News gathered 2024-08-30
(date: 2024-08-30 09:33:10)
Featured Friday: 24 Hours or Less
date: 2024-08-30, from: John August blog
Weekend Read, our app for reading scripts on your phone, features a new curated collection of screenplays each week. This week, we look at movies that use the confines of a single day to their advantage, keeping characters constantly pushing against time and towards their goals. Our collection includes: All is Lost by J.C. Chandor […] The post Featured Friday: 24 Hours or Less first appeared on John August.
https://johnaugust.com/2024/featured-friday-24-hours-or-less
Behind the Scenes at the 2024 Mars 2020 Science Team Meeting
date: 2024-08-30, from: NASA breaking news
The Mars 2020 Science Team meets in Pasadena for 3 days of science synthesis
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/behind-the-scenes-at-the-2024-mars-2020-science-team-meeting/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Maryland Supreme Court sends Adnan Syed case back to lower court.
https://thehill.com/regulation/court-battles/4855801-adnan-syed-maryland-supreme-court/
‘Matching’ Dinosaur Footprints Discovered in Africa and South America
date: 2024-08-30, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The fossils show how dinosaurs may have crossed between landmasses around 120 million years ago, when the continents were still connected
Gelsinger opens up about Intel troubles amid talk of possible split
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
From spinoffs to layoffs and a boardroom revolt, 2024 isn’t going great for Chipzilla
Intel chief Pat Gelsinger has acknowledged the chip giant’s financial woes and said he is working to address investor concerns amid talk that the company is considering spinning off its foundry business and delaying expansion of its fabrication plants.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/gelsinger_discusses_intel_troubles/
Behind the Blog: Bobbleheads and Maxed-Out Gaming
date: 2024-08-30, from: 404 Media Group
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss generative AI in gaming, getting into sports events, and good laptops.
https://www.404media.co/behind-the-blog-bobbleheads-and-maxed-out-gaming/
NASA, ESA Missions Help Scientists Uncover How Solar Wind Gets Energy
date: 2024-08-30, from: NASA breaking news
Since the 1960s, astronomers have wondered how the Sun’s supersonic “solar wind,” a stream of energetic particles that flows out into the solar system, continues to receive energy once it leaves the Sun. Now, thanks to a lucky lineup of a NASA and an ESA (European Space Agency)/NASA spacecraft both currently studying the Sun, they […]
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Pelosi’s Car Passed Near Pipe Bomb on Jan. 6, According to New Video.
Marathon Games on Steam
date: 2024-08-30, from: Michael Tsai
Malcolm Owen: Bungie has finally brought all of the “Marathon” trilogy of games to Steam, with “Marathon Infinity” now playable for free on modern Macs.[…]Classic Marathon Infinity is a free game on the Steam storefront, playable on both Mac and Windows PC. It is a faithful re-release of the 1995 first-person shooter, using the original […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/30/marathon-games-on-steam/
Cancellable withObservationTracking in Swift
date: 2024-08-30, from: Michael Tsai
Toomas Vahter: This function works as a one shot function and the onChange closure is called only once. Note that it is called before the value has actually changed. If we want to get the changed value, we would need to read the value on the next run loop cycle. It would be much more […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/30/cancellable-withobservationtracking-in-swift/
SwiftUI Breaks Continuity Camera
date: 2024-08-30, from: Michael Tsai
Wade Tregaskis: If any view in the [active] window contains a Toggle – even one that’s disabled or hidden – then Continuity Camera (re. ImportFromDevicesCommands and importableFromServices) doesn’t work; all the submenu items under “Import from iPhone or iPad” are disabled. I don’t know if this is truly specific to Toggle, that’s just the example […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/30/swiftui-breaks-continuity-camera/
macOS Firewall Slows DNS Queries
date: 2024-08-30, from: Michael Tsai
Jeff Johnson (Reddit): I took packet traces of the DNS queries with the firewall enabled and disabled. What I found is that the DNS query response packet consistently arrives in under 20 milliseconds after the query packet is sent, regardless of whether the firewall is enabled. Thus, it appears that the extra query time added […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/30/macos-firewall-slows-dns-queries/
NSA releases copy of internal lecture delivered by computing giant Rear Adm. Grace Hopper
date: 2024-08-30, from: OS News
In one of the more unique public proactive transparency record releases for the National Security Agency (NSA) to date, NSA has released a digital copy of a lecture that then-Capt. Grace Hopper gave agency employees on August 19, 1982. The lecture, “Future Possibilities: Data, Hardware, Software, and People,” features Capt. Hopper discussing some of the potential future challenges of protecting information. She also provided valuable insight on leadership and her experiences breaking barriers in the fields of computer science and mathematics. ↫ NSA press release Digital preservation is about more than just code – it’s also about invaluable content like this. It seems rather uncouth to spend only a few lines on who Grace Hopper really is, since it’s your duty to know already, and she deserves a hell of a lot more than a few lines. If you don’t yet know who she is, her Wikipedia page is a good place to start. The speech in question has an interesting history, in that the only medium on which it was stored were 1-inch AMPEX tapes. The speech was originally given to NSA employees, but not even the damn NSA had the ability to access the recordings of the speech, and had to call in the National Archives and Records Administration’s help. The NARA managed to retrieve the footage from the tapes, and now here we are. This will make for some great weekend viewing.
Did Section 230 Meet Its Match?
date: 2024-08-30, from: Tedium site
A new ruling from a federal appeals court finds that Section 230 protections may not apply to algorithms like the one TikTok uses. That could (potentially) be a big problem for the internet.
https://feed.tedium.co/link/15204/16789094/section-230-anderson-tiktok-ruling-analysis
T-38 Flyover of Artemis I on Launch Pad
date: 2024-08-30, from: NASA breaking news
NASA’s T-38 jets fly in formation above the Space Launch System rocket on Launch Pad 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Aircraft designations and passengers:901: Chris Condon / Astronaut Zena Cardman.902: Astronaut Candidate Nicole Ayers / Astronaut Christina Koch.903: Canadian Space Agency Astronaut Jeremy Hansen / Astronaut Drew Morgan.904: Chief Astronaut Reid Wiseman / Astronaut […]
https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/t-38-flyover-of-artemis-i-on-launch-pad/
End of the road: an AnandTech farewell
date: 2024-08-30, from: OS News
I hate this timeline. It is with great sadness that I find myself penning the hardest news post I’ve ever needed to write here at AnandTech. After over 27 years of covering the wide – and wild – word of computing hardware, today is AnandTech’s final day of publication. For better or worse, we’ve reached the end of a long journey – one that started with a review of an AMD processor, and has ended with the review of an AMD processor. It’s fittingly poetic, but it is also a testament to the fact that we’ve spent the last 27 years doing what we love, covering the chips that are the lifeblood of the computing industry. ↫ Ryan Smith at AnandTech This sudden loss is sending shockwaves through the industry, and rightfully so. AnandTech is a pillar, a cornerstone of hardware reporting, and one of the very few – possibly only – tech news outlet out there with such depth, quality, integrity, and restraint. I can’t think of any other outlet being as dedicated to proper benchmarking and hardware reviews as AnandTech was, and losing them is a huge loss for all of us. The cause is exactly what you’d expect, sadly. It’s simply not really possible to remain profitable writing in-depth hardware reviews and benchmarks, as the world has shifted to video, and advertising income has cratered. There’s tons of hints about AnandTech not wanting to embrace sensationalism and clickbaiting to increase revenue – they’d rather go out with class, and I admire and appreciate that greatly. It just goes to show how hard it is to keep your head above water in the current online publishing world without rampant clickbaiting and flashy videos. In a better, less monopolised world, AnandTech could thrive. Sadly, that’s not the timeline we’re in. As far as housekeeping goes, the site will remain up for now, but there’s no guarantee it’ll stay up forever. I’m sure countless people are already archiving the invaluable content AnandTech has produced over its 27 year run, including the forums. We shan’t lose what AnandTech has created.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140635/end-of-the-road-an-anandtech-farewell/
As a rate cut looms, can the Fed stick the landing?
date: 2024-08-30, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Interest rates in America are guided by a key inflation reading released today, and it came in line with expectations, showing year-over-year inflation was pretty tame. We chat with FHN Financial Chief Economist Christopher Low about how to unpack recent inflation data and what it says about a potential Fed rate cut. Also on the show: the potential economic boon provided by a reunion of the British band Oasis.
NASA’s SpaceX Crew-9 Changes Ahead of September Launch
date: 2024-08-30, from: NASA breaking news
Editor’s note: This release was updated on Aug. 30, 2024, to correct Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov’s role as mission specialist. NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov will launch no earlier than Tuesday, Sept. 24, on the agency’s SpaceX Crew-9 mission to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Stephanie Wilson, […]
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-spacex-crew-9-changes-ahead-of-september-launch/
The secret inside One Million Checkboxes
date: 2024-08-30, from: Tilde.news
https://eieio.games/essays/the-secret-in-one-million-checkboxes/
SpaceX grounded after fumbling Falcon 9 landing for first time in years
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Failure has become rare, but the FAA needs to look into it regardless
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 has been grounded following a rare mishap during the landing of a veteran booster.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/spacex_falcon_9_failure/
TANK 3S is a cheaper rugged phone with a built-in projector
date: 2024-08-30, from: Liliputing
After launching the TANK 3 Pro rugged smartphone with a massive 23,800 mAh battery and a built-in projector earlier this year, the folks behind the TANK line of rugged projector-phones are back with a slightly cheaper model with many of the same features. The new TANK 3S is a rugged phone with an integrated 100-lumen, 120 […]
The post TANK 3S is a cheaper rugged phone with a built-in projector appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/tank-3s-is-a-cheaper-rugged-phone-with-a-built-in-projector/
Hubble Zooms into the Rosy Tendrils of Andromeda
date: 2024-08-30, from: NASA breaking news
Clusters of stars set the interstellar medium ablaze in the Andromeda Galaxy about 2.5 million light-years away. Also known as M31, Andromeda is the Milky Way’s closest major galaxy. It measures approximately 152,000 light-years across and, with almost the same mass as our home galaxy, is headed for a collision with the Milky Way in […]
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Harris bus tour focused on reproductive rights to start in Palm Beach.
https://thehill.com/homenews/4855089-harris-bus-tour-eproductive-rights-palm-beach/
Tired of airport security queues? SQL inject yourself into the cockpit, claim researchers
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Infosec hounds say they spotted vulnerability during routine travel in the US
Updated Cybersecurity researchers say they’ve found a vulnerability that allowed them to skip US airport security checks and even fly in the cockpit on some scheduled flights.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/sql_injection_known_crewmember/
The Secret Message Contained in One Million Checkboxes
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/secret-message-in-one-million-checkboxes
This 4-Year-Old Shattered a Bronze Age Jar. Now, He’ll Get to See How Experts Restored It
date: 2024-08-30, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The 3,500-year-old artifact had been on view at an Israeli museum, which wants to use the mishap as a teaching opportunity
What is missing from the web? We’re asking for Google
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Besides sanity, of course
The CSS Day conference may have come and gone, but Google’s Chrome team is keen to keep the spirit alive with a list of what attendees felt was missing from the web.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/what_is_missing_from_web/
Qualcomm’s 8-core Snapdragon X Plus chip is made for sub-$800 notebooks
date: 2024-08-30, from: Liliputing
When the first crop of Copilot+ PCs with Qualcomm Snapdragon X Plus and Snapdragon X Elite chips began to hit the streets earlier this year, they all had a few things in common. They were thin and light machines with long battery life and an integrated NPU that delivered 45 TOPS of AI performance. And […]
The post Qualcomm’s 8-core Snapdragon X Plus chip is made for sub-$800 notebooks appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/qualcomms-8-core-snapdragon-x-plus-chip-is-made-for-sub-800-notebooks/
Kamala Harris Tells CNN She ‘Will Not Ban Fracking’
date: 2024-08-30, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Conditions in the central Atlantic appear “conducive” to the possible formation of Tropical Storm Francine over Labor Day weekend • A cold front is relieving the more than 20 million Americans who were under a heat alert this week • An “exceptionally rare deluge” could bring rain to parts of the Sahara Desert for the first time on record in August.
THE TOP FIVE
- BLM finalizes plan to free 31 million acres for solar development
On Thursday, the Bureau of Land Management released its Final Utility-Scale Solar Energy Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement and Proposed Resource Management Plan Amendments — a mouthful more commonly known as the Western Solar Plan. The idea is to “drive responsible solar development to locations with fewer potential conflicts while helping the nation transition to a clean energy economy,” BLM Director Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement.
To speed up the approval process of solar projects, the Western Solar Plan identifies 31 million acres of public lands across 11 western states as available for potential development, singling out regions that would bring solar “closer to transmission lines or to previously disturbed lands” and avoid “protected lands, sensitive cultural resources, and important wildlife habitat,” according to the BLM. Individual projects would still need to be authorized through site-specific environmental reviews and public comment periods.
- Kamala Harris commits to fracking in first major interview as
candidate
CNN’s Dana Bash pressed Kamala Harris on her former opposition to fracking on Thursday night during the candidate’s first major sit-down with the press since becoming the Democratic presidential nominee. Asked if she stood by her 2019 statement that “there’s no question I’m in favor of banning fracking,” Harris stressed, “As vice president, I did not ban fracking. As president, I will not ban fracking.” Harris said her “values have not changed” and that “we take seriously what we must do to guard against what is a clear crisis in terms of the climate,” but that she has become convinced “we can grow and we can increase a thriving clean energy economy without banning fracking.”
Harris has had weak recent poll numbers in Pennsylvania, where the fracking industry employs about 24,000 people, and which could be a deciding factor in the November election. The Trump campaign has seized on her potential weakness there, telling Axios in the aftermath of the interview that Harris “has promised to ban fracking and kill good-paying energy jobs in Pennsylvania and across the heartland.”
- It’s official: This summer was disgusting
Saturday, August 31, marks the end of meteorological summer (even if real ones know summer doesn’t end spiritually until next Tuesday and astronomically until the 22nd). And yes, this was another one for the books: Specifically, summer 2024 was the most humid in 85 years of record-keeping, and likely the most humid summer on Earth, as well, The Washington Post reports based on calculations by the climate scientist Brian Brettschneider.
“June 2024 and July 2024 both set records for highest dew point for their respective months,” Brettschneider told the Post. “I expect August 2024 to be a record too. Summer 2024 should break the record set in summer 2023.” Humidity notably makes extreme heat more dangerous, a process that is accelerating because warmer air caused by climate change can hold more moisture.
- More than half of Americans would back a permitting reform
compromise
Just over half of Americans (52%) would support a bipartisan law that made it easier to build new clean energy projects and benefit some oil and gas development, a new poll by Heatmap has found. “That’s good news for one of the last remaining pieces of environmental policy that Congress could pass under this presidency: a bipartisan proposal from Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that would speed up the process of building climate-friendly infrastructure in exchange for concessions to the oil and gas industry,” writes Heatmap’s Robinson Meyer.
Though many people polled said they didn’t know enough about the bill to make a call one way or the other, those who did were largely in favor, including 58% of GOP voters, who were a little more amenable to the compromise than Democrats. “This all suggests that the permitting reform deal could remain largely depoliticized as Congress continues to debate it through the fall,” adds Meyer. “If you were to summarize respondents’ reactions to the survey, it might look like, ‘Sure, whatever, sounds good.’”
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- August’s extreme heat may be behind youth football deaths
At least seven teenage athletes have died in the U.S. in August during or immediately after football practice, with experts saying extreme heat may be to blame. Three of the deaths — 15-year-old Javion Taylor of central Virginia; 14-year-old Semaj Wilkins of Alabama; and 16-year-old Junior Leslie Noble of Maryland — were linked to heat, while others involved traumatic head injuries. But heat can also increase the risk of brain injuries, Kei Katawa, an assistant professor of clinical neuroscience at Indiana University Bloomington, told NPR. “At that point, your brain [already has] asymptomatic heat exhaustion — pre-heat exhaustion. And then on top of that, you sustain head impact. It has a potential of amplifying head impact effect,” he said. Since 1960, at least 157 football players across all levels of the sport have died of heatstroke, according to The National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research.
