Gooooooood morning, Crowd!!! Hey, this is not a test, this is a tech roundup. Time to rock it from the Delta to the DMZ.
AI, bots and robots
- Daily blue light shortens lifespan, causes brain neurodegeneration in Drosophila
- The problem with metrics is a big problem for AI
- Alexa and Google Home expose users to vishing and eavesdropping
- RoboTrump – A fully convincing Trump AI text generator
- Courts reshape the rules around AI
- The Google Antitrust Investigations–Learning from Germany’s Facebook Inquiry
- RoboTrump – I made a Trump text generator that is fully convincing
- DeepSORT: Deep Learning to Track Custom Objects in a Video
- Aim and Shoot – A game where your opponents are neural networks
Blockchain and decentralization
- Catalonia protestors use distributed network to securely organize protests
- Days Since a Cryptocurrency Exchange Has Lost More Than $100M
- Boom.fyi – a link shortening service built for IPFS
Woman computer scientist of the week
Miriah Meyer is an American computer scientist and USTAR professor at the University of Utah. She is noted for her pioneering work in data visualization for research applications. She received an American Association for the Advancement of Science Mass Media Science & Engineering Fellowship in 2006 and served as a reporter for The Chicago Tribune. She was named in MIT Technology Review’s TR35 list in 2011 and Fast Company’s list of the 100 most creative people in 2012. She was named a 2013 TED Fellow for her work in interactive visualization.
Cloud and architecture
- Video Architecture Search
- The Elm Architecture (TEA) animation
- The Big Interception Flaw in the US-UK Cloud Act Agreement
- Bank of America’s CEO says it’s saved $2B per year by building its own cloud
Brian Moynihan, Bank of America’s CEO, highlighted the firm’s decision to move to a private cloud on its third-quarter earnings call. - AWS cross-AZ data transfer costs more than they tell you
- AWS Customers Rack Up Hefty Bills for Moving Data
There are a lot of ways companies can rack up high bills for using cloud services, sometimes unexpectedly. One particularly stiff expense is the cost of shifting data from one cloud providerâs servers to another provider, or to a companyâs own data center. The Information has learned just how … - Equifax used ‘admin’ as username and password for sensitive data: lawsuit
- Serverless doc writing app built using Cloudflare Workers and KV Store
- AWS Experiencing Intermittent DNS Resolution Errors
- YARA – A pattern-matching Swiss knife for malware researchers
- Cloudflare’s service’s questionable practices
Development and languages
- Digital pollution
- Loopless Programming
- Igloo: A simple Windows automation tool
Igloo is a software application for Microsoft Windows which automates common desktop support and systems administration tasks. Igloo uses Python and PowerShell to provide users with TCP scanners, Windows shortcuts, and a simplified command line that helps IT professionals reduce stress and improve t - Open Sourcing Fuzz Testing Library for JavaScript/Node.js
- Git Internals, Techniques, and Rewriting History
- Client-side web programming in Haskell: A retrospective
- How to prepare a technical interview (and why good programmers also fail)
- Git Tricks: Avoiding merge when dealing with remote conflicts
- Google to use fourth-price auction to select other search providers in Android
- Under digital surveillance: how American schools spy on millions of kids
- US Constitution – A Git repo with history of edits
A history of edits to the US Constitution as it has been amended. Written in markdown to match original formatting. – JesseKPhillips/USA-Constitution - Thanks Gitlab
Attached: 1 image
Thanks GitLab
- قلب: a non-ASCII programming language written entirely in Arabic
- Python and OpenGL for Scientific Visualization
- Blurring the Line Between User and Programmer
- Research Based on the .NET Runtime
- Intel SPMD Program Compiler: A Compiler for High-Performance SIMD Programming
- Android’s messaging mess is about to get even worse?
Quote of the week
Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming.
