Popular：
Virtualization DNS security formal verification reachability analysis compiler errors macro conflict web extension development framework Bitmap Graphics API inconsistencies All Tags

Denmark Ditches Windows for Linux: A Move Towards Digital Sovereignty

2025-06-22
Denmark Ditches Windows for Linux: A Move Towards Digital Sovereignty

Denmark's Ministry of Digital Affairs is making a significant shift, moving away from Windows and Office 365 to embrace Linux and LibreOffice. This decision reflects a growing focus on digital sovereignty, aiming to reduce reliance on a few foreign tech giants. The transition, starting this summer, will affect roughly half of the ministry's systems. This high-profile move underscores a global trend towards greater technological independence and control over critical infrastructure.

Read more
(www.pcgamer.com)
Tech

Apollo 15: First Moon Buggy Ride

2025-08-04
Apollo 15: First Moon Buggy Ride

In 1971, astronauts David Scott and James Irwin of the Apollo 15 mission became the first to drive on the moon's surface in the Lunar Roving Vehicle (LRV), or 'moon buggy'. This battery-powered vehicle, capable of 12 mph, enabled longer excursions than previously possible on foot. Weighing just 77 pounds on the moon, it carried two astronauts, equipment, and hundreds of pounds of samples. Rigorously tested to withstand extreme temperatures and impacts, the LRV collected 170 pounds of lunar samples during Apollo 15. Today, it remains on the moon's near side.

Read more
(nautil.us)
Tech Apollo 15 Lunar Roving Vehicle

Regionalized Brain and Spinal Cord Organoids from Human iPSCs

2025-04-09
Regionalized Brain and Spinal Cord Organoids from Human iPSCs

Researchers generated regionalized brain and spinal cord organoids from human induced pluripotent stem cells (hiPSCs) using various differentiation and culture protocols. These organoids mimicked different brain regions, including the cortex, dorsal and ventral midbrain, and spinal cord. The researchers characterized the cellular composition, gene expression, and neuronal activity of the organoids using single-cell RNA sequencing, immunocytochemistry, and calcium imaging. They further constructed assembloids – combinations of organoids – to study inter-regional connectivity. This research provides valuable in vitro models for studying human brain development and neurological diseases.

Read more
(www.nature.com)
Development organoids single-cell sequencing

Bell Labs' Secret Sauce: Balancing Basic and Applied Research

2025-03-08
Bell Labs' Secret Sauce: Balancing Basic and Applied Research

This article explores how Bell Labs successfully balanced basic and applied research, achieving both groundbreaking scientific discoveries and immense commercial success. It argues that Bell Labs didn't rely solely on free-wheeling basic research, but instead employed a 'long leash, short fence' approach, guiding researchers towards crucial problems relevant to the company's business. This involved three key elements: granting researchers a degree of freedom, facilitating close collaboration between basic and applied researchers, engineers, and manufacturing, and establishing a dedicated team of systems engineers to bridge the gap between research and application, ensuring efficient resource allocation. By analyzing Bell Labs' case study, the article offers valuable lessons for modern applied research organizations, emphasizing the importance of systematically selecting research directions and the critical role of systems engineers.

Read more
(www.freaktakes.com)
Tech Bell Labs basic research applied research

Building a Personalized Calendar with Org-mode

2025-03-14
Building a Personalized Calendar with Org-mode

The author initially used Org Roam for daily planning but found it too complex. Discovering calendar.txt's simple elegance, they decided to recreate its functionality within Org-mode. Using the `org-clone-subtree-with-time-shift` command, a year-long template was quickly generated, with each day containing sections for morning, work, and evening activities. While not as concise as calendar.txt, Org-mode's flexibility allows for richer entries, including images and tables. Ultimately, the author leveraged Org-mode's filtering and hiding features to boost efficiency.