THE KICKER
A “daring team of three Tesla enthusiasts” is set to embark this week on a six-day, 460-mile round trip journey from Dawson City, Yukon, to the Arctic Ocean … in a Cybertruck. The drive — which is intended to promote “the sustainable energy future through electric vehicle travel” — is off to a bit of a rough start, per Futurist, which reports the adventurers have been struggling to reach their starting point due to northwestern Canada’s limited charging infrastructure.
https://heatmap.news/politics/kamala-harris-fracking-cnn-interview
How to Sign Up for Local Emergency Alerts Before Natural Disasters Strike
date: 2024-08-30, from: The Markup blog
We know early warning systems save lives. Give yourself extra time when disasters come your way
https://themarkup.org/the-breakdown/2024/08/30/local-emergency-alerts-sign-up
25 Years Strong: NASA’s Student Launch Competition Accepting 2025 Proposals
date: 2024-08-30, from: NASA breaking news
By Wayne Smith NASA’s Student Launch competition kicks off its 25th year with the release of the 2025 handbook, detailing how teams can submit proposals by Wednesday, Sept. 11, for the event scheduled next spring near NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. Student Launch is an annual competition challenging middle school, high school, […]
EV sales hit speed bump as drivers unplug from the electric dream
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Cost of the hardware as well as range and lack of charging infrastructure to blame
Registrations of battery electric vehicles (BEV) continue to fall in the European continent, as sales growth slows in the US and British manufacturing of the wheeled machines declines sharply.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/electric_vehicle_sales/
Investment in the Paralympic Games is growing
date: 2024-08-30, from: Marketplace Morning Report
The Paralympic Games are now underway in Paris, and a record number of broadcasters around the world will be covering this year’s events, including para swimming, wheelchair rugby and tennis. NBC — the games’ U.S. broadcast partner — reported that Paralympic ad sales are up 60% over the Tokyo games in 2021. Also on the show: the presidential candidates on economic policy and a big moving day in Boston.
Only You (and AI) Can Prevent Wildfires
date: 2024-08-30, from: Heatmap News
In a warming world where winter snow is melting earlier and rain is
arriving later,
“wildfire
season” has become somewhat of a misnomer. Some parts of the
country now see blazes popping up practically year round. This, combined
with decades of fire management policy that promoted suppression over
natural and controlled burns, has turned certain states — California,
most famously — into tinderboxes.
With wildfire smoke becoming a standard component of Silicon Valley summers, it’s probably no surprise that numerous data analytics and artificial intelligence-focused startups have sprung up to address the issue. There’s even a San Francisco-based venture capital firm, Convective Capital, devoted solely to funding wildfire solutions.
“My big question coming into starting Convective was, are there enough companies in this category?” Bill Clerico, founder and managing partner of the firm told me. The answer, he found, was yes. After establishing Convective Capital in the beginning of 2022, he said, “we’ve identified about 500 of what we call fire tech companies.” They run the gamut from startups that work on wildfire suppression to those dealing with identification, prevention, mitigation, and insurance against damages.
Rhizome, a company making an AI-powered wildfire risk mitigation platform for utilities, is one of the firm’s most recent investments. “Think of it as Sim City for the grid,” Mishal Thadani, CEO of the Washington, D.C.-based startup, told me. “You obviously need to know, as extreme weather events hit, how this is going to affect your assets,” he explained.
Rhizome’s platform gives utilities insight into, “if there is an asset failure, given the asset type, the type of failure, and the burn probability given the vegetation makeup and the dryness conditions, what’s going to be the likelihood of a wildfire ignition?” This information helps utilities decide where to put their money, whether that means replacing a power line or pole, insulating conductors, undergrounding power lines, or trimming back a bush. Last month, Rhizome announced a $1 million investment from Convective Capital, not tied to a particular funding round. The company raised $2.5 million in its pre-seed round last year.
The problem is not simply a lack of data, Thadani told me — utilities often know things about their assets such as last inspection date and outage history, and have systems that can render the surrounding landscape and other infrastructural features. The problem is that data is not part of a holistic system that can provide comprehensive insights. If risk analysis is being performed, Thadani said, “it’s being done on a super scrappy spreadsheet basis.”
Rhizome aims to build the “connective tissue” between a utility’s disparate data systems, then combine that with other geographic datasets on climate, weather, and vegetation. From there, the company uses its machine learning models to assess the likelihood of extreme weather events and their subsequent impacts. Ultimately, this allows utilities to provide regulators with more quantifiable information on their plans to improve grid resiliency and prevent wildfires, beyond just citing a figure for how much money they want to spend.
Utilities are not exactly known for their technical prowess, but are hungry nevertheless for solutions to their wildfire woes. Pacific Gas & Electric, the nation’s largest utility, was driven into bankruptcy after being found liable for a spate of enormous California wildfires in 2017 and 2018. After reemerging from bankruptcy in 2020, it now has a plan to spend $18 billion on wildfire mitigation through 2025. Other utilities such as Hawaii Electric and Berkshire Hathaway Energy face billions in potential liabilities for wildfires in their service areas.
The most common customers for companies in Convective Capital’s portfolio are utilities, governments, and insurance companies. “These are tremendously deep-pocketed institutions, but they are not, you know, necessarily the most fast-moving or innovative,” he told me. “And so that is the fundamental challenge of building a wildfire technology company.”
So far, Rhizome has announced partnerships with two utilities, Seattle City Light and Vermont Electric Power Company. But Clerico acknowledges that getting traditional institutions onboard is no easy task, even when the benefits seem clear. The magnitude of the destruction in recent years has served as an accelerant, though — something the vegetation management platform provider AiDash has seen first hand. Abhishek Singh, cofounder and CEO of the startup (which is not in Convective’s portfolio), said that when he founded the company in 2019, “Every investor warned us not to do this because utilities don’t buy and they won’t invest.” But that’s not what he’s experienced.
AiDash raised $58.5 million in an oversubscribed Series C round earlier this year, led by the impact investor Lightrock, and has five utility partnerships, including Southern California Edison’s holding company, Edison International, as well as Duke Energy. The company uses satellite data and AI analytics to assess vegetation near utility infrastructure for wildfire risk. It can also detect faults by fusing satellite data with other sources such as thermal or LiDAR-based imagery. (Convective Capital sees the value proposition in using satellites for vegetation management, too — it’s invested in one of AiDash’s direct competitors, an Amsterdam-based startup called Overstory.)
When Singh founded AiDash in 2019, both the size and cost of satellites were plummeting, leading to far more launches and thus far more data. . “Since the history of the first satellite until 2018, there were 2,200-odd satellites launched,” he told me. “From 2019 onwards, each year close to 1,000 satellites are getting launched.” The company purchases mounds of that data to conduct its vegetation analyses.
Vegetation management is typically the largest line item in a utility’s operations and maintenance budgets, Singh told me, costing the entire sector around $6 billion or $7 billion annually. “It’s also the single largest cause of utility-caused wildfires, as well as the cause of most outages,” he said, as power lines coming into contact with trees, grasses, and shrubs can easily spark a fire. Anything that can help them trim that budget and preempt the need for costly equipment repairs is worth a lot. “These are all million dollar contracts,” Singh told me.
But big data platforms alone are just one tool in the vast toolbox that comprises a holistic approach to wildfire management. “There’s no panacea, where you just do one thing and then it solves the problem,” Clerico told me. “It’s going to get solved as a combination of consistent and repeated forest management, building towns and cities that are fire adapted, building great infrastructure, and then having the ability to detect and respond quickly. All of these things are huge, multi decade, multi billion dollar investments.”
So for the foreseeable future, Convective Capital will have its work cut out for it. But when I asked Clerico if one day, in a beautiful, far-off dreamland, there might not be the need for a dedicated wildfire tech VC, he said he hopes so.
https://heatmap.news/technology/ai-fire-prevention
Social media platform X could be blocked in Brazil
date: 2024-08-30, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: A dispute over local laws in Brazil could mean that the X platform is blocked in the country. And with the announcement that the British band Oasis is reforming, we look at the figures behind the hype.
Post-apocalyptic education
date: 2024-08-30, from: One Useful Thing
What comes after the Homework Apocalypse
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/post-apocalyptic-education
Microsoft PC accessories rise from the grave just in time for Christmas
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Incase revives Windows giant’s abandoned peripherals range
Microsoft’s line of PC peripherals is being revived in time for the incoming festive season, with a range reintroduced under the “Designed by Microsoft” brand.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/incase_designed_by_microsoft/
Panama deports Ecuadorean migrants in second US-backed flight
date: 2024-08-30, from: VOA News USA
PANAMA CITY — Panamanian authorities deported a group of migrants to Ecuador on a second flight financed by the United States, as part of an agreement between the U.S. and Panama to discourage irregular crossings and reduce the flow of mostly U.S.-bound migration.
The flight carrying 30 Ecuadoreans departed on Thursday evening en route to the coastal city of Manta, Ecuador, Panama’s migration service said, adding the migrants were deported for evading a migration checkpoint on the popular Darien Gap route.
Thousands of people every year cross the dangerous Darien Gap jungle on Panama’s border with Colombia on the way to the United States.
The flight on Thursday followed a maiden journey financed by Washington in mid-August, which returned around 30 migrants to Colombia.
The latest deportation comes days after Panama’s President Jose Mulino announced return flights for Indian migrants in September and for Chinese citizens on an unspecified date.
https://www.voanews.com/a/panama-deports-ecuadorean-migrants-in-second-us-backed-flight/7765093.html
September’s Night Sky Notes: Marvelous Moons
date: 2024-08-30, from: NASA breaking news
by Kat Troche of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific September brings the gas giants Jupiter and Saturn back into view, along with their satellites. And while we organize celebrations to observe our own Moon this month, be sure to grab a telescope or binoculars to see other moons within our Solar System! We recommend […]
https://science.nasa.gov/solar-system/skywatching/night-sky-network/sept2024-night-sky-notes/
Faulty valve sent Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander straight back to Earth’s atmosphere
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
What goes up must come down – just not always on the Moon
Astrobotic has continued its policy of transparency with a report into the failings that resulted in its Peregrine lander burning up in Earth’s atmosphere rather than making a soft landing on the Moon.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/astrobotic_peregrine_postmortem/
NY nonprofit reclaims centuries-old cemetery for enslaved people
date: 2024-08-30, from: VOA News USA
KINGSTON, New York — On a residential block in upstate New York, college students dug and sifted backyard dirt as part of an archeological exploration this summer of a centuries-old cemetery for African Americans.
Now covered with green lawns in the city of Kingston, this spot in 1750 was part of a burial ground for people who were enslaved. It was located on what was then the outskirts of town. An unknown number of people who were denied church burials were interred here until the late 19th century, when the cemetery was covered over as the city grew.
The site is now being reclaimed as the Pine Street African Burial Ground, one of many forgotten or neglected cemeteries for African Americans getting fresh attention. In the last three summers, the remains of up to 27 people have been located here.
Advocates in this Hudson River city purchased a residential property covering about half the old cemetery several years ago and now use the house there as a visitor center. Money is being raised to turn the urban backyard into a respectful resting place. And while the names of people buried here may be lost, tests are planned on their remains to shed light on their lives and identify their descendants.
“The hardships of those buried here cannot just go down in vain,” said Tyrone Wilson, founder of Harambee Kingston, the nonprofit community group behind the project. “We have a responsibility to make sure that we fix that disrespect.”
While the more-than-0.2 hectares site was designated as a cemetery for people who were enslaved in 1750, it might have been in use before then. Burials continued through about 1878, more than 50 years after New York fully abolished slavery. Researchers say people were buried with their feet to the east, so when they rise on Judgment Day they would face the rising sun.
Remains found on the Harambee property are covered with patterned African cloths and kept where they are. Remains found on adjoining land are exhumed for later burial on the Harambee property.
Students from the State University of New York at New Paltz recently finished a third summer of supervised backyard excavations in this city 129 kilometers upriver from Manhattan. The students get course credit, though anthropology major Maddy Thomas said there’s an overriding sense of mission.
“I don’t like when people feel upset or forgotten,” Thomas said on a break. “And that is what’s happened here. So we’ve got to fix it.”
Harambee is trying to raise $1 million to transform the modest backyard into resting spot that reflects the African heritage of the people buried there. Plans include a tall marker in the middle of the yard.
While some graves were apparently marked, it’s still hard to say who was buried there.
“Some of them, it’s obvious, were marked with just a stone with no writing on it,” said Joseph Diamond, associate professor of anthropology at New Paltz.
The only intact headstone recovered with a name visible was for Caezar Smith, who was born enslaved and died a free man in 1839 at age 41. A researcher mined historical records and came up with two more people potentially buried there in 1803: a man identified as Sam and a 16-year-old girl named Deyon who was publicly hanged after being convicted of murdering the 6-year-old daughter of her enslavers.
The cemetery was at first covered by a lumberyard by 1880, even though some gravestones were apparently still standing by that date.
In 1990, Diamond was doing an archaeological survey for the city and noticed the cemetery was marked on a map from 1870. He and the city historian went out to find it.
Coincidentally, Pine Street building owner Andrew Kirschner had just discovered buried bone chips while digging in front of the building in search of a sewer pipe. He put the pieces in a box. Kirschner said he was still digging when Diamond told him what they were looking for.
“The conversation begins and then I go, ‘Well, let me show you what I found.’ Of course, they were amazed,” said Kirschner, who had owned the building next to the current Harambee property.
Even after the discovery, Diamond said it was difficult to convince people there were graves on Pine Street. There were even plans in 1996 to build a parking lot over much of the site. Advocates purchased the property in 2019.
Similar stories of disregard and rediscovery have played out elsewhere.
In Manhattan, the African Burial Ground National Monument marks the site where an estimated 15,000 free and enslaved Africans were buried until the 1790s. It was discovered in 1991 during excavations for a federal building. Farther up the Hudson River, the renovation in Newburgh of a century-old school into a courthouse in 2008 led to the discovery of more than 100 sets of remains.
Antoinette Jackson, founder of The Black Cemetery Network, said many of the 169 sites listed in their online archive had been erased.
“A good deal of them represent sites that have been built over — by parking lots, schools, stadiums, highways. Others have been under-resourced,” said Jackson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Southern Florida.
She added that the cemeteries listed on the archive are just the “tip of the iceberg.”
Given the meager historical record in Kingston, advocates hope tests on the remains will help fill in some gaps. Isotopic analyses could provide information on whether individuals grew up elsewhere — like South Carolina or Africa — and then moved to the region. DNA analyses could provide information on where in Africa their ancestors came from. The DNA tests also might be able to link them to living descendants.
Wilson said local families have committed to providing DNA samples. He sees the tests as another way to connect people to heritage.
“One of the biggest issues that we have in African culture is that we don’t know our history,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of information of who we are.”
Biometrischer Überwachungsexzess der Bundesregierung
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: Chaos Computer Club Updates
Das neue „Sicherheitspaket“ der Bundesregierung beinhaltet gefährliche Überwachungsvorhaben. Die geplante biometrische Erfassung von Gesichtsbildern aus dem Internet ist ein Angriff auf die Privatsphäre aller – ohne klare Notwendigkeit oder Nutzen.
https://www.ccc.de/de/updates/2024/biometrischer-uberwachungsexzess-der-bundesregierung
Have we stopped to think about what LLMs actually model?
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Claims about much-hyped tech show flawed understanding of language and cognition, research argues
In May, Sam Altman, CEO of $80-billion-or-so OpenAI, seemed unconcerned about how much it would cost to achieve the company’s stated goal. “Whether we burn $500 million a year or $5 billion – or $50 billion a year – I don’t care,” he told students at Stanford University. “As long as we can figure out a way to pay the bills, we’re making artificial general intelligence. It’s going to be expensive.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/ai_language_cognition_research/
How to set up the Raspberry Pi AI Kit with Raspberry Pi 5
date: 2024-08-30, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Learn how to run rpicam-apps camera demos using the Hailo AI neural network accelerator.
