Tech roundup 108: a journal published by a bot

Gooooooood morning, Web!!! 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

• We don’t ‘do’ learning. It does us
• An Introduction to AI Story Generation
• A man spent a year in jail on murder charge that hinged on disputed AI evidence
  Plus: Intel winds down RealSense, and more
• Machine learning’s crumbling foundations
• Machine learning’s crumbling foundations
• When America Had an Atomic Mecha Warrior Robot
  Tougher (and more expensive) than Iron Man!
• The Myth of a Superhuman AI
• A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical
  A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical. – GitHub – roboflow-ai/neuralhash-collisions: A catalog of naturally occurring images whose Apple NeuralHash is identical.
• Open Source Is Throwing AI Policymakers for a Loop
  Machine learning isn’t just for big companies any more
• Do vision transformers see like convolutional neural networks?
  Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have so far been the de-facto model for
  visual data. Recent work has shown that (Vision) Transformer models (ViT) can
  achieve comparable or even superior performance on image classification tasks.
  This raises a central question: how are Vision Transformers solving these
  tasks? Are they acting like convolutional networks, or learning entirely
  different visual representations? Analyzing the internal representation
  structure of ViTs and CNNs on image classification benchmarks, we find striking
  differences between the two architectures, such as ViT having more uniform
  representations across all layers. We expl
• 59a34eabe31910abfb06f308 – NeuralHash Collision Demo
  This site is a proof of concept for NeuralHash collision attacks.
• Google has killed Discord’s best music bot
• OpenShot 2.6.0 Released – AI and Computer Vision and Audio Effects
• When Do Investors Freak Out? Machine Learning Predictions of Panic Selling

Blockchain and decentralization

• Decentralized ETS Counters for Better Scalability
• Apple exec: ‘we are the greatest platform for distributing child porn’
• Coinbase plans to add $500M worth of crypto to its balance sheet
• Sweden must repay $1.6M in Bitcoin to convicted drug dealer
  The Swedish government has to return about $1.6 million worth of bitcoin to a convicted drug dealer after the value of his illegally earned crypto soared while he sat in prison.
• Lebanon’s underground cryptocurrency market
• Man Robbed of 16 Bitcoin Sues Young Thieves’ Parents
• Big oil coined ‘carbon footprints’ to blame us for their greed
• Why observability requires a distributed column store
• Pocuter – A coin-sized micro computer with WiFi and BLE

Cloud and architecture

• George Mason professor wins Covid antibody lawsuit as vaccine exemption
• Test cross-architecture without leaving home
• AWS Doesn’t Know Who I Am. Here’s Why That’s a Problem
  AWS needs an identity that uniquely represents its users, not fractured across corporate identity providers.
• Apple already scans iCloud Mail for CSAM, but not iCloud Photos
• Convergent patterns between grizzly bear genetics and Indigenous language groups
• Pinterest Required to Spend $3B on AWS
• Man steals 620k photos from iCloud accounts from home without Apple noticing
  Man who tricked thousands of iPhone users into giving up their passwords admits he stole private photos and videos and shared them online.
• Cloud pricing comparison: AWS vs. Azure vs. Google Cloud in 2021
• Microsoft warns thousands of cloud customers of exposed databases

