enthusiasm for Biden will depress turnout among voters who are pivotal
to the Democratic coalition.
Biden’s team is using South Carolina as a proving ground, tracking
which messages and platforms break through with voters.
South Carolina, where Black voters make up a majority of the
Democratic electorate, is now the first meaningful contest in the
Democratic presidential race after the party reworked the party’s
nominating calendar at Biden’s call. Leading off with Iowa and New
Hampshire had long drawn criticism because the states are less diverse
than the rest of the country.
A co-chairman of Biden’s reelection campaign, Clyburn has remained
one of the president’s most stalwart advocates in Congress, as well as
in his home state.
Frequently, he reminds people of the same message he delivered in his
2020 endorsement: “We know Joe, and Joe knows us.”
Biden’s decision to campaign in the state “helps solidify South
Carolina’s place as the first in the nation primary moving forward,”
said Biden campaign communications director Michael Tyler.
It also provides Biden an opportunity to re-engage with Black voters
who have connections that extend beyond South Carolina.
“Obviously the diaspora is strong, familial ties are strong with
other key swing states in the area like Georgia and North Carolina,”
Tyler said.
This is Biden’s second trip to South Carolina this month. He spoke
earlier in the month at the pulpit of Mother Emanuel AME Church in
Charleston, where nine Black parishioners were shot to death in 2015 by
a white stranger they had invited to join their Bible study.
US
Appeals for Contributions to Haiti Security Mission
date: 2024-01-28, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The United States on Saturday appealed for urgent
support for a U.N.-backed law-and-order mission to Haiti, which has been
thrown into doubt after a Kenyan court ruled against Nairobi’s plan to
send its police to the gang-plagued nation.
“The United States’ commitment to the Haitian people remains
unwavering,” State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said in a
statement.
“We reaffirm our support of ongoing international efforts to deploy a
Multinational Security Support mission for Haiti… and renew our calls
for the international community to urgently provide support for this
mission.”
Kenya had been meant to lead the mission but a High Court judge on
Friday ruled that sending police to Haiti “contravenes the constitution
and the law and is therefore unconstitutional, illegal and invalid.”
The Kenyan government has vowed to challenge the decision, a move
noted by Miller in his statement.
Nairobi had previously said it was ready to provide up to 1,000
personnel — an offer welcomed by the United States and other nations
that had ruled out putting their own forces on the ground.
“It is urgent that the international community respond to the
unprecedented levels of gang violence and destabilizing forces preying
upon the Haitian people,” Miller said.
“At the same time, we call for the restoration of democratic order
through an inclusive political process in Haiti,” he said, adding that
the “only legitimate path to long-term peace and stability is through
free and fair elections.”
Haiti, the Western hemisphere’s poorest nation, has been in turmoil
for years, with armed gangs taking over parts of the country and
unleashing brutal violence, leaving the economy and public health system
in tatters.
The 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moise plunged the country
further into chaos. No elections have taken place since 2016 and the
presidency remains vacant.
Haiti’s foreign minister pleaded Thursday for the deployment plans to
be accelerated, telling the U.N. Security Council that gang violence in
the country was as barbaric as the horrors experienced in war zones.
Tiny11
creates a 100MB version of Windows 11 by axing the windows
date: 2024-01-28, from: OS News
If you know your Windows history, you’ll know that the operating
system got that name when it moved away from using pure MS-DOS and
started using a graphical user interface to show things. As it turns
out, you can force Windows 11 back to its legacy roots and reduce it
back to a command-line interface. This is what the developer of Tiny11
has achieved, calling their new creation “Minwin.” The developer of
Win11, NTDev, posted a video on YouTube about their project. There’s
absolutely nothing flashy here; no Copilot, no Start menu, and
definitely no UI. It’s as graphically complex as the Command Prompt,
which meant that NTDev had to resort to fancy 00s-era ASCII logos to
announce that Minwin was working. ↫ Simon Batt at XDA Definitely a neat
proof-of-concept, and it shows just how modular Windows could be if only
Microsoft allowed its users to take out the parts they don’t need. I
wonder how close this is to Nano Server, an installation option for
Windows Server you’ve probably never heard of. I also like the nod to
MinWin, the informal codename Microsoft used internally to refer to an
effort by a small number of expert Windows kernel engineers to untangle
the spaghetti ball of dependencies that had sprouted between the various
architectural layers of Windows. This project started around Vista, and
eventually made it possible to make broader, sweeping changes to Windows
without breaking things all over the place because the spaghetti ball of
internal, low-level dependencies wasn’t mapped out.
Two
months in Servo: better inline layout, stable Rust, and more
date: 2024-01-28, from: OS News
Another month, another pile of improvement to Servo, the rendering
engine written in Rust, originally a Mozilla project. This month the
proof-of-concept browser UI got forward and backward buttons, making
this bare-bones UI just a tiny bit more usable. Of course, the vast
majority of changes and improvements are all focused on the actual
rendering engine, which makes sense because Servo definitely isn’t ready
for any prime time use – nor is anyone claiming it is. I’m incredibly
curious to see where Servo goes in the future.
Apple
loses veteran hardware engineering executive to Rivian
date: 2024-01-28, from: Electrek Feed
Apple veteran DJ Novotney is departing the company for a new role at
Rivian, according to a report from
Bloomberg.