Read more
(sourcery.zone)
Development Calendar Management Productivity Tools

Turning Waste Rock into Battery Materials: A New Zealand Startup's Sustainable Approach

2025-07-27
Turning Waste Rock into Battery Materials: A New Zealand Startup's Sustainable Approach

Aspiring Materials, a New Zealand company, has developed a patented process to extract valuable minerals, including nickel-manganese-cobalt hydroxide (NMC) for lithium-ion batteries, from olivine, a previously low-value waste product. Their process uses acid leaching to transform olivine into a solution from which silica, magnesium hydroxide, and NMC are extracted. The closed-loop system produces no harmful waste and utilizes renewable energy. While NMC constitutes only 10% of the output, this technology offers a more sustainable and geopolitically stable alternative for battery material supply chains, reducing reliance on high-risk mining regions.

Read more
(spectrum.ieee.org)
Tech Sustainable Mining Battery Materials Olivine

Scottish Police Face Data Sovereignty Showdown with Microsoft

2025-08-29

Scottish police are grappling with significant data security and sovereignty challenges in their adoption of Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft's refusal to disclose data processing locations and methods, citing "commercial confidentiality," prevents the police from meeting the stringent data transfer restrictions of the UK's 2018 Data Protection Act. This raises concerns about data potentially being processed in countries lacking adequate data protection, including China and India, and highlights the risks of relying on cloud services without sovereign cloud capabilities. While aware of the risks, the police are constrained by the UK National Enabling Programme and existing contracts with Microsoft, making a swift change of supplier difficult.

Read more
(www.computerweekly.com)
Tech

Compiling Perl to WebAssembly: A Herculean Task

2025-02-11
Compiling Perl to WebAssembly: A Herculean Task

Building a startup, the author faced a challenge: client-side file metadata extraction. ExifTool, while powerful, proved difficult to statically compile and deploy across OSes due to its Perl nature. Various approaches were attempted, including statically compiling Perl, finally leading to WebAssembly. The journey was fraught with challenges, battling Perl's build system, Emscripten, and WASI, even requiring Perl source code modifications. The author successfully built a self-contained WebAssembly Perl running ExifTool, but the process exposed insufficient exception handling support in WebAssembly runtimes.

Read more
(andrews.substack.com)
Development

Arch Linux Under Week-Long DDoS Attack

2025-08-24
Arch Linux Under Week-Long DDoS Attack

The popular Arch Linux distribution is under a week-long distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeting its main website, AUR, and forums. The attacker's motive is unknown. The Arch team is actively working with its hosting provider to mitigate the attack and evaluating DDoS protection options. While Arch is known for its technical difficulty, the attack causes inconvenience to the community. Users can obtain packages via the pacman-mirrorlist package or GitHub to work around service outages.

Read more
(www.theregister.com)
Tech

Embracer Games Archive: Preserving Gaming History

2025-05-10
Embracer Games Archive: Preserving Gaming History

Embracer Games Archive aims to preserve video game history. Inspired by Embracer Group CEO Lars Wingefors's personal collection, the archive has grown alongside the company. Its goal is to collaborate with institutions, grassroots movements, journalists, researchers, publishers, and studios to preserve and document gaming history, ultimately benefiting the entire industry.

Read more
(embracergamesarchive.com)
Game

Trump's De Minimis Exemption Elimination: A Shockwave Through E-commerce

2025-08-01
Trump's De Minimis Exemption Elimination: A Shockwave Through E-commerce

The Trump administration is moving to permanently eliminate the de minimis exemption for imported goods, a move with significant implications for e-commerce giants like Amazon, eBay, and Walmart, and consumers. This elimination will likely lead to higher prices for Chinese-made goods and potentially goods from other countries sold on US platforms. While travelers can still bring back a small amount of duty-free items, many direct-to-consumer shipments will face tariffs ranging from $80 to $200 per item. This action, framed as addressing national emergencies impacting trade and public health, is expected to disrupt e-commerce and consumer purchasing power, with long-term consequences yet to be fully understood.

