feedz – Page 17 – The Death of the Mind

– The Conversation – Home – Asymptomatic COVID-19 is linked to a gene variant that boosts immune memory after exposure to prior seasonal cold viruses

Jul 192023

Genetics may play a role in COVID-19 disease severity. BlackJack3D/E+ via Getty ImagesThe Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work. The big idea A common genetic variant explains why some people are asymptomatic after being infected with the virus that causes COVID-19, according to our recently published study in the journal Nature. Early in the pandemic, we were intrigued that many people did not develop COVID-19 symptoms while still testing positive for it. Because asymptomatic people are unlikely to seek medical help, we knew that collecting DNA samples to study the role of genetics in asymptomatic infections would be difficult. So instead, we took advantage of existing genetic data stored in the Be…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theconversation.com/asymptomatic-covid-19-is-linked-to-a-gene-variant-that-boosts-immune-memory-after-exposure-to-prior-seasonal-cold-viruses-209774

2023-07-19 Comments Off

Hackaday – DisplayPort: Under The Hood

Jul 182023

Last time, we looked at all the things that make DisplayPort unique for its users. What about the things that make it unique for hackers? Let’s get into all the ways that DisplayPort can serve you on your modern tech wrangling adventures.
You Are Watching The AUX Channel
With DisplayPort, the I2C bus we’ve always seen come bundled with VGA, DVI and HDMI, is no more – it’s been replaced by the AUX bus. AUX is a 1 MHz bidirectional diffpair – just a bit too complex for a cheap logic analyzer, though, possibly, something you could wrangle with the RP2040’s PIOs. Hacking thoughts aside, it’s a transparent replacement for I2C, so that software doesn’t have to be…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/07/17/displayport-under-the-hood/

2023-07-18 Comments Off

Techdirt. – Massachusetts Prepares To Ban The Collection And Abuse Of Cell Phone Location Data

Jul 172023

For more than a decade now, app makers, phone makers, wireless companies — and pretty much everybody else — has been collecting and monetizing your daily movement habits. There’s genuinely no reason most of these companies (like, say, your light bulb maker) need this information, but because the U.S. is too corrupt to pass a real privacy law, they collect it and sell access to it because they can.
This data is hoovered up, “anonymized” to provide the pretense of user privacy, then sold to a wide assortment of largely unaccountable and frequently sleazy data brokers. This data is then widely and routinely abused from everybody from stalkers and foreign governments, to a long line of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/17/massachusetts-prepares-to-ban-the-collection-and-abuse-of-cell-phone-location-data/

2023-07-17 Comments Off

Hackaday – Hackaday Prize 2023: OMOTE Universal Remote

Jul 162023

A good universal remote can help tame today’s complex home entertainment systems, combining both classic IR and more modern WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity with programmable functions that allow the user to execute multi-step operations with a single button. Unfortunately, programming them often involves the use of clunky proprietary software.
Which is why [Maximilian Kern] has developed the OMOTE. This open source universal remote is powered by the ESP32, and features the usual collection of physical buttons in addition to a 2.8” 320 x 240 touchscreen with a responsive graphical interface that can display more advanced user interfaces. Everything is packed into an ergonomic 3D printed case that gives it an exceptionally professional look.
The remote’s USB-C port can…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/07/15/hackaday-prize-2023-omote-universal-remote/

2023-07-16 Comments Off

Hackaday – The Another World Chip

Jul 152023

We cover many recreations of classic computer games on these pages, sometimes on original hardware, other times through ports to newer hardware, or even on emulators. But [Sylefeb]’s version of the Amiga classic Another World is in a class of its own. It doesn’t recreate an Amiga or run an emulator, instead it implements the game itself on a relatively modest Lattice UP5K FPGA.
This feat is possible because of the game’s architecture, it runs on a quite minimalist virtual machine that only needs blitter and rasterising hardware. This makes it a good candidate for the FPGA treatment. [Sylefeb] goes into a deep discussion of the hardware implemented in the FPGA, which makes a solid primer…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/07/14/the-another-world-chip/

2023-07-15 Comments Off

Biometric Update – Sony, Honda, Ford, Genesis, and Mullen Automotive nod toward facial recognition tech

Jul 152023

A slew of the world’s largest automakers, including Sony, Honda, Ford, Genesis, and Mullen Automotive, have all either recently announced or patented facial recognition technologies. A newly unveiled prototype car from Sony and Honda, called “Afeela,” is set to employ facial recognition to unlock the vehicle and open its door. The semiconductors and chipsets set to underpin this biometric tech will be provided by electronics giant Qualcomm. The firms will start taking orders in 2025, with U.S. deliveries set to start in 2026. Commenting on the move, Sony Honda Mobility President Izumi Kawanishi told Axios, that though the automotive industry has been “a very traditional business,” it is “growing up” by adopting products and software…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202307/sony-honda-ford-genesis-and-mullen-automotive-nod-toward-facial-recognition-tech