Novotney, a vice president of hardware engineering, has spent almost 25
years at Apple and worked across multiple generations of the iPod, the
iPhone, the Apple Watch, and more. His LinkedIn page hasn’t yet been
updated, but he is shown pictured next to a Rivian.
Listen to a recap of the top stories of the day from Electrek. Quick
Charge is available now
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and other podcast players.
EDB is pleased to announce
the release of Barman 3.10.0.
Highlights of this release:
Features:
Limit the average bandwidth used by barman-cloud-backup
when backing up to either AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage according to the
value set by a new CLI option –max-bandwidth.
Add the new configuration option lock_directory_cleanup
That enables cron to automatically clean up the barman_lock_directory
from unused lock files.
Add support for a new type of configuration called model.
The model acts as a set of overrides for configuration options for a
given Barman server.
Add a new barman command barman config-update that allows
the creation and the update of configurations using JSON
Related to this Barman release,
pg_backup_api
has been updated and released to support these new features. As a
result, Barman now supports changes in the configuration whilst it’s
running. This pg-backup-api release adds the required endpoints to
trigger that switch when requested.
Bug fixes:
Fix a bug that caused –min-chunk-size to be ignored when
using barman-cloud-backup as a hook script in Barman.
This information is also published in the
NEWS
for Barman.
About Barman
Backup and Recovery Manager (or Barman) is an open-source administration
tool for remote backups and disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers in
business-critical environments. It relies on PostgreSQL’s robust and
reliable Point-In-Time Recovery technology, allowing DBAs to remotely
manage a complete catalog of backups and the recovery phase of multiple
remote servers – all from one location. Barman is distributed under GNU
GPL 3 and maintained by EDB.
We are excited to announce the release of Greenmask v0.1.1. This release
introduces a suite of new transformers, significantly enhancing its
capabilities for obfuscating PostgreSQL databases.
Greenmask Overview
Key Features
Cross-Platform Support: Developed in Go, Greenmask
operates independently of platform constraints, offering flexibility
across different operating systems.
Type-Safe Database Operations: It ensures data
validation and encoding, maintaining the integrity of your database
throughout the obfuscation process.
Transformation Validation: Greenmask guarantees correct
and maintainable data transformations, ensuring reliability and
accuracy.
Partitioned Table Support: Simplifies configuration for
partitioned tables, making it easier to manage large datasets.
Stateless and Backward Compatible: Designed to be
compatible with standard PostgreSQL utilities, ensuring seamless
integration into existing workflows.
Parallel Execution: Enhances efficiency in dumping and
restoration processes through concurrent operations, reducing the time
required for data handling.
Multiple Storage Options: Supports both local and
remote storage solutions, offering flexibility in data management and
backup strategies.
Use Cases
Greenmask is ideally suited for:
Routine backup and restoration tasks,
ensuring data integrity and availability.
Anonymization and data masking for
staging environments and analytics, protecting sensitive information
while maintaining data utility.
Release Notes
Improvements
New Transformers: The latest update vastly expands the
variety of available transformers, enhancing Greenmask’s versatility for
database obfuscation. The newly added transformers include:
Geographic data generators like RandomLatitude and
RandomLongitude.
Temporal data generators such as RandomUnixTime and
RandomMonthName.
Communication data generators, including RandomEmail
and RandomPhoneNumber.
User identity generators like RandomUsername and
RandomName.
Network data generators, including RandomIPv4 and
RandomIPv6.
Security data generators such as RandomPassword.
Financial data generators like RandomCurrency and
RandomAmountWithCurrency.
Content data generators, including RandomWord and
RandomParagraph.
A unique RealAddress generator for more realistic data
simulation.
These transformers facilitate the generation of mock data for various
testing and development purposes, enhancing the utility and flexibility
of Greenmask.
Documentation Updates: To accompany the introduction of
new transformers, we’ve thoroughly updated our documentation. It now
includes detailed explanations and examples, enabling easy configuration
and effective use of the new features in your data obfuscation
pipelines.
Community Participation
We encourage the PostgreSQL community to engage with us by providing
feedback and suggestions. Your insights and testing are invaluable for
improving Greenmask’s robustness and utility.
A
note to people who make feeds, software that generates feeds, readers of
feeds and everyone else. 
I
spent a couple of days putting together a JSON text editor in a modal
dialog for a project I’m working on. I’m combining the
A
bit of philosophy. People say these things aren’t intelligent, but
seriously, if I can engage with it as if it were intelligent, far more
intelligent in ways than I am, what’s the difference between that and
actually being intelligent? I know from a lifetime of dealing with
supposedly intelligent humans, and being one myself, how rarely we focus
on the idea that the person we’re conversing with has an inner life
that’s vastly different from ours and no less complex, and
contradictory. We tend to think of others as being like us, or like
someone who raised us. Always in a movie, never in the moment. So why is
it interesting that ChatGPT is a machine? These are questions thinkers
and writers have been pondering for decades if not centuries, but –
now we’re living it. I’m so happy to have made it this far! An
amazing experience, so much learning in so little time. I don’t
understand how people can sit on the sidelines and not want to be the
first to try all this stuff out, to be part of its evolution. I feel so
lucky.