— Brian Kernighan
Enterprises
- Researchers design new material using artificial intelligence
- Amazon is shipping expired baby formula and other out-of-date foods
- Saudi Aramco Is the WeWork of Energy with Pulled IPO
- Google attempted to shut down a unionization meeting in Zurich
- TU Delft researchers design new material by using Artificial Intelligence only
- Gmail Hooked Us on Free Storage. Now Google Is Making Us Pay
- EU data watchdog raises concerns over Microsoft contracts
- Google clamps down on free storage
- Google Claims a Quantum Breakthrough That Could Change Computing
- IBM casts doubt on Google’s claims of quantum supremacy
Google researchers say they have achieved milestone with number-generating computation - IBM Responds to Google Claims: On “Quantum Supremacy”
Recent advances in quantum computing have resulted in two 53-qubit processors - Google’s Play Store gives a worse age rating to Fleksy, a Gboard rival
Platform power is a helluva a drug. Do a search on Google’s Play Store in Europe and you’ll find the company’s own Gboard app has an age rating of PEGI 3 — aka the pan-European game information labelling system which signifies content is suitable for all age groups. PEGI 3 m… - Trip Planner – A tool for planning a trip itinerary using Google Maps
- Netflix open-sources Polynote, an IDE-inspired polyglot notebook
- Tesla Q3 Financial Results
- Amazon Ready to Pour Billions into Policing Products on Its Site
- Stripe to move to South San Francisco
San Francisco is losing one of its most valuable tech startups as Stripe signs a lease in South San Francisco. - Google T5 scores 88.9 on SuperGLUE Benchmark, approaching human baseline
SuperGLUE is a new benchmark styled after original GLUE benchmark with a set of more difficult language understanding tasks, improved resources, and a new public leaderboard. - Lawmakers ask US intelligence chief to investigate TikTok
- Reflections on My Career at Microsoft
How about just: Former Facebook Microsoft engineer James Whittaker on how to fix the company - Google brings in BERT to improve its search results
Google today announced one of the biggest updates to its search algorithm in recent years. By using new neural networking techniques to better understand the intentions behind queries, Google says it can now offer more relevant results for about one in 10 searches in the U.S. in English (with suppo… - Microsoft Wins Pentagon’s $10B Contract
Amazon was considered a front-runner for the cloud computing project before President Trump began criticizing the companyâs founder, Jeff Bezos.
Other news
- HackPPL: A universal probabilistic programming language
- Learn ClojureScript: Discovering Sequence Operations
- Weaponizing and Gamifying AI for WiFi Hacking: Presenting Pwnagotchi 1.0.0
This is the story of a summer project that started out of boredom and that evolved into something incredibly fun and unique. It is also the story of how that project went from being discussed on a por - Good UX = Boring UI. Don’t Be Creative
The best user experiences are often found on the most boring interfaces. If you want your product to stand out above the rest, then be average. - How oral contraceptives may affect women’s minds
- Disney+ Doesn’t Work on Linux
First of all, as always my opinions are my own, not those of my employer. Since I have 2 children I was happy to learn that the Netherlands would be one of the first countries to get Disney+ streaming. So I subscribed for the testing period, problem all devices in my home run Fedora. I started up… - FireEye confirms APT41 hacked TeamViewer, may have accessed billions of devices
FireEye confirms that APT41 Group hacked TeamViewer; attackers might have accessed billions of devices : web application security IICS - Phantom – forward-thinking concept of OS that’s not Linux-derived
- NordVPN confirms it was hacked
NordVPN, a virtual private network provider that promises to “protect your privacy online,” has confirmed it was hacked. The admission comes following rumors that the company had been breached. It first emerged that NordVPN had an expired internal private key exposed, potentially allowi… - Samsung Kills ‘Linux on DeX’ with Android 10 Rollout
- Lyft No Longer Showing What Passengers Pay on Trips
- SoftBank to Take Control of WeWork: Sources
- SoftBank to take control of WeWork: Sources
- Softbank to Pay Adam Neuman $200M to Leave WeWork Board
- Apple CEO becomes chairman of China university board
- McKinsey: Half the World’s Banks Too Weak to Survive Downturn
- WeWork Accepts SoftBank Takeover Offer
- Dramatically reduced power usage in Firefox 70 on macOS with Core Animation