The post How to set up the Raspberry Pi AI Kit with Raspberry Pi 5 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/how-to-set-up-the-raspberry-pi-ai-kit-with-raspberry-pi-5/
Use Your Pubnix as a Personal Permanent Pastebin Service
date: 2024-08-30, from: Tilde.news
https://klu.sdf.org/articles/pubnix_as_pastebin.html
A nice cup of tea rewired the datacenter and got things working again
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
See? The world’s second best hot non-alcoholic beverage can fix anything
On Call Many folks start their day with the gentle stimulus of tea or coffee. But each Friday morning The Register offers a different way to kickstart your brain: a fresh serve of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which you share stories of trying to bring tech back to life and we try to tell them in an amusing fashion.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/on_call/
No one’s ready for this
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: Robin Rendle Essays
https://robinrendle.com/notes/no-ones-ready-for-this/
France charges Telegram CEO with multiple crimes
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Testing the idea that a platform boss can be responsible for the acts of others, or not helping to investigate them
French police have laid multiple charges against Pavel Durov, co-founder and CEO of encrypted messaging platform Telegram.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/french_telegram_ceo/
Webcurios 30/08/24
date: 2024-08-30, from: Web Curios blog
Reading Time: 34 minutes HAPPY LAST FRIDAY IN AUGUST, EVERYONE! That’s right – it’s basically all over, it’s all mist and mellow fruitfulness from hereon in (apart from those of you reading this in the antipodes – thanks Rosie! Does this satisfy your hubris?), but thankfully this edition of Curios is PACKED FULL OF SUNSHINE and will possibly extend…https://webcurios.co.uk/webcurios-30-08-24/
Crypto boss finds fraud trial a serious pain in the neck
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Thankfully his injuries are not life threatening
South Korean crypto CEO Hyung-soo “Hugo” Lee was stabbed in the neck in court during his fraud trial on Thursday, according to numerous reports.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/crypto_boss_stabbed_in_neck/
Iran hunts down double agents with fake recruiting sites, Mandiant reckons
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Farsi-language posts target possibly-pro-Israel individuals
Government-backed Iranian actors allegedly set up dozens of fake recruiting websites and social media accounts to hunt down double agents and dissidents suspected of collaborating with the nation’s enemies, including Israel.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/iran_dissident_recruitment_scam/
A message in binary
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: Robin Rendle Essays
https://robinrendle.com/notes/a-message-in-binary/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
How the NY Times came to support RSS.
http://scripting.com/2019/09/03/132640.html?title=nytAndRss
Trump asks federal court to intervene in hush money case
date: 2024-08-30, from: VOA News USA
new york — Donald Trump asked a federal court late Thursday to intervene in his New York hush money criminal case, seeking a pathway to overturn his felony conviction and indefinitely delay his sentencing scheduled for next month.
Lawyers for the former president and current Republican nominee asked the federal court in Manhattan to seize the case from the state court where it was brought and tried, arguing that the historic prosecution violated Trump’s constitutional rights and ran afoul of the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent ruling on presidential immunity.
Trump’s lawyers said moving the case to federal court following his May 30 conviction will give him an “unbiased forum, free from local hostilities” to address those issues. If the case is moved to federal court, Trump lawyers wrote, they will then seek to have the verdict overturned and the case dismissed. If it remains in state court, with sentencing proceeding as scheduled, it could amount to election interference, they said.
“The ongoing proceedings will continue to cause direct and irreparable harm to President Trump — the leading candidate in the 2024 Presidential election — and voters located far beyond Manhattan,” Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote in a 64-page U.S. District Court filing.
Trump was convicted in state court in Manhattan of 34 counts of falsifying business records related to a payment to bury affair allegations that threatened to cloud his 2016 presidential run. Even if the case isn’t moved to federal court, the potential delay caused by litigation surrounding Trump’s effort could give him a critical reprieve as he navigates the aftermath of his criminal conviction and the homestretch of his presidential campaign.
Separately, the state court judge who presided over the trial, Juan M. Merchan, is weighing Trump’s requests to postpone sentencing until after Election Day, November 5, and to overturn the verdict and dismiss the case in the wake of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.
The high court’s July 1 ruling reins in prosecutions of ex-presidents for official acts and restricts prosecutors in pointing to official acts as evidence that a president’s unofficial actions were illegal.
Trump’s lawyers argue that in light of the ruling, jurors in the hush money case should not have heard such evidence as former White House staffers describing how the then-president reacted to news coverage of the deal to pay hush money to porn actor Stormy Daniels.
Trump’s lawyers had previously invoked presidential immunity in a failed bid last year to get the hush money case moved from state court to federal court. A federal judge rejected that request, clearing the way for Trump’s historic trial in state court.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein rejected Trump’s claim that allegations in the hush money indictment involved official duties, writing in July 2023, “The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely a personal item of the president — a cover-up of an embarrassing event.”
“Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a president’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the president’s official duties,” Hellerstein added.
A message seeking comment was left with the Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case.
https://www.voanews.com/a/trump-asks-federal-court-to-intervene-in-hush-money-case/7764996.html
China is beating the world at scientific research, think tank finds
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Could monopolise 24 key techs if current trends continue
Think Tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has released an update to its Critical Technology Tracker, revealing that China leads the way in 89 percent of the technologies it tracks.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/30/aspi_technology_tracker/
Harris vows tougher approach on migration, supports weapons for Israel
date: 2024-08-30, from: VOA News USA
savannah, georgia/washington — Kamala Harris vowed a tougher approach to migration along the U.S. southern border and said she would not withhold weapons to Israel, in her first interview with a major news organization since becoming the Democratic nominee for president.
In the interview with CNN anchor Dana Bash, Harris sought to show she is in command of the issues and give Americans a sense of her policy positions with little more than two months until Election Day on November 5.
Harris said she would renew a push for comprehensive border legislation that would tighten migration into the United States and vowed to “enforce our laws” against border crossings.
“We have laws that have to be followed and enforced, that address and deal with people who cross our border illegally, and there should be consequence,” Harris said.
She also hewed closely to President Joe Biden’s strong support of Israel and rejected calls from some in the Democratic Party that Washington should rethink sending weapons to Israel because of the heavy Palestinian death toll in Gaza.
She said she supports a strong Israel but “we must get a deal done” to get a cease-fire in the Gaza conflict.
“No, we have to get a (cease-fire and hostage) deal done,” Harris said when asked if she would withhold weapons to Israel. She has been Biden’s vice president since the start of his administration.
Abbas Alawieh, a co-founder of the Uncommitted National Movement that has protested against Biden’s policy, expressed frustration over Harris’ response on Gaza.
“If the vice president is interested in a cease-fire, she must support an immediate stop to sending the fire,” Alawieh said.
Harris, joined by her vice presidential running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, also said she would like to add a Republican to her cabinet if she wins the election.
“I think it’s important to have people at the table when some of the most important decisions are being made that have different views, different experiences. And I think it would be to the benefit of the American public to have a member of my cabinet who was a Republican,” she said.
Surging in polls
Since becoming the Democratic candidate for president last month, Harris has surged in the polls, brought in hundreds of millions of dollars in campaign donations, and had a series of forceful campaign speeches.
She leads Trump 45% to 41% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll published on Thursday that showed the vice president sparking new enthusiasm among voters.
Some critics suggested she might be less polished in unscripted settings like a TV interview, but she appeared to make no major mistakes on Thursday.
Harris defended her and Biden’s handling of inflation, saying they inherited a pandemic-ravaged economy that she said Trump had mismanaged. She said much work had been done to lower prices but that “prices are still too high.”
Jeremi Suri, history and public affairs professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said Harris came across as knowledgeable and a “consensus builder” in the interview but she could have had “more concrete and specific answers” on what she would do on her first day as president.
Harris has moved more toward the center on some issues from the time she ran for president in 2020 until she took over from Biden last month as the Democrats’ choice to face Republican former President Donald Trump in the election.
She has toughened her position on migration along the southern U.S. border with Mexico. She also no longer wants a ban on fracking, an energy production method that employs many people in Pennsylvania, one of a handful of swing states that could decide the election.
When asked about her policy shifts, Harris said: “My values have not changed.”
Harris dismissed a comment from Trump in which he questioned whether she was a Black American. “Same old tired playbook,” she said. “Next question, please.”
Trump, in a post on Truth Social, responded to the interview by saying: “I look so forward to Debating Comrade Kamala Harris and exposing her for the fraud she is.” Trump often falsely refers to Harris as a Marxist.
Though she has taken questions from journalists on the campaign trail and been interviewed on TikTok in recent days, she had, until Thursday, not done a one-on-one interview with a major network or print journalist since Biden ended his reelection campaign on July 21 and endorsed her.
Bash, who co-moderated the June 27 debate between Trump and Biden that ultimately led to the president’s departure from the race, conducted the interview in Savannah, Georgia, as Harris and Walz were on a campaign bus tour.
Harris widens lead over Trump with boost from women, Hispanics, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds.
https://www.voanews.com/a/7764956.html
EmuDeck Machine is a mini PC made for retro gaming (crowdfunding)
date: 2024-08-30, from: Liliputing
EmuDeck is a script that simplifies the process of using a Steam Deck handheld gaming PC as an emulation machine. You can use it to install emulators, set up folders, optimize settings, and keep everything up to date. Now EmuDeck founder Rodrigo Sedano wants to try his hand at hardware. He’s launched a crowdfunding campaign […]
The post EmuDeck Machine is a mini PC made for retro gaming (crowdfunding) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/emudeck-machine-is-a-mini-pc-made-for-retro-gaming-crowdfunding/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Steve Silberman, Grateful Dead and autism writer, dies at 66.
https://sfstandard.com/2024/08/29/grateful-dead-autism-writer-steve-silberman-dies/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-30, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump Threatens to Jail Mark Zuckerberg for Life Over Election: Book.
RIP to journalist, author, and huge Deadhead Steve Silberman. His wish when…
date: 2024-08-30, updated: 2024-08-30, from: Jason Kottke blog
https://kottke.org/24/08/0045192-rip-to-journalist-author-
ASSURE 2018
date: 2024-08-30, from: NASA breaking news
Home ASSURE 2018 has successfully concluded. UPDATES Introduction The 6th International Workshop on Assurance Cases for Software-intensive Systems (ASSURE 2018) is being collocated this year with SAFECOMP 2018, and aims to provide an international forum for high-quality contributions on the application of assurance case principles and techniques to provide assurance that the dependability properties of critical, […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/assure-2018/
pg_hint_plan v1.7.0 Released
date: 2024-08-30, from: PostgreSQL News
The pg_hint_plan development team is pleased to announce pg_hint_plan 1.7.0. This release of pg_hint_plan adds compatibility with PostgreSQL 17, and includes various improvements and bug fixes. For more details, see the release notes. This new major version includes the following new features:
- Addition of a lexer to parse the query indexes.
- Integration of query IDs with the hint table, instead of normalized strings.
- Removal of pg_hint_plan.hints_anywhere.
pg_hint_plan is a PostgreSQL extension that offers the possibility to tweak PostgreSQL execution plans using so-called “hints” in SQL comments. For more information, see the project page.
The documentation of the project is published at this page, and is synced up automatically from the source repository.
A new set of minor releases is available down to PostgreSQL 12, each marked with the following versions:
- pg_hint_plan 1.6.1, compatible with PostgreSQL 16.
- pg_hint_plan 1.5.2, compatible with PostgreSQL 15.
- pg_hint_plan 1.4.3, compatible with PostgreSQL 14.
- pg_hint_plan 1.3.10, compatible with PostgreSQL 12 and 13.
This is the last release planned for PostgreSQL 12.
Notable changes in this set of releases include the following bug fixes, where applicable:
- Revert improvement related to the handling of unavailable indexes in Scan hints. This has proved to cause unwelcome plan instabilities, so this has been removed for all stable branches.
- Handle better the hint table if the extension is not created.
- Various improvements and fixes to documentation and regression test suite.
- Addition of META.json to distribute the module in PGXN.
- Fix crash when retrieving query hint, impacting only PostgreSQL 12 and 13.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/pg_hint_plan-v170-released-2924/
Full Circle Magazine 208
date: 2024-08-30, from: Full Circle Magazine
This month:
- Command & Conquer
- How-To : Python, Stable Diffusion and Latex
- Graphics : Inkscape
- Micro This Micro That
- Review : Ubuntu Budgie 24.04, Ubuntu Unity 24.04 and Ubuntu Lomiri 24.04 (A Quick Look)
- UbPorts Touch
- Ubuntu Games - Chasm
plus: News, My Opinion, Q&A, The Daily Waddle, and more.
Other Languages
https://fullcirclemagazine.org/magazines/issue-208/
What is the soul of a game?
date: 2024-08-30, from: Ze Iaso’s blog
A video essay about Pikmin
https://xeiaso.net/videos/2024/soul-of-game/
SETI boldly looks beyond the Milky Way in latest alien hunt
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-30, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Civilizations detectable at galactic distances could harness all of a star’s energy output, boffins reckon
Looking for life in the Milky Way is so 20th century – today’s alien-hunters are going intergalactic to look for signs of alien intelligence.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/seti_intergalactic_search_alien/
Broadcom has brought VMware down to earth and that’s welcome
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
But users aren’t optimistic it will land softly
VMware Explore I’ve attended VMware’s annual conference every year since 2007 and this year the event had a very different flavor.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/vmware_explore_strategy_analysis/
Can you convert a video to pure CSS?
date: 2024-08-29, from: OS News
He regularly shares cool examples of fancy css animations. At the time of writing his focus has been on css scroll animations. I guess there are some new properties that allow playing a css animation based on the scroll position. Apple has been using this on their marketing pages or so jhehy says. The property seems pretty powerful. But how powerful? This got me thinking… Could it play a video as pure css? ↫ David Gerrells The answer is yes. This is so cursed, I love it – and he even turned it into an app so anyone can convert a video into CSS.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140633/can-you-convert-a-video-to-pure-css/
Assure 2017
date: 2024-08-29, from: NASA breaking news
Home ASSURE 2017 has successfully concluded. UPDATES Introduction The 5th International Workshop on Assurance Cases for Software-intensive Systems (ASSURE 2017) is being collocated this year with SAFECOMP 2017, and aims to provide an international forum for high-quality contributions on the application of assurance case principles and techniques to provide assurance that the dependability properties of critical, […]
https://www.nasa.gov/general/assure-2017/
This Election, Dark Money Is Blackmailing Lawmakers
date: 2024-08-29, from: The Lever News
Lawmakers are being forced to negotiate with oligarchs and special interests they can’t even identify.
https://www.levernews.com/this-election-dark-money-is-blackmailing-lawmakers/
US indicts duo over alleged Swatting spree that targeted elected officials
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Apparently made over 100 fake crime reports and bomb threats
The US government has indicted two men for allegedly reporting almost 120 fake emergencies or crimes in the hope of provoking action by armed law enforcement agencies.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/us_indicts_swatted_duo/
@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-08-29, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)
Prototyping the behavior of turning on/off of the various bottom panels in Godot on iPad. Inspired by assorted behaviors I am mimicking from Logic Pro.
This is the skeleton shell upon which Godot/iPad runs, just with fake data and colors, so I can iterate faster.
https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113047631040728092
China takes mild tone on US official’s visit
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Beijing has adopted a conciliatory tone in its reporting on this week’s visit by White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan, emphasizing cooperation and open communication channels while claiming that Washington remains “incorrect” on its China policies.
Sullivan’s tightly scheduled three-day trip to Beijing ended Thursday after he met with Chinese officials, including the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping.
In a readout of Sullivan’s meeting with Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, the Foreign Ministry of China on Wednesday called the conversation “candid, substantive and constructive,” a phrase that was echoed by a White House statement regarding the meeting.
Sullivan was the first White House national security adviser to visit China in eight years, a period that saw contacts between the countries grow increasingly contentious over issues that included military-to-military relations, cybersecurity, espionage and the war in Ukraine.
It was Sullivan’s fifth in-person meeting with Wang since May 2023. The two had previously held talks in Bangkok, Vienna, Washington and Malta. But Wednesday’s meeting marks the first time in this series of talks that Beijing included some of the U.S. side’s views in its readout.
“The U.S. and China will coexist peacefully on this planet for a long time,” Sullivan was quoted as saying in the Chinese readout. “The goal of U.S. policies is to find a way that allows for a sustainable development of the U.S.-China relations.”
According to Beijing’s readout, Sullivan defined the two countries’ ties as a mixture of cooperation and competition, a characterization that’s been the core principle of the Biden administration’s China strategy.
Some experts say the fact that China allowed space in its readout for U.S. talking points signals Beijing’s increased openness to working with Washington.
Dali Yang, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, told VOA Mandarin Service that China used to reject the Biden administration’s characterization of the U.S.-China relationship.
