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Google Gemini: Privacy in a Gray Area

2025-06-29
Google Gemini: Privacy in a Gray Area

Starting July 7th, Google's Gemini assistant will access your phone, messages, WhatsApp, and utilities (even with Gemini Apps Activity off) to make calls, send texts, etc. Google claims this is for 'service reliability and safety checks,' deleting data after 72 hours without recording it in your Gemini activity. This gives Gemini deeper access than before, even when tracking is disabled. This blurs privacy lines, raising privacy concerns.

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(www.laptopmag.com)
Tech

Viral TikTok: A Basement-Built Replica of NYC

2025-09-16

Joseph Macken spent over two decades painstakingly crafting a 1:50 scale model of New York City in his upstate New York basement. This massive undertaking features hundreds of thousands of buildings, landmarks, and geographical elements, spanning all five boroughs. His TikTok videos showcasing the intricate model have garnered over 20 million views, attracting widespread praise and even sparking discussions with museums about potential exhibitions. Currently on display at the Cobleskill Fairgrounds, Macken's mini-NYC is a testament to dedication and artistry. He's already planning his next project: a miniature Minneapolis, with Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Chicago on his future list.

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(gothamist.com)
Misc

Supersolidity Achieved in a Photonic Crystal: A Breakthrough

2025-03-11

An international team has for the first time observed a supersolid phase in a photonic crystal polariton condensate, published in Nature. This groundbreaking research introduces a new platform for exploring supersolidity beyond traditional ultracold atomic systems. Supersolids uniquely combine the rigidity of a crystal with the frictionless flow of a superfluid. The researchers achieved this by condensing polaritons within a photonic crystal waveguide, enabling precise measurement of density modulations and probing the local coherence of the supersolid wavefunction. This work not only demonstrates a supersolid phase in a photonic platform but also paves the way for exploring quantum phases of matter in non-equilibrium systems, with potential applications in neuromorphic computing and advanced photonics.

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(www.photonicsonline.com)
Tech Supersolid Photonic Crystal

Acronis True Image Causes Explorer.exe High CPU Usage

2025-08-24
Acronis True Image Causes Explorer.exe High CPU Usage

The author discovered that after installing Acronis True Image, plugging or unplugging an external monitor would cause Explorer.exe to consume a significant amount of CPU resources, resulting in system sluggishness. Through ETW tracing and debugging, the culprit was identified as a shell extension within Acronis True Image. This extension repeatedly calls CreateToolhelp32Snapshot to retrieve a list of running processes, leading to performance issues. Acronis is aware of the problem and plans to fix it. A temporary workaround is to delete a registry key or uninstall the software.

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(randomascii.wordpress.com)
Development performance issue

Salt Typhoon Continues Telecom Attacks Despite US Sanctions

2025-02-15
Salt Typhoon Continues Telecom Attacks Despite US Sanctions

Despite US sanctions, the Chinese government-linked hacking group Salt Typhoon continues its attacks on telecommunication providers, according to Recorded Future. Five telecom firms were breached between December 2024 and January 2025, including a US affiliate of a major UK provider, and companies in Italy, South Africa, and Thailand. Salt Typhoon exploited vulnerabilities in Cisco devices and conducted reconnaissance on Myanmar's Mytel. Universities were also targeted, possibly for research access. While the US Treasury sanctioned Sichuan Juxinhe Network Technology, linked to Salt Typhoon, Recorded Future expects the attacks to persist.

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(techcrunch.com)
Tech

Trump Nominates Arielle Roth to Lead NTIA

2025-02-28
Trump Nominates Arielle Roth to Lead NTIA

President Trump nominated Arielle Roth, telecom director for Senator Ted Cruz, to lead the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). Roth has criticized the $42.5 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, arguing its overemphasis on fiber deployments and excessive regulatory burdens. She advocates for technology neutrality, opposing NTIA's preference for fiber in BEAD and calling for Universal Service Fund (USF) reform, citing its unsustainable funding model. She also voiced concerns about the FCC's digital discrimination rules and expansion of the E-Rate program. Roth's nomination has been praised by industry groups who see it as an opportunity to reshape broadband and spectrum policy.

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(broadbandbreakfast.com)
Tech Telecom Broadband

Cancelled: A Scala Developer's Four-Year Reckoning

2025-08-01

In 2021, a prominent Scala developer was targeted by online 'mob justice', accused of sexual misconduct. Despite the false accusations, he lost his job, income, home, and friends overnight, facing financial ruin and health problems. While ultimately vindicated legally, the reputational damage remains, leaving him with psychological trauma and prolonged financial hardship, including homelessness. This account details his four-year ordeal, urging caution in public condemnation and highlighting the devastating impact of online attacks on individuals.