- WeWork founder will get $1.7B to let SoftBank take over his company
- Kusumoto Ine: A Remarkable Woman in Meiji Restoration Japan
- Quantum supremacy: the gloves are off
- A U.S. Citizen Was Detained While Trying to Pay for a Gift for His Daughter
- Terminal Uses “80×25” Because of Civil War Era Banknotes
- Man sues AT&T over ‘SIM Swap’ hack allegedly involving employees
Torrance resident Seth Shapiro has filed a federal lawsuit against AT&T, alleging that the wireless provider’s employees helped hackers pull off a ‘SIM Swap’ hack that robbed him of $1.8 million, and he says chat logs from the arrested hackers prove it. - Teaching Rats to Drive Tiny Cars
A bunch of rats have learned how to drive tiny vehicles around to pick up food. How did this unlikely scenario come around, you’re no doubt asking? Well, f - Royal Society entire catalog of scientific journals open access until Oct 27
Our international, peer reviewed journals publish high quality science and provide an excellent service to our authors and readers. - The Hacker Manifesto
- We Never Paid for Journalism
- Women Under the Spell
- Fair, the SoftBank-backed car startup, lays off 40% of staff, sacks CFO
As the market continues to turn against the wave of highly valued venture-backed startups operating with little end in sight to their huge losses — Uber and WeWork being two prime examples — another startup is taking a proactive step to get ahead of the story, by cutting costs and restr… - Men hold more positive attitudes towards ex-partners than women do
A study looks at the question of what might distinguish men and women in the ways they view their ex-partners
Using lobbying, the revolving door and “dark pattern” customer tricks, Intuit fended off the government’s attempts to make tax filing free and easy, and created its multi-billion-dollar franchise.
Telegram’s whole scheme was to skin precisely the retail buyers who securities registration is meant to protect from being ripped off.
The Bitcoin Energy Consumption Index provides the latest estimate of the total energy consumption of the Bitcoin network.
Is our age of ubiquitous smartphones and social media turning into an era of mass civil unrest? Two years after holding an independence referendum and unilaterally declaring independence in defiance of the Spanish state — then failing to gain recognition for la república and being forced to w…
Money can be only a short-term motivation / Make it “better” rather than “bigger” / Figuring out “enough” / Life is one shot
We’re really excited to announce that AWS is sponsoring the Rust programming language! Rust is designed for writing and maintaining fast, reliable, and efficient code. It has seen considerable uptake since its first stable release four years ago, with companies like Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla all using Rust. Rust has also seen lots of growth […]
Not too long ago the A2 motorway split the city of Maastricht in two. The internationally important road connection cut off the east of the city from the centre. The space where the road once was i…
Python Is Not A Great Programming Language. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.
We started in .NET Core 1.0 with a very minimal API set that only included ~18K of the .NET Framework APIs. With .NET Standard 2.0, we tried to make it much more viable to share code between .NET F…
Code-hosting biz also bans staff from talking politics at work
“Please share this as widely as possible. Why should we have to police Amazon? This problem is ongoing since 2017. These counterfeits are shipped and sold by AMAZON, NOT A THIRD PARTY. This is not Marketplace. https://t.co/QSP65CWJ7O”
My Google account got suspended yesterday, I was like what the heck is going on. First I got an email from Google saying that I was using 3rd party app outside of Play Store to go around Youtube ad…
Over my 17 years at Amazon, I have seen that my colleagues on the engineering team are never content to leave good-enough alone. They routinely re-evaluate every internal system to make sure that it is as scalable, efficient, performant, and secure as possible. When they find an avenue for improvement, they will use what they […]
Twitter said it will restrict how users can interact with tweets from world leaders who break its rules. The social media giant said it will not allow users to like, reply, share or retweet the offending tweets, but instead will let users quote-tweet to allow ordinary users to express their opinion…
Google presented a vision of ambient computing that goes beyond the smartphone. The company is well-placed, but faces challenges both in the marketplace and in the mirror.