2023-07-15 Comments Off

Motherboard – U.S. Building More Apartments Than It Has In Decades, But Not For the Poor: Report

Jul 142023

The U.S. is building more apartments than it has in half a century, but the poorest people still can’t afford them. The amount of units affordable to the lowest income groups has decreased across the country even as apartment construction has reached a 50-year-high and even as overall rent growth is slowing, according to a report from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. There are many reasons for this, the report’s authors explain, but the main one is that new units being produced are on the higher end and not affordable to people with the lowest incomes. Coupled with rent increases and deteriorating buildings, it means the benefits of the housing boom have been uneven. According…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/y3w3aj/us-building-more-apartments-than-it-has-in-decades-but-not-for-the-poor-report

2023-07-14 Comments Off

World Socialist Web Site (en) – Body camera footage confirms unarmed Orlando, Florida father was murdered by police while sitting in legally parked car

Jul 142023

Orlando police delayed showing the body camera footage to the family of 26-year-old Derek Diaz for over a week.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/07/14/ziwx-j14.html

2023-07-14 Comments Off

Ballot Access News – Media Reprints Statements About Jill Stein and 2016 Without Checking Facts About Exit Polls

Jul 142023

Leaders of the Democratic Party continue saying they are worried that if Cornel West runs for president as the Green Party nominee, that will cause Donald Trump to win the 2024 election. Then they frequently assert that Jill Stein’s Green candidacy in 2016 caused Donald Trump to win that election. For example, this story says that a few days ago, David Axelrod said, “In 2016 the Green Party played an outsized role in tipping the election to Donald Trump.”
If reporters would do a minimal amount of research, they could point out that the 2016 exit polls show that Hillary Clinton did not lose any state due to the Jill Stein vote. All they need to do…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2023/07/13/media-reprints-statements-about-jill-stein-and-2016-without-checking-facts-about-exit-polls/

2023-07-14 Comments Off

Techdirt. – Court Rules Against FTC To Keep Microsoft’s Activision Deal From Closing Pending Antitrust Trial

Jul 122023

And away we go. The ongoing saga that is Microsoft’s attempt to acquire Activision Blizzard has been going on for months now, with a flurry of news and activity occurring over the past couple of those months as the deal sits before three major regulatory bodies in the EU, the UK, and here in America. If you’re keeping score at home, the EU has already approved the deal, the UK’s CMA blocked it pending Microsoft’s appeal, and the FTC filed an antitrust suit and requested a preliminary injunction barring the deal from going through until that litigation is complete.
That injunction hearing was a mess from the start, with Microsoft promising not to consummate the deal until…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/12/court-rules-against-ftc-to-keep-microsofts-activision-deal-from-closing-pending-antitrust-trial/

2023-07-12 Comments Off

Planet Debian – Russell Coker: Matrix

Jul 092023

Introduction
In 2020 I first setup a Matrix [1] server. Matrix is a full featured instant messaging protocol which requires a less stringent definition of “instant”, messages being delayed for minutes aren’t that uncommon in my experience. Matrix is a federated service where the servers all store copies of the room data, so when you connect your client to it’s home server it gets all the messages that were published while you were offline, it is widely regarded as being IRC but without a need to be connected all the time. One of it’s noteworthy features is support for end to end encryption (so the server can’t access cleartext messages from users) as a core feature.
Matrix was…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://etbe.coker.com.au/2023/07/09/matrix/

2023-07-09 Comments Off

Hackaday – Adding Portals To Quake

Jul 062023

For those who have played Quake extensively, adding portals seems unnecessary, as teleporters are already a core part of the game mechanics. What [Matthew Earl] accomplishes is more of the Portal style of portal by rendering what is on the other side of the portal with a seamless teleportation transition.
Of course, Quake is an old game with a software renderer. Just throwing another camera into the scene, rendering to another texture, and then mapping that texture to the scene isn’t an option. Quake uses an edge rasterizer and generates spans along scanlines that track where edges intersect the current scanline. Rather than making expensive per-pixel comparisons, [Matt] stashes the portal spans and renders them in a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/07/06/adding-portals-to-quake/

2023-07-06 Comments Off

jwz – DNA Lounge: Wherein the poster gallery has been refreshed

Jul 052023

I replaced a couple dozen of the posters on the DNA Pizza walls. See if you can spot the new ones! It has been a while since I’ve hung any new posters. I was kind of paralysed by choice: what to put up, and what to take down. We’re kind of in a one-in-one-out situation at this point. Though there are a few spots left where new frames could go, those are mostly up high or in shadow. In fact, quite a few of the posters are already in places where you can hardly see them. Well anything worth doing is worth overengineering, so the first thing I did was make a map. I built a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2023/07/04.html