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(pretty.direct)
Development online mob justice cancel culture reputational damage

Millions of Malicious Requests Flood Servers: A Botnet DDoS Attack

2025-04-02

A recent surge in abusive web crawlers has overwhelmed servers with millions of requests. The attack originates from numerous IP addresses, each making a small number of requests with disguised user agents, making detection and blocking difficult. One shared hosting server alone averages over 1.5 million fraudulent requests daily from 290,000 unique IPs. Analysis suggests a botnet of compromised Android set-top boxes is likely responsible, aiming to evade anti-crawler measures. This incident has wasted significant staff time and impacted some legitimate users.

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(www.mythic-beasts.com)
Tech Botnet Web Crawlers

Subway Poker: A Novel Commute Game

2025-02-19

A new game called "Subway Poker" is taking the urban commuting world by storm. This innovative game blends the excitement of poker with the unpredictable nature of public transport, adding a fun twist to your daily journey. Two players each select a row of five seats and assign card values to the passengers (Child=10, Teenager=J, Woman=Q, Man=K, Elderly=A). The highest-ranking poker hand at the agreed-upon end station wins. Strategy involves observing passenger flow, choosing advantageous seats, and predicting passenger types based on time of day and other factors. This game has apparently gained popularity in cities around the world, but players need to adapt their strategy to the specific layout of their local subway.

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(experience.prfalken.dev)
Game Commute Subway

arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community-Driven Features

2025-03-21
arXivLabs: Experimenting with Community-Driven Features

arXivLabs is an experimental framework enabling collaborators to build and share new arXiv features directly on the website. Participants share arXiv's values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. Got an idea to enhance the arXiv community? Learn more about arXivLabs.

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(arxiv.org)
Development

Hacking My Logitech MX Ergo: USB-C, Silent Clicks, and Better Software

2025-08-25

The author loves their Logitech MX Ergo mouse, but it has flaws: a micro-USB charging port, loud clicks, and bloated software. After eight years of waiting for an update, they decided to take matters into their own hands. This involved a challenging but rewarding USB-C port replacement, detailed soldering instructions, swapping out noisy switches for silent Huano alternatives, and finally ditching Logitech's software for the leaner SteerMouse. It's a compelling story of DIY customization and a deep dive into the process.

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(samwilkinson.io)
Hardware Mouse Mod

Steam Deck Gets 'Bricked': A Minimalist Handheld Mod

2025-01-25

A developer has created a radical modification of the Steam Deck, removing the screen and controllers to create a minimalist handheld dubbed the 'Steam Brick'. This involved a complete teardown and rebuild, leaving only the motherboard, power button, and a USB port. The motivation? Portability. The resulting device is about a third the size of the original and significantly lighter, easily fitting into a backpack. While functionality is reduced – accessing the BIOS is currently impossible – for users who primarily connect their Steam Deck to AR glasses or a TV, this could be a worthwhile trade-off.

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(crastinator-pro.github.io)
Hardware Minimalist Handheld

The Harvard Blood Factory: How a Pure Scientist Won WWII

2025-01-07
The Harvard Blood Factory: How a Pure Scientist Won WWII

Edwin Cohn, a temperamental Harvard protein chemist, unexpectedly transformed his lab into a highly effective applied R&D powerhouse during WWII. Initially focused on theoretical research, the war spurred him to lead his team in inventing methods to produce life-saving albumin from blood. Cohn's team not only created albumin more stable than plasma but also developed other blood products for treating battlefield injuries. While his methods are outdated, his ability to translate lab discoveries into commercial-scale products remains a valuable lesson. Cohn's story offers a compelling case study for science organizations and funders: combining a pilot plant, funding, and vision to tackle significant problems can yield extraordinary results in translating research into real-world impact.

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(www.asimov.press)
Tech blood products research translation

From Automated Screencasts to Motion Comics: A Programmer's Creative Journey

2025-02-06

To streamline video content creation for the Web Origami project, a programmer experimented with automating audio and video generation. Facing challenges like tedious macro scripting and cumbersome video editing, he shifted to creating motion comics. He built a system using HTML/CSS and minimal JavaScript animation, generating both audio and video from a screenplay. Origami's features facilitated testing and updates. This approach allowed him to focus on storytelling, increasing efficiency and eliminating the hassle of video updates.

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(jan.miksovsky.com)
Development Motion Comics

Modeling the Fellowship's Social Network with SQL

2025-02-17

This code snippet demonstrates a simple relational database model depicting friendships within Tolkien's Lord of the Rings universe. Using SQL `INSERT` statements, it defines 'friend' edges connecting characters like Frodo, Sam, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, and Bilbo, illustrating their social network. This provides foundational data for analyzing character relationships and building a social graph.