“But it looks like the China side is now relatively more accepting of the U.S. side’s view,” Yang said. “Or at least Beijing has accepted that this is the kind of U.S. position that China must deal with.”
After Wang, Sullivan met separately with Xi and senior military official Zhang Youxia. These meetings focused on topics that included Taiwan, the South China Sea, trade policies, U.S. sanctions on Chinese businesses and entities, conflicts in Gaza and the war in Ukraine.
The meetings appeared to be cordial. Photos and footage released by Chinese state media show Sullivan shaking hands with a smiling Xi and a smiling Zhang.
US ‘incorrect’ in Beijing’s narrative
Smiling faces and words of cooperation aside, however, Beijing continues to paint the U.S. as the one that needs to adjust its policies and move closer to Beijing’s positions on issues.
Xi told Sullivan the U.S. should “work with China in the same direction, view China and its development in a positive and rational light, see each other’s development as an opportunity rather than a challenge, and work with China to find a right way for two major countries to get along.”
Zhang urged the U.S. to “correct its strategic perceptions of China” and respect China’s “core interests” by halting arms sales to Taiwan and to “stop spreading false narratives on Taiwan.”
Prior to Sullivan’s arrival in Beijing, the Global Times, China’s state media outlet, published a commentary criticizing Washington’s “incorrect” understanding of China.
“The U.S. needs to fundamentally change its perception of China and its strategic positioning toward China,” according to the article.
The Global Times told Sullivan that “truly listening to and understanding Beijing’s words and making a proper contribution to establishing the correct understanding between China and the U.S. should be one of the standards to evaluate the success of his visit to China.”
China’s political commentators have gone even further, calling on Beijing to remain tough.
In a commentary, Shen Yi, an international relations professor at Fudan University in Shanghai who has a huge following on social media, wrote that the U.S. is in no position to make any demands toward China because of the domestic economic difficulties in which he contends Washington is trapped.
“China should be sufficiently confident that it’s the U.S. who needs help from China,” he wrote. “Under this new frame of understanding, we have reasons to believe that China does not need to compromise with the U.S.”
This kind of tough narrative, often pushed by Beijing and adopted by online commentators during the past decade, remains popular on social media. But Yang of the University of Chicago told VOA Mandarin Service that Beijing seems to be moving away from this kind of rhetoric.
“When China is facing a variety of challenges, and when the leaders of China have to maintain and manage China-U.S. relations, they have to think beyond just making tougher and tougher talks” and relying on this type of approach to be effective.
“The two sides actually have a lot of common interests,” he said.
https://www.voanews.com/a/china-takes-mild-tone-on-us-official-s-visit/7764507.html
Biden restarts immigration program for 4 countries with more vetting
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
washington — The Biden administration is restarting an immigration program that allows migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to come to the United States, and it is including “additional vetting” of their U.S.-based financial sponsors following fraud concerns.
The Department of Homeland Security had suspended the program earlier this month to investigate the concerns but indicated that an internal review found no widespread fraud among sponsors.
“Together with our existing rigorous vetting of potential beneficiaries seeking to travel to the United States, these new procedures for supporters have strengthened the integrity of these processes and will help protect against exploitation of beneficiaries,” the agency said.
The program launched in January 2023 and is a major piece of the Biden administration’s immigration policies that create or expand pathways for legal entry while restricting asylum for those who cross the border illegally.
The policy is aimed at countries that send large numbers of people to the United States and generally refuse to accept those who are deported. It is paired with commitments from Mexico to take back people from those countries who cross the U.S. border illegally.
Under the program, the U.S. accepts up to 30,000 people a month from the four countries for two years and offers eligibility for work authorization. To qualify, migrants must have a financial sponsor in the U.S. who vouches for them and fly into an American airport at their own expense, rather than crossing at the southern border. Those acting as sponsors and the migrants hoping to come to America undergo vetting by Homeland Security.
Republicans have repeatedly criticized the program as an end-run around immigration laws. They immediately attacked the administration when the program was suspended early this month, pointing to it as further validation of their concerns about whether migrants were properly vetted.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement Thursday that the additional vetting would include more scrutiny of the financial records that U.S.-based sponsors are required to submit as well as their criminal backgrounds. Sponsors will be required to submit fingerprints, and the agency will bolster steps to identify sponsors who are fraudulent and when one files numerous applications.
DHS said an internal review found some cases of fraud, such as sponsors using fake Social Security numbers, but that the majority of cases it investigated had a reasonable explanation, such as a typo when a sponsor was submitting information online.
“Since the inception of the process, a very small number of supporters were found to have fraud or criminal issues warranting referral to law enforcement for investigation and/or appropriate action,” the agency said.
Homeland Security also said it had not found issues in vetting the migrants themselves, saying those who come to the U.S. under the program “have been thoroughly screened and vetted.”
When it announced the program’s suspension, Homeland Security didn’t say when processing stopped. But the news broke after the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that favors immigration restrictions, cited an internal agency report that raised questions about fraud.
Neither Homeland Security nor FAIR have provided that report. FAIR asserted that the report showed that 3,218 sponsors were responsible for more than 100,000 filings and that 24 of the top 1,000 Social Security numbers used by sponsors corresponded to dead people.
Arrests for illegal crossings have plummeted among the four nationalities. Cubans were arrested 5,065 times during the first half of the year, compared with more than 42,000 arrests in November 2022 alone. Haitians were arrested 304 times during the first six months of the year, compared with a peak of nearly 18,000 in September 2021.
Make your own CDN with OpenBSD base and just 2 packages
date: 2024-08-29, from: OS News
The internet today relies TOO MUCH on just a few big players. When one of them stops working, half the world is impacted because too many services, in my opinion, depend on them. “Too big to fail,” some might say. “Single Point of Failure,” I respond.” The strength of the internet has always been its extreme decentralization, which is now less evident due to this phenomenon. In this article, I want to show how easy it is to create a self-hosted CDN using OpenBSD and just two external packages: Varnish and Lego. ↫ Stefano Marinelli Stefano Marinelli is a gem of a person, and a great voice for the wider BSD community. In this article he covers building your own CDN using OpenBSD, and a few days ago he published a similar article, but using FreeBSD instead. These are excellent resources for anyone who wants to take self-hosting and data ownership to the next level, even cutting out big players like Cloudflare which often don’t have the best interests of us regular people at heart. It’s probably not for everyone, but odds are if you’re reading OSNews, you might be capable of and interested in doing this. And Marinelli’s point about the internet being overly reliant on a just a few small players is well taken. We often focus on the front-end of the monopolised internet – Google, Apple, Microsoft, and so on – but the backend and infrastructure often also suffers from the same problem. These articles focus on effectively replacing Cloudflare, but something like Amazon Web Services is also a prime example of a service that’s basically become too big to fail. That’s not at all how the internet was supposed to work, but unfettered capitalism ruins everything, and this is no exception. While a few of us breaking away from the monopolies and building our own alternatives isn’t going to have any material impact, it at least aides in a cleaner conscience.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140631/make-your-own-cdn-with-openbsd-base-and-just-2-packages/
NASA Life Sciences Portal (NLSP)
date: 2024-08-29, from: NASA breaking news
NASA Life Sciences Portal (NLSP) The NASA Life Sciences Portal (NLSP) is the gateway to discovering and accessing all archive data from investigations sponsored by NASA’s Human Research Program (HRP). The HRP conducts research and develops technologies that allow humans to travel safely and productively in space. The Program uses evidence from data collected from […]
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/esdmd/hhp/nlsp/
OS-9 Bonus Content
date: 2024-08-29, from: Computer ads from the Past
A detailed look at OS-9 for Tandy Color Computers
https://computeradsfromthepast.substack.com/p/os-9-bonus-content
DirectML expands NPU support to Copilot+ PCs and WebNN
date: 2024-08-29, from: Windows Developer Blog
AI is transforming the way we interact with technology, enabling new and improved experiences across a variety of scenarios. DirectML empowers developers to bring their AI innovations to Windows and utilize local hardware acceleration to scale across
The post DirectML expands NPU support to Copilot+ PCs and WebNN appeared first on Windows Developer Blog.
Fossils Capturing a Sea Cow’s Violent End Shed Light on Prehistoric Food Chains
date: 2024-08-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
New research suggests the dugong-like sea creature was attacked by a crocodile, then its remains were scavenged by a tiger shark—a rare series of events to be immortalized in the fossil record
Nvidia admits Blackwell defect, but Jensen Huang pledges Q4 shipments as promised
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
The setback won’t stop us from banking billions, CFO insists
Nvidia has confirmed earlier reports that its Blackwell generation of GPUs suffered from a design defect that adversely impacted the yields of the hotly anticipated accelerators.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/nvidia_blackwell_manufacturing/
Americans Say ‘Okay, Whatever’ to Permitting Reform
date: 2024-08-29, from: Heatmap News
Most Americans support the idea of a bipartisan law that would make it easier to build new clean energy projects while benefiting some oil and gas development, according to a Heatmap News poll conducted earlier this month.
Some 52% of Americans said they backed the general idea of the legislation, the poll found. About a quarter of Americans opposed it, and roughly another quarter said they weren’t sure.
That’s good news for one of the last remaining pieces of environmental policy that Congress could pass under this presidency: a bipartisan proposal from Senators Joe Manchin and John Barrasso that would speed up the process of building climate-friendly infrastructure in exchange for concessions to the oil and gas industry.
The legislation is meant to bind together Democratic and Republican goals for the country’s energy development. Democrats in Congress and the White House are worried that permitting delays and excessive red tape could now slow down America’s shift away from fossil fuels. This year, for instance, the United States will add less new wind capacity than it has in any year since 2020. Experts say that’s due in large part to the lack of new power lines to parts of the country where wind is abundant. Even many progressives, who have historically championed stricter permitting and environmental review laws, now favor altering them in the abstract to speed the zero-carbon buildout — although prominent groups have opposed this particular deal.
Republicans, meanwhile, have accused the Biden administration of dragging its feet on making federally owned lands available for oil and gas development. The Biden administration leased 95% fewer acres in 2023 than the Trump administration did in 2019, according to E&E News.
Under President Biden, the Interior Department has acknowledged that oil and gas drilling on public lands worsens climate change, but said that information alone does not allow it to block new leases. From 2005 to 2019, roughly one quarter of all fossil fuel extraction in the United States happened on federal land.
Beyond those facts, however, having a national conversation about permitting reform is tricky because so many proposals are so deep in the weeds that their importance often isn’t immediately obvious. How many voters are ready to debate whether the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission should be able to fast-track certain new power lines? Or why there should be a statute of limitations for some National Environmental Policy Act lawsuits? (If you’re curious, I wrote a cheat sheet on some of the biggest permitting reform proposals last year.)
Indeed, many of the people Heatmap polled told us they didn’t know enough to decide whether they were for or against the bill — but those who did feel confident answering largely said they were in favor of it. Across cities and suburbs, political parties and age groups, permitting reform is about 15 to 25 points above water. Republicans are somewhat more amenable to the compromise than Democrats: 58% of GOP voters support the proposal, while only 47% of Democrats do. Independents are most skeptical at 44%, though the idea of the deal still has more independent supporters than opponents.
The idea of a deal commands majority support in every region of the country. It’s also supported by most Americans who say they live in rural areas, small towns, suburbs, and small cities. (Among Americans who live in large cities, the measure commands 48% support.) Even Americans who say they would oppose some forms of energy development in their area — such as a hydrogen project or battery storage plant — back the proposal.
This all suggests that the permitting reform deal could remain largely depoliticized as Congress continues to debate it through the fall — if you were to summarize respondents’ reactions to the survey, it might look like, “Sure, whatever, sounds good.” The public’s apparent openness to a deal also comes as its concern for urgent action on climate change has somewhat cooled since 2020.
Over the past few years, too, polls have detected a substantive drop in Republican support for clean energy development. While 54% of conservative Republicans backed clean energy in 2018 according to a Yale poll, that figure has since fallen to 24%. Building more clean energy does not even command a majority of liberal and moderate Republican support anymore, Anthony Leiserowitz, a Yale professor of climate change communication, told me.
A separate poll — from the Pew Research Center — found that Republican support for building more wind and solar farms has fallen by 20 percentage points since President Joe Biden took office, although it also showed that both energy sources commanded majority support.
“Clean energy used to be one of those things that pretty much everyone supported more or less,” Leiserowitz said. “That is important. That is the backdrop to the deeper currents behind the increasing opposition to wind farms and solar farms across the country.”
“Clean energy,” he added, “has become much more politicized than it was in the past.”
The Heatmap poll of 5,202 American adults was conducted by Embold Research via online responses from August 3 to 16, 2024. The survey included interviews with Americans in all 50 states and Washington, D.C. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.
https://heatmap.news/politics/permitting-reform-survey
What a coincidence. Spyware makers, Russia’s Cozy Bear seem to share same exploits
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Google researchers note similarities, can’t find smoking-gun link
Google’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG) has spotted an interesting pattern: A Kremlin-linked cyber-espionage crew and commercial spyware makers exploiting specific security vulnerabilities in pretty much the same way.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/commercial_spyware_russia_mongolia/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Obama roasted Trump in 2011.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHckZCxdRkA&t=165s
These Signed Salvador Dalí Prints Were Forgotten in a Garage for Half a Century
date: 2024-08-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The ten lithographs by Dalí, along with another five by Théo Tobiasse, will go to auction next month
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
America's political news media reaches new lows in the 2024 election cycle.
Japan’s real first console? Bandai’s TV Jack 5000
date: 2024-08-29, from: OS News
The Epoch Cassette Vision is often reported as the first Japanese cartridge-based game console. But reality is always a bit more complicated. In 1978, years before the Cassette Vision, two Japanese companies put together cartridge-based game consoles that were unique to Japan, but relied on technology and chips licensed from American firms. And hey, despite my whirlwind tour of Pong consoles, I never looked at GI chips. Behold, the breathes in Bandai Video Mate All Color TV Jack Addon 5000. (longest console name in the history of the blog?) This 1978 console was the follow-on to Bandai’s earlier Video Mate TV Jack consoles, which were more or less the same as everyone else’s Pong-on-a-chip consoles. (The TV Jack 2500 appears rather intriguing, but we’re not looking at that one today) ↫ Nicole Express As usual, Nicole’s deep dives into weird consoles you’ve never heard of are a great read, and this one is no exception. There are many things that make the Jack Addon 5000 unique and interesting, but the one thing that’s really cool is that while the game lives on the cartridge, the colour lives inside the console itself. Inside the cartridge you’ll only find the monochrome game chip; the colour is added by another chip that’s fitted inside the console. Only four cartridges were ever released for the system, so it’s not particularly more versatile than contemporary Pong clones that had multiple built-in games or game modes. Still, it’s an interesting footnote, and I’m so happy we got such a detailed look at this console.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140628/japans-real-first-console-bandais-tv-jack-5000/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Arlington National Cemetery meant to be 'neutral zone,' says military chaplain.
You can run a minimal Linux distro on Raspberry Pi’s new RP2350 microcontroller
date: 2024-08-29, from: Liliputing
Raspberry Pi’s new RP2350 microcontroller is a small cheap chip that powers the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 and other inexpensive development boards. Released earlier this month, the RP2350 is a major upgrade over the 4-year-old RP2040 chip at the heart of the first-gen Raspberry Pi Pico, with the new model featuring a faster microcontroller, twice […]
The post You can run a minimal Linux distro on Raspberry Pi’s new RP2350 microcontroller appeared first on Liliputing.
