Cloudflare fingers intertwined BGP and Flowspec SNAFUs Internet backbone operator CenturyLink has experienced an outage that degraded performance of major web companies around the world.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/31/centurylink_outage/
Enlarge / Lick Observatory (credit: Bill Dally | Getty Images) On the morning of Sunday, August 16, freak summer thunderstorms rolled into the Bay Area, peppering the ultra-dry landscape with lightning, setting nearly 400 fires across Northern California. Ten miles to the north of the historic Lick Observatory, atop Mount Hamilton near San Jose, one such blaze was closing in, and fast: By Tuesday morning, the flames were 6 miles away. That night, the California…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1702069
At the GNU Tools Track during this week’s Linux Plumbers Conference was an interesting talk by Red Hat’s Ben Woodard. He shares his perspective on how the GNU dynamic linker (ld.so) could be ripe for an overhaul in the 2020’s…
External feed Read More at the Source: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=GNU-Dynamic-Linker-2020s
So far, no independent candidate or minor political party has managed to overcome any petition requirement greater than 5,000 signatures, during the period starting in March 2020. This statement might cease to be true if Kanye West is able to … Continue reading →
Microsoft’s ‘open source wonk’ Sarah Novotny wants to see easier ways for people to get involved Interview Linux kernel development – which is driven by plain-text email discussion – needs better or alternative collaborative tooling “to bring in new contributors and maintain and sustain Linux in the future,” says Sarah Novotny, Microsoft’s representative on the Linux Foundation board.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
It was supposed to be magazines.Elaine Wooton contacted me as many people do – in the middle of a shutdown and discard project, asking if the Internet Archive might want some of what is destined for deep storage or the trash compactor. In this case, she said, there might be some old journals and magazines I’d want. They were centered around the culture and innovations of the modern office, “modern” being the 1970s and 1980s.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2020/08/26/an-archive-of-a-different-type/
Microsoft’s ‘open source wonk’ Sarah Novotny wants to see easier ways for people to get involved Interview Linux kernel development – which is driven by plain-text email discussion – needs better or alternative collaborative tooling “to bring in new contributors and maintain and sustain Linux in the future,” says Sarah Novotny, Microsoft’s representative on the Linux Foundation board.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/25/linux_kernel_email/
Every year, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents seize tens of thousands of cell phones, laptops, and other devices from travelers at or near the country’s borders, often without charging them with a specific crime. Those seizures give the agency access to massive amounts of highly personal information—data that CBP will now upload to a searchable, agency-wide surveillance database and maintain for up to 75 years, according to a privacy assessment recently published by…
While a graduate student at the University of Utah in the early 1970s, computer graphics pioneer Frederic Parke created some of the first 3D models of human faces. The research was supported by the Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (now called DARPA). Parke’s wife Vicky was one the models. Here’s the full technical report from 1972: “Computer generation animation of faces”
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/24/the-first-3d-animations-of-a-h.html
SOUTH BEND, IN—Calling his presidential run a “perfect launchpad” for becoming a leader on a larger scale, Pete Buttigieg told reporters Friday that he was hoping to leverage his rising star status into ultimately becoming the mayor of Evansville, IN. “After the incredible year I’ve had serving not just as the mayor…Read more…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.theonion.com/pete-buttigieg-hoping-to-leverage-rising-star-status-in-1844804824
Tracking down, prosecuting, blocking and otherwise trying to prevent The Pirate Bay from operating has become an entertainment industry project for the last 15 years. The torrent site has faced more adversaries than any other on the planet yet today the site remains stubbornly online. Exactly where and operated by whom remains either a mystery or a topic of speculation. After a period of what seemed like calm, this year it became clear that the…
…on an eviction notice.The single mother of two says she lost her job in March when the restaurant where she was working cut hours. She was denied unemployment and fell behind on rent for June, July and August.The letter goes on to say, “Pay your outstanding balance, or release your apartment and turn in your keys to the leasing office by 6 p.m. today. Eviction will be filed promptly Tuesday morning.””The notice wasn’t there until…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2020/08/in-these-uncertain-times-a-smile-goes-a-long-way/
It appears the Supreme Court is unwilling to address a another problem it created. The first major problem created by the Court has been discussed here quite frequently. Qualified immunity was created by the Supreme Court in 1967 as a way to excuse rash decisions by law enforcement if undertaken in “good faith.” Since then, it has only gotten worse. Fifteen years later, the Supreme Court added another factor: a violation of rights must be…
In September 1935, Modern Mechanix covered a new “electric glove” invented by Cirilo Diaz of Cuba. According to the report, it’s intended for “use by police while handling rough characters or in quelling riots…” Persons contacted by an officer wearing the glove receive a 1,500-volt shock, sufficient to remove all traces of flight.” (Archive.org via Weird Universe)
External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/21/electric-glove-for-police-to-h.html
As previously noted, Space X, Amazon, and others are pushing harder than ever into the low-orbit satellite broadband game. The industry, pockmarked by a long road of failures, involves firing thousands of smaller, cheaper, lower orbit satellite constellations into space to help supplement existing broadband services. The lower orbit means that LO satellite service will offer lower-latency broadband than traditional satellite offerings, which for 15 years or so have been widely maligned as expensive, slow,…
In 1847, Frederick Douglass started a newspaper advocating the abolition of slavery that ran until 1851. After the Civil War, there was a newspaper for freed slaves, the Freedmen’s Record. The Internet Archive is bringing these and many more works online for free public access. But there’s a problem: Our Optical Character Recognition (OCR), while the best commercially available OCR technology, is not very good at identifying text from older documents. Take for example, this…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2020/08/21/can-you-help-us-make-the-19th-century-searchable/
That’s a big dish! The Arecibo radio telescope in its salad days. (credit: NSF) Early Monday morning, a cable suspended over the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico broke and left a 100-foot-long gash in the dish of the iconic radio telescope. The 3-inch-diameter cable also caused damage to the panels of the Gregorian dome that is suspended hundreds of feet above the dish and houses the telescope’s receivers. It is unclear what caused the cable…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1699209
Spreadsheet woes spanning 16+ years force official update Geneticists have issued new guidelines in naming human genes – after spending years wrestling with Microsoft Excel and similar software that automatically converts the names of genes to dates.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2020/08/06/excel_gene_names/
There’s this dumb but persistent meme in American culture that somehow the First Amendment simply doesn’t exist within the walls of a public school district. This is patently false. What is true is that there have been very famous court cases that have determined that speech rights for students at school may be slightly curtailed and must face tests over “substantial disruption” of the speech in question in order to have it limited. Named after…
Proposals to use the tracking capabilities of our cell phones to help fight COVID-19 have probably received more attention than any other technology issue during the pandemic. Here at the ACLU, we have been skeptical of schemes to use apps for contact tracing or exposure warnings from the beginning, but it is clearer than ever that such tools are unlikely to work, and that the debate over such tracking is largely a sideshow to the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-apps-are-unlikely-to-help-stop-covid-19