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(www.richard-towers.com)
Development relational model

Versioning vs. Coordination in Distributed Databases: Coordination's Killer

2025-02-08

This article explores the advantages of versioning over coordination mechanisms when building highly available, low-latency, and scalable distributed database systems. Through a concrete example, the author demonstrates how versioning avoids concurrency issues and scalability bottlenecks caused by locking. Versioning creates multiple versions of data, allowing concurrent transactions to access data without blocking each other, thus improving system performance and throughput. The article delves into version selection and management mechanisms, explaining how Aurora DSQL uses physical clocks to avoid coordination, ultimately achieving a high-performance and highly available distributed database system.

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(brooker.co.za)
Development versioning coordination

Ireland May Boycott Eurovision 2026 Over Israel's Participation

2025-09-11
Ireland May Boycott Eurovision 2026 Over Israel's Participation

RTÉ, Ireland's national broadcaster, announced it will not participate in the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest if Israel remains in the competition. Director General Kevin Bakhurst stated Ireland's participation would be unconscionable given the ongoing conflict in Gaza and the targeting of journalists. This decision follows concerns raised by other EBU members, including Spain and Slovenia, and comes after Ireland's seven previous Eurovision wins since 1965. The EBU has committed to dialogue on the issue.

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(www.rte.ie)
Misc Eurovision

UN Security Council Debates Commercial Spyware Regulation for the First Time

2025-01-16
UN Security Council Debates Commercial Spyware Regulation for the First Time

The UN Security Council held its first-ever meeting on the dangers of commercial spyware, with the US and 15 other countries calling for regulation. While no concrete proposals emerged, most nations agreed on the need for action to control its proliferation and misuse. Citizen Lab highlighted a secretive global ecosystem of spyware developers, citing Europe as a hotspot for abuse. Russia and China criticized the meeting; Russia blamed the US, while China argued that government-developed cyberweapons pose a greater threat.

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(techcrunch.com)
Tech UN Security Council

Proving Memoization Correctness in Lean: A Case Study

2025-06-20
Proving Memoization Correctness in Lean: A Case Study

This blog post demonstrates how to solve a dynamic programming problem using memoization in the Lean theorem prover and formally verify its correctness. The author tackles the Bytelandian Gold Coins problem, initially presenting a memoized solution using a HashMap. The difficulty of directly proving its correctness is highlighted due to challenges in reasoning about data structure invariants. The solution leverages subtypes and dependent pairs to create a `PropMap`, a memoization table that stores not only computed values but also proofs of their correctness. The algorithm's correctness is then proven incrementally within the recursive implementation itself, culminating in a trivial top-level proof. This approach elegantly intertwines code and proof, showcasing a powerful technique for formally verifying dynamic programming algorithms.

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(tannerduve.github.io)
Development dynamic programming

Undercover DHS Agents Detain Tufts PhD Student in Somerville

2025-03-26
Undercover DHS Agents Detain Tufts PhD Student in Somerville

Rumeysa Ozturk, a Tufts University PhD student from Turkey, was unexpectedly arrested in Somerville by Department of Homeland Security agents. The agents, who did not identify themselves, masked their faces, and confiscated her phone before detaining her. A witness reported Ozturk was visibly distressed, crying and stating she was a student. Her lawyer has not yet been able to contact her or learn her location. The arrest appears connected to the Trump administration's campaign targeting pro-Palestinian campus activists.

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(www.bostonglobe.com)
Misc arrest student

Trump Admin's $100k H-1B Visa Fee Shockwave: Microsoft's Urgent Recall

2025-09-20
Trump Admin's $100k H-1B Visa Fee Shockwave: Microsoft's Urgent Recall

The Trump administration's September 19th executive order imposing a $100,000 annual fee on H-1B visa applications sent shockwaves through the tech industry, heavily reliant on skilled workers from India and China. Microsoft urgently advised its H-1B and H-4 visa holders to return to the US before the September 21st deadline, facing hefty penalties otherwise. The move sparked backlash from tech giants and India, with experts calling it 'regressive'. US Commerce Secretary urged prioritizing American worker training.

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(timesofindia.indiatimes.com)
Tech H-1B Visa

Web Server Listen Overflows Traced to a Linux Kernel Performance Issue

2025-02-14

Upgrading web servers from CentOS to Ubuntu led to listen overflow errors. Investigation revealed a system CPU spike on newly booted Ubuntu hosts within minutes of startup, causing slow web request processing and subsequent listen overflows. The culprit was inode cgroup switching in the Linux kernel; after writing many files, the kernel spent significant time moving inodes between cgroups. Disabling the io or memory controllers in systemd resolved the issue. CentOS was unaffected as it uses cgroups v1, unlike Ubuntu's cgroups v2. A minimal reproduction script was created to demonstrate the issue.