2023-07-05 Comments Off

Ars Technica – Lonely people see the world differently, according to their brains

Jul 032023

Enlarge (credit: D. Anschutz)
There is a reason countless songs about loneliness exist. Many are relatable, since feeling alone is often part of being human. But a particular song or experience that resonates with one lonely person may mean nothing to someone else who feels isolated and misunderstood.
Human beings are social creatures. Those who feel left out often experience loneliness. To investigate what goes on in the brains of lonely people, a team of researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted noninvasive brain scans on subjects and found something surprising. The scans revealed that non-lonely individuals were all found to have a similar way of processing the world around them. Lonely…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1951521

2023-07-03 Comments Off

The Register – TSA wants to expand facial recognition to hundreds of airports within next decade

Jul 032023

Digital rights folks, as you can imagine, want the tech grounded

America’s Transportation Security Agency (TSA) intends to expand its facial-recognition program used to screen US air travel passengers to 430 domestic airports in under a decade.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2023/07/03/tsa_facial_recognition_airport/

2023-07-03 Comments Off

TorrentFreak – Over 900 RARBG Magnet Link Repos Anonymously Nuked From GitHub

Jul 012023

The most dependable things in life tend to be the things most easily taken for granted. In the piracy ecosystem, that certainly applied to torrent site RARBG.
RARBG was never likely to win any prizes for being the best-looking site with bleeding-edge features. Nor would its operators hope to win any. What the site did was what any indexer of any content should strive for; plenty of well-organized and readily searchable content, all of it supported by ancillary sources of complementary data, with very little downtime and zero drama.
Until the site threw in the towel in May, RARBG met all of these requirements and made it look easy. The decision to shut down obviously came as a…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/over-900-rarbg-magnet-link-repos-anonymously-nuked-from-github-230701/

2023-07-01 Comments Off

World Socialist Web Site (en) – A wrecking operation?: Warner Brothers Discovery initiates new round of layoffs, targets Turner Classic Movies

Jun 252023

The changes at TCM have provoked an outpouring of criticism and opposition on social media, including from various prominent Hollywood filmmakers.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/06/25/ycgv-j25.html

2023-06-25 Comments Off

LWN.net – Kuhn: A Comprehensive Analysis of the GPL Issues With the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) Business Model

Jun 232023

Over on the Software Freedom Conservancy blog, Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence Bradley M. Kuhn analyzes the recent changes to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) source availability in light of the GPL. It contains some interesting information about two alleged GPL violations that came about because the company’s business model is structured in a way that brings it too close to non-compliance with the license, he said:

Perhaps the biggest problem with a murky business model that skirts the line of GPL compliance is that violations can and do happen — since even a minor deviation from the business model clearly violates the GPL agreements. Pre-IBM Red Hat deserves a certain amount of credit, as SFC is aware…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/936127/

2023-06-23 Comments Off

Planet Debian – John Goerzen: Using git-annex for Data Archiving

Jun 162023

In my recent post about data archiving to removable media, I laid out the difference between backing up and archiving, and also said I’d evaluate git-annex and dar. This post evaluates git-annex. The next will look at dar, and then I’ll make a comparison post.
What is git-annex?
git-annex is a fantastic and versatile program that does… well, it’s one of those things that can do so much that it’s a bit hard to describe. Its homepage says:
git-annex allows managing large files with git, without storing the file contents in git. It can sync, backup, and archive your data, offline and online. Checksums and encryption keep your data safe and secure. Bring the power and distributed nature of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10516-using-git-annex-for-data-archiving

2023-06-16 Comments Off

TechCrunch – Hundreds of subreddits plan to go dark indefinitely after Reddit CEO’s internal memo

Jun 142023

More than 300 subreddits, including popular ones like r/aww, r/music r/videos, and r/futurology, plan to go dark indefinitely after a large protest against Reddit’s API changes ends on June 14. This means users won’t be able to access these communities during this blackout.
This step was announced after The Verge reported that in an internal memo, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said “Like all blowups on Reddit, this one will pass as well”. Huffman said in the memo that the blackout hasn’t caused any significant impact on the company’s revenue.
Over the last few days, (June 12-14) thousands of subreddits have gone dark to protest API changes by the platform that will potentially shut down many third-party apps. Because…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://techcrunch.com/2023/06/14/hundreds-of-subreddits-plan-to-go-dark-indefinitely-after-reddit-ceos-internal-memo/

2023-06-14 Comments Off

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