Feeling Sticky This Summer? ‘Corn Sweat’ Could Be Raising the Humidity
date: 2024-08-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
The natural process of plant evapotranspiration is pumping moisture into an already hot and humid atmosphere, especially in the corn-growing areas of the Midwest
EditorConfig Files in Xcode
date: 2024-08-29, from: Michael Tsai
Pol Piella: As a developer for Apple platforms, you probably work on multiple projects with different coding styles and conventions and have to find yourself adjusting Xcode’s editor settings every time you switch between projects. This can be a tedious process that you might forget to do or overlook and, if the project does not […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/29/editorconfig-files-in-xcode/
Find Any File 2.5
date: 2024-08-29, from: Michael Tsai
Thomas Tempelmann: Adds a “Name without Extension” rule.[…]Holding the Option key with the search location popup menu open will now also show the System and Data members of bootable volumes. If you choose a “(Data)” volume as the search destination, it’ll skip the original files installed by Apple, making the search faster. If you’re searching […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/29/find-any-file-2-5/
Calling async Code Synchronously in Swift
date: 2024-08-29, from: Michael Tsai
Wade Tregaskis: I find my hand is often forced by APIs I don’t control (most often Apple’s APIs). e.g. data source or delegate callbacks that are synchronous and require you to return a value, but in order to obtain that value you have to run async code (perhaps because yet again that’s all you’re given […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/29/calling-async-code-synchronously-in-swift/
Mobile Deployment Pipelines for $0
date: 2024-08-29, from: Michael Tsai
Jacob Bartlett: Today, I’ll show you how to set up CI on your side projects. For free!Part I: FastlanePart II: App Store ConnectPart III: GitHub Actions […] Frustratingly, cloud-hosted MacOS runners on GitHub Actions cost 10x as much per minute as Linux runners. While public repos are granted 200 minutes of Mac runner time a […]
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2024/08/29/mobile-deployment-pipelines-for-0/
AMD’s Victor Peng: AI thirst for power underscores the need for efficient silicon
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Moore’s Law may be running out of steam, but there are still knobs to turn and levers to pull
Hot Chips Speaking at Hot Chips this week, AMD president Victor Peng addressed one of the biggest challenges facing the semiconductor industry as it grapples with growing demand for ever larger AI models: power.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/ai_thirst_for_power/
Vietnam’s defense minister to visit US next month
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
Washington — Vietnam’s minister of national defense, Phan Van Giang, is set to visit Washington next month for a high-level meeting with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, U.S. and Vietnamese officials tell VOA.
The minister is expected to visit Washington from September 7-9 to strengthen defense cooperation between the two countries, according to a Vietnamese defense ministry official and a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the trip has not been officially announced.
During the talks, the sides are expected to discuss a range of defense-related topics, including training initiatives and the lingering legacies of the Vietnam War. Giang is also expected to sign an agreement to purchase military equipment from the U.S., though Vietnamese officials said the details of the deal are still being work out.
The Vietnamese Embassy in Washington has yet to comment on the visit.
This meeting marks the first encounter between the defense chiefs of Vietnam and the U.S. since the two countries upgraded their bilateral relations to a Strategic Comprehensive Partnership a year ago, coinciding with U.S. President Joe Biden’s historic visit to Vietnam. It also signals a strengthening of military ties and could pave the way for further cooperation between the two nations in the future.
The expected visit follows the 13th Political, Security, and Defense Dialogue held in Hanoi on August 26, the first such dialogue since the relationship upgrade.
U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, Bonnie Jenkins, who led the U.S. delegation at the dialogue, emphasized the U.S. commitment to enhancing defense and security cooperation with Vietnam. This cooperation includes programs on military training, medicine, peacekeeping, counter-terrorism, and cybersecurity.
The last face-to-face meeting between Giang and Austin took place in November 2023, during an ASEAN defense ministers’ meeting in Jakarta. During that encounter, the two discussed measures to boost bilateral defense cooperation, with a particular focus on efforts to address war legacies and provide humanitarian assistance.
Topics covered included demining and the removal of unexploded ordnances, dioxin cleanup, and accounting for Missing in Action (MIA) soldiers.
Vietnam’s defense minister also extended an invitation to U.S. defense companies to participate in Vietnam’s second international defense exhibition, scheduled for late 2024.
This article originated in VOA’s Vietnamese Service; Carla Babb is VOA’s Pentagon correspondent.
https://www.voanews.com/a/vietnam-s-defense-minister-to-visit-us-next-month-/7764337.html
Forecasting Like a Pro: Q&A with Jordan Despanie
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: RAND blog
Jordan Despanie is a technology and security policy fellow at RAND with interests spanning biosecurity, artificial intelligence, open-source intelligence, and foreign policy. The RAND Forecasting Initiative asked him to share insights on how he achieved top-tier forecaster status to inform its approach toward recruiting and training forecasters across RAND.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/08/forecasting-like-a-pro-qa-with-jordan-despanie.html
Daily Deals (8-29-2024)
date: 2024-08-29, from: Liliputing
The Epic Games Store is giving away the Fallout Classic Collection for free this week. The bundle includes the first two Fallout games as well as Fallout Tactics: Brotherhood of Steel. Meanwhile folks with an Amazon Prime membership can stream Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas free through Amazon Luna this month, as well as […]
The post Daily Deals (8-29-2024) appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/daily-deals-8-29-2024/
Feds claim sinister sysadmin locked up thousands of Windows workstations, demanded ransom
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Sordid search history ‘evidence’ in case that could see him spend 35 years for extortion and wire fraud
A former infrastructure engineer who allegedly locked IT department colleagues out of their employer’s systems, then threatened to shut down servers unless paid a ransom, has been arrested and charged after an FBI investigation.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/vm_engineer_extortion_allegations/
Economics, tensions blamed for Chinese students shifting from US to Australia, Britain
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
Austin, Texas — U.S. universities are welcoming international students as the academic year begins. But while the total number of foreign students is steadily growing, the top sending country, China, is showing signs of leveling out or shrinking.
Industry analysts say the negative trend is mainly due to higher costs amid China’s struggling economy, with a growing number of students going to less expensive countries like Australia and Britain, and tense ties between Washington and Beijing.
The number of foreign students studying in the U.S. in 2022-23 passed 1 million for the first time since the COVID pandemic, said Open Doors, an information resource on international students and scholars.
While the U.S. saw a nearly 12% total increase year-on-year for that period, the number of international students from China, its top source, fell by 0.2% to 289,526.
That’s 600 fewer students than the 2021-22 academic year, when their numbers dropped by nearly 9%. The COVID pandemic saw Chinese student numbers drop in 2020-21 by nearly 15%, in line with the world total drop.
While it’s not yet clear if the drop is a leveling out or a fluctuating decline, analysts say China’s struggling economy and the high cost of studying in the U.S. are the main reasons for the fall in student numbers.
Vincent Chen, a Chinese study abroad consultant based in Shanghai, said although most of his clients are still interested in studying in the U.S., there is a clear downward trend, while applicants for Anglophone universities in Australia and Britain have been increasing.
“If you just want to go abroad, a one-year master’s degree in the U.K. is much cheaper,” Chen said. “Many people can’t afford to study in the U.S., so they have to settle for the next best thing.”
Data from the nonprofit U.S. group College Board Research shows that in the 2023-24 academic year, the average tuition and fees for a U.S. private college four-year education increased 4% to $41,540 compared with the previous academic year.
The British Council said three to four years of undergraduate tuition in Britain starts as low as $15,000.
The number of Chinese students in Britain was 154,260 in 2022-23, according to the U.K. Higher Education Statistics Agency, HESA, up from 121,145 in the 2018/19 academic year.
Australia’s Home Affairs office said in the 2023-24 program year, China was the top source foreign country for new student visa grants at 43,389, up slightly (1.5%) from the previous year.
Chen said Chinese state media’s negative portrayal of the United States and concerns about discrimination have also contributed to the shift.
Bruce Zhang, a Chinese citizen who received his master’s degree in Europe after studying in China, told VOA Mandarin he had such an incident occur to him after he was admitted to a U.S. university’s Ph.D. program.
When he entered Boston’s Logan International Airport last year, Zhang said customs officers questioned him for more than an hour about his research, and if it had any links to the military, and took his computer and mobile phone for examination.
“Fortunately, I had heard that U.S. customs might be stringent in inspecting Chinese students, so I had relatively few study-related data and documents on my personal computer,” he said.
Zhang was allowed to enter the U.S. for his studies in materials science, but the questioning left him so rattled that he has encouraged other Chinese to study elsewhere.
Cui Kai, a study abroad consultant in Massachusetts told VOA Mandarin that experiences like Zhang’s or worse happen for a reason.
“Students who were questioned or their visas were revoked at the customs are usually those who completed their undergraduate studies in China and come to the U.S. for a master’s or doctoral degree in a sensitive major,” said Cui.
Former President Donald Trump signed Proclamation 10043 in June 2020, prohibiting visas for any Chinese student who “has been employed by, studied at, or conducted research at or on behalf of, an entity in the PRC that implements or supports the PRC’s “military-civil fusion strategy.”
The U.S. says China has been using students and scholars to gain access to key technology and, under Proclamation 10043, revoked more than 1,000 visas issued to Chinese nationals and has denied thousands more.
Critics say the policy is costly to the U.S. and is encouraging Chinese students to look to European and other universities.
Adrianna Zhang contributed to this report.
Museum Settles With Heirs of Jewish Couple Who Sold a 16th-Century Painting as They Fled the Nazis
date: 2024-08-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
A Pennsylvania museum will auction the portrait—and split the proceeds with the descendants of Henry and Hertha Bromberg
eBPF from Go; First Steps
date: 2024-08-29, from: Miek Giebin blog
So I had this itch that I wanted to make a Go program compile to eBPF and be able to load that program in the Linux kernel by use of bpftool. As I say in github.com/miekg/ebpf eBPF in C? What am I, a farmer? After much reading about eBPF and thinking about how that would work from Go, I figured that would involve writing a Go compiler. So I could:
https://miek.nl/2024/august/29/ebpf-from-go-first-steps/
Yelp accuses Google of being a local search bully in antitrust lawsuit
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Chocolate Factory claims rival is trying to revive cases it’s already lost
Yelp has waded through legal floodgates opened by the Department of Justice’s antitrust victory with a lawsuit of its own, alleging Google is monopolizing local search and advertising markets.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/google_antitrust_yelp/
US Army: Arlington cemetery official ‘abruptly pushed’ by Trump staffer
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
Pentagon — The U.S. Army says a female Arlington National Cemetery official was “abruptly pushed aside” by a campaign staffer for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump as she was trying to ensure that rules prohibiting political activities there were followed.
“This incident was unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the ANC employee and her professionalism has been unfairly attacked,” an Army spokesperson said in a written statement on Thursday.
The Trump campaign has pushed back, saying that the former president was granted permission to bring “campaign designated media” to Section 60 of the cemetery by Gold Star families.
“The fact is that a private photographer was permitted on the premises and for whatever reason, an unnamed individual, clearly suffering from a mental health episode, decided to physically block members of President Trump’s team during a very solemn ceremony,” Trump’s spokesperson Steven Cheung said earlier this week.
Another top Trump aide, Chris LaCivita, issued a written statement saying, “For a despicable individual to physically prevent President Trump’s team from accompanying him to this solemn event is a disgrace and does not deserve to represent the hallowed grounds of Arlington National Cemetery. Whoever this individual is, spreading these lies are dishonoring the men and women of our armed forces.”
However, rules at the military cemeteries in Arlington, Virginia, “clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds,” the Army said. In other words, the Gold Star families who told the Trump campaign that media representatives could be there did not have the authority to allow campaign media to film the event.
The Army says the Trump campaign and participants in the August 26 ceremony had been made aware of the relevant federal laws before the incident in which the cemetery employee was pushed.
“Consistent with the decorum expected at ANC, this employee acted with professionalism and avoided further disruption. The incident was reported to the JBM-HH (Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall) police department, but the employee subsequently decided not to press charges,” the Army said.
The Army now considers the matter closed.
Arlington National Cemetery hosts public wreath laying ceremonies at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier for individuals and groups who submit requests to do so in advance.
“ANC conducts nearly 3,000 such public ceremonies a year without incident,” the Army spokesperson said. “Its dedicated staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.”
Salesforce mulls charging per AI chat as investors sweat over fewer seats
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Benioff sees ‘very high margin opportunity’ in bid to ‘monetize’ productivity gains
Salesforce is considering a new charging model based on AI agent conversations as it attempts to allay investor concerns that improving productivity among users will lead to them buying fewer license seats.…
Hebrew Bible From Medieval Spain Could Sell for $7 Million
date: 2024-08-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
After years of painstaking work, Rabbi Shem Tov Ibn Gaon finished the illustrated manuscript in 1312
MSI MS-C918S is a tiny fanless PC with Intel N100 and dual display support
date: 2024-08-29, from: Liliputing
The MSI MS-C918S is a small small desktop computer with a 6-watt Intel N100 quad-core processor based on Alder Lake-N architecture, support for up to two displays, Gigabit Ethernet, and optional support for WiFi 6E and Bluetooth 5.2 In other words, it’s a lot like the MSI MS-C918 we wrote about earlier this summer. But there’s on […]
The post MSI MS-C918S is a tiny fanless PC with Intel N100 and dual display support appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/msi-ms-c918s-is-a-tiny-fanless-pc-with-intel-n100-and-dual-display-support/
Rock Chrome hard enough and get paid half a million
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Google revises Chrome Vulnerability Rewards Program with higher payouts for bug hunters
Google’s Chrome Vulnerability Rewards Program (VRP) is now significantly more rewarding – with a top payout that’s at least twice as substantial.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/google_chrome_vuln_rewards/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Why, after 30 years, is there still no distribution system for news on the web?
http://scripting.com/2024/08/29/153350.html?title=webNewsStillSucks
Why Wind Energy Is in a State of Crisis
date: 2024-08-29, from: Distilled Earth blog
Wind energy’s recent woes, explained
https://www.distilled.earth/p/why-wind-energy-is-in-a-state-of
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Laughing at Trump.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2024/08/how-to-mock-trump-and-win/679645/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
How it all went wrong for tourism.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/tourism-why-it-went-wrong/index.html
Today’s Leased EVs Are Tomorrow’s Cheap Used Cars
date: 2024-08-29, from: Heatmap News
The new way to buy an electric car is not to buy one at all.
Just three years ago, four out of five EV drivers had financed their car or paid in cash, while only 21% had leased the EV, according to data from TransUnion. But by the second quarter of this year, leasing had become the top choice: 48.7% of people leased their new electric vehicle versus 34.7 percent who financed and 16.6% who paid in cash.
That’s a sea change in the way people shop for EVs, and it could be great news for the electric car market — just think of all the gently used cars that will flood the market when those leases end.
Why leasing has spiked
There are numerous factors behind leasing’s ascendance, starting with money matters. Electric cars still cost more than fossil fuel-burners, but the monthly payment on a lease is almost always less than what you’d pay per month to finance the full cost of a vehicle. In that way, leasing brings EVs within reach for budget-minded drivers — Joseph Yoon, consumer insights analyst at Edmunds, recently told me there are great leasing deals aplenty on EVs because dealers want to move them off the lots.
A tweak to the federal tax credits helped, too. It got more complicated to buy an EV outright this year after the government restricted the benefits to vehicles with a minimum amount of domestic manufacturing. But the same rules don’t apply to leased vehicles, giving those who lease an EV the option to get a discount on a car that wouldn’t necessarily be eligible if they financed it.
There are other hypotheses about the rising popularity of the lease. A bigwig at one of the credit bureaus told InsideEVs that leasing reflects buyers’ comfort with the subscription model that has taken over our economy at large. The data also shows that the total number of first-time lessees has actually declined a little since 2019, which suggests to me that perhaps a lot of people who always lease their vehicles decided over the past few years that it was time to go for an EV.
Leasing is also simply an attractive choice given the current state of electric vehicle offerings. Most of today’s most popular models haven’t been on the road long enough to tell us much about how they’ll age — or what might go wrong when they’re eight or 10 or 12 years old. Lease-holders don’t have to worry about any of that. They need not worry about the battery range inevitably fading, either.
For this reason I’ve begun, from time to time, to second-guess my own decision to buy my EV. Rather than watching its battery diminish as the years go by, I could have leased it, returned it after three years, and gotten into a cool new EV that didn’t exist when I bought mine. Then again, I’m closing in on the last monthly payment rather than being locked into the cycle of forever payments that comes with leasing. So I got that going for me, which is nice.
Why that’s great for the EV market
The jump in leasing is having a clear impact on the shape of the electric vehicle market, where carmakers in the U.S., in particular, are still having trouble putting out affordable EVs that buyers want. Luxury buyers, on the other hand, have always favored leases as a way to keep themselves in a shiny, new-ish car, and to avoid the unpleasant experience of owning an out-of-warranty BMW, Mercedes-Benz, or Audi. Around 90% of those three companies’ EVs are leased, a number that has helped the Germany luxury brands get a foothold in the electric car market (especially considering the staggering MSRPs of most of their electric offerings).
