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There needs to be a meta-app that just takes all the apps and converts them back into Internet.Today’s News:
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/app-5
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/
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…
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
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
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/
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…
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.
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…
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/
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/
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.…
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
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…
Prominent Wake Democrats and the Wake County chapter of the North Carolina Democratic Party’s Jewish caucus are urging the larger county party not to make endorsements in this year’s nonpartisan Raleigh City Council races. All city council seats and the mayor’s seat are up for election in November, and in several races, multiple Democrats are in the running. Since 2011, the party has endorsed one of those candidates. But this year, some are calling for the party not to weigh in, and candidates’ positions on the Israel-Hamas conflict appear to be the main reason. In a letter sent to Wake County Democratic Party Chair Kevyn Creech and executive director Wesley Knott on Friday, more than 20…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://indyweek.com/news/wake/endorsements-split-wake-county-dems/
Texas is one of eight states that have enacted laws that force adults to prove their age before accessing porn sites. Soon it will try to persuade the Supreme Court that its law doesn’t violate the First Amendment.
Good luck with that.
These laws are unconstitutional: They deny adults the well-established right to access constitutionally protected speech.
Texas’ H.B. 1181 forces any website made up of one-third or more adult content to verify every visitor’s age. Some adult sites have responded to the law by shutting down their services in Texas. The Free Speech Coalition challenged the law on First Amendment grounds, arguing that mandatory age verification does more than keep minors away from porn — the law nannies adults as well, barring…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/08/08/age-gating-access-to-online-porn-is-unconstitutional/
Raspberry Pi’s first foray into the world of microcontrollers, the RP2040, was a very interesting chip. Its standout features were the programmable input/output units (PIOs) which enabled all sorts of custom real-time shenanigans. And that’s not to discount the impact of the Pi Pico, the $4 dev kit built around it.
Today, they’re announcing a brand-new microcontroller: the RP2350. It will come conveniently packaged in the new Pi Pico 2, and there’s good news and bad news. The good news is that the new chip is better in every way, and that the Pico form factor will stay the same. The bad news? It’s going to cost 25% more, coming in at $5. But in exchange for…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/08/08/raspberry-has-a-new-pico-and-the-rp2350/
Enlarge / EUS panel test weld at the Michoud Assembly Facility on Tuesday, February 9, 2021. (credit: Michael DeMocker/NASA)
The NASA program to develop a new upper stage for the Space Launch System rocket is seven years behind schedule and significantly over budget, a new report from the space agency’s inspector general finds. However, beyond these headline numbers, there is also some eye-opening information about the project’s prime contractor, Boeing, and its poor quality control practices.
The new Exploration Upper Stage, a more powerful second stage for the SLS rocket that made its debut in late 2022, is viewed by NASA as a key piece of its Artemis program to return humans to the…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2041826
The ‘CRT Effect’ myth says that the reason why pixel art of old games looked so much better is due to the smoothing and blending effects of cathode-ray tube (CRT) displays, which were everywhere until the early 2000s. In fits of mistaken nostalgia this has led both to modern-day extreme cubism pixel art and video game ‘CRT’ filters that respectively fail to approach what pixel art was about, or why old games looked the way they did back with our NES and SNES game consoles. This is a point which [Carl Svensson] vehemently argues from a position of experience, and one which is likely shared by quite a few of our readers.
Although there is some possible…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/08/03/pixel-art-and-the-myth-of-the-crt-effect/
Small stay of execution in ‘exceptional circumstances’ promised as lawsuits start to fly
As the DigiCert drama continues, we now have a better idea of the size and scope of the problem – with the organization’s infosec boss admitting the SSL/TLS certificate revocation sweep will affect tens of thousands of its customers, some of which have warned that the short notice may have real-world safety implications and disrupt critical services.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/07/31/digicert_certificates_extension/
