Aug 272024
 

Crunchy Data is pleased to announce a new open source
pgMonitor Extension.
Crunchy Data has worked on a pgMonitor tool for several years as part of our
Kubernetes
and
self-managed Postgres
deployments and recently we’ve added an extension to the tool set.
Two primary scenarios motivated the creation of the pgMonitor extension :

Quicker Metrics: Monitoring metrics often need quick response times to
allow for frequent updates. We’ve noticed that certain metrics become slower
as the database grows. This impacts not only common metrics but also more
complex business metrics that could require several minutes to generate.
Version Compatibility: New PostgreSQL versions can break existing metrics
due to changes in the catalogs. Managing different metric sets for various
PostgreSQL versions is tedious and can be challenging.

Benefits of the pgMonitor extension
The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/6Cc

 2024-08-27  Comments Off on Planet PostgreSQL – Keith Fiske: Announcing an Open Source Monitoring Extension for Postgres with pgMonitor
Aug 272024
 

This article was originally published by The Legal Aid Society’s Decrypting a Defense Newsletter on August 5, 2024 and is reprinted here with permission.
Police departments and law enforcement agencies are increasingly collecting personal information using drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles. In addition to high-resolution photographic and video cameras, police drones may be equipped with myriad spying payloads, such as live-video transmitters, thermal imaging, heat sensors, mapping technology, automated license plate readers, cell site simulators, cell phone signal interceptors and other technologies. Captured data can later be scrutinized with backend software tools like license plate readers and face recognition technology. There have even been proposals for law enforcement to attach lethal and less-lethal weapons to…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/08/backyard-privacy-age-drones

 2024-08-27  Comments Off on Deeplinks – Backyard Privacy in the Age of Drones
Aug 232024
 

When the Rev. Al Sharpton took the stage to introduce members of the Exonerated Five on the last night of the Democratic National Convention, it was, for the briefest moment, a nod toward a reality that the DNC had otherwise aggressively avoided: the myriad injustices of our criminal legal system. “Thirty-five years ago my friends and I were in prison for crimes we didn’t commit,” Korey Wise said. As teenagers, Wise, Yusef Salaam, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Antron McCray were wrongly arrested, brutally interrogated, and imprisoned for the rape of a jogger in Central Park. Donald Trump notoriously spent tens of thousands of dollars on full-page ads in the New York Times calling to bring…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theintercept.com/2024/08/23/dnc-democrats-death-penalty-executions/

 2024-08-23  Comments Off on The Intercept – Democrats Abandoned Their Anti-Death Penalty Stance. Those on Federal Death Row May Pay the Price.
Aug 222024
 

A few thousand protesters marched toward the site of the Democratic National Convention to voice their opposition to the war in Gaza, with activists hoping to amplify their progressive message before the nation’s top Democratic leaders. What do you think?

“If they really hated human rights abuses, they wouldn’t tempt the Chicago Police Department like this.”
Paul Bouis, Trombonist


“I prefer to have my convictions ignored from the comfort of home.”
Maggie Saam, Unemployed


“The DNC is hardly the place for political grandstanding.”
TJ Larios, Wax Molder

The post Thousands Of Pro-Palestinian Protesters Gather Outside DNC appeared first on The Onion.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://theonion.com/thousands-of-pro-palestinian-protesters-gather-outside-dnc/

 2024-08-22  Comments Off on The Onion – Thousands Of Pro-Palestinian Protesters Gather Outside DNC
Aug 222024
 

Enlarge / The Recall feature provides a timeline of screenshots and a searchable database of text, thoroughly tracking everything about a person’s PC usage. (credit: Microsoft)
Microsoft will begin sending a revised version of its controversial Recall feature to Windows Insider PCs beginning in October, according to an update published today to the company’s original blog post about the Recall controversy. The company didn’t elaborate further on specific changes it’s making to Recall beyond what it already announced in June. For those unfamiliar, Recall is a Windows service that runs in the background on compatible PCs, continuously taking screenshots of user activity, scanning those screenshots with optical character recognition (OCR), and saving the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2044616

 2024-08-22  Comments Off on Ars Technica – Microsoft will try the data-scraping Windows Recall feature again in October
Aug 222024
 

Whack yakety-yak app chaps rapped for security crack

Updated  Slack AI, an add-on assistive service available to users of Salesforce’s team messaging service, is vulnerable to prompt injection, according to security firm PromptArmor.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/21/slack_ai_prompt_injection/

 2024-08-22  Comments Off on The Register – Slack AI can be tricked into leaking data from private channels via prompt injection
Aug 212024
 