And then there’s what happens to all those leased vehicles. Once a typical three-year agreement expires, its driver must give back the vehicle to the dealership, presumably in the undamaged, low-mileage condition that’s specified in the terms of the lease. From there, the vehicle goes on to start its second life as someone else’s brand new used car — which is why it’s good news that lots of people are leasing EVs.
While leasing is one way to work around the high sticker prices of EVs, buying used is another. Used vehicles have long been a better deal because somebody else suffered the financial penalty of buying a new car and seeing its value plummet the moment they drove it off the lot. (In fact, what you’re really paying for when you lease a car is the severe depreciation it undergoes during its first few years of life. The dealership has to get that money from lease customers because they’ll get much less for the vehicle when it returns from its lease as a three-year-old and they resell it as a used car.)
The used EV market, though, hasn’t been particularly robust to date. For one thing, there just aren’t that many vehicles on the market since EV sales really only took off in the past few years. Further limiting supply are the plummeting prices of used EVs, which appear to be depreciating much faster than gasoline cars or hybrids. Since owners would recoup so little from selling their EVs, more of them are hanging onto their cars.
That’s why the rise in leased EVs could be good news for everyone else. In a few years, all of those electric vehicles will return to the lot where many will become gently used, certified pre-owned cars that sell for much less than new vehicles. And though the fate of the federal tax credits after this year’s election are uncertain, used EVs currently also qualify for a tax break.
Used electric vehicles have their own set of concerns. Their drivers won’t enjoy the full driving range that the battery offered when new. They’ll be responsible for the longer-term repairs if they want to keep the car running indefinitely. But used EVs with 80% or 90% of their original range are plenty useful, and given those prices and tax breaks, they’re a steal, too. And with a lot of leased EVs soon to enter the secondary market, you might even be able to find one.
https://heatmap.news/electric-vehicles/ev-leases-used-cars
Snags in the food supply chain are becoming a “dire situation”
date: 2024-08-29, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Members of Congress are calling on the Agriculture Department to fix supply chain problems. Several groups of lawmakers are saying some tribes and food banks that rely on supplies from USDA distribution programs are reporting empty shelves because promised food deliveries never came. Also, a growing minority of Americans worry curbing climate change will hurt the economy, and Singapore’s government is pushing older workers to keep working.
Verizon taps another satellite operator to make texting from the middle of nowhere easier
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
iPhone-like functionality coming to other devices on the network soon
Verizon has teamed up with another satellite operator to offer US customers a commercial direct-to-device messaging service for when a terrestrial cell network is not available, starting this fall.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/verizon_skylo_satellite_messaging/
How to See the Milky Way This Weekend
date: 2024-08-29, from: Smithsonian Magazine
Late August is a great time to observe the dazzling core of our galaxy, and with the upcoming new moon, viewing conditions should be ideal—as long as you’re in a very dark area
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/how-to-see-the-milky-way-this-weekend-180984991/
MEGAMINI G1 liquid-cooled mini gaming PC is coming soon to Kickstarter
date: 2024-08-29, from: Liliputing
The MEGAMINI G1 is a small desktop computer designed for gaming. It features NIVDIA GeForce RTX 4060 graphics, a 13th-gen Intel Core H-series processor configured to run at up to 65 watts, and a liquid cooling system designed to keep everything running smoothly. First unveiled earlier this year, the MEGAMINI G1 should be available for pre-order […]
The post MEGAMINI G1 liquid-cooled mini gaming PC is coming soon to Kickstarter appeared first on Liliputing.
https://liliputing.com/megamini-g1-liquid-cooled-mini-gaming-pc-is-coming-soon-to-kickstarter/
@Tomosino’s Mastodon feed (date: 2024-08-29, from: Tomosino’s Mastodon feed)
Just had a platform survey me about the #AI features I’d like to see them add. My response was loud and clear:
I need to be able to disable AI features completely. My MSAs have rules governing the use of AI. If your platform can’t disable it, many companies are not going to be able to use your software and stay legally compliant.
Feature #1 should be the off switch.
Please share this loudly everywhere.
https://tilde.zone/@tomasino/113045989593886761
My House Is Part of a Virtual Power Plant
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: One Foot Tsunami
https://onefoottsunami.com/2024/08/29/my-house-is-part-of-a-virtual-power-plant/
GNU Screen 5.0 released
date: 2024-08-29, from: OS News
I don’t use GNU Screen so I don’t have much to say here, but I do know it’s a popular tool among the kind of people who read OSNews, so a new major release should be covered here. In case you’re not aware, “Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells”. Basically, it’s window manager for terminals. You can download the tarball yourself, or just wait until the update hits your distribution of choice.
https://www.osnews.com/story/140626/gnu-screen-5-0-released/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
The joy comes from finally being rid of the threat of Trump.
https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:oety7qbfx7x6exn2ytrwikmr/post/3l2ug3fmlsw2c
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
New York mayor Eric Adams personally destroys 4 tons of illegal pot products seized by the city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPvBlYkVphk
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Mathew Ingram is leaving CJR. This is his last piece.
https://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/mathew_ingram_goodbye.php
Ex-Windows boss who tried to save the Start Menu now Shopify tech wizard
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Time to make e-commerce great again instead?
Mikhail Parakhin, the former Windows boss who pledged to “make Start Menu great again” before departing Microsoft shortly after, has popped up as CTO of e-commerce outfit Shopify.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/mikhail_parakhin_shopify_cto/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Local news covers a lot of crime, yet people can’t find the crime news they need.
New 2GB Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings
date: 2024-08-29, from: Jeff Geerling blog
New 2GB Pi 5 has 33% smaller die, 30% idle power savings
<div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p>Raspberry Pi <a href="https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/2gb-raspberry-pi-5-on-sale-now-at-50/">launched the 2 gig Pi 5 for $50</a>, and besides half the RAM and a lower price, it has a new stepping of the main BCM2712 chip.</p>
This is the BCM2712 D0 stepping. Older Pi 5’s shipped with a C1. In their blog post, they said:
The new D0 stepping strips away all that unneeded functionality, leaving only the bits we need.
Steppings are basically chip revisions where they don’t change functionality, and usually just fix bugs, or tweak the layout. But even tiny design changes could have unintended consequences. I wanted to see exactly what happens when I push one of these new chips to the limits.
First, I wanted a performance baseline, so I ran Geekbench with the latest Pi OS and all the defaults.
<span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>
https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/new-2gb-pi-5-has-33-smaller-die-30-idle-power-savings
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump’s Arlington Cemetery Campaign Event.
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/trumps-arlington-cemetery-campaign-event
Fintech outfit Klarna swaps humans for AI by not replacing departing workers
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Insists it’s not cutting jobs and pays harder-to-automate people more with AI savings
Buy-now-pay-later outfit Klarna’s CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski is so thrilled with the performance of AI at his business that he’s planning to shrink the human headcount by half – and predicts he won’t be alone.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/ai_hiring_freeze_klarna/
How Should ROR Handle API Client Identification?
date: 2024-08-29, from: ROR Research ID Blog
We’re looking for your feedback on a draft proposal for managing ROR API client identification with ‘mailto’ parameters or API keys, and comments are open through October 4th, 2024.
https://ror.org/blog/2024-08-29-api-client-identification/
US second quarter growth stronger than estimated, government says
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
Washington — The U.S. economy expanded more than initially estimated in the second quarter this year, the Department of Commerce said Thursday, on stronger consumer spending than originally anticipated.
The world’s biggest economy grew at an annual rate of 3.0% in the April-to-June period, up from 2.8% according to an earlier estimate.
Analysts had expected no revision to the figure.
“The update primarily reflected an upward revision to consumer spending,” the Commerce Department said.
Unexpectedly robust consumption — even in the face of high interest rates — has helped to bolster the U.S. economy in recent times. But with households depleting pandemic-era savings, the anticipation was for consumption to pull back.
In the latest revision, the higher spending was partly offset by downward revisions in areas such as business investment, exports and government spending.
Imports, however, were revised higher.
The 3.0% figure for the second quarter this year was an uptick from 1.4% growth in the first quarter.
The Federal Reserve rapidly increased interest rates to tackle surging inflation in 2022. It is widely expected to make its first post-pandemic rate cut in September. This could provide a boost to the economy.
Apple’s Huge “Dual Use” Face Swap App Problem Is Not Going Away
date: 2024-08-29, from: 404 Media Group
Maybe Apple should ban face swapping apps entirely.
https://www.404media.co/apples-huge-dual-use-face-swap-app-problem-is-not-going-away/
Plot to attack Taylor Swift’s Vienna shows was intended to kill thousands, CIA official says
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
Berlin — The suspects in the foiled plot to attack Taylor Swift concerts in Vienna earlier this month sought to kill “tens of thousands” of fans before the CIA discovered intelligence that disrupted the planning and led to arrests, the agency’s deputy director said.
The CIA notified Austrian authorities of the scheme, which allegedly included links to the Islamic State group. The intelligence and subsequent arrests ultimately led to the cancellation of three sold-out Eras Tour shows, devastating fans who had traveled across the globe to see Swift in concert.
CIA Deputy Director David Cohen addressed the failed plot during the annual Intelligence and National Security Summit, held this week in Maryland.
“They were plotting to kill a huge number — tens of thousands of people at this concert, including I am sure many Americans — and were quite advanced in this,” Cohen said Wednesday. “The Austrians were able to make those arrests because the agency and our partners in the intelligence community provided them information about what this ISIS-connected group was planning to do.”
Austrian officials said the main suspect, a 19-year-old Austrian man, was inspired by the Islamic State group. He allegedly planned to attack outside the stadium, where upwards of 30,000 fans were expected to gather, with knives or homemade explosives. Another 65,000 fans were likely to be inside the venue. Investigators discovered chemical substances and technical devices during a raid of the suspect’s home.
Austria’s interior minister, Gerhard Karner, previously said help from other intelligence agencies was needed because Austrian investigators, unlike some foreign services, can’t legally monitor text messages.
The 19-year-old’s lawyer has said the allegations were “overacting at its best,” and contended Austrian authorities were “presenting this exaggeratedly” in order to get new surveillance powers.
Swift broke her silence about the cancellations last week after her London shows had concluded.
“Having our Vienna shows cancelled was devastating,” she wrote in a statement posted to Instagram. “The reason for the cancellations filled me with a new sense of fear, and a tremendous amount of guilt because so many people had planned on coming to those shows.”
She thanked authorities — “thanks to them, we were grieving concerts and not lives,” she wrote — and said she waited to speak until the European leg of her Eras Tour concluded to prioritize safety.
“Let me be very clear: I am not going to speak about something publicly if I think doing so might provoke those who would want to harm the fans who come to my shows,” she wrote.
Concert organizer Barracuda Music said it canceled the three-night Vienna run that would have begun Aug. 8 because the arrests made in connection to the conspiracy were too close to showtime.
The main suspect and a 17-year-old were taken into custody on Aug. 6, the day before the cancellations were announced. A third suspect, 18, was arrested Aug. 8. Their names have not been released in line with Austrian privacy rules.
The shows in London, the next stop after Vienna, came on the heels of a stabbing at a Swift-themed dance class that left three little girls dead in the U.K. In a statement issued after the Southport attack, Swift said she was “just completely in shock” and “at a complete loss for how to ever convey my sympathies to these families.” News outlets reported that Swift met with some of the survivors backstage in London.
The Vienna plot also drew comparisons to a 2017 attack by a suicide bomber at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, that killed 22 people. The bomb detonated at the end of Grande’s concert as thousands of young fans were leaving, becoming the deadliest extremist attack in the United Kingdom in recent years.
Cohen on Wednesday praised the CIA’s work in preventing the planned violence, saying that other counterterrorism “successes” in foiling plots typically go unheralded.
“I can tell you within my agency, and I’m sure in others, there were people who thought that was a really good day for Langley,” he said, referring to the CIA headquarters. “And not just the Swifties in my workforce.”
The record-smashing tour is on hiatus until the fall.
Bring NASA Into Your Classroom This Fall Through Virtual Experiences
date: 2024-08-29, from: NASA breaking news
Explore the universe this fall without leaving your classroom through live virtual engagements with NASA space and aviation experts. NASA is offering a new lineup of stellar virtual experiences to spark STEM excitement and connect students with the agency’s missions, science, careers, and more. The virtual engagements, managed by NASA’s Next Gen STEM project, are […]
https://www.nasa.gov/learning-resources/bring-nasa-into-your-classroom/
After 20 years, killer, invasive snakehead fish haven’t devoured the competition
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
Fredericksburg, Virginia — Most mornings, when the weather cooperates, angler Mike Sielicki can be found out on the water in Fredericksburg, Virginia — about an hour’s drive from Washington — trying to hook a species of fish that was once considered a dangerous threat to the surrounding aquatic wildlife.
“To me, it’s the best fish that ever hit the United States,” Sielicki says. “I hope it winds up going in every body of water so everybody can enjoy it.”
Sielicki has fished for northern snakeheads for 20 years, since they first showed up in Potomac Creek, a shallow inlet that feeds into the Potomac River, a major Washington-area waterway. Through his company, Apex Predators Potomac Creek, he takes paying customers out on his boat to fish for the invasive predator, which originally came from Asia.
“I have a fair amount of people that come from out of the state, out of the United States, that come fish with me,” he says on a quiet August morning when the snakeheads are proving elusive so far. “The water here is very shallow, gets very grassy, and that’s their perfect habitat.”
Snakeheads first appeared in the Washington area in 2002. Almost immediately, local wildlife officials sounded the alarm. Scientists worried that snakeheads would decimate this area’s native predator fish populations, including the prized largemouth bass.
“The Potomac River is a renowned destination throughout the country for bass tournaments and sport bass fishing. It’s huge,” says John Odenkirk, a fisheries biologist with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources. “And so, that was the concern, that this fish [snakehead] was going to destroy that, because they were kind of the same level at the top of the food chain.”
Snakeheads, which can grow to more than 83 centimeters long, have pointy teeth and can breathe air, which means they can survive out of the water for several days — as long as their skin remains moist.
Snakeheads also spawn twice a year, while similar level fish only spawn once a year. Officials worried these unique qualities would give snakeheads the edge over native top-level predators.
“So, on paper, it’s like, ‘Wow, they got some competitive advantage here.’ … What was driving the fear was that the abundance of snakeheads would get so high they would just overwhelm the system. That never happened,” Odenkirk says. “They never got to the point where they could threaten the stature of the bass, because there weren’t enough of them.”
Odenkirk says snakeheads aren’t dominating their environment in part because predators, including birds and other large fish, found them. And he says the snakehead’s natural prey, including smaller fish, instinctively adjusted to its presence.
The fish populations that snakeheads prey on have not declined, which suggests the snakeheads aren’t having a negative impact on the environment, Odenkirk adds.
The fish is also popular with anglers, which has also kept the snakehead population in check. Their firm, mild-tasting white meat makes them a sought-after delicacy.
“Like swimming chicken,” Sielicki says. “It’s the most hardiest piece of meat that you’ll ever get.”
Despite this suppression, in the United States the snakehead population has become most abundant in the Washington-area’s Potomac River and its tributaries, and in the southern state of Arkansas, where the fish used to be bred for food until 2002, when federal officials banned the practice.
Even though snakeheads haven’t had a noticeably negative impact on the ecosystem, wildlife officials aren’t prepared to give the invasive species the all-clear.
“If they get in somewhere different, maybe where we have a threatening or endangered fish, where there’s not as much diversity in the fish community, there could be some unwanted impacts in a situation like that,” Odenkirk says. “So, there’s still that hesitancy to sort of embrace the fish all across the board.”
Years ago, worried wildlife officials advised people to kill snakeheads if they caught them. But a recent state survey showed that about 40% of people who catch this prized fish in Virginia now choose to release it back in the wild.
But not Sielicki, who relishes harvesting his catch, which he does on this morning after an hourslong lull, when the determined fisherman finally hooks a 63-cm snakehead.
“Back up! We’re getting ready to put him in the boat,” he calls out. “Let’s see if we can get another one.”
