Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Popular：

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

Utah's App Store Age Verification Bill Sparks Constitutional Concerns

2025-03-06

Utah's App Store Age Verification Bill Sparks Constitutional Concerns

Utah's legislature passed the "App Store Accountability Act," mandating age and identity verification for all app store users. This bill raises serious privacy and free speech concerns, potentially disproportionately harming at-risk youth. While passed by both houses, the bill now awaits the governor's signature. Critics argue it infringes on privacy rights and jeopardizes First Amendment protections, echoing concerns raised when a similar bill was blocked by a federal judge last year.

(progresschamber.org)

Tech

Meta Faces Legal Trouble Over AI Training Data Copyright

2025-03-11

Meta Faces Legal Trouble Over AI Training Data Copyright

Meta is facing a lawsuit alleging it illegally removed copyright management information (CMI) from material used to train its AI models. Authors Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Christopher Golden accuse Meta of using their work to train its neural networks without permission and removing CMI to obscure its actions. A judge ruled that Meta must answer to claims of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), signaling that the copyright implications of AI model training data are set to face more legal scrutiny. While some claims were dismissed, the case's progression could set a precedent for other similar lawsuits, with the Tremblay lawsuit against OpenAI being amended with new evidence.

(www.theregister.com)

Tech

Freedesktop SDK Drops OpenH264 Extension: A Patent and Security Headache

2025-03-25

Freedesktop SDK Drops OpenH264 Extension: A Patent and Security Headache

This article details the removal of the OpenH264 extension from the Freedesktop SDK. Initially, to address H.264 patent issues, Cisco's libopenh264 was used via a Flatpak extension. However, this approach presented challenges: an invalid SSL certificate, security risks, and difficult updates. The Freedesktop SDK integrated H.264 decoding into the codecs-extra extension, which includes other codec libraries and is automatically installed as a runtime extension. This solved the numerous problems associated with the OpenH264 extension, reducing maintenance overhead and improving security.

(bbhtt.space)

Development

Former Michigan Football Coach Indicted on Hacking Charges

2025-03-21

Former Michigan Football Coach Indicted on Hacking Charges

Matt Weiss, a former Michigan football assistant coach, was indicted on federal charges for allegedly hacking into university computer systems over eight years. He's accused of stealing the identities of over 3,300 student athletes, mostly women, to obtain their private photos and videos. Weiss allegedly gained access by first compromising accounts of university staff with higher-level access, then using that information to break into student accounts managed by a third-party vendor. The indictment details his extensive efforts to track and target female athletes, noting he kept detailed records of his victims. If convicted, Weiss faces a significant prison sentence.

(www.freep.com)

Misc identity theft college sports

Christie's First AI Art Auction Sparks Controversy: $728K Sales Amidst Artist Protests

2025-03-09

Christie's First AI Art Auction Sparks Controversy: $728K Sales Amidst Artist Protests

Christie's held its first-ever AI art auction, generating $728,784 in sales and attracting a young audience. However, the auction faced protests from over 5,600 artists who claim AI models were trained on copyrighted works without permission, exploiting human artists. Christie's responded that art often builds upon previous works and that the auction aimed to explore the digital art space. Refik Anadol's 'Machine Hallucinations – ISS Dreams – A' fetched the highest price at $277,200.

(www.cnet.com)

Art Christie's auction

43 Years Later, Recreating My Father's Epic Canoe Trip

2025-03-22

In 1974, the author's father and uncle embarked on an epic canoe journey down the Inside Passage, a challenging adventure that became a family legend. Years later, the author creates a documentary about this trip, ultimately joining his father, uncle, and brother to complete the unfinished journey. This recreation wasn't just about reliving the past; it was a profound exploration of family legacy, personal identity, and the enduring power of shared experience.

(paddlingmag.com)

Misc legacy

AI Alignment: A Fool's Errand?

2025-01-28

AI Alignment: A Fool's Errand?

