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kreuzfeld writes:

Help please: here in Lawrence, Kansas the public school district has recently started using Gaggle," a system for monitoring all digital documents and communications created by students on school-provided devices. Unsurprisingly, the system inundates employees with false 'alerts' but the district nonetheless hails this pervasive, dystopic surveillance system as a great success. What useful advice can readers here offer re. successful methods to get public officials to backtrack from a policy so corrosive to liberty, trust, and digital freedoms?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

I came across an interesting blog post that suggests the Web is splitting into two with an offshoot made up of a commercial dystopia that is increasingly viewed as the "normal web," leaving an insurmountable chasm developing between the two. Regular readers of SN will appreciate the points made, but do you agree with them, particularly where you'll eventually need to pick one side or the other?

https://ploum.net/2023-08-01-splitting-the-web.html

There's an increasing chasm dividing the modern web. On one side, the commercial, monopolies-riddled, media-adored web. A web which has only one objective: making us click. It measures clicks, optimises clicks, generates clicks. It gathers as much information as it could about us and spams every second of our life with ads, beep, notifications, vibrations, blinking LEDs, background music and fluorescent titles.

A web which boils down to Idiocracy in a Blade Runner landscape, a complete cyberpunk dystopia.

Then there's the tech-savvy web. People who install adblockers or alternative browsers. People who try alternative networks such as Mastodon or, God forbid, Gemini. People who poke fun at the modern web by building true HTML and JavaScript-less pages.

Between those two extremes, the gap is widening. You have to choose your camp. When browsing on the "normal web", it is increasingly required to disable at least part of your antifeatures-blockers to access content.

[...] Something strange is happening: it's not only a part of the web which is disappearing for me. As I'm blocking completely google analytics, every Facebook domain and any analytics I can, I'm also disappearing for them. I don't see them and they don't see me!

Think about it! That whole "MBA, designers and marketers web" is now optimised thanks to analytics describing people who don't block analytics (and bots pretending to be those people). Each day, I feel more disconnected from that part of the web.

[...] It feels like everyone is now choosing its side. You can't stay in the middle anymore. You are either dedicating all your CPU cycles to run JavaScript tracking you or walking away from the big monopolies. You are either being paid to build huge advertising billboards on top of yet another framework or you are handcrafting HTML.

Maybe the web is not dying. Maybe the web is only splitting itself in two.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Mathematicians have found a new way to impose order on chaos in the form of an answer to a challenge which has puzzled them for nearly a century:

In mathematics, Ramsey theory deals with the 'order in disorder'. No matter how complex a large system is, order will emerge as a smaller subsystem with unique structure.

Humans are pattern-seeking creatures living in a world of random chaos. We look for order in everything, from our lives, the world around us, to the Universe, and you could say Ramsey theory explains our ability to find it.

Ramsey numbers can be thought of as representing the boundaries of disorder. And it's notoriously hard to figure them out.

Since mathematician Frank Ramsey proved Ramsey's Theorem in the late 1920s, there's been perplexion on the specific problem that Sam Mattheus and Jacques Verstraete of the University of California, San Diego, finally cracked.

"Many people have thought about r(4,t) – it's been an open problem for over 90 years," Verstraete says.

"It really did take us years to solve. And there were many times where we were stuck and wondered if we'd be able to solve it at all."

[...] A common analogy for Ramsey theory requires us to consider how many people to invite to a party so that at least three people will either already be acquainted with each other or at least three people will be total strangers to each other.

Here, the Ramsey number, r, is the minimum number of people needed at the party so that either s people know each other or t people don't know each other. This can be written as r(s,t), and we know the answer to r(3,3) = 6.

"It's a fact of nature, an absolute truth. It doesn't matter what the situation is or which six people you pick – you will find three people who all know each other or three people who all don't know each other," Verstraete says.

"You may be able to find more, but you are guaranteed that there will be at least three in one clique or the other."

[...] After almost a year and several math obstacles, they found r(4,t) is close to a cubic function of t. For a party with four people who all know each other or t people who don't, you need t³ people.

[...] "One should never give up, no matter how long it takes," Verstraete says. "If you find that the problem is hard and you're stuck, that means it's a good problem."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

It may seem like blasphemy for an Engadget writer to diss touch controls, but as the demise of the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar has proven, those aren't always a good idea — especially on cars. As spotted by Autocar at Volkswagen City Studio in Copenhagen, the ID. 2all concept electric car now features a slightly updated interior, with the most notable change being the return of physical buttons below the central touchscreen. According to the brand's interior designer Darius Watola, this will be "a new approach for all models" based on "recent feedback from customers" — especially those in Europe who wanted "more physical buttons."