Snakehead fish: The invasive species disaster that wasn’t
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
Invasive plants and animals disrupt food supplies, carry diseases and cause an estimated $423 billion in damage every year around the world. When an Asian fish called the snakehead invaded waterways near Washington, experts warned it might devour the competition and upset of the ecosystem. But, as VOA’s Dora Mekouar reports, that’s not what ended up happening. VOA footage by Adam Greenbaum.
https://www.voanews.com/a/snakehead-fish-the-invasive-species-disaster-that-wasn-t/7763787.html
Hubble Observes An Oddly Organized Satellite
date: 2024-08-29, from: NASA breaking news
Andromeda III is one of at least 13 dwarf satellite galaxies in orbit around the Andromeda galaxy, or Messier 31, the Milky Way’s closest grand spiral galactic neighbor. Andromeda III is a faint, spheroidal collection of old, reddish stars that appears devoid of new star formation and younger stars. In fact, Andromeda III seems to […]
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/hubble/hubble-observes-an-oddly-organized-satellite/
Brain Cipher claims attack on Olympic venue, promises 300 GB data leak
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
French police reckon financial system targeted during Summer Games
Nearly four weeks after the cyberattack on dozens of French national museums during the Olympic Games, the Brain Cipher ransomware group claims responsibility for the incident and says 300 GB of data will be leaked later today.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/brain_cipher_olympic_attack/
Latina women are helping drive the economy
date: 2024-08-29, from: Marketplace Morning Report
Latinas’ contribution to the U.S. economy grew more than 50% between 2010 and 2021. In 2021, it totaled $1.3 trillion, new data shows. But despite their economic rise, Latina workers are still overrepresented in certain low-wage jobs. We’ll hear more. But first, Nvidia reported superb results, but that still disappointed some on Wall Street. And we’ll learn the latest developments in the arrest of Telegram’s Pavel Durov.
Social Media Manipulation in the Era of AI
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: RAND blog
AI has opened a potential propaganda gold mine. Large language models like ChatGPT can learn to mimic human speech. They can respond to jokes and cultural references and engage users in debates. Social media platforms should redouble their efforts to identify, attribute, and remove fake accounts.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/articles/2024/social-media-manipulation-in-the-era-of-ai.html
Canada’s 2023 Wildfires Spewed More CO2 Than Most Countries
date: 2024-08-29, from: Heatmap News
Current conditions: Thousands of dead fish are stinking up the port of Volos in Greece • At least 24 people are missing after flash floods hit Yemen • More than 4 million people are under evacuation orders in Japan because of Typhoon Shanshan.
THE TOP FIVE
- New research shows just how extreme Canada’s 2023 wildfires were
The wildfires that raged through Canada’s boreal forests last year released as much carbon dioxide over just five months as a large country might throughout an entire year, according to new research published in the journal Nature. Just China, the U.S., and India emitted more CO2 than the fires.
NATURE
Canada is warming at about twice the global rate, and the average temperature during fire season last year was about 4 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal. The heat is triggering “flash droughts,” where the ground dries out quickly and large areas of forest become easy kindling. Extreme fire events like those in 2023 are likely to become more common as the planet warms. Because forests absorb about 25% of the world’s carbon emissions, the research suggests the world may need to reconsider how the carbon budget is calculated.
- Last Energy raises $40 million for small, modular nuclear reactors
Last Energy, a D.C.-based company making miniature, modularized nuclear reactors, announced today its $40 million series B round, led by the Austin-based venture capital firm Gigafund. CEO and founder Bret Kugelmass told Heatmap’s Katie Brigham that the company already has commercial agreements for 80 units, all in Europe, and that nearly half of these will be deployed at data centers. The company has reached the permitting stage for some of its European projects, with aims to deploy the first microreactor by 2026. There are currently no operational microreactors anywhere in the Western world, though other companies, including Radiant, Westinghouse, and BWX Technologies are also trying to build one. Last Energy’s investors are betting, however, that it could be one of the first to market.
- China wary of ‘peak emissions’ speculation
China’s energy officials are pouring cold water on the hot speculation that the country has reached peak carbon emissions, saying today that “great efforts are still needed to achieve the goals of peak carbon and carbon neutrality.” Song Wen, director of China’s National Energy Administration’s law and institutional reform department, cautioned that the country’s domestic energy demand is still growing and “the outlook is uncertain.”
- Researchers say climate change made deadly Typhoon Gaemi worse
A cyclone is gaining strength off the coasts of India and Pakistan in the Arabian Sea, forcing thousands to evacuate before the storm is expected to hit on Friday. Heavy rains are already bringing flooding to some of India’s western states. As a reminder, cyclones are the umbrella term for “intense rotating storm systems” that originate over warm tropical waters. Hurricanes and typhoons are also cyclones but have different regional names.
Scientists say climate change is making tropical storms more intense. New research from the World Weather Attribution found that Typhoon Gaemi, which hit the Philippines, Taiwan, and China last month and killed 90 people, was made worse by warmer sea temperatures, and that typhoons are 30% more likely now than during the pre-industrial era. “With global temperatures rising, we are already witnessing an increase in these ocean temperatures, and as a result, more powerful fuel is being made available for these tropical cyclones, increasing their intensity,” said Nadia Bloemendaal, a researcher at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. So far, the Atlantic hurricane season has been somewhat quiet, but forecasters warn activity will likely ramp up in September.
- Orsted to shutter its last remaining coal-fired power plant
Orsted announced today that it will shut down its last coal-fired heat and power plant this Saturday. The Esbjerg Power Station in Denmark consumes 500,000 metric tons of coal each year, equivalent to roughly 1.2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions, the company said. “We’re well on track to becoming the first major energy company to completely transform its energy production from fossil fuels to renewable energy,” said Ole Thomsen, senior vice president and head of Orsted’s bioenergy business. According to Reuters, 85% of Orsted’s heat and power production came from fossil fuels as recently as 2008.
THE KICKER
This week the Oakland Unified School District in California became the first major school district in America to transition to 100% electric school buses.
Zum
https://heatmap.news/climate/canada-wildfire-emissions-study
Argentine retirees protest over pensions
date: 2024-08-29, from: Marketplace Morning Report
From the BBC World Service: In Argentina, police have clashed with demonstrating senior citizens in the capital, Buenos Aires. The protesters are angry that President Javier Milei is to veto a pension increase as part of his austerity drive. Plus, the founder and boss of Telegram has been banned from leaving France . And in Singapore, we look at how an aging population is affecting the workforce.
DataVita declares sovereignty with ‘National Cloud’ for UK
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Scottish provider promises no hidden fees, full control, and safe haven for data
British hosting biz DataVita has launched what it calls “National Cloud,” a service offering clients data residency within the UK, and claims to have full transparency over costs, with no hidden fees or egress charges.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/datavita_national_cloud/
Brit teachers are getting AI sidekicks to help with marking and lesson plans
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Isn’t the education system in enough trouble already?
Updated The UK government is set to equip teachers with AI tools to help them “mark and plan lessons.”…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/uk_ai_for_teachers/
Why Really Tiny Nuclear Reactors Are Bringing In Big Money
date: 2024-08-29, from: Heatmap News
Nuclear energy is making a comeback, conceptually at least. While we’re yet to see a whole lot of new steel in the ground, money is flowing into fusion, there’s a push to build more standard fission reactors, and the dream of small modular reactors lives on, even in the wake of the NuScale disappointment.
All this excitement generally revolves around nuclear’s potential to provide clean, baseload power to the grid. But Washington D.C.-based Last Energy is pursuing a different strategy — making miniature, modularized reactors to provide power directly to industries such as data centers, auto manufacturing, and pulp and paper production. Size-wise, think small modular reactors, but, well, even smaller — Last Energy’s units provide a mere 20 megawatts of electricity, whereas a full-size reactor can be over 1,000 megawatts. SMRs sit somewhere in between.
Today the company announced its $40 million series B round, led by the Austin-based venture capital firm Gigafund. Last Energy aims to deploy its first microreactor by 2026, and CEO and founder Bret Kugelmass told me the company has already reached commercial agreements for 80 units, all in Europe. Nearly half of these will be deployed at data centers, the notoriously energy hungry server farms powering the AI boom.
Kugelmass told me the goal is for Last Energy’s reactor to be transportable in the back of a truck. “We decided to focus most of our specific design criteria based on supply chain and logistics constraints,” he said. Every part of the system is “built in a factory, first tested in a factory, mass manufactured in a factory, and then snaps together like a Lego set out in the field.”
There are currently no operational microreactors anywhere in the Western world, though other companies, including Radiant, Westinghouse, and BWX Technologies are also trying to build one. Last Energy’s investors are betting, however, that it could be one of the first to market.
As of now, the company has reached the permitting stage for some of its European projects. Kugelmass told me that Wales, England, Poland, and Romania are the company’s top markets, and that the decision to start in Europe was mainly financial. “Energy is so expensive in Europe compared to the U.S. — I mean, we’re talking like two, three times higher for the exact same thing that we’re going to deliver. We can make two or three times more money.”
The company estimates that its reactors can be fully manufactured and assembled onsite within two years. And while Kugelmass wouldn’t reveal an exact price, he said Last Energy will be cost-competitive with solar or wind plus storage. Problem is, there’s not really any precedent that would indicate how realistic these targets are, and nuclear doesn’t exactly have the best track record when it comes to arriving on time or on budget.
At the very least, though, Kugelmass told me the reactor’s smaller size makes a meltdown “practically impossible,” meaning securing regulatory approval should be much simpler than it is for full-size plants. And building on the customer’s side of the meter also allows the company to supply power before it’s officially grid-connected, meaning Last Energy can work around the interminably long interconnection queues that plague the European clean energy market just as they do the U.S.
As manufacturing ramps, costs come down, and the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission streamlines its process for approving new projects, Kugelmass told me he could see Last Energy entering the domestic market in a few years. After all, with American companies driving the boom in AI and cloud computing, the U.S. has far more data centers than anywhere else on earth. Last Energy has aggressive plans to meet that demand, aiming to deploy 10,000 reactors in the next 15 years.
“But it doesn’t stop there, because that’s still only like 1% of global energy,” Kugelmass told me, saying that Last Energy’s ultimate goal is to “fundamentally transform global energy.” But that’s for tomorrow. For the unglamorous now, some more prototypes and permits are in order.
https://heatmap.news/sparks/last-energy-series-b
What’s new in Raspberry Pi Pico 2
date: 2024-08-29, from: Raspberry Pi News (.com)
Our CTO James Adams gives us a closer look at what’s new in Raspberry Pi Pico 2.
The post What’s new in Raspberry Pi Pico 2 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/whats-new-in-pico-2/
Standards
date: 2024-08-29, from: Enlightenment Economics
Colleen Dunlavy’s Small, Medium, Large is an interesting and thought provoking read – and relevant to today’s debate on industrial policy. It’s a relatively short book, a history of the emergence of standards in US goods in the 1910s and … Continue reading
http://www.enlightenmenteconomics.com/blog/index.php/2024/08/standards/
Hangover from messy Walmart tech divorce ongoing at Asda
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
UK grocer suffers IT issues with clothing orders, self-scanning, and store picker app
The UK’s third-largest grocery retailer continues to see its IT operations beset with problems as it struggles with its fraught divorce from US retail giant Walmart.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/asda_it_woes_continue/
MASTER PLAN Bonus: The Perils Of Prosecuting Watergate
date: 2024-08-29, from: The Lever News
An inside look at the little-known task force that uncovered the companies secretly funding Nixon’s operation.
https://www.levernews.com/master-plan-bonus-the-perils-of-prosecuting-watergate/
MASTER PLAN Bonus: How Watergate’s Corporate Cash Prompted This Era Of Corruption
date: 2024-08-29, from: The Lever News
An inside look at the little-known task force that uncovered the companies secretly funding Nixon’s operation.
Sullivan: Biden ‘looking forward’ to talks with Xi in coming weeks
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
Beijing — U.S. President Joe Biden is looking forward to talks with Xi Jinping in the “coming weeks,” top White House aide Jake Sullivan told the Chinese leader Thursday as they met for rare talks in Beijing.
Sullivan, the first White House national security advisor to visit China since 2016, met Xi as he wrapped up three days of talks in Beijing which also saw him sit down with Foreign Minister Wang Yi and other high-ranking officials.
His visit came as China was embroiled in security rows with US allies Japan and the Philippines.
At a meeting with Xi in Beijing’s ornate Great Hall of the People Thursday, he said President Biden “looks forward to engaging with you again in the coming weeks.”
“President Biden is committed to responsibly managing this consequential relationship to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict or confrontation, and to work together where our interests align,” he said.
Chinese state media said Xi told Sullivan that in spite of “great changes,” China and the U.S. could still enjoy good ties.
“China’s commitment to the goal of stable, healthy, and sustainable development of China-U.S. relations hasn’t changed,” Xi said.
“We hope that the U.S. will work with China to meet each other halfway,” he added, according to CCTV.
On Wednesday, Sullivan and top diplomat Wang discussed plans for their leaders to talk in the coming weeks.
They also clashed over China’s increasingly assertive approach in disputed maritime regions.
Taiwan ‘red line’
On Thursday morning, Sullivan met with senior Chinese army official Zhang Youxia at the Beijing headquarters of the Central Military Commission, where the two discussed Taiwan and other flashpoint issues.
“It’s rare that we have the opportunity to have this kind of exchange,” Sullivan told Zhang in opening remarks.
The officials agreed to hold a call between the two sides’ theatre commanders “in the near future,” a readout from the White House said.
Sullivan also raised the importance of “freedom of navigation” in the South China Sea, where China and the Philippines have clashed in recent months, and “stability” in the Taiwan Strait, Washington said.
Zhang, in turn, warned that the status of the self-ruled island was “the first red line that cannot be crossed in China-U.S. relations”.
“China has always been committed to maintaining peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait,” he said, according to a readout by Beijing’s defense ministry.
“But ‘Taiwan independence’ and peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait are incompatible,” he said.
“China demands that the U.S. halts military collusion with Taiwan, ceases arming Taiwan, and stops spreading false narratives related to Taiwan,” Zhang added.
He also asked Washington to “work with China to promote communication and exchanges between the two militaries and jointly shoulder the responsibilities of major powers”.
‘Avoid miscalculation’
China has kept up its sabre-rattling since the inauguration this year of President Lai Ching-te, whose party emphasizes Taiwan’s separate identity.
Thursday’s talks also saw Sullivan express “concerns about (Chinese) support for Russia’s defense industrial base,” the readout added – echoing longstanding US claims that Beijing has rejected.
He also raised “the need to avoid miscalculation and escalation in cyber space, and ongoing efforts to reach a ceasefire and hostage deal in Gaza,” the White House said.
Sullivan’s visit comes months ahead of U.S. elections in November.
The Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, would be expected, if she wins, to continue Biden’s approach of seeking dialogue with China while also maintaining pressure.
Her Republican rival Donald Trump has vowed, at least rhetorically, to take a harder line, with some of his aides seeing a far-reaching global showdown with China.
To a tiling WM user, apparently other GUIs are like wearing handcuffs
date: 2024-08-29, from: Liam on Linux
This is interesting to me. I am on the other side, and ISTM that the tiling WM folks are the camp you describe.Windows (2.01) was the 3rd GUI I learned. First was classic MacOS (System 6 and early System 7.0), then Acorn RISC OS on my own home computer, then Windows.
Both MacOS and RISC OS have beautiful, very mouse-centric GUIs where you must use the mouse for most things. Windows was fascinating because it has rich, well-thought-out, rational and consistent keyboard controls, and they work everywhere. In all graphical apps, in the window manager itself, and on the command line.
– Ctrl + a letter is a discrete action: do this thing now.
– Alt + a letter opens a menu
– Shift moves selects in a continuous range: shift+cursors selects text or files in a file manager. Shift+mouse selects multiple icons in a block in a file manager.
– Ctrl + mouse selects discontinuously: pick disconnected icons.
– These can be combined: shift-select a block, then press ctrl as well to add some discontinuous entries.
– Ctrl + cursor keys moves a word at a time (discontinuous cursor movement).
– Shift + ctrl selects a word at a time.
In the mid-’90s Linux made Unix affordable and I got to know it, and I switched to it early ’00s.
But it lacks that overall cohesive keyboard UI. Some desktops implement most of Windows’ keyboard UI (Xfce, LXDE, GNOME 2.x), some invent their own (KDE), many don’t have one.