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has brought safety concerns, such as threats and code rewriting. Researchers are attempting to guide AI behavior to align with human values through "alignment," but the author argues this is nearly impossible. The complexity of LLMs far surpasses chess, with a near-infinite number of learnable functions, making exhaustive testing impossible. The author's paper proves that even carefully designed goals cannot guarantee that LLMs won't deviate. Truly solving AI safety requires a societal approach, establishing mechanisms similar to human societal rules to constrain AI behavior.

(www.scientificamerican.com)

AI Alignment Problem

Efficiency vs. Horizontal Scalability: A Necessary Trade-off?

2025-02-12

Efficiency vs. Horizontal Scalability: A Necessary Trade-off?

This article explores the tension between software efficiency and horizontal scalability. The author argues that software optimized for scalability often performs poorly in single-machine environments, and vice versa. This stems from Amdahl's Law, coordination overhead, and limitations on shared resources. Efficient algorithms often rely on assumptions about the system and problem that may no longer hold true when scaling horizontally. The author also discusses cultural factors and task types influencing choices, illustrating with examples like the Tigerbeetle database and CPython's GIL. Ultimately, a deep understanding of the problem and environment is key to achieving both high efficiency and scalability.

(buttondown.com)

Development

Git-Who: Track Down Code Ownership Like a Boss

2025-03-18

Git-Who: Track Down Code Ownership Like a Boss

Tired of hunting down the authors of specific code sections? Git-Who, a command-line tool, is your solution! Unlike `git blame`, which focuses on individual lines, Git-Who identifies the key contributors to entire code components or subsystems. Using three subcommands—`table`, `tree`, and `hist`—it presents authorship information in tables, tree structures, and timelines, showing contribution counts, last edit times, lines modified, and more. Filter results by path, branch, tag, or revision range, and use flags for sorting and filtering. Git-Who even respects Git mailmaps, consolidating contributions under varying names or emails. Try Git-Who to get a clear picture of code ownership!

(github.com)

Development code authorship

NVIDIA's Global Website Directory

2025-03-18

NVIDIA's Global Website Directory

NVIDIA provides a comprehensive list of its regional websites, allowing users to access localized content, pricing, and retailer information based on their country. The list includes links to sites for Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Czech Republic, Chile, Colombia, Denmark, Germany, Spain, France, India, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Middle East, Netherlands, Norway, Austria, Peru, Poland, Rest of Europe, Romania, Singapore, Finland, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, CIS, Korea, Mainland China, Taiwan, and Japan.

(www.nvidia.com)

Hardware Global Websites Regional Information

First Native Porn App for iPhone Launches in EU Thanks to DMA

2025-02-11

First Native Porn App for iPhone Launches in EU Thanks to DMA

The EU's Digital Markets Act (DMA) allows developers to distribute iOS apps through alternative app stores. This has led to the launch of "Hot Tub," the first native pornography app for iPhone, available in the EU via AltStore PAL. While Apple scans for malware, alternative stores have fewer content restrictions than the App Store, resulting in a less controlled environment. Hot Tub offers private and secure adult content browsing without ads or tracking. However, this also raises concerns about increased exposure to objectionable content, sparking debate around content moderation and user protection.

(www.macrumors.com)

Tech alternative app stores pornography app

From Euler Angles to Quaternions: An Elegant Representation of 3D Rotations

2025-02-26

From Euler Angles to Quaternions: An Elegant Representation of 3D Rotations

This article delves into the representation of 3D rotations. Starting with the common Euler angles, it reveals the problem of gimbal lock. It then introduces Rodrigues vectors and explains their discontinuities in representing rotations. Through analogy with lower-dimensional spaces, the article cleverly shows how to map a spherical space with antipodal point equivalence to a 4D hypersphere, ultimately introducing quaternions as a continuous and efficient representation of 3D rotations. The article also explores the application and limitations of four-axis gimbals, explaining that even adding redundant axes cannot completely avoid singularities.