Read more
(arstechnica.com)
Tech trade policy

Microsoft's Security Scanners Break Single-Use Links: A Shifting Cyber Norm

2025-01-23
Microsoft's Security Scanners Break Single-Use Links: A Shifting Cyber Norm

Bert Hubert reveals that Microsoft and other email security scanners are visiting links in emails and executing JavaScript, including sending POST requests. This violates the long-standing norm that POST requests shouldn't have side effects, breaking single-use login links. The article discusses the impact on web development and calls for greater transparency from large tech companies when changing internet norms.

Read more
(berthub.eu)
Development Single-use links

FBI, Scrapers, and a Weird Fediverse Encounter

2025-06-09

A Fediverse instance admin recounts a bizarre tale: the FBI pays shady companies to scrape data, which is used to monitor online threats. The twist? A forum search engine, BoardReader, was scraping his instance and feeding data to Facebook, leading to FBI contact. The admin thwarted the scraping, only to discover the FBI's target wasn't his instance, but a user, WitchKingOfAngmar, whose threatening posts were indirectly obtained via BoardReader. This user turned out to be a perpetrator of bomb threats. The story highlights the challenges law enforcement faces with decentralized networks, and the issues of data scraping and privacy.

Read more
(blog.freespeechextremist.com)
Tech

Puget Systems' Mineral Oil-Cooled PC: A Decade+ of Experimentation

2025-01-27
Puget Systems' Mineral Oil-Cooled PC: A Decade+ of Experimentation

Since 2007, Puget Systems has experimented with mineral oil cooling for PCs, iterating through multiple versions. Starting with a simple aquarium and inexpensive hardware, they refined their design with custom acrylic motherboard trays, efficient radiators, and dual-pump systems, achieving remarkable cooling performance and stability. While patent issues led to the discontinuation of sales, their persistent experimentation and contribution to the DIY community remain noteworthy.

Read more
(www.pugetsystems.com)
Hardware mineral oil cooling liquid cooling

Run Python in Your Browser Effortlessly with WebAssembly

2025-01-08

Run Python code directly in your browser using the power of WebAssembly! This post details how Pyodide, an open-source project, enables running Python in the browser. The author successfully ported MarkItDown, a Python program converting Office files to Markdown, to a browser-based tool. Pyodide supports nearly all Python syntax and many popular packages, offering a robust JavaScript/Python interoperability interface. Overcoming file transfer and dependency installation challenges, the author created a fully functional browser-based MarkItDown tool, highlighting WebAssembly's transformative potential for browser-based applications.

Read more
(kai.bi)
Development

CISA Releases Open-Source Malware Analysis Platform: Thorium

2025-08-01
CISA Releases Open-Source Malware Analysis Platform: Thorium

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has released Thorium, an open-source platform for malware and forensic analysis. Developed in partnership with Sandia National Labs, Thorium automates many tasks in cyberattack investigations, boasting impressive scalability (over 1700 jobs/second, 10 million files/hour per group). It integrates commercial, open-source, and custom tools, supporting software analysis, digital forensics, and incident response. This release follows CISA's previous initiatives, including the Eviction Strategies Tool and Malware Next-Gen analysis system, all aimed at bolstering cybersecurity defenses.

Read more
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
Tech open-source platform

TruffleRuby Regexps: 200x Faster Than C and SIMD

2025-03-18
TruffleRuby Regexps: 200x Faster Than C and SIMD

This blog post explores performance optimization for JSON string escaping in Ruby. Benchmarks compare three approaches: a pure Ruby version, a C extension with SIMD instructions, and a pure Ruby version on TruffleRuby. Surprisingly, TruffleRuby's pure Ruby version, leveraging its advanced JIT compiler and TRegex engine, is 20 times faster than the C extension and SIMD, and over 200 times faster than the baseline C code in some cases. This stems from TruffleRuby's TRegex engine, which compiles regexps into deterministic finite automata, avoiding backtracking and utilizing SIMD instructions for optimization. Similar comparisons are shown for `Time.new(String)` and `StringScanner#scan_integer`, where TruffleRuby's regexp implementations significantly outperform CRuby's C implementations. This demonstrates that in some cases, concise pure Ruby code, combined with an advanced JIT compiler, can surpass the performance of lower-level languages.