Amazon has become a lucrative place to do business for many Hasidic Jews, offering anonymity to a largely insular community and allowing women to work from home.
Microsoft today announced two new open-source projects: Dapr, a portable, event-driven runtime that takes some of the complexity out of building microservices, and the Open Application Model (OAM), a specification that allows developers to define the resources their applications need to run on Kube…
Google devices chief Rick Osterloh said he believes anyone “in proximity” of a microphone-fitted smart device like Google Nest or Amazon Echo should be informed the devices are in use.
Microsoft just open sourced their data exploration tool known as SandDance: For those unfamiliar with SandDance, it was introduced nearly four years ago as a system for exploring and presenting dat…
The new Mac Pro is a long-anticipated development for Apple’s high end pro users, but it sure looks as if the company also created the machine for its own strategic benefit — specifically to help make its Metal API become a dominant standard for GPU-intensive software. That could have big implications for Macs, iOS devices, and Apple GPUs going forward, with history providing some insight into why this matters.
Alphabet -owned drone delivery spin-out Wing is starting to service U.S. customers, after becoming the first drone delivery company to get the federal go-ahead to do so earlier this year. Wing is working with FedEx Express and Walgreens on this pilot, and their first customers are Michael and Kelly…
One of China’s most brazen hacking sprees involved intelligence officers, hackers, security researchers, and company insiders.
Sears’s bankruptcy filing was supposed to give the troubled retailer a fresh start. But a year later, the chain is still struggling with many of the same problems it faced before it sought court protection.
There’s a language for talking about hot-button issues. And we’re not learning it.
Does anyone remember the Black Hat BCard hack in 2018? This hack has been documented extensively, most notoriously by [NinjaStyle] in his original blog post revealing the circumstances around disco…
Despite active learning being recognized as a superior method of instruction in the classroom, a major recent survey found that most college STEM instructors still choose traditional teaching methods. This article addresses the long-standing question of why students and faculty remain resistant to active learning. Comparing passive lectures with active learning using a randomized experimental approach and identical course materials, we find that students in the active classroom learn more, but they feel like they learn less. We show that this negative correlation is caused in part by the increased cognitive effort required during active learn
In 2020, we will celebrate that many of the basic ideas behind the Deep Learning Revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our “Annus Mirabilis” 1990-1991
Learning to write is learning to think, because writing is thinking. They are two peas in a powerful pod. This article goes over my writing process, focused on minimizing the activation energy to get started. 
The U.S. government widened its trade blacklist to include some of China’s …
Since deep learning regained prominence in 2012, many machine learning frameworks have clamored to become the new favorite among researchers and industry practitioners. From the early academic outputs Caffe and Theano to the massive industry-backed PyTorch and TensorFlow, this deluge of options makes it difficult to keep track of what
Conducting a Twitter network analysis uncovers a widespread bot network targeting West Papua with pro-Indonesian Government content on major social platforms.
Distributed virtual private networks (dVPNs) are a new form of VPN with no central authority. In a dVPN, users are both VPN clients and relay/exit nodes as in a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network. While dVPNs make strong privacy claims, they also carry the risk that a user will inadvertently have their machine used to transmit potentially harmful or illegal network traffic. Several incidents have been reported [2] where unaware dVPN users have been (ab)used as exit nodes.
As a reminder, Mac software distributed outside the Mac App Store must be notarized by Apple in order to run on macOS Catalina. To make this transition easier and to protect users on macOS Catalina who continue to use older versions of software, we’ve adjusted the notarization prerequisites until January 2020.
IR-2019-167, October 9, 2019
I’m currently working on a logging project that was initially implemented using AWS Elasticsearch. Having worked with large-scale mainline Elasticsearch clusters for several years, I’m absolutely stunned at how poor Amazon’s implementation is and I can’t fathom why they’re unable to fix or at least
Introducing Streamlit, an app framework built for ML engineers
Billions of people worldwide access the internet only through their phones. But using a cheap smartphone comes with some serious trade-offs.