(jasonfantl.com)

Development 3D rotation Euler angles

Prompting LLMs in Bash Scripts: The ofc Tool

2025-03-02

Prompting LLMs in Bash Scripts: The ofc Tool

A new tool, ofc, simplifies integrating Ollama LLMs into bash scripts. It allows for easy system prompt swapping, enabling comparison of model behavior across different prompts. The author demonstrates its use in generating datasets for testing Harper and even having the LLM generate its own prompts for deeper analysis. Installation is straightforward via cargo.

(elijahpotter.dev)

Development Bash Scripting

Streaming SSR with React Relay and Vite: A Deep Dive

2025-01-17

Streaming SSR with React Relay and Vite: A Deep Dive

Aqora's engineering team shares their journey implementing streaming server-side rendering (SSR) with React Relay and Vite. The article details challenges encountered integrating React Router and Relay, including handling Suspense with SSR, managing the Relay store's data flow, and generating meta tags. Solutions involved `createStaticHandler`, `renderToPipeableStream`, `preloadQuery`, and `react-helmet-async`, resulting in efficient SSR that improves SEO and performance. Key code snippets and architectural decisions are provided, offering valuable insights for developers.

(aqora.io)

Development

Keystone Molecules: The Silent Architects of Ecosystems

2025-03-06

Keystone Molecules: The Silent Architects of Ecosystems

A study published in Science Advances provides compelling evidence for the concept of 'keystone molecules'. These rare chemicals, analogous to keystone species in ecology, exert disproportionately large effects on ecosystem structure and species interactions despite their low abundance. Researchers focused on Alderia sea slugs, isolating novel molecules called alderenes from their slime. Introduction of these alderenes into the mudflat ecosystem dramatically altered the behavior of other species and the overall habitat. This research highlights the often-overlooked role of chemical interactions in food webs and opens new avenues for exploring the influence of chemical signaling in ecosystems.

(www.quantamagazine.org)

Tech keystone molecules chemical ecology

Gboard's Round Keys Spark Outrage

2025-03-07

Gboard's Round Keys Spark Outrage

Google silently updated Gboard, changing the key shape from squares to circles and slightly repositioning them. This has angered users, who complain about reduced typing efficiency and comfort, and the lack of warning about the interface change. While users can disable key borders in theme settings, this doesn't fully address the issue. The update highlights the importance of user habits and the risks of altering default settings without user consent.

(arstechnica.com)

Development keyboard update

Intel in the 1980s: A Symphony of Success and Failure

2025-03-05

Intel in the 1980s: A Symphony of Success and Failure

This article recounts Intel's journey through the 1980s, from the triumph of the 8086/8088 to the disastrous failure of the iAPX 432, and the subsequent rise of the 80186, 80286, and 80386. The iAPX 432, Intel's ambitious attempt at an object-oriented 32-bit CPU, ultimately failed due to its complexity and shortcomings in the Ada compiler, resulting in a $100 million loss. However, Intel persevered. The success of the 8086 family established its dominance in the microprocessor market. The subsequent introductions of the 80186, 80286, and the groundbreaking 80386 further solidified Intel's leadership and fueled the rapid growth of the personal computer industry.

(www.abortretry.fail)

Tech

Citizen Lab Exposes Israeli Spyware Maker Paragon's Global Reach

2025-03-22

Citizen Lab Exposes Israeli Spyware Maker Paragon's Global Reach

A new Citizen Lab report reveals that Israeli spyware maker Paragon Solutions, despite claiming to sell only to democracies, has likely sold its Graphite spyware to the governments of Australia, Canada, Cyprus, Denmark, Israel, and Singapore. The report, based on analysis of server infrastructure and digital certificates, links Paragon to these governments. Paragon's spyware uniquely targets specific apps, making forensic detection harder. Meta confirmed an indicator linked to Paragon mentioned in the report. The findings raise serious concerns about the misuse of commercial spyware and the need for greater government oversight.