The shell and editors don’t have any consistency. Each editor has its own set of keyboard controls, and some environments honour some of them – but not many because the keyboard controls for an editor make little sense in a window manager. What does "insert mode" mean in a file manager?
They are keyboard-driven windowing environments built by people who live in terminals and only know the extremely limited keyboard controls of the most primitive extant shell environment, one that doesn’t honour GUI keyboard UI because it predates it and so in which every app invents its own.
Whereas Windows co-evolved with IBM CUA and deeply embeds it.
The result is that all the Linux tiling WMs I’ve tried annoy me, because they don’t respect the existing Windows-based keystrokes for manipulating windows. GNOME >=3 mostly doesn’t either: keystrokes for menu manipulation make little sense when you’ve tried to eliminate menus from your UI.
Even the growing-in-trendiness MiracleWM because the developer doesn’t use plain Ubuntu, he uses Kubuntu, and Kubuntu doesn’t respect basic Ubuntu keystrokes like Ctrl+Alt+T for a terminal, so neither does MiracleWM.
They are multiple non-overlapping, non-cohesive, non-uniform keyboard UIs designed by and for people who never knew how to use a keyboard-driven whole-OS UI because they didn’t know there was one. So they all built their own ones without knowing that there’s 30+ years of prior art for this.
All these little half-thought-out attempts to build something that already existed but its creators didn’t know about it.
To extend the prisoners-escaping-jail theme:
Each only extends the one prisoner cell that inmate knew before they got out, where the prison cell is an app – often a text editor but sometimes it’s one game.
One environment lets you navigate by only going left or straight. To go right, turn left three times! Simple!
One only lets you navigate in spirals, but you can adjust the size, and toggle clockwise or anticlockwise.
One is like Asteroids: you pivot your cursor and apply thrust.
One uses Doom/Quake-style WASD + mouse, because everyone knows that, right? It’s the standard!
One expects you to plug in a joypad controller and use that.
comments
https://liam-on-linux.dreamwidth.org/91647.html
Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry’s biggest fails
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
As the hardware got more capable, the messes got more expensive
Part 2: The 16-bit era Welcome back to The Reg FOSS desk’s roundup of the slip-ups and missteps from the dawn of the microcomputer industry onward – at least those that are most memorable to us.…
Sweet 16 and making mistakes: More of the computing industry’s biggest fails
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register
Part 2: The 16-bit era As the hardware got more capable, the messes got more expensive
<p>Welcome back to The Reg FOSS desk's roundup of the slip-ups and missteps from the dawn of the microcomputer industry onward – at least those that are most memorable to us.</p> Sols 4289-4290: From Discovery Pinnacle to Kings Canyon and Back Again
date: 2024-08-29, from: NASA breaking news
Earth planning date: Wednesday, Aug. 28 2024 We are back … almost, anyways. Today’s parking location is very close to where we parked on sol 4253, and in an area near one of the previous contact science targets “Discovery Pinnacle.” You can read in this blog post that most of the team, this blogger included, […]
https://science.nasa.gov/blog/sols-4289-4290-from-discovery-pinnacle-to-kings-canyon-and-back-again/
Astronomers back call for review of bonkers rule that means satellite swarms fly without environment checks
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Space boffins want pollution from the likes of Starlink regulated
Astronomy researchers from several US universities have joined a campaign coordinated by US Public Interest Research Group (US PIRG) to pause low Earth satellite launches and convince the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to reconsider exempting swarms of small satellites from environmental review requirements.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/astronomers_space_pollution/
FAA grounds SpaceX after rocket falls over in flames
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
EU tries to pin down China on definition of ‘important data’
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Rules on cross border data transfers have European businesses scratching their heads
The European Union and China have launched an initiative aimed at addressing issues faced by European companies in the Middle Kingdom related to the transfer of non-personal data.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/eu_china_data_talks/
China’s airspace intrusion a ‘wake-up call’ for Japan, US lawmaker says
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
TOKYO — The intrusion of a Chinese spy plane into Japanese airspace is a “wake-up call” for Tokyo about the aggressive nature of China’s leadership, U.S. lawmaker John Moolenaar, who chairs the House Select Committee on China, said Wednesday.
The incident on Monday involving a Y-9 reconnaissance aircraft flying near the southern Kyushu island was the first time a Chinese military aircraft had breached Japan’s airspace, according to Tokyo, which told Beijing it was “utterly unacceptable.”
The Chinese foreign ministry said Tuesday it was still trying to understand the situation.
We’ve “seen a very different China in the last few years and the question is what’s the best way to deter future aggression and malign activity,” Moolenaar, who is a Republican member of the House of Representatives, said in an interview in Tokyo on Wednesday.
His visit to Japan, with half a dozen members of a bipartisan committee that has looked at topics ranging from China’s exports of fentanyl precursor chemicals to Beijing’s influence over U.S. businesses, comes as President Joe Biden’s administration looks to expand restrictions on semiconductor manufacturing equipment exports.
While Japan has worked with its U.S. ally to restrict shipments of such technology, unlike Washington it has avoided trade curbs that directly target its neighbor and largest trading partner.
A new rule that will broaden U.S. powers to halt semiconductor manufacturing equipment exports to China from some foreign chipmakers will exclude Japan, the Netherlands and South Korea, two sources told Reuters last month.
In Japan, Moolenaar met trade and industry minister Ken Saito, who oversees Japan’s technology exports and is meeting with the Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and other senior Japanese officials.
“The question is what’s the best way to deter future (Chinese) aggression and malign activity. We don’t want to feed into a military complex that can be used against us,” Moolenaar said.
My book — Not the End of the World — is out in paperback in the UK today
date: 2024-08-29, from: Hannah Richie at Substack
Exploring seven of our big environmental problems, and how to solve them.
https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/book-paperback
Departure Mono
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: Robin Rendle Essays
https://robinrendle.com/notes/departure-mono/
Nvidia’s growth slows to a mere 122 percent but it’s still topping expectations
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Still growing in China, ramping Hopper prods and predicting Blackwell billions soon
Nvidia has again achieved triple-digit year-over-year growth, but its expansion is slowing.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/nvidias_growth_slows/
Russia bans 92 Americans
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
https://www.voanews.com/a/russia-bans-92-americans/7763564.html
Second elephant calf in 2 weeks is born at California zoo
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
FRESNO, Calif. — The second elephant calf in two weeks has been born at a California zoo.
African elephant Amahle gave birth early Monday morning, according to the Fresno Chaffee Zoo. The event came 10 days after Amahle’s mother, Nolwazi, gave birth to another male calf.
The new additions are the first elephants born at the zoo, about 240 kilometers southeast of San Francisco, which has embarked on a program to breed elephants in the hope that they can be seen by zoogoers in years to come.
“To have two healthy calves is a historic milestone,” Jon Forrest Dohlin, the zoo’s chief executive, said in a statement Tuesday. “We cannot wait for the public to see the new additions to our herd and share in our excitement.”
The elephants and their calves will continue to be monitored behind the scenes for now, Dohlin said. While the zoo expanded its exhibit in anticipation of growing its herd, some animal activists have opposed the breeding program, saying elephants shouldn’t be in zoos because of their complex needs.
In 2022, the zoo brought in male elephant Mabu hoping he’d breed with the two females. The future of elephants — which have relatively few offspring and a 22-month gestation period — in zoos hinges largely on breeding.
https://www.voanews.com/a/second-elephant-calf-in-2-weeks-is-born-at-a-california-zoo-/7763534.html
CrowdStrike’s meltdown didn’t dent its market dominance … yet
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Total revenue for Q2 grew 32 percent
CrowdStrike’s major meltdown a month ago doesn’t look like affecting the cyber security vendor’s market dominance anytime soon, based on its earnings reported Wednesday.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/crowdstrikes_q2_earnings/
@Dave Winer’s linkblog (date: 2024-08-29, from: Dave Winer’s linkblog)
Trump Rally Shooter Had Interest in Violence Since 2019, FBI Analysis Shows.
Public clouds are ‘dirty’ about VMware’s on-prem push, says Broadcom CEO Hock Tan
date: 2024-08-29, updated: 2024-08-29, from: The Register (UK I.T. News)
Virtzilla’s sales swing decisively to the Cloud Foundation bundle
VMware Explore Broadcom CEO Hock Tan has told members of VMware’s user group that public clouds are not entirely happy with his private cloud push.…
https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/29/hock_tan_vmware_private_cloud/
US to finalize significant tariffs on selected Chinese imports
date: 2024-08-29, from: VOA News USA
STATE DEPARTMENT — The White House says U.S. officials continue to raise concerns about what they describe as unfair trade policies and non-market economic practices by the People’s Republic of China.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is expected to unveil its final implementation plans for substantial tariff increases on selected Chinese imports in the coming days.
Some U.S. manufacturers, however, including those in the electric vehicle and utility equipment sectors, have requested that the higher tariff rates be reduced or delayed, citing concerns about rising cost.
On May 14, the White House announced a significant increase in tariffs on Chinese imports, raising duties on electric vehicles to 100%, doubling tariffs on semiconductors and solar cells to 50%, and introducing new 25% tariffs on lithium-ion batteries and other strategic products such as steel.
The move is seen as an effort to reshore U.S. manufacturing, enhance supply chain resilience, and protect domestic U.S. industries from what officials described as China’s overproduction.
This week, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan told Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi during their talks near Beijing that Washington will continue to take necessary actions to prevent advanced U.S. technologies from being used to undermine national security, while avoiding undue limitations on trade or investment.
In Beijing, China has vowed to take countermeasures.
Wang this week accused the U.S. of using overcapacity as an excuse for “protectionism.” He urged the U.S. to “stop suppressing China in the economic, trade, and technological fields and to stop undermining China’s legitimate interests.”
Sullivan and Wang have discussed arranging a call between Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping in the coming weeks. Disputes over trade and tariffs are expected to be among the issues on the agenda.
Former U.S. officials told VOA that the leaders also are likely to have face-to-face talks before Biden leaves office next January.
“The first opportunity is the APEC (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) leaders’ summit in November, and the second is the G20 summit in November,” Ryan Haas, a former NSC senior official from 2013 to 2017 and currently a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution, told VOA on Wednesday.
Some analysts have downplayed the likelihood of immediate inflation, noting that the tariff increases announced in May target a relatively small portion of products — $18 billion in imports from China, which accounts for only 4.2% of all U.S. imports from China in 2023.
“Because many of the tariffs affect products that are not currently being imported in large quantities, and because they are phased in over two years, the immediate inflationary effect is likely to be small,” wrote William Reinsch, the Scholl Chair in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a CSIS analysis earlier this year.
This week, following the Biden administration’s May announcement, Canada said that it will impose a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicle imports and a 25% tariff on steel and aluminum imports from China, effective Oct. 1.
In Beijing, China’s Commerce Ministry issued a statement expressing strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to Canada’s planned tariff increases, stating that they would disrupt the stability of global industrial and supply chains, severely impact trade relations, and harm the interests of businesses in both countries.
Some material in this report came from Reuters.
Release Announcement Barman 3.11.1 and 3.11.0
date: 2024-08-29, from: PostgreSQL News
EDB is pleased to announce the release of Barman 3.11.1 and 3.11.0.
Highlights of this release:
Version 3.11.1 - 22 August 2024
Bug fixes:
-
Fix failures in
</code>barman-cloud-backup-delete<code>
Version 3.11.0 - 22 August 2024
Features:
-
Add support for Postgres 17+ incremental backups. This major feature is composed of several small changes:
-
Add
</code>--incremental<code></code>barman backup<code> -
Add
</code>latest-full<code></code>latest<code></code>latest<code></code>latest-full<code> -
</code>barman keep<code></code>backup_method = postgres<code> -
When deleting a backup all the incremental backups depending on it, if any, are also removed.
-
Retention policies do not take incremental backups into consideration. As incremental backups cannot be recovered without having the complete chain of backups available up to the full backup, only full backups account for retention policies.
-
</code>barman recover<code></code>--local-staging-path<code></code>local_staging_path<code>
-
-
Changes to
</code>barman show-backup<code>-
Add the “Estimated cluster size” field. It’s useful to have an estimation of the data directory size of a cluster when restoring a backup. It’s particularly useful when recovering compressed backups or incremental backups, situations where the size of the backup doesn’t reflect the size of the data directory in Postgres. In JSON format, this is stored as
</code>cluster_size<code> -
Add the “WAL summarizer” field. This field shows if
</code>summarize_wal<code></code>server_information.summarize_wal<code> -
Add “Data checksums” field. This shows if
</code>data_checkums<code></code>server_information.data_checksums<code> -
Add the “Backup method” field. This shows the backup method used for this backup. In JSON format, this is stored as
</code>base_backup_information.backup_method<code> -
Rename the field “Disk Usage” as “Backup Size”. The latter provides a more comprehensive name which represents the size of the backup in the Barman host. The JSON field under
</code>base_backup_information<code></code>disk_usage<code></code>backup_size<code> -
Add the “WAL size” field. This shows the size of the WALs required by the backup. In JSON format, this is stored as
</code>base_backup_information.wal_size<code> -
Refactor the field “Incremental size”. It is now named “Resources saving” and it now shows an estimation of resources saved when taking incremental backups with
</code>rsync<code></code>pg_basebackup<code></code>incremental_size<code></code>resource_savings<code></code>base_backup_information<code> -
Add the
</code>system_id<code>
-
-
Add fields related with Postgres incremental backups:
-
“Backup type”: indicates if the Postgres backup is full or incremental. In JSON format, this is stored as
</code>backup_type<code></code>base_backup_information<code> -
“Root backup”: the ID of the full backup that is the root of a chain of one or more incremental backups. In JSON format, this is stored as
</code>catalog_information.root_backup_id<code> -
“Parent backup”: the ID of the full or incremental backup from which this incremental backup was taken. In JSON format, this is stored as
</code>catalog_information.parent_backup_id<code> -
“Children Backup(s)”: the IDs of the incremental backups that were taken with this backup as the parent. In JSON format, this is stored as
</code>catalog_information.children_backup_ids<code> -
“Backup chain size”: the number of backups in the chain from this incremental backup up to the root backup. In JSON format, this is stored as
</code>catalog_information.chain_size<code>
-
-
Changes to
</code>barman list-backup<code>-
It now includes the backup type in the JSON output, which can be either
</code>rsync<code></code>full<code></code>incremental<code></code>pg_basebackup<code></code>snapshot<code></code>R<code></code>F<code></code>I<code></code>S<code> -
Remove tablespaces information from the output. That was bloating the output. Tablespaces information can still be found in the output of
</code>barman show-backup<code>
-
-
Always set a timestamp with a time zone when configuring
</code>recovery_target_time<code></code>barman recover<code></code>--target-time<code></code>recovery_target_time<code></code>timezone<code></code>recovery_target_time<code></code>--target-time<code> -
When recovering a backup with the “no get wal” approach and
</code>--target-lsn<code> -
When recovering a backup with the “no get wal” approach and
</code>--target-immediate<code> -
</code>barman-wal-restore<code></code>pg_wal<code></code>pg_wal<code> -
</code>barman check-backup<code></code>FAILED<code></code>FAILED<code></code>barman show-backup<code> -
Add configuration option
</code>aws_await_snapshots_timeout<code></code>--aws-await-snapshots-timeout<code></code>barman-cloud-backup<code> -
Add a keep-alive mechanism to rsync-based backups. Previously the Postgres session created by Barman to run
</code>pg_backup_start()<code></code>pg_backup_stop()<code></code>keepalive_interval<code></code>--keepalive-interval<code></code>barman backup<code>
Bug fixes:
-
When recovering a backup with the “no get wal” approach and
</code>--target-time<code> -
Pin
</code>python-snappy<code></code>0.6.1<code></code>python-snappy<code></code>cramjam<code></code>2.7.0<code> -
</code>barman receive-wal<code></code>1<code></code>0<code>-
Being unable to run with
</code>--reset<code></code>pg_receivewal<code> -
Being unable to start
</code>pg_receivewal<code>
-
-
Fix and improve information about Python in
</code>barman diagnose<code>-
The command now makes sure to use the same Python interpreter under which Barman is installed when outputting the Python version through
</code>python_ver<code> -
Added a
</code>python_executable<code>
-
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.
https://www.postgresql.org/about/news/release-announcement-barman-3111-and-3110-2920/
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date: 2024-08-29, from: Bluesky web news
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