In Autocar's Tiguan launch interview back in June, Volkswagen CEO Thomas Schäfer already acknowledged customers' criticism on the over-reliance on touch controls — namely on the Golf Mk8 and ID.3, not to mention the same trend across the motor industry. The exec went as far as saying the earlier touch-heavy approach — endorsed by his predecessor, Herbert Diess — "definitely did a lot of damage" in terms of customer loyalty.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

An EV from Chinese manufacturer Nio will soon go on sale with a "semi-solid state" 150kWh battery (140kWh usable) that's the largest in any passenger car, Car News China reported. To show [how] much range that will deliver, Nio CEO William Li drove a prototype version of the ET7 1,044km (650 miles) in 14 hours, a distance surpassing many gas-powered vehicles.

The test was run in relatively cool temperatures (between 28 – 54 F) and livestreamed. Driving was done mainly in semi-autonomous (or Navigate-on-Pilot+, as Nio calls it), and speed-limited to 90 km/h (56 MPH). The average speed was 83.9 km/h (a respectable 52.4 MPH), with a travel time of 12.4 hours excluding stops.

"The completion of this endurance challenge proves the product power of the 150kWh ultra-long endurance battery pack," said Li in a Weibo post (Google translation). "More importantly, all models on sale can be flexibly upgraded to 150kWh batteries through the Nio battery swap system."

In fact, the ET7's 150kWh battery will only be available on a lease separate from the car, much as we've seen with some cars sold in Europe. Previously, the company said that the battery alone would cost as much as an entire car (the company's entry-level ET5 EV), or around $42,000.

[...] Nio is a luxury EV manufacturer in China that offers vehicles without a battery, letting you sign up to a battery-as-a-service (BAAS) monthly subscription. That service also allows you to swap out your battery at any time for a larger one.

Original Submission

janrinok writes:

Internet of Things security remains sketchy at best:

A new development now puts the spotlight squarely on networking device manufacturer Ubiquiti after the company admitted that a misconfiguration with its cloud infrastructure allowed some of its customers to watch footage from strangers' security cameras.

The admission came days after some Ubiquiti customers reported seeing images and videos from other people's cameras through the company's Unifi Protect cloud app. One of the first persons to report the bug was a Redditor claiming his wife received a notification, which included an image from a security camera that didn't belong to them.

[...] A Ubiquiti customer on the company's forum claimed to have accessed "88 consoles from another account" when logging into the Unifi portal. The user had full access to these devices until refreshing their browser. After that, the client returned to normal, with only owned devices showing.

[...] The company claims the problem happened due to an upgrade to Ubiquiti's UniFi Cloud infrastructure, which it has since resolved. So, customers should no longer worry about their other users accessing their cameras and UniFi accounts. While the company claimed the bungle affected 1,216 accounts in one group and 1,177 in another, supposedly fewer than a dozen instances of improper access occurred. It added that it would notify those customers about the breach.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The region of the Reykjanes Peninsula north of the town Grindavík in Iceland remains closed due to a now active volcanic eruption. Below are two video links.

• The Exact Moment When Lava Reached Surface! Grindavik Volcano Eruption! Iceland Volcano, Dec18, 2023 (old)
• Live eruption from Iceland (live)

The town's evacuation is still ongoing.

Previously:

(2015) Watch a Volcano

Original Submission

mrpg writes:

https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/13/23999848/tesla-sweden-union-autoworkers-transport-trash-waste-pickup

Tesla will have to skip trash day in Sweden as the country's labor groups continue to protest the company's anti-union policies. Reuters reports the country's Transport Workers' Union will refuse to pick up waste at the automaker's workshops in solidarity with Tesla autoworkers who've been on strike since October 27th.

Tesla has resisted collective bargaining agreements worldwide, but Sweden's strong labor culture is continuing to test the automaker's policy.

After 130 workers at Tesla repair shops walked out, the first show of solidarity came from union dockworkers who refused to unload Tesla vehicles from cargo ships in early November. Then, on November 20th, postal workers joined the effort by refusing to deliver mail to Tesla, including license plates. On November 27th, the automaker then sued and initially won the right to pick up the license plates directly from Sweden's Transport Agency.