Read more
(eregon.me)
Development Regexps

Jack London's Biased Reporting: The Jeffries-Johnson Fight

2025-04-01
Jack London's Biased Reporting: The Jeffries-Johnson Fight

In 1910, Jack London covered the Jeffries-Johnson boxing match in the US, producing numerous articles analyzing the fighters' tactics and personalities from various angles. Despite witnessing Johnson's decisive victory in Sydney, London employed racist rhetoric, portraying Johnson's skill as a liability, suggesting his sophistication prevented him from being champion. He depicted Jeffries as a more 'savage' warrior, inverting typical racial stereotypes, yet Johnson still emerged negatively portrayed, highlighting the inherent bias in London's reporting.

Read more
(publicdomainreview.org)
Misc Jack London racism

How Modern CPUs Efficiently Predict Bytecode Interpreter Loops

2025-07-05

While investigating the performance of a new Python interpreter, the author discovered that modern CPUs can efficiently predict indirect jumps within bytecode interpreter loops. This is achieved through advanced branch predictors like TAGE and ITTAGE. These predictors map the program counter (PC) and its history to past execution behavior, using multiple tables with geometrically increasing history lengths to dynamically choose the best prediction. The author explores applying ITTAGE's principles to coverage-guided fuzzing and program state exploration, suggesting it could lead to better understanding and exploration of interpreters and similar programs.

Read more
(blog.nelhage.com)
Development branch prediction bytecode interpreter

Firefly Aerospace's Moon Landing Attempt: Blue Ghost's Rendezvous with the Lunar Surface

2025-03-01
Firefly Aerospace's Moon Landing Attempt: Blue Ghost's Rendezvous with the Lunar Surface

Firefly Aerospace, equipped with a suite of NASA science and technology, is targeting a lunar landing no earlier than 3:34 a.m. EST on Sunday, March 2nd. Their Blue Ghost lunar lander aims to touch down near Mare Crisium, on the near side of the Moon, as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative and the Artemis program. Live coverage, jointly hosted by NASA and Firefly, begins at 2:20 a.m. EST on NASA+, approximately 75 minutes before the anticipated landing.

Read more
(plus.nasa.gov)
Tech Moon Landing

HP's 15-Minute Phone Wait: Forcing Customers Online?

2025-02-20
HP's 15-Minute Phone Wait: Forcing Customers Online?

HP Inc. is implementing a minimum 15-minute wait time for phone support in several European countries for consumer PC and print customers. This is a deliberate strategy to drive customers towards online support channels and reduce warranty costs. Internal sources express concern, highlighting the disconnect between decision-makers and the impacted customers. While HP claims to monitor customer satisfaction metrics, the move is likely to push some customers towards alternative support methods like social media or live chat.

Read more
(www.theregister.com)
Tech customer service online support

Hollywood's Unsung Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story

2025-03-14
Hollywood's Unsung Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story

The documentary "Hollywood's Architect: The Paul R. Williams Story" chronicles the life of Paul Revere Williams, the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects. Overcoming immense racial barriers, Williams designed iconic buildings like LAX and homes for Hollywood legends. The film not only celebrates his extraordinary talent but also highlights the lack of diversity in architecture and the importance of preserving his legacy, prompting reflection on racial equality and cultural heritage preservation.

Read more
(www.latimes.com)
Design architecture racial equality

A Deep Dive into Compression Algorithms: From DEFLATE to ZSTD

2025-01-23

While building MonKafka, a Kafka Broker implementation, the author delved into the four compression algorithms supported by Kafka: GZIP, Snappy, LZ4, and ZSTD. The article provides a detailed explanation of these algorithms, covering lossless and lossy compression, run-length encoding, Lempel-Ziv algorithms, Huffman coding, and a deep dive into the DEFLATE algorithm's implementation, including LZ77, Huffman coding, and hash tables. Furthermore, it compares the performance of Snappy, LZ4, and ZSTD, and briefly introduces arithmetic coding and FSE. The author concludes by summarizing the core concept of compression algorithms: removing data redundancy, reducing entropy, and extracting information.

