Tech roundup 96: a journal published by a bot

Gooooooood morning, Mortals!!! 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

• Konlabot: Thai Poetry from ‘Jewels of Thought’
• Evolving Reinforcement Learning Algorithms
• Goaded by a robot, students took greater risk: study
• Farming robot kills 100k weeds per hour with lasers
  Carbon Robotics’ Autonomous Weeder is a smart farming robot that identifies weeds and then kills them using high-power lasers.
• The Botanist Who Defied Stalin
• Why AI is harder than we think
• AI Dungeon will block certain words, review content flagged as inappropriate
• Flower Summit 2021 (The Friendly Federated Learning Framework)
• New AI tool calculates materials’ stress and strain based on photos
• AI Dungeon public disclosure vulnerability report
  Report and source code detailing the AI Dungeon private adventure vulnerability – AetherDevSecOps/aid_adventure_vulnerability_report
• 25tons seabed mining robot prototype was lost at 4km depth in Pacific Ocean
• The Fourier transform is a neural network
  The site of Sid.
• Computer Science from the Bottom Up
• Robotic harvester plucks an Apple every 7 seconds
• Google-led paper pushes back against claims of AI inefficiency

Blockchain and decentralization

• Nassim Taleb says Bitcoin is an open Ponzi scheme and a failed currency
• Ether as a Computation Unit
• A second Bitcoin exchange collapses in Turkey amid crackdown on cryptocurrencies
• Ethereum staking – More sustainable crypto
• Apple store fake app stole man’s life savings in Bitcoin
• Neurons in the mouse brain correlate with cryptocurrency price
• Iran authorizes use of cryptocurrency for imports payment
• TikToker makes ‘scamcoin’ as a joke and within an hour it’s worth –$70mln
• Money Stuff: Tesla Sold Some Bitcoins
• Opera adds native support for blockchain domain names
  When my kids were born, I immediately set up gmail accounts for each of them using their nicknames. I’d email observations to their accounts of their first everything, along with photos of moments captured on my mobile. As they grew, I sent audio messages of them reciting poems or silly stories in their raspy, caveman…
• Building a Distributed Turn-Based Game System in Elixir
  Running Elixir on Fly.io let me easily create a globally distributed, privately networked, clustered, multi-player game server! Here’s how.
• SSD Makers Start Warning That Mining Products Like Chia Coin Will Void Warranty
  A new trend in cryptocurrency mining is using SSDs for Chia Coins mining. And that can heavily affect the lifespan of an SSD. The first manufacturers now have started altering Warranty claims….

Cloud and architecture

• Understanding SaaS Metrics
• The Laws Giving People the Right to Crash Cars into Demonstrators
• Nutrimatic: A pattern-matching word-search tool designed for puzzles
• Karmada: Open, Multi-Cloud, Multi-Cluster Kubernetes Orchestration
  Open, Multi-Cloud, Multi-Cluster Kubernetes Orchestration – karmada-io/karmada
• Our Journey Towards Cloud Efficiency
• How to Rewrite the Laws of Physics in the Language of Impossibility
• Habitual coffee drinkers have a distinct pattern of brain functionalconnectivity
• AWS on track to be bigger than IBM by Christmas
• Pirates Who Illegally Streamed Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren Target of $100m Lawsuit
• AWS inter-region latency chart
• Space Cloud: Open-Source Firebase and Heroku on Kubernetes
  Open source Firebase + Heroku to develop, scale and secure serverless apps on Kubernetes – spaceuptech/space-cloud
• Serverless Python in 60 Seconds

