CompSci and math professor by trade, he envisaged a galactic Usenet, and was utterly brilliant
Obituary Science fiction author and academic Vernor Vinge has departed this life, aged 79.…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2024/03/22/vernor_vinge_obituary/
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the Democratic Party has assembled a “new team of lawyers” tasked with blocking third-party candidates from appearing on the ballot.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/03/22/nzvc-m22.html
Calling all extension developers! With Manifest V3 picking up steam again, we wanted to provide some visibility into our current plans as a lot has happened since we published our last update.
Back in 2022 we released our initial implementation of MV3, the latest version of the extensions platform, in Firefox. Since then, we have been hard at work collaborating with other browser vendors and community members in the W3C WebExtensions Community Group (WECG). Our shared goals were to improve extension APIs while addressing cross browser compatibility. That collaboration has yielded some great results to date and we’re proud to say our participation has been instrumental in shaping and designing those APIs to ensure broader applicability across…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2024/03/13/manifest-v3-manifest-v2-march-2024-update/
The leader in gunshot detection tech rebranded recently. Following several months of sustained negative press, ShotSpotter decided it wanted to be called something else: SoundThinking.
But a raffelesia by any other name smells the same. ShotSpotter had experienced a bit of quick uptake by law enforcement agencies, but in recent years, it was more well-known for having contracts terminated by major cities, allegedly altering data to better fit police report narratives, and suing reporters for covering nothing more than allegations made against the company in court.
No one’s going to stop calling ShotSpotter by its original Christian name. SoundThinking may be the new brand, but if anyone wants readers to instantly understand the tech being discussed, ShotSpotter…
Enlarge / A car’s hazard warning lights will need a physical control to get a five-star EuroNCAP score in 2026.
Some progress in the automotive industry is laudable. Cars are safer than ever and more efficient, too. But there are other changes we’d happily leave by the side of the road. That glossy “piano black” trim that’s been overused the last few years, for starters. And the industry’s overreliance on touchscreens for functions that used to be discrete controls. Well, the automotive safety organization European New Car Assessment Programme (Euro NCAP) feels the same way about that last one, and it says the controls ought to change in 2026.
“The overuse of touchscreens…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2007776
San Francisco’s ballot initiative Proposition E is a dangerous and deceptive measure that threatens our privacy, safety, and democratic ideals. It would give the police more power to surveil, chase, and harm. It would allow the police to secretly acquire and use unproven surveillance technologies for a year or more without oversight, eliminating the hard-won protections backed by a majority of San Franciscans that are currently in place. Prop E is not a solution to the city’s challenges, but rather a threat to our rights and freedoms.
Don’t be fooled by the misleading arguments of Prop E’s supporters. A group of tech billionaires have contributed a small fortune to convince San Francisco voters that they would be safer…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/voting-no-prop-e-easy-and-important-san-francisco
Continuing the relentless assault on civilians in Gaza, Israeli troops killed more than 100 starving Palestinians waiting for flour from aid trucks yesterday. Emboldened by US complicity, Israel persists in acting with impunity in Gaza.
Palestinians mourn following an early morning incident when residents rushed toward aid trucks in Gaza City and were met with Israeli gunfire on February 29, 2024. (AFP via Getty Images) On Thursday at dawn, Israeli troops unleashed a barrage of gunfire on a crowd of starving Palestinians waiting for aid trucks in Gaza City, killing over one hundred people and wounding more than one thousand others. The death toll is expected to rise as most hospitals…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://jacobin.com/2024/03/israel-flour-massacre-war-crime-gaza/
As we celebrate Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week, we are reminded of all the ways these flexible copyright exceptions enable libraries to preserve materials and meet the needs of the communities they serve. Indeed, fair use is essential to the functioning of libraries, and underlies many of the ordinary library practices that we all take for granted. In this blog post, we wanted to describe a few of the ways the fair use doctrine has helped us build our library. Fair use in action: Web Archives and the Wayback Machine The Internet Archive has been archiving the web since the mid-1990’s. Our web collection now includes more than 850 billion web pages, with hundreds of millions…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://blog.archive.org/2024/03/01/fair-use-in-action-at-the-internet-archive/
Listening to police and fire calls used to be a pretty simple proposition: buy a scanner, punch in some frequencies — or if you’re old enough, buy the right crystals — and you’re off to the races. It was a pretty cheap and easy hobby, all things considered. But progress marches on, and with it came things like trunking radio and digital modulation, requiring ever more sophisticated scanners, often commanding eye-watering prices.
Having had enough of that, [Top DNG] decided to roll his own digital trunking scanner on the cheap. The first video below is a brief intro to the receiver based on the combination of an RTL-SDR dongle and a Raspberry Pi 5. The Pi is…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2024/02/10/pi-5-and-sdr-team-up-for-a-digital-scanner-you-can-actually-afford/
The Mission’s response to homelessness: More than 2,000 planters:
There are some 2,078 planters across the neighborhood, according to a block-by-block count conducted by Mission Local reporters. About 200 of these are the large metallic containers and another 400 are wooden barrels. There are 155 wooden troughs. The remaining 1,307 are a mixture of receptacles ranging in size from tiny clay pots to massive sidewalk gardens filled with an assortment of vessels.
Kudos to the web designers for making this article be both: an interactive scrolling 3d-ish map thingy; and also, completely legible in Reader Mode! One usually does not get both.
Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/hostile-architecture-survey/
There’s been plenty of bad news regarding federal legislation in 2023. For starters, Congress has failed to pass meaningful comprehensive data privacy reforms. Instead, legislators have spent an enormous amount of energy pushing dangerous legislation that’s intended to limit young people’s use of some of the most popular sites and apps, all under the guise of protecting kids. Unfortunately, many of these bills would run roughshod over the rights of young people and adults in the process. We spent much of the year fighting these dangerous “child safety” bills, while also pointing out to legislators that comprehensive data privacy legislation would be more likely to pass constitutional muster and address many of the issues that these…
The Debian project has completed a
general-resolution vote, adopting a statement expressing concern about
the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA) pending in the European Union.Even if only “commercial activities” are in the scope of CRA, the Free Software community – and as a consequence, everybody – will lose a lot of small projects. CRA will force many small enterprises and most probably all self employed developers out of business because they simply cannot fulfill the requirements imposed by CRA. Debian and other Linux distributions depend on their work. If accepted as it is, CRA will undermine not only an established community but also a thriving market. CRA needs an exemption for small businesses and, at the very least,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/956187/
A recent Guardian interview with the British Library’s head of digital publications, Giulia Carla Rossi, reveals the problems caused by copyright for those tasked with preserving modern culture. In some respects, the British Library finds itself in a fortunate position, as Rossi explains:
Because we collect under non-print legal deposit [the regulation that grants the British Library a copy of every work published in the UK], the idea is we collect everything that is published.
However, there is a fundamental difference between collecting analogue publications such as books, and those that are born digital. Where the former can be appreciated directly, the latter require a platform of some kind. That might be an operating system, a browser plug in,…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/26/how-copyright-hinders-the-preservation-of-modern-digital-culture/
According to this story, the Green Party of North Carolina did not submit any presidential candidates for inclusion on its 2024 presidential primary. The decision does not affect the ability of the party to list its presidential nominee in November.
In 2020, the North Carolina Green Party did have a presidential primary, and the ballot listed Howie Hawkins and uncommitted.
The article also says the No Labels Party isn’t using its presidential primary either, but the law does not permit a new party to have a primary, so even if No Labels had wanted a presidential primary, it could not have had one.
Since China State Shipbuilding Corporation (CSSC) unveiled its KUN-24AP containership at the Marintec China Expo in Shanghai in early December of 2023, the internet has been abuzz about it. Not just because it’s the world’s largest container ship at a massive 24,000 TEU, but primarily because of the power source that will power this behemoth: a molten salt reactor of Chinese design that is said to use a thorium fuel cycle. Not only would this provide the immense amount of electrical power needed to propel the ship, it would eliminate harmful emissions and allow the ship to travel much faster than other containerships.
Meanwhile the Norwegian classification society, DNV, has already issued an approval-in-principle to CSSC Jiangnan…
The Internet Archive (IA) is a non-profit organization that aims to preserve digital history for generations to come.
The digital library is a staunch supporter of a free and open Internet and began meticulously archiving the web over a quarter century ago.
In addition to archiving the web, IA also operates a library that offers a broad collection of digital media, including books. Staying true to the centuries-old library concept, IA patrons can also borrow books that are scanned and digitized in-house.
Publishers vs. Internet Archive
The self-scanning service is different from the licensing deals other libraries enter into. Not all publishers are happy with IA’s approach which triggered a massive legal battle two years ago.
Publishers Hachette, HarperCollins, John…
Enlarge / A jackdaw tries to remember what color it was thinking of. (credit: Frans Buiter / 500px)
Humans tend to think that we are the most intelligent life-forms on Earth, and that we’re largely followed by our close relatives such as chimps and gorillas. But there are some areas of cognition in which homo sapiens and other primates are not unmatched. What other animal’s brain could possibly operate at a human’s level, at least when it comes to one function? Birds—again.
This is far from the first time that bird species such as corvids and parrots have shown that they can think like us in certain ways. Jackdaws are clever corvids that belong…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1992736
Albertsons and Macy’s uses facial recognition on customers, but this article gives us little information on how.
We must reject the idea that businesses deserve the freedom to do
facial recognition on video images in and around their premises, or
the freedom to make videos and transmit them elsewhere, or regularly
save them for more than a few weeks, This supposed freedom conflicts with the privacy that humans beings deserve, and it facilitates the repression
than US cities and agencies are already eager to commit. These include
Atlanta
and Florida.
One inevitable aspect of cities and urban life in general is that it is noisy, with traffic being one of the main sources of noise pollution. Finding a way to attenuate especially the low-frequency noise of road traffic was the subject of [Joe Krcma]’s Masters Thesis, the results of which he gave a talk on at the Portland Maker Meetup Club after graduating from University College London. The chosen solution in his thesis are Helmholtz resonators, which are a kind of acoustic spring. Using a carefully selected opening into the cavity, frequencies can be filtered out, and extinguished inside the cavity.
Basic functionality and formula used to determine the dimensions of a Helmholtz Resonator.
As examples of existing…
External feed Read More at the Source: https://hackaday.com/2023/12/24/absorbing-traffic-noise-with-bricks-using-helmholtz-resonators/
This story originally published online at NC Newsline. Five rooms in Poe Hall at NC State University are contaminated with PCBs at levels up to 38 times greater than EPA standards for building materials, according to sampling results obtained by Newsline this week under Public Records law. The results are here, and Newsline has annotated them to explain what they mean. University officials last month temporarily closed the seven-story building after initial tests showed the presence of PCBs, a probable carcinogen in various building materials, including in several air handling units. Poe Hall houses the College of Education and the Department of Psychology. Raleigh’s WRAL first reported on the building’s closure. Several people who worked…