Library Genesis (LibGen) is one of the oldest shadow libraries on the Internet, offering free access to millions of books and academic papers people otherwise have to pay for.
The site’s origins reportedly trace back to the Soviet Union’s underground publishing culture ‘samizdat,’ which was used to bypass state censorship in the last century.
LibGen launched around 2008 as a digital version of the same concept. In addition to bypassing ‘local’ censorship, it’s widely used to circumvent the paywalls of major international publishing companies, serving as a popular ‘pirate’ site for (text)books and academic works.
Rightsholders have attempted to take the site offline several times over the years, but none led to concrete results. Today, Libgen.rs, Libgen.is…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/popular-shadow-library-libgen-breaks-down-amidst-legal-troubles-240814/

 2024-08-21  Comments Off on TorrentFreak – Popular Shadow Library ‘LibGen’ Breaks Down Amidst Legal Troubles (Updated)
Aug 202024
 

On August 17, the Seventh Circuit upheld Indiana’s petition requirement for statewide independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties.  Indiana Green Party v Morales, 23-2756.  The state required 44,935 signatures when the lawsuit was filed in 2022, and at the time Indiana had the nation’s highest percentage for presidential candidates running outside the major parties.  No one had used the petition since 2000.
However, due to low voter turnout in November 2022, the requirement (2% of the vote for Secretary of State) dropped to 36,944 signatures for the 2024 election. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. successfully met the requirement.  The Seventh Circuit therefore seemed to feel the requirement is not severe enough to be unconstitutional
Here is the…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/08/19/seventh-circuit-upholds-indiana-petition-requirement-for-statewide-independent-petitions/

 2024-08-20  Comments Off on Ballot Access News – Seventh Circuit Upholds Indiana Requirement for Statewide Independent Petitions
Aug 192024
 

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)
The TV business isn’t just about selling TVs anymore. Companies are increasingly seeing viewers, not TV sets, as their most lucrative asset.
Over the past few years, TV makers have seen rising financial success from TV operating systems that can show viewers ads and analyze their responses. Rather than selling as many TVs as possible, brands like LG, Samsung, Roku, and Vizio are increasingly, if not primarily, seeking recurring revenue from already-sold TVs via ad sales and tracking.
How did we get here? And what implications does an ad- and data-obsessed industry have for the future of TVs and the people watching them?Read 44 remaining paragraphs | Comments…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2027078

 2024-08-19  Comments Off on Ars Technica – Your TV set has become a digital billboard. And it’s only getting worse.
Aug 192024
 

One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather amusing in a Slashdot-baity sort of way: You could apply to get an account on a real, actual ancient Mainframe hooked up to the Internet, which meant you could literally connect into real, actual ancient hardware. I assure you that to a segment of the population, this is an irresistible proposition. It’s also, ultimately, one that even the most ardent fans of “how it was” will leaf away from, because mainframes are their own wacky old world, like using a taffy-pull…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/5672

 2024-08-19  Comments Off on ASCII by Jason Scott – The Dying Computer Museum
Aug 192024
 

On an x86 system the BIOS is the first part of the system to become active along with the basic CPU core(s) functionality, or so things used to be until Intel introduced its Management Engine (IME) and AMD its AMD Secure Processor (AMD-SP). These are low-level, trusted execution environments, which in the case of AMD-SP involves a Cortex-A5 ARM processor that together with the Cryptographic Co-Processor (CCP) block in the CPU perform basic initialization functions that would previously have been associated with the (UEFI) BIOS like DRAM initialization, but also loading of encrypted (AGESA) firmware from external SPI Flash ROM. Only once the AMD-SP environment has run through all the initialization steps will the x86 cores…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/08/18/reverse-engineering-the-amd-secure-processor-inside-the-cpu/

 2024-08-19  Comments Off on Hackaday – Reverse-Engineering the AMD Secure Processor Inside the CPU
Aug 172024
 

Over the past two years, AI developments have progressed at a rapid pace.
This includes large language models, which are typically trained on a broad datasets of texts; the more, the better.
When AI hit the mainstream, it became apparent that rightsholders are not always pleased that their works were used to train AI. This applies to photographers, artists, music companies, journalists, and authors, some of whom formed groups to file copyright infringement lawsuits to protect their rights.
Book authors, in particular, complained about the use of pirated books as training material. In various lawsuits, companies including OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, and NVIDIA are accused of using the ‘Books3’ dataset, which was scraped from the library of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-copyrighted-books-are-just-statistical-correlations-to-our-ai-models-240617/

 2024-08-17  Comments Off on TorrentFreak – NVIDIA: Copyrighted Books Are Just Statistical Correlations to Our AI Models
Aug 172024
 

Arizona held its non-presidential primaries on July 30.  Two candidates appeared on the Green Party’s primary ballot for U.S. Senate, Mike Norton and Arturo Hernandez.  Norton was backed by Democratic Party figures and Hernandez was backed by Republican figures.  The Green Party did not approve of either one of them, and endorsed Eduardo Quintana, a long-time Green Party official.