Development and languages

• Grain: A strongly-typed functional programming language for the modern web
• OpenSourceFPGA Launches Foundation to Accelerate Adoption of Programmable Logic
• The difficulty of programming depends on the layer and quality of abstraction
• Libfive: Solid modeling (CAD) library/tools with Scheme/Python bindings and GUI
• JavaScript for Data Science
• Python Mobile App Development
• Heroku-style deployments with Docker and Git tags
  In this post I want to explain a new deployment method I came up with while working on drwn.io.
  I wanted it to meet a few requirements:
  Simple Based on git tags Zero-downtime Easy rollbacks Creating an empty remote in the server Imagine you already have your project with some code that is being synchronized with a git service like GitHub. To have a git push based deployment, we need to have our own remote.
• How the Internet Archive digitizes 78rpm records
• RPython-Based VMs: Fast Enough in Fast Enough Time
• Git repository of Plan 9 History, from 1992 to 2015
• Digital Needle: Ripping vinyl records with a scanner
• Strand Programming Language
• Using asynchronous web APIs from WebAssembly
• Unikraft – Fast, Specialized Unikernels
  Unikernels are famous for providing excellent performance in terms of boot
  times, throughput and memory consumption, to name a few metrics. However, they
  are infamous for making it hard and extremely time consuming to extract such
  performance, and for needing significant engineering effort in order to port
  applications to them. We introduce Unikraft, a novel micro-library OS that (1)
  fully modularizes OS primitives so that it is easy to customize the unikernel
  and include only relevant components and (2) exposes a set of composable,
  performance-oriented APIs in order to make it easy for developers to obtain
  high performance.
  Our evaluation
• Gitlab has 15 ad trackers, 22 third party cookies, and a keylogger
  A Real-Time Website Privacy Inspector
• Never run Google ads if you have an Android app
  Google can and will permanently ban your Android app if Google thinks you’ve clicked on your own ads
• Film simulations from scratch using Python
• GitHub blocks FLoC across all of GitHub Pages
  GitHub Pages: Permissions-Policy: interest-cohort=() Header added to all pages sites
• Eddy Cue wanted to bring iMessage to Android in 2013
• Minimal 3D creative coding tool – control 8×8×8 dots with JavaScript
• GitHub Collection: Made in India
• How JavaScript works: cryptography and how to deal with MitM attacks
  This is post # 24 of the series, dedicated to exploring JavaScript and its building components. In the process of identifying and…
• Simple way to access various statistics in Git repository
• Write Gitlab CI Pipelines in Python Code
• PySDR: A Guide to SDR and DSP Using Python
• Scaling Monorepo Maintenance at GitHub
  Today, GitHub can repack even the largest repositories we host in a fraction of the time it used to take. Here’s how we did it, and why.
• Everything Old Is New Again: Binary Security of WebAssembly
• FB JavaScript SDK down
• Programmable Music with Layers

Quote of the week

A language that doesn’t have everything is actually easier to program in than some that do.