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

Google is announcing the end of support for its Usenet client and servers in February 2024. This is a significant turning point because Usenet predates the Internet. Much of the Internet and, later, the WWW, was designed and built around Usenet discussions. That includes Linus Torvalds' now famous announcement about his then hobby, which he asserted at the time would not be big and professional like GNU:

What do I need to do?

If you don't actively engage with Usenet content, you don't need to do anything. Current Usenet users will need to do two things before February 22, 2024 if they want to continue engaging with Usenet content:

1. Find a new Usenet client. Several free and paid alternatives are available, both web-based and application-based. To find a client, do a web search for "how do I find a usenet text client"
2. Find a new public Usenet server. The new client you choose will likely have a default server or a set of curated options for you. If not, to find a server, do a web search for "public NNTP servers."

Because Usenet is a distributed system, you do not need to migrate data. All of the Usenet content you can access today on Google Groups should already be synced to the new server you choose. After you select a new client and server, you can reselect the groups you're interested in.

For the time being, you will be able to continue to view and search for the many decades of historical Usenet content posted before February 22, 2024 which Google acquired itself combined with the vast, historically important archives from Deja News.

Usenet remains a distributed, decentralized, peer-to-peer messaging network. The news readers contact an NNTP server in a client-server relation but the NNTP servers themselves communicated as peers. One thorn in the side for the powers which be is that it is essentially uncensorable. In the old days it was sufficient to get a floppy or two across the border to complete the circuit via sneakernet. One downside, sometimes humorous, was that propagation delays resulting from the distributed, decentralized nature of the peer-to-peer network meant that sometimes one saw a response hours or days before the original message showed up.

Previously:
(2016) Gmane is Under Threat

Original Submission

canopic jug writes:

The US Department of Defense has published a report entitled, Securing the Software Supply Chain: Recommended Practices for Managing Open Source Software and Software Bill of Materials (warning for PDF) about aligning government activities with industry best practices. It covers principles that software developers and software suppliers can reference, including managing open source software and software bills of materials to maintain and provide awareness about software security. The reports a follow up to the much hyped 2021 executive order on cybersecurity. Much focus is given to making and using Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) and incorporating them into the work flow:

The SBOM and its contents must be validated and verified. Validation assures that the SBOM data is appropriately formatted and can be integrated into various tools and automation. Verification ensures the content within the SBOM is accurately described and all components and related information on a product for licensing and exporting are represented.

Many organizations are increasingly incorporating tools into the build and source repository facility to automate this process and provide artifacts which can attest to the verification of the SBOM being delivered. Both the content of the package, the executables, libraries and configuration files, and the actual format of the SBOM, should be validated. Any open-source software components should be verified for license or export restrictions. In some organizations, validation is performed first by the developer during build/packing of the product and then by the developer/supplier before customer delivery to verify the integrity of the SBOM being delivered. For more information on the formats and tools available for validation, refer to section 5.1.5 of this document "SBOM Validation."

A good reference on guidance for the SBOM process can be found in NTIA's publication "Software Suppliers Playbook: SBOM Production and Provision" guidance. It is important that developers understand the end-user requirements for SBOM generation and how this information might be used by both suppliers and customers. Additional process information relating to SBOMs and acquisitions can be found in the "Software Consumers Playbook: SBOM Acquisition, Management, and Use".

Don't say that acronym at the airport while working with your team over the phone...

Previously:
(2022) Open Source Community Sets Out Path to Secure Software

Original Submission

Freeman writes:

Elon Musk's X ad revenue reportedly fell $1.5B this year amid boycotts

It's hard to know exactly how dire the financial situation is at Elon Musk's X (formerly Twitter). However, insider sources recently revealed to Bloomberg that the social media platform expects to end 2023 with "roughly" $2.5 billion in advertising revenue.

That's "a significant slump from prior years," sources said. It's also about half a billion short of the $3 billion that X executives expected to make in ad sales in 2023, one source said.

Last year, Twitter raked in more than $1 billion in ad revenue per quarter, sources said. But in each of the first three quarters of 2023, X only managed to generate "a little more than $600 million" in ad revenue.

[...] After Musk boosted an antisemitic post on X, he apologized, but he never removed his controversial post and continued antagonizing advertisers that he claimed were "going to kill the company."

Among the major brands pausing advertising on X is Disney, which seems to have particularly offended Musk. He's spent the past week targeting Disney CEO Bob Iger in a series of X posts, calling out Disney for boycotting X. Musk appears particularly frustrated that Disney is advertising on Meta platforms after New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez filed a lawsuit alleging that Facebook and Instagram are "prime locations for predators to trade child pornography and solicit minors for sex."