However, Quintana was not on the Green Party primary ballot; instead he was a write-in candidate.  But the Green Party mailed a postcard to every registered Green and asked the voters to write-in Quintana, and it worked.  He received more votes than either of his ballot-listed opponents.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/08/17/arizona-green-party-choice-for-u-s-senate-defeats-his-opponents-even-though-he-was-a-write-in-and-his-opponents-were-on-the-ballot/

 2024-08-17  Comments Off on Ballot Access News – Arizona Green Party Choice for U.S. Senate Defeats His Opponents, Even Though He was a Write-in and His Opponents Were On the Ballot
Aug 152024
 

Late 2019, Internet provider Cox Communications lost its legal battle against a group of major record labels, including Sony and Universal.
Following a two-week trial, a Virginia jury held Cox liable for its pirating subscribers. The ISP failed to disconnect repeat infringers and was ordered to pay $1 billion in damages.
Cox challenged the verdict through several routes and earlier this year booked a partial victory. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals confirmed that the ISP was contributorily liable for pirating subscribers, but reversed the vicarious copyright infringement finding. A new trial will determine the appropriate damages amount given these new conclusions.
Following this ruling, Cox asked for the damages question to be put on hold, as there were…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/cox-asks-supreme-court-to-protect-internet-subscribers-from-piracy-terminations-240815/

 2024-08-15  Comments Off on TorrentFreak – Cox Asks Supreme Court to Protect Internet Subscribers from ‘Piracy Terminations’
Aug 152024
 

Everyone knows automation will happen, which is why everyone needs proof of human involvement

Column  Earlier this year I got fired and replaced by a robot. And the managers who made the decision didn’t tell me – or anyone else affected by the change – that it was happening.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/15/robot_took_my_job/

 2024-08-15  Comments Off on The Register – AI stole my job and my work, and the boss didn’t know – or care
Aug 142024
 

Library Genesis (LibGen) is one of the oldest shadow libraries on the Internet, offering free access to millions of books and academic papers people otherwise have to pay for.
The site’s origins reportedly trace back to the Soviet Union’s underground publishing culture ‘samizdat,’ which was used to bypass state censorship in the last century.
LibGen launched around 2008 as a digital version of the same concept. In addition to bypassing ‘local’ censorship, it’s widely used to circumvent the paywalls of major international publishing companies, serving as a popular ‘pirate’ site for (text)books and academic works.
Rightsholders have attempted to take the site offline several times over the years, but none led to concrete results. Today, Libgen.rs, Libgen.is…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://torrentfreak.com/popular-shadow-library-libgen-breaks-down-amidst-legal-troubles-240814/

 2024-08-14  Comments Off on TorrentFreak – Popular Shadow Library ‘LibGen’ Breaks Down Amidst Legal Troubles
Aug 132024
 

Is it not a strange fate that we should suffer so much fear and doubt for so small a thing?

def con  The electronic badges at DEF CON have long been a hot commodity for attendees, tinkerers, and collectors, though this year they’re getting attention for an entirely different reason.…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/08/13/defcon_badge_disagreement_gets_physical/

 2024-08-13  Comments Off on The Register – DEF CON badge disagreement gets physical as firmware dev removed from event stage
Aug 102024
 

36 years ago today, Zero Cool hacked all those banks across state lines. From his house. Crashed 1,507 systems in one day. Biggest crash in history. Front page New York Times, August 10, 1988. Naturally, that means it’s time for our latest installment of CYBERDELIA. Yo, check it. DNA. Fri Sep 6. This is the 29th Anniversary of HACKERS, so as per tradition, we will have: A screening of Hackers at 8pm; Hackers costume contest at 11pm; Head-to-head Wipeout XL competition throughout the night; Skate ramps! Rollerblades welcome! Electro / big beat / cyberpunk dance party to follow. And if you like this…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.dnalounge.com/backstage/log/2024/08/10.html

 2024-08-10  Comments Off on jwz – DNA Lounge: Wherein today is Zero Cool Day
Aug 092024
 

You know, when you’ve written as much as I have about trademark disputes, there are times when you think you’ve seen everything, only to have the universe remind you that the depth of silliness around trademarks can always get deeper. The subject of today’s conversation is going to be a certification mark. While afforded similar protections to a trademark, they are primarily used by a third party, with permission of the owner of a trademarked product, to validate that a product meets certain agreed upon quality standards from the trademark owner. You can find some examples here, but one that is easy to understand is the Energy Star certification mark. To have an Energy Star stamp…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/09/us-appeals-court-sends-dispute-between-french-cognac-cartel-and-music-label-back-to-uspto/

 2024-08-09  Comments Off on Techdirt. – US Appeals Court Sends Dispute Between French Cognac Cartel And Music Label Back To USPTO