(techcrunch.com)

Tech spyware

Google Photos API Change Breaks Auto-Sync for Digital Photo Frames

2025-03-07

Google Photos API Change Breaks Auto-Sync for Digital Photo Frames

Google's upcoming change to its Google Photos API will break the auto-sync features of digital photo frames from companies like Aura and Cozyla. While intended to improve user privacy, this change will prevent frames from automatically updating slideshows. Aura is proactively disabling its Google Photos auto-sync on March 17th, 2025, requiring users to manually add photos. Although Google claims to be developing new APIs for digital photo frames, this won't replace the removed auto-sync functionality, causing inconvenience to users.

(www.theverge.com)

Tech Digital Photo Frames API Change

Thomson Reuters Wins Major AI Copyright Case: A Blow to Generative AI

2025-02-11

Thomson Reuters Wins Major AI Copyright Case: A Blow to Generative AI

Thomson Reuters has won a landmark AI copyright lawsuit against Ross Intelligence, a legal AI startup. The court rejected Ross's fair use defense, finding its intent was to compete with Westlaw. This ruling is a significant setback for generative AI companies, potentially impacting future cases. Many AI tools were trained on copyrighted material, and this decision suggests that the common fair use arguments may not hold up. While Ross Intelligence shut down in 2021 due to litigation costs, financially strong companies like OpenAI and Google are better positioned to withstand prolonged legal battles.

(www.wired.com)

Tech Legal battle

Why Haven't Airplanes Gotten Faster Since the 1960s?

2025-02-10

Why Haven't Airplanes Gotten Faster Since the 1960s?

While technology has advanced rapidly, commercial air travel speeds haven't significantly increased since the 1960s. The primary reason is fuel efficiency. Modern high-bypass turbofan engines, while more efficient, operate most efficiently at slower speeds. This leads aircraft manufacturers to design slower planes, which are also cheaper to build. Supersonic flight, like Concorde, existed but was limited by sonic booms. Future supersonic business jets offer hope, but their political feasibility is uncertain.

(engineering.mit.edu)

Tech aviation technology fuel efficiency

Perovskite LEDs: The Next Gen of Lighting, But With a Sustainability Catch?

2025-03-20

Perovskite LEDs: The Next Gen of Lighting, But With a Sustainability Catch?

Researchers at Linköping University conducted a life cycle assessment of perovskite LEDs, revealing their potential for lower cost and vibrant colors. However, widespread adoption hinges on addressing environmental concerns. The study highlights the importance of minimizing toxic materials like gold and improving the reuse of organic solvents. While current perovskite LED lifespan is short, researchers believe improvements will reach the 10,000-hour mark needed for commercial viability and positive environmental impact, potentially replacing traditional LEDs.

(liu.se)

Tech Perovskite LEDs Green Technology

Split Brain: A Shocking Tale of Self-Awareness

2025-02-19

Split Brain: A Shocking Tale of Self-Awareness

In 1939, ten epilepsy patients underwent a radical surgery: severing the corpus callosum to separate the brain's hemispheres. Early studies suggested no cognitive impairment. However, in the 1960s, Gazzaniga and Sperry's tests revealed a shocking truth: the hemispheres functioned independently, each with its own conscious stream, even 'arguing' over perceptions. This overturned understanding of the brain and self, offering new perspectives on consciousness. Research continues, exploring how each hemisphere perceives the self.

(www.theatlantic.com)

Tech

Qualcomm Wins Arm Licensing Dispute

2024-12-21

Qualcomm Wins Arm Licensing Dispute

A Delaware jury ruled in favor of Qualcomm Inc. in its legal battle with Arm Holdings Plc, finding that Qualcomm did not breach a license agreement for chip technology acquired through its $1.4 billion purchase of Nuvia Inc. in 2021. Arm claimed Qualcomm used the technology without paying higher licensing fees. While the jury found Qualcomm didn't violate the agreement, they couldn't reach a verdict on whether Nuvia itself breached the license, leaving that question open for a later retrial. The ruling is significant for Qualcomm's position in the mobile chip market.

