On November 12, 1970, a 45-foot, eight-ton sperm whale washed up on the beach at Florence, Oregon. What unfolded next has become an epic representation of taking a bad idea and running with it.
The Oregon Highway Division, lacking experience in whale carcass disposal but high on creativity, decided that dynamite was the way. — Read the rest
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2023/11/12/happy-oregon-tried-to-explode-a-whale-day.html
On November 12, 2005, I started a ‘blog’ to share news snippets and information about emerging file-sharing technology. At the time it would’ve been unthinkable that it would still draw visitors in 2023. But here we are.
Running a site like this on your own is impossible, so luckily Andy joined TF in 2006. Without his tireless input, the site wouldn’t be where it is today. I couldn’t have wished for a better partner to work alongside, period.
With two main writers and no other editorial staff we’re just a tiny operation compared to most other news sites. This means that we can’t cover every news story. Instead, we often try to focus on unique angles and perspectives….
External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/torrentfreak-turns-18-today-hospital-edition-231112/
Click here to go see the bonus panel!
Hovertext:
Honestly geometry’s pretty dicey, as are numbers larger than 1.Today’s News:
Thanks for a great launch day, all. I’ll be in conversation with Randall Munroe tonight in NYC if you wanna say hi!
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/science-4
Hidden deep in Seagate’s financial report released late last month was a brief roadmap update for the company’s heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology. As noted in the latest update, Seagate is now planning to begin mass production of its 32 TB HAMR in early 2024, which is a slight delay from what the company announced early this year. Meanwhile, the company expects to start production of 40+ TB HDDs in about two years’ time. “Qualification and revenue ramp plans for our 30-plus terabyte products remain fully on track with high-volume ramp starting early in calendar 2024,” said Dave Mosley, chief executive of Seagate, during conference call with financial analysts and investors. ” These drives deliver capacity…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.anandtech.com/show/21125/seagates-hamr-update-32-tb-in-early-2024-40-tb-two-years-later
EFF warns incoming rules may return web ‘to the dark ages of 2011’
Lawmakers in Europe are expected to adopt digital identity rules that civil society groups say will make the internet less secure and open up citizens to online surveillance.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/11/08/europe_eidas_browser/
What the Alpha means
The alpha release primarily focuses on preparing our software for a future release. It involves handling unreleased dependencies, version numbers, co-installation conflicts, and all the relevant bookkeeping work.
This release has been somewhat manic, with issues surfacing up to the last minute. However, that’s precisely what this early release is for: resolving these issues now and gathering feedback on packaging to ensure a smoother transition to the beta phase.
Feature Freezes
The complete feature freeze for Plasma is scheduled for the day of the first beta, which is on November 29th. After that, bug fixing will be the sole focus for a period of three months leading up to the final release.
A soft freeze is set…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://blog.davidedmundson.co.uk/?p=495
Most of us will have at some point have bought a long power cable to charge the bike on the deck, but [Slava G. Turyshev] has a slightly more ambitious idea. In this recent paper, he outlines how an advanced civilization could use a star or two to transmit power or send signals over an interstellar distance. And his idea is also simple enough that we could do it right now, with existing technology, or detect if someone else is doing it.
Gravitational lensing is where a large mass (such as, say, a star) bends the path of light around it. That can act like a lens in a telescope, focussing light that would otherwise be impossible…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/11/07/using-gravitational-lensing-to-transmit-power-and-detect-aliens/
We just got done noting how pretty much all of the criticism of the Sprint T-Mobile merger by economists and consumer advocates wound up being true. The deal has resulted in more than 10,000+ eliminated jobs, steady price hikes, annoying new fees, a weaker T-Mobile brand, and a lower quality product overall. It also clearly distracted T-Mobile from competent network security.
T-Mobile’s reddit forums are filled with employees saying the disruptive spirit of the company has been dead since the merger. T-Mobile customers are annoyed by endless new restrictions and price hikes.
But Verizon and AT&T customers are also pissed, and are part of a new lawsuit against T-Mobile arguing that the merger raised prices for everybody…
35 years ago today, They Live debuted at #1 at the box office. In honor of my favorite documentary about the Reagan administration, here are some highlights from my OBEY tag: 2016, just before the election: They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo: One of my most popular posts of all time. “I’m going to draw a line through 1930s agitprop, Ronald Reagan, methane-breathing zombie space aliens, the Mozilla logo, Barack Obama and the International Commiunist Conspiracy. It’s a long walk, so please stick with me.” I ended with, “In this upcoming presidential election, please vote against the methane-breathing zombie space alien.” Reader, my supplication did not work. …
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2023/11/happy-they-live-day-to-all-who-celebrate/
A new BeagleBoard is on the way, full of FPGA hotness: the BeagleV-Fire has been announced. The new $150 Single-Board Computer (SBC) from the pioneering open source BeagleBoard company is built around a RISC-V chip that has FPGA features built in. The BeagleV-Fire is built around the snappily named Microchip PolarFire MPFS025T FCVG484E, a System on a Chip (SoC) that has five Reduced Instruction Set Coding Version 5 (RISC-V) cores and a big chunk of FPGA fabric built in. That means it combines the speed of RISC-V processors with the flexibility of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), a big pile of logic gates that can be reprogrammed.