Google warns that some of the world’s most popular Android phones are vulnerable, including its own Pixel 2. An Israeli spyware dealer, NSO Group, is believed to have developed the hack.
Timsort: A very fast , O(n log n), stable sorting algorithm built for the real world — not constructed in academia.
At GitHub, we believe in empowering developers around the world. We also believe in basic human rights and treating people with respect and dignity. Today, I wanted to share a message I sent to all employees yesterday that is related to this, as it is important that we share our views on immigration policy with the world and not just internally with employees.
Ontario-based company brings specialist battery manufacturing expertise to global EV giant amid talk of “Tesla’s secret battery lab”
Researchers at Googleâs security group Project Zero have found an active vulnerability in Android that affects several popular devices including the Pixel 2, Huawei P20 Pro, and Xiaomi Redmi Note 5. A post from the security group suggests it found the bug last week, and attackers were exploiting it at that moment. The post notes …
Normally Norway is the biggest Tesla market in Europe. When the Dutch market absorbs nearly three times the Norwegian number of Model 3s, that is crazy.
Over the past year, I’ve built and grown 3 marketplaces in the event sector, all with a 95% SEO acquisition strategy.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Amazon.com’s bid to avoid…
Can you smell the doom and gloom?
Network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory confirm that Turkey has blocked access to social media and messaging platforms in the southern cities of Gaziantep, Şanlıurfa and Hatay, as the …
One week after PayPal left the project
A 2017 cartoon from this post. For my fellow combinatorialists here is the link to the previous post on Kahn-Park’s result, isoperimetry, Talagrand, nice figures and links. Quick update (Sep…
Could you survive for an entire year without access to Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram or any other app?
Suppose you want to pick an integer at random in a set of N elements. Your computer has functions to generate random 32-bit integers, how do you transform such numbers into indexes no larger than N? Suppose you have a hash table with a capacity N. Again, you need to transform your hash values (typically 32-bit … Continue reading A fast alternative to the modulo reduction
The 400 wealthiest Americans now pay a lower rate than the middle class.
System76, the Denver-based Linux PC manufacturer and developer of Pop OS, has some stellar news for those of us who prefer our laptops a little more open.
Fancy trackers and headbands are all part of a growing sleep-tech industry. I decided to put them to the test.
Researchers want to pave their own path. But the growing industry is still dependent on tech giants like Google and Microsoft.
After three years of quietly toiling away on a robotic food system, Seattle startup Picnic has emerged from stealth mode with a system that assembles custom pizzas with little human intervention.
PayPal was one of several corporate backers of Facebook’s cryptocurrency project.
At its annual Surface hardware event in New York, Microsoft today announced the expected set of updates to its existing hardware lineup. The biggest surprise, though, was surely the announcement of the company’s dual-screen Surface Neo, which will go on sale before the 2020 holiday season. To…
Amazon’s new Sidewalk protocol and Apple’s experiments with ultra-wideband signal a new battleground that gets Amazon out of the house and Apple inside it
DNS over HTTPS will make it harder for ISPs to monitor or modify DNS queries.
Remote teams configuration and combination. Learn the caveats and nuances of running a remote team and why internal communication is paramount to success.
Network data from the NetBlocks internet observatory show that Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Instagram and other social and messaging apps have been blocked in Iraq by multiple internet providers as of …
The fashion and lifestyle site had something that Vice lacked: an audience made up largely of women.
They need facial scans of people with darker skin
Posted by Sara M. Butler; 17 August, 2018. Setting the Scene The period leading up to the expulsion of the Jews from England in July of 1290 was a time of mounting uncertainty for the Anglo Jewry. …
How is Python 2 supported in RHEL after 2020? How long will Python 2.7 be supported within Red Hat products? As per https://pythonclock.org the Python project is retiring development on Python 2 Jan 1st, 2020. What happens after this date? Python2 is available in an Application stream in RHEL8. Can you let me know what that means for the Python 2 lifecycle within RHEL8? Will Python 2 be available for the entire life of RHEL 8? Will Red Hat continue to provide bugfix/security errata to Python 2 after the EOL of the language?