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(dasl.cc)
Development Performance Issue

Western Digital Bets Big on HAMR for 100TB HDDs by 2030

2025-02-14
Western Digital Bets Big on HAMR for 100TB HDDs by 2030

Western Digital announced its roadmap to adopt Heat-Assisted Magnetic Recording (HAMR) technology for its HDDs, starting late 2026, aiming for 80TB-100TB drives by 2030. This marks a shift away from their previously championed MAMR technology. Initial HAMR drives, with 36TB (CMR) and 44TB (UltraSMR) capacities, will launch in 2026, with mass production slated for the first half of 2027. Two hyperscalers are already testing these drives. This breakthrough promises to more than double hard drive storage capacity within the next few years.

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(www.tomshardware.com)
Hardware Hard Drive Technology Western Digital

BYD's Gigantic Car Carrier Fuels Global EV Ambitions

2025-01-18
BYD's Gigantic Car Carrier Fuels Global EV Ambitions

BYD launched the world's largest car carrier, the BYD Shenzen, capable of transporting 9,200 vehicles. This is BYD's fourth ro-ro ship, following three others already delivering thousands of NEVs to Europe and South America. Following a record 4.25 million NEV sales in 2024, BYD is aggressively expanding globally, challenging established automakers and seeing significant success in markets like Japan and South Korea. The sheer scale of the Shenzen underscores BYD's ambition to dominate the global EV market.

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(electrek.co)
Tech Global Expansion

California Wildfires Trigger $1B Insurance Assessment

2025-02-15
California Wildfires Trigger $1B Insurance Assessment

Facing massive claims from recent wildfires in Los Angeles County, California's last-resort fire insurance provider, the FAIR Plan, will impose a $1 billion special assessment on insurance companies, ultimately passed on to homeowners. This is the first such move in over three decades. The assessment aims to cover the FAIR Plan's wildfire-related payouts and ensure solvency. Most California homeowners will see temporary increases in their insurance bills. While the insurance industry supports the change, a consumer advocacy group plans to sue, calling it a consumer 'bailout' and questioning potential insurer 'double-dipping'.

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(calmatters.org)
Tech Insurance Costs FAIR Plan

5MB in 1966: The Story of 62,500 Punched Cards

2025-02-19
5MB in 1966: The Story of 62,500 Punched Cards

In 1966, storing a mere 5MB of data required a staggering 62,500 punched cards—a stark contrast to today's instant access to vast information. Each card held a few hundred bytes, and loading 5MB took four days. This compares dramatically to modern flash drives and cloud computing. Giant mainframe computers, primarily used by governments and large corporations, relied on this system. The shift from punched cards to magnetic tape and hard drives marked a giant leap in computing technology, highlighting the incredible progress made in modern computing.

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(www.vintag.es)
Tech punched cards

America's Healthcare System: A Total Breakdown, Beyond Insurance Companies

2024-12-14
America's Healthcare System: A Total Breakdown, Beyond Insurance Companies

The American healthcare system is broken, and the problem extends far beyond insurance companies. An oncologist argues that pharmaceutical firms, PBMs (pharmacy benefit managers), the FDA, CMS, hospitals, and doctors all share responsibility. Pharmaceutical companies push unproven drugs, PBMs profit excessively, regulators are lax, hospitals charge exorbitant fees and engage in predatory practices, and doctors order unnecessary tests and treatments. While insurance companies are frustrating, they are a scapegoat for a larger systemic issue. The author calls for sweeping reforms of the FDA and CMS to end corporate capture of regulatory agencies, addressing the high costs and inefficiency of the US healthcare system. The recent assassination of an insurance CEO highlights public frustration with the system.

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(www.sensible-med.com)
Misc healthcare reform healthcare costs US healthcare

Variational Lossy Autoencoders: When RNNs Ignore Latent Variables

2025-03-09
Variational Lossy Autoencoders: When RNNs Ignore Latent Variables

This paper tackles the challenge of combining Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) with Variational Autoencoders (VAEs). While VAEs use latent variables to learn data representations, RNNs as decoders often ignore these latents, directly learning the data distribution. The authors propose Variational Lossy Autoencoders (VLAEs), which restrict the RNN's access to information, forcing it to leverage latent variables for encoding global structure. Experiments demonstrate VLAEs learn compressed and semantically rich latent representations.

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(theahura.substack.com)
AI representation learning

Modern Bikes, Modern Dangers: The Perils of Lightweighting and Integration

2025-07-19
Modern Bikes, Modern Dangers: The Perils of Lightweighting and Integration

A seasoned bicycle mechanic sounds the alarm: Modern bikes' lightweight and highly integrated designs, while boosting performance, also increase safety risks. From handlebars and steerers to tires, brakes, and even seemingly minor components like chains and seatposts, failures can lead to accidents due to design flaws, improper installation, or misuse. The author urges cyclists and mechanics to prioritize the safety of every part, perform regular inspections and maintenance, and choose reputable brands and mechanics for repairs.

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(escapecollective.com)
Misc bicycle safety bike maintenance
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