The new BeagleV-Fire includes a sizeable chunk of FPGA to…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/11/04/beaglev-catches-fire/
Enlarge (credit: Google/YouTube)
YouTube has launched a global front against ad-blocking extensions, taking a small experiment it began in June full-scale.
As noticed by Android Authority on Monday morning, some YouTube users are now seeing a disruptive prompt when they try to watch videos while using a browser with an ad blocker. The prompt notes that “ad blockers violate YouTube’s Terms of Service” and urges users to either allow ads on YouTube or subscribe to YouTube Premium.
While I was able to still watch YouTube with an ad blocker, there’s recently been a noticeable increase in the number of users who report seeing the prompt. The Verge reported that sometimes those who see the prompt…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1980323
Matthew Garrett explains
why ACPI exists and why it is not as bad a thing as some think.There’s an alternative universe where we decided to teach the kernel about every piece of hardware it should run on. Fortunately (or, well, unfortunately) we’ve seen that in the ARM world. Most device-specific simply never reaches mainline, and most users are stuck running ancient kernels as a result. Imagine every x86 device vendor shipping their own kernel optimised for their hardware, and now imagine how well that works out given the quality of their firmware. Does that really seem better to you?
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/949625/
Perception matters more than reality, especially when your budget is on the line.
Law enforcement agencies like to portray criminal activity as constantly rising, especially now that they’re facing additional scrutiny and the occasional so-called “defunding” effort. It’s a weird way to handle (government) business. On one hand, the cops claim rising crime necessitates more funding. On the other hand, an endlessly escalating crime rate tends to demonstrate cops aren’t an effective solution to the problem.
Portraying America as crime-ridden has worked out well for most law enforcement agencies. The tough questions are almost never asked by local legislators who tend to give cops whatever they want, rather than risk being perceived as “soft” on crime.
These efforts…
CVS and Walgreens are making enormous profits, but still trying to increase those profits by understaffing their pharmacies. That puts patients at risk of errors.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://stallman.org/archives/2023-jul-oct.html#23_October_2023_(Pharmacy_strike)
Intel, Siemens, Google, Meta, and Stripe among event walkouts
Meta and Stripe have joined Google, Intel, and Siemens in a growing boycott of next month’s Web Summit in Lisbon after the event’s chief executive compared Israel’s actions in response to attacks by Hamas as “war crimes.”…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/10/20/web_summit_cancelations_israel/
My final Medium column.
Just as important as what a regulation says is who it applies to.
Take financial regulation. A great idea! American could use some. But — as the cryptocurrency world forcibly reminded us — it’s not always easy to figure out when someone is doing something “financial.”
So let’s come up with a test. Here’s one: “If a transaction involves a million dollars or more, financial regulations apply to it.” Not every million-dollar transaction is “financial” but there are few enough of these that filing the “worth a million bucks, but not financial” paperwork for them won’t be a huge deal. Besides, anyone moving a million dollars around can afford professional help in navigating the paperwork.
But…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/21/the-internets-original-sin/
A digital rights organization says the popular view of biometric identification and surveillance is backward and the result is the commodification of people for government control and business profit. Access Now, which is particularly focused on the impact of AI on economically disadvantaged communities, has published a report with what it sees as unnecessary risks of biometrics-based tools. Instead of viewing the tools as mere collection systems, executives with Access Now see algorithms as programmed categorizers. They impose a desired order on what is by definition a spectrum of qualities, behaviors, reactions and identities. Biometric systems “are used to create baselines of what constitute ‘normal’ behaviors and bodies,’ ” according to the report. This “further…
Suggests bodycam footage should replace paperwork for simple arrests
San Francisco’s mayor, London Breed, has proposed drone surveillance and cameras on public buildings to curb the city’s crime problems.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/10/19/san_francisco_police_drones/
Enlarge / Surveying the atmospheres of planets beyond the solar system, such as those in the TRAPPIST-1 system (artist’s concept of four of the system’s seven planets shown), could turn up interesting molecules that might indicate life. But ruling out false positives will be a challenge. (credit: ADAPTED FROM NASA / JPL-CALTECH / R. HURT, T. PYLE (IPAC))
In June, astronomers reported a disappointing discovery: The James Webb Space Telescope failed to find a thick atmosphere around the rocky planet TRAPPIST-1 C, an exoplanet in one of the most tantalizing planetary systems in the search for alien life.
The finding follows similar news regarding neighboring planet TRAPPIST-1 B, another planet in the TRAPPIST-1 system….
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1975686
This report [PDF], obtained by the newly-formed 404 Media, contains a lot of what we know, some of what we don’t know, and confirms a lot of suspicions.
The reliance on data brokers for cell location data very likely predates the Supreme Court’s 2018 Carpenter decision. But it’s safe to assume this market really took off following that decision. Prior to that, law enforcement needed, at best, a subpoena, to obtain a wealth of historical cell location data.
That decision erected some privacy protections for cell site location info. But the finding was limited to large quantities of historical data. And it had nothing to say at all about obtaining this information from third-parties-once-removed: i.e., data brokers collecting…