Development and languages

• A Simple Interpreter in Python
• GitHub Issues-only project management
• Tikz.net – Graphics with TikZ in LaTeX
• Pyret Programming Language
• TypeIt – A Versatile JavaScript Animated Typing Utility
• Gitfs: Version Controlled File System
  Gitfs is a fuse file system that fully integrates with git
• Constant craving: how digital media turned us all into dopamine addicts
• WinFsp – Windows File System Proxy
  Windows File System Proxy – FUSE for Windows. Contribute to billziss-gh/winfsp development by creating an account on GitHub.
• PlsExplain: A small dynamic programming language where every value is explained
• Conditionally setting your gitconfig
• Razer bug lets you become a Windows 10 admin by plugging in a mouse
• Competitive Programming Is Useless
• An empirical cybersecurity evaluation of GitHub Copilot’s code contributions
• Hiding Images in Plain Sight: The Physics of Magic Windows
• Influential books on Computer Science and programming
  Most influential books on Computer Science/programming – GitHub – cs-books/influential-cs-books: Most influential books on Computer Science/programming
• My Journey as a Self-Taught Programmer
• Visualizing Python modules and dependencies with Neo4j
• Write an SQL query builder in 150 lines of Python
• Aggregate streaming data in real-time with WebAssembly
  Examples on how to use aggregate functions to calculate streaming sums, averages, and key-value updates.
• Golang vs. C# (.NET 5.0) at Benchmarks Game
• Nelua Programming Language
• Design a Camera with Python and PyRayT: Part One – Fotonix and Gizmos
• Prettymaps: Small Python library to draw customized maps from OpenStreetMap data
  A small set of Python functions to draw pretty maps from OpenStreetMap data. Based on osmnx, matplotlib and shapely libraries. – GitHub – marceloprates/prettymaps: A small set of Python functions t…
• ReGit – A Tiny Git-Compatible Git Implementation
• Thousands of Debian packages updated from their upstream Git repository
• Silent changes to Western Digital’s budget SSD may lower speeds by up to 50%
• Portal Windows for Electron
• Power users mourn features lost in Windows 11 ‘simplification’
• Western Digital confirms speed crippling SN550 SSD flash change

Quote of the week

For a sucessful technology, honesty must take precedence over public relations for nature cannot be fooled.

        — Richard Feynman

Enterprises

• Google’s ‘Project Hug’ paid out huge sums to keep game devs in the Play Store
  Google made sure popular games stayed on the Play Store.
• Intel Brings Chiplets to Data Center CPUs
• Intel’s Thread Director: Assisting the OS to make task placement decisions
• The Tesla Semi Is an Engineering Failure
• Tesla is planning a “super long range” Model Y
  Tesla is planning a “super long-range” Model Y according to documents filed with Chinese authorities.
• Google says geofence warrants make up one-quarter of all US demands
  The search giant revealed it received 20,932 geofence warrants in three years.
• Amazon Staffer Says She Was Fired over Bathroom Breaks for Bowel Issue
• Nvidia’s takeover of Arm raises serious concerns, says watchdog
• Tesla Project Dojo Overview
• Google found guilty of infringing 5 of Sonos’ patents
  Smart speaker maker Sonos just won its first victory in a year-long patent lawsuit against Google.
• London civil servant’s bus odyssey sparks Twitter storm
• OCaml at Bloomberg
• A bike parts company ditched Amazon to support indie shops instead
  Customer service on Amazon can’t compare to an independent bike shop.
• The First Step Toward Protecting Everyone Else from Teslas
• Twitter starts to require login to view tweets
  833 votes and 277 comments so far on Reddit
• The Clickbaitification of Netflix
  The streaming service has discovered the allure of clickbait. You won’t believe what happens next.
• I kept honking at a sleeping Tesla driver on the freeway, but she didn’t wake up
• Googlespeak – How Google limits thought about antitrust
  “Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.” 1984, George Orwell Not long ago, those active in the SEO space may have noticed I got into a … Read more
• S.Korea parliament committee votes to curb Google, Apple commission dominance
  A South Korean parliamentary committee voted on Wednesday to recommend amending a law, a key step toward banning Google and Apple from forcibly charging software developers commissions on in-app purchases, the first such curb by a major economy.
• A history of Google messaging apps: Will Google ever figure this out?
  Sixteen years after the launch of Google Talk, Google messaging is still a mess.
• An analysis of Amazon Echo’s network behavior
  With over 20 million units sold since 2015, Amazon Echo, the Alexa-enabled
  smart speaker developed by Amazon, is probably one of the most widely deployed
  Internet of Things consumer devices. Despite the very large installed base,
  surprisingly little is known about the device’s network behavior. We modify a
  first generation Echo device, decrypt its communication with Amazon cloud, and
  analyze the device pairing, Alexa Voice Service, and drop-in calling protocols.
  We also describe our methodology and the experimental setup. We find a minor
  shortcoming in the device pairing protocol and learn that drop-in calls are
  end-to-end encrypted and based
• Google is committing $10B to advance cybersecurity
• Google to pay Apple $15B to remain default Safari search engine in 2021
• A simple string handling library for Microsoft Fortran-80
• Apple has surpassed Facebook and Google in violating user trust
• How does Google Authenticator work?
• Police Shared Intelligence on Protesters with Pipeline Company
• Google: ‘Reverse Warrants’ Becoming Law Enforcement’s Go-To Investigative Tool
• Tesla Packs 50B Transistors onto D1 Dojo Chip