Read more
(cefboud.github.io)
Development compression algorithms

Google Chromecast Brick: An Expired Certificate Causes Havoc

2025-03-14
Google Chromecast Brick: An Expired Certificate Causes Havoc

Millions of older Google Chromecast devices suddenly stopped working due to an expired device authentication certificate. This isn't a simple software glitch; it involves complex digital signatures and certificate chains. While Google acknowledged the issue and promised a fix, the repair process could take weeks, potentially requiring coordination across multiple teams to update apps. Experts estimate Google might need over a month to build and test a new Chromecast update to renew expired certificates or coordinate multiple teams to release new app versions. The incident highlights shortcomings in Google's device security and maintenance, raising concerns about product lifecycles and security updates.

Read more
(www.theregister.com)
Tech expired certificate

Tranquilizers and the Age of Anxiety: Capitalism's Drug Problem

2025-09-21
Tranquilizers and the Age of Anxiety: Capitalism's Drug Problem

This article explores the intricate relationship between drug consumption and modern capitalism. Through personal experience and historical review, the author traces the evolution of anti-anxiety medications, from Miltown in the 1950s to Klonopin today. These drugs, the author argues, are not simply treatments for anxiety, but also products of a capitalist society that generates widespread stress and precarity. The article posits that the pressures, instability, and uncertainty of modern life lead to pervasive anxiety and trauma, with drugs serving as a coping mechanism. The author's personal journey illustrates this, prompting reflection on the complex interplay between drug use and societal structures.

Read more
(lithub.com)
Misc History of Drugs Anxiety

Anthropic to Train AI Models on User Data, Opt-Out Required

2025-08-29
Anthropic to Train AI Models on User Data, Opt-Out Required

Anthropic will begin training its AI models, including Claude, on user chat transcripts and coding sessions unless users opt out by September 28th. This affects all consumer tiers, extending data retention to five years. A prominent 'Accept' button in the update notification risks users agreeing without fully understanding the implications. While Anthropic claims data protection measures, users who inadvertently accept can change their preference in settings, though previously used data remains inaccessible.

Read more
(www.theverge.com)
AI user agreement

DigiCert Attempts to Silence Open Discussion of WebPKI Security Issues

2025-02-25

Following comments by Sectigo's Chief Compliance Officer, Tim Callan, on the Bugzilla forum regarding DigiCert's certificate practices, DigiCert's lawyers attempted to suppress the discussion through the threat of legal action. Sectigo's General Counsel, Brian Holland, responded that Callan's statements were protected under the First Amendment and aimed at fostering open debate on important WebPKI issues. Holland argues DigiCert's actions damage the WebPKI's self-regulatory system and calls for industry attention to prevent similar incidents. The incident highlights WebPKI security and transparency, and the responsibilities and rights of companies in public discourse.

Read more
(bugzilla.mozilla.org)
Tech Legal Action

Georgian Highland Villages: Tradition in Transition

2025-05-24
Georgian Highland Villages: Tradition in Transition

Over a decade, a photographer has revisited remote villages in Georgia's Adjara region, documenting the lives of a pastoral nomadic community. Facing challenges like limited access to education, healthcare, and essential services, these villages experience outmigration, and traditions like traditional weddings are fading. The photographer aims to showcase the community's adaptation and creation of new meaning in the modern world, not simply through nostalgia.

Read more
(www.thedial.world)
Misc traditional culture

Gamers Fight Back Against Payment Processor Censorship

2025-08-03
Gamers Fight Back Against Payment Processor Censorship

Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, and PayPal's sudden delisting of NSFW games from Itch.io sparked a massive gamer backlash. Players are bombarding payment companies with phone calls, demanding the games' reinstatement. The movement, supported by unions and game developer associations, has yielded some results, with payment company representatives showing shifts in attitude. However, payment companies refuse comment, citing vague policies about "illegal or brand-damaging" activities. The core issue revolves around whether payment processors should censor content and the implications for free speech.

Read more
(aftermath.site)
Game
1 2 … 227 228 229 231 233 234 235 … 596 597