In the largest study of its kind, researchers found that testosterone administration did not affect cognitive empathy, a measure of the ability to recognize another’s feelings and motivations. The finding calls into question the theory that the symptoms of autism are caused by a hyper-masculinized brain.
Lawyers representing disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes said she hasn’t paid them for more than a year and probably never will, according to court records.
After working for weeks with Pythonâs data science stack and R I started to ask my self if there could not be a common intermediateâ¦
Guard is an AI that reads privacy policies for you and uncovers their hidden, filthy secrets.
“Estonian is popularly known as a difficult language to learn. The only other national languages it’s related to are Finnish and Hungarian.”
The image of bottle water as clean and pure is being challenged by a global investigation that found the water tested is often contaminated with tiny particles of plastic.
Gary Marcus, a leader in the field, discusses how we could achieve general intelligence—and why that might make machines safer.
Tax forms filed by OpenAI provide insight into the enormous salaries and bonuses paid to artificial intelligence specialists across the world.
TON will be the largest blockchain ever when it launches next month, but it’s not on regulators’ radars.
Weâre announcing the CodeSearchNet Challenge and releasing a large dataset for natural language processing and machine learning.
Carmen and Jon talk with Rob Pike and Robert Griesemer (the creators of Go) about its origins, growth, influence, and future. This an epic episode that dives deep into the history and details of the how’s and why’s of Go, and the choices they’ve made along the way in creating this awesome programing language. 
Code, test & deploy with GitLab. Everyone can contribute!
Police used drones to track down a man who evaded detection for almost two decades.
Last month, more than 66 percent of Google tech contractors signed cards to hold a vote on whether to create a labor union at HCL…
In 2002, still reeling from the dot-com crash, Google realized they’d been harvesting a very valuable raw material — your behavior.
A leaked document highlights stories of abuse and retaliation against Google employees, told by the employees themselves.
Electric vehicle startup to raise $200m from chairman and Tencent
Reports that some AVID Users Macs would no longer boot. It now may be that a Google Chrome Keystone update modifies /var on NON SIP Protected Macs.
It’s here. Software Version 10.0 – our biggest software update ever. We’re raising the bar for what people have come to expect from their cars with new entertainment, gaming, music, and convenience features designed to make your car much more capable, as well as making time spent in your car more fun.
Alphabet Inc’s Google will stop showing news snippets from European publish…
A Financial Times report revealed that Google achieved quantum supremacy. Is it now time to panic about encryption being broken, or do we have nothing to worry about?
WeWork’s parent The We Company on Monday filed to withdraw its initial publ…
Critics claim they try to suppress anti-Chinese views to keep lucrative Chinese students happy
(Adds CEO quote, background)
Rui Pinto ran a website called Football Leaks and won praise as a whistle-blower. Portugal’s authorities consider him a criminal.
In
The 178-year-old tour operator failed to secure a £200 million rescue on Sunday, leading it to suspend its flights and bookings.
A game for learning CSS grid layout
As WeWork investors jousted over Adam Neumannâs future at the company he built, a parallel debate by WeWork executives and bankers has centered on just how deeply WeWork should cut costs to save its business.In recent days, a group of executives from WeWorkâs parent company and bankers have been …
:mortar_board: Path to a free self-taught education in Computer Science! – ossu/computer-science
A.I. research is becoming increasingly expensive, leaving few people with easy access to the computing firepower necessary to develop the technology.
The retailer fell victim to the eroding power of shopping malls and said it would cease operations in 40 countries and close up to 178 stores in the U.S.
SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) — A former Yahoo software engineer has pleaded guilty to hacking into the accounts of some 6,000 Yahoo users in search of sexual photos and videos.