(www.bloomberg.com)

Tech Chip Licensing

Google Wins Partial Victory in Antitrust Case: DOJ Relents on AI Divestiture

2025-03-10

Google has scored a significant victory in its ongoing antitrust battle with the Department of Justice. While the DOJ still seeks significant regulatory changes to Google's search and Android operations, it has dropped its demand for Google to divest from its AI investments. Instead, Google will now be required to notify the government of future AI acquisitions. This is a substantial win for Google, which argued that restricting its AI investments would harm US leadership in the field. The government's revised proposal still includes extensive oversight of Google's search and Android businesses.

(arstechnica.com)

Tech

Building a Micro Asynchronous Event Loop Library from Scratch

2025-02-28

Building a Micro Asynchronous Event Loop Library from Scratch

This project implements a minimal, yet feature-complete asynchronous event loop library from scratch for educational purposes. It demonstrates core asynchronous programming concepts: task scheduling and management, I/O multiplexing with non-blocking sockets, timeouts and sleep functionality, task cancellation, and coroutine-based concurrency. The library uses Python's generator-based coroutines and the `select` module for I/O multiplexing, providing a simplified model of how modern async frameworks like `asyncio` work internally. Learn the magic behind `await`, how `yield from` functions, and how coroutines communicate with the event loop.

(gist.github.com)

Development asynchronous programming event loop coroutines

Frink: A Practical Calculator and Programming Language

2025-03-21

Frink is a powerful calculating tool and programming language designed to simplify physical calculations, ensure accurate answers, and provide a truly useful tool. It tracks units of measure (feet, meters, kilograms, watts, etc.) throughout calculations, allowing transparent mixing of units and verification of results. Frink also boasts a large database of physical constants, supports multiple languages, advanced mathematical functions, unit conversions, date/time math, regular expressions, and graphics, even supporting object-oriented programming and Java code calls. It runs on various operating systems and devices and auto-updates via Java Web Start.

(frinklang.org)

Development unit tracking

German Town's Geothermal Gamble: Deep-Rock Energy for a Cleaner Future

2025-03-04

German Town's Geothermal Gamble: Deep-Rock Energy for a Cleaner Future

Geretsried, Germany, once abandoned its hopes for geothermal energy after traditional methods failed. Now, Eavor is pioneering a new approach, building its first commercial power plant in the town. Their technology taps into deep, dry hot rock, drilling kilometers deep to create closed loops that heat water for electricity generation and district heating for around 36,000 homes. This innovative solution addresses Germany's energy transition challenges and holds global potential for a cleaner, more secure energy future, combating climate change.

(apnews.com)

Tech geothermal energy

Thirty and Redefining Travel's Purpose

2025-04-05

At 25, the author moved to Goa, India, embracing a simpler, community-focused life and pursuing various hobbies. A recent trip to Kazakhstan, however, left him feeling that travel had lost its meaning. He found people across the globe to be fundamentally similar, and the internet readily provides travel information. He now prioritizes deep, lasting connections with his home community, focusing future travels on visiting friends and exploring local nature.

(sidverma.io)

Misc

Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS): Another Threat to Your Computing Freedom

2025-02-06

This article explores the concept of "Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS)", which refers to using someone else's service as a replacement for running your own program. Richard Stallman argues that SaaSS deprives users of control over their computing because the process is handed over to servers controlled by others. This is similar to proprietary software, both presenting security risks such as data leaks and backdoors. The author calls for users to reject SaaSS and choose to use free software and programs running on computers they control to maintain their computing freedom.

(www.gnu.org)

Development computing freedom

← Previous 1 2 … 302 303 304 305 306 307 308 309 310 … 487 488 Next →