Original Submission

Meeting Announcement: The next meeting of the SoylentNews governance committee is scheduled for Wednesday, December 20th, 2023 at 21:00 UTC (4pm Eastern) in #governance on SoylentNews IRC. Logs of the meeting will be available afterwards for review, and minutes will be published when complete.

Minutes and agenda, and other governance committee information are to be found on the SoylentNews Wiki at: https://wiki.staging.soylentnews.org/wiki/Governance

The community, welcome to observe and participate, is encouraged to attend the meeting.

owl writes:

https://www.righto.com/2023/12/386-xor-circuits.html

Intel's 386 processor (1985) was an important advance in the x86 architecture, not only moving to a 32-bit processor but also switching to a CMOS implementation. I've been reverse-engineering parts of the 386 chip and came across two interesting and completely different circuits that the 386 uses to implement an XOR gate: one uses standard-cell logic while the other uses pass-transistor logic. In this article, I take a look at those circuits.

[...] Parts of the 386 were implemented with standard-cell logic. The idea of standard-cell logic is to build circuitry out of standardized building blocks that can be wired by a computer program. In earlier processors such as the 8086, each transistor was carefully positioned by hand to create a chip layout that was as dense as possible. This was a tedious, error-prone process since the transistors were fit together like puzzle pieces. Standard-cell logic is more like building with LEGO. Each gate is implemented as a standardized block and the blocks are arranged in rows, as shown below. The space between the rows holds the wiring that connects the blocks.

[...] Some parts of the 386 implement XOR gates completely differently, using pass transistor logic. The idea of pass transistor logic is to use transistors as switches that pass inputs through to the output, rather than using transistors as switches to pull the output high or low. The pass transistor XOR circuit uses 8 transistors, compared with 10 for the previous circuit.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

BC psychologists probe the roots of truth judgments in the 'post-truth' era:

Putting truth to the test in the "post-truth" era, Boston College psychologists conducted experiments that show when Americans decide whether a claim of fact should qualify as true or false, they consider the intentions of the information source, the team reported recently in Nature's Scientific Reports.

That confidence is based on what individuals think the source is trying to do – in this case either informing or deceiving their audience.

"Even when people know precisely how accurate or inaccurate a claim of fact is, whether they consider that claim to be true or false hinges on the intentions they attribute to the claim's information source," said Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience Liane Young, an author of the report. "In other words, the intentions of information sources sway people's judgments about what information should qualify as true."

Lead author Isaac Handley-Miner, a PhD student and researcher in Young's Morality Lab, said the so-called post-truth era has revealed vigorous disagreement over the truth of claims of fact — even for claims that are easy to verify.

"That disagreement has alarmed our society," said Handley-Miner. "After all, it's often assumed that the labels 'true' and 'false' should correspond to the objective accuracy of a claim. But is objective accuracy actually the only criterion people consider when deciding what should qualify as true or false? Or, even when people know how objectively accurate a given claim of fact is, might they be sensitive to features of the social context—such as the intentions of the information source? We set out to test whether the intentions of information sources affect whether people consider a claim of fact to be true or false even when they have access to the ground truth."

[...] The findings suggest that, even if people have access to the same set of facts, they might disagree about the truth of claims if they attribute discrepant intentions to information sources.

The results demonstrated that people are not merely sensitive to the objective accuracy of claims of fact when classifying them as true or false. While this study focused on the intent of the information source, Young and Handley-Miner say intent is probably not the only other feature people use to evaluate truth.

Journal Reference:
Handley-Miner, I.J., Pope, M., Atkins, R.K. et al. The intentions of information sources can affect what information people think qualifies as true. Sci Rep 13, 7718 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-34806-4

Original Submission

upstart writes:

NASA donates Ingenuity Mars Helicopter prototype to Smithsonian:

The Smithsonian would love to display the first vehicle to achieve powered flight on another world, but with NASA's Ingenuity helicopter still busy setting records on Mars, the Washington, D.C. institution has accepted the next best thing.

Officials from NASA and the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum marked the agency's donation of the aerial prototype for Ingenuity into the museum's collection at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center in Chantilly, Virginia on Friday (Dec. 15). The full-scale prototype was the first to demonstrate that an aircraft could fly in the atmosphere of another planet during tests performed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

The prototype's first free flight in a simulated Mars environment gave NASA the confidence to commit to sending Ingenuity to Mars. The helicopter and its companion Perseverance rover landed in Jezero Crater on Feb. 18, 2021.

Original Submission