Other news

• A crash course on our boundlessly bizarre universe
• A FTA TV Transcription Side-Project Becomes a Popular Tool for Journalists
• The Shadowy Business of International Education
• The case for mutual educational disarmament
  And for a high-stakes, lower-effort test | Finance & economics
• Linux is dead, long-live Docker monoculture
• Working towards a source-based bootstrapping path to a GNU+Linux system
• I’ve been programming since I was 10, but I don’t feel like a ‘hacker’
• Cloudflare: Warp for Linux and Proxy Mode
• The Linux Kernel Module Programming Guide
• James Loewen, Author of ‘Lies My Teacher Told Me,’ Dies at 79
• Bahraini Government Hacks Activists with NSO Group Zero-Click iPhone Exploits
  We identified nine Bahraini activists whose iPhones were successfully hacked with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware between June 2020 and February 2021. The hacked activists included three members of Waad (a secular Bahraini political society), three members of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights, two exiled Bahraini dissidents, and one member of Al Wefaq (a Shiite Bahraini political society).
• My dead dad’s journal
  For some reason, when my brother told me our dad was dead, I immediately went and listened to my voicemails. He left me silly voicemails often and I wanted to hear his voice. I came across the last voicemail he ever left me, a month before. This one wasn’t
• Happy birthday – 30 years of Linux – Ubuntu
• Free Machine Learning crash course from Google
• ‘Extraordinary’ hacking powers pass Australian Parliament
  Legislation handing “extraordinary” new hacking powers to Australian authorities has sailed through Parliament with support from the Opposition, despite the government not implementing some of the recommendations from the national security committee. The Australian Federal Police (AFP) and Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC) will now be able to access the computers and networks of those…
• Toshiba reports milestone in quantum cryptography
  Toshiba Corporation is reporting a breakthrough involving a cutting-edge technology said to be «un-hackable.» The company says a research team has used quantum cryptography to securely send and store human genome data, calling the experiment a world first.
• Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat
  Linux in a Pixel Shader – A RISC-V Emulator for VRChat
• T-Mobile Hacker Who Stole Data on 50M Customers: ‘Their Security Is Awful’
• Monitoring Raspberry Pi Devices Using Telegraf, InfluxDB and Grafana
• PureOS – a pure Linux phone experience
  The Librem 5 comes with PureOS by default. This page explains why that is important. An operating system in your best interests The Librem 5 comes with PureOS by default, not Android. It is the only smartphone on the market today to ship with a fully-free and auditable operating system, from the ground up, that …
• I switched from macOS to Linux after 15 years of Apple
  After using Macs for fifteen years, I switched to Linux as my main operating system and I’m enjoying it. Here’s an introduction to Linux that may help you too.
• Apple will let developers accept payment outside App Store
• Conversations on Quantum Gravity
• Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout
  The award of more than five million Apple shares comes as Mr Cook marks a decade as the firm’s boss.
• I hacked an office telephone to play Doom
• App store payments will have increased competition
• nimforum: Lightweight alternative to Discourse written in Nim
  Lightweight alternative to Discourse written in Nim – GitHub – nim-lang/nimforum: Lightweight alternative to Discourse written in Nim
• Sad Little Men: Assessing the impact of an elite education
• Now that machines can learn, can they unlearn?
• The real OnlyFans scandal is the unaccountable power of platforms and banks
  The service has reversed its ban on sexual content, but valid – and legal – forms of expression for sex workers are still under threat, says author Jillian C York

Autor: Javi López G.

Arquitecto/desarrollador, creativo, buscador de nuevas soluciones y modelos de negocio, crítico constructivo y ex muchas cosas Lee todas las entradas de Javi López G.