        — Dennis M. Ritchie

Enterprises

• Twitter takes down tweets criticising handling of pandemic at government request
• AMD Ryzen Processor Software Optimization
• Tesla admits its Full Self-Driving technology is a Level 2 system
  Tesla admitted to California regulators that its Full Self-Driving technology is a Level 2 system, like Autopilot. Some say the name is misleading.
• Twitter Is Blocking Tweets That Criticize the Indian Government
  A good chunk of the tweets, which are now withheld from public view in India, criticised either the Centre’s handling of the pandemic or the recent Kumbh Mela gathering.
• Roku says it may lose YouTube TV app after Google made anti-competitive demands
  Roku claims that Google is demanding preferential treatment for YouTube and YouTube TV.
• Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’
• Woven Planet, a subsidiary of Toyota, to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car divisi
  $550 Million Deal Unites Talent, Technology and Geographies to Propel the Industry Forward Lyft, Inc. (LYFT) announced today that the company has signed an agreement with Woven Planet Holdings, Inc., (“Woven Planet”), a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corporation, for the acquisition of Lyft’s self-driving vehicle division, Level 5. The transaction also includes multi-year non-exclusive commercial agreements between Lyft and Woven Planet to accelerate the development and enhance the safety of automated driving technology. “Today’s announcement launches Lyft into the next phase of an incredible journey to bring our mission to life,” Lyf
• Tesla Q1 2021 Results
• Google promised its contact tracing app was completely private, but it wasn’t
  Researchers say hundreds of preinstalled apps can access a log found on Android devices where sensitive contact tracing information is stored
• Google have declared Droidscript is malware
• Mighty Makes Google Chrome Faster
  Mighty makes Google Chrome faster and uses 10x less memory by streaming your browser from a powerful computer in the cloud.
• Alphabet reports big earnings beat as revenue grows 34%
• Alphabet First Quarter 2021 Results
• AMD Reports Q1 2021 Earnings
• Dominance of Apple and Google’s app stores impacting competition and consumers
  App developers need fair and reasonable terms when dealing with app stores and better processes for the approval of apps to help address the consequences of Google and Apple’s power in the app market, the ACCC has found in a report released today.
• Finding an Easter Egg in Microsoft Bob
• Google is saving $1B per year as a result of employees working from home
• Union’s evidence in Amazon vote ‘could be grounds for overturning election’
• Zanzibar: Google’s Consistent, Global Authorization System
• Scientists re-evaluating relative brain size and mammalian intelligence
• Hedonometer: Average Happiness of Twitter over Time
• Amazon Q1 2021 Quarterly Results
• It’s Arrived Now Behold the Intelligent Timing Lock
• YouTube TV removed from Roku channel store amid Google contract dispute
  Roku accused Google of making anti-competitive demands.
• Intel seeks $10 bln in subsidies for European chip plant
• Google’s push to bring employees back to offices, some say they’ll rather quit
• Darktrace Jumps 40% on IPO
• Cancel culture, Twitter trendings and radical transparency
  This post is a bit different from usual posts, and because I’m not very good at communicating unstructured thoughts it could be hard to read I’m not going to debate whether or not cancel culture is bad, plenty of people have done it, and it seems there can’t be a …

Other news

• Hack an Analog TV into a Geek TV
• Common interface for Linux NIC statistics
  In Linux 5.13 ethtool gains an interface for querying IEEE and IETF statistics. This removes the need to parse vendor specific strings in…
• An open letter to the Linux community
• Let’s Stop Building APIs Around a Network Hack
  JSON:API has been one of the most popular standards for API development for a while now. It was conceived in 2013, battled through some…
• Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/S: How I Learned to Love Tail Calls in C
  Parsing, performance, and low-level programming.
• Greg Kroah-Hartman Rejects Apology from University of Minnesota Researchers
• How to Learn Unix Tools
• Reliability of police mobile phone evidence questioned after hack
  Concerns raised after possible security flaws in mobile phone analysis technology used by Police Scotland emerge.
• Telegram: Payments 2.0, Scheduled Voice Chats, New Web Versions
• Project Jengo Redux: Cloudflare’s Prior Art Search Bounty Returns
• A Hack to Update RAM Initialization Contents in Intel FPGA Bitstreams
• A practical guide to reducing loneliness
  11 easy, dorky, & life-affirming ways to connect to others — according to an introvert.
• Hedy is a gradual programming language that helps kids to learn Python
• Lambda School Agrees to End Deceptive Educational Financing Practices
  The DFPI today finalized a settlement with San Francisco-based Lambda, Inc. which removes deceptive language from Lambda School’s student contracts. Read more …
• Merge tag ‘arm-Apple-M1-5.13’ of Linux
• Fedora Linux 34 is officially here
• Using a disk-backed Redis alternative to reduce AWS S3 bill
• Linux Foundation’s demands to the University of Minnesota
• Signal’s Cellebrite Hack Is Already Causing Grief for the Law
  A Maryland defense attorney has decided to challenge the conviction of one of his clients after it was recently discovered that the phone cracking product used in the case, produced by digital forensics firm Cellebrite, has severe cybersecurity flaws that could make it vulnerable to hacking.
• Proposed futex2 allows Linux to mimic the NT kernel for better wine performance
• Samsung’s Lee family to pay over $10.8B inheritence tax
• 30 Years of Linux: An Interview with Linus Torvalds
• The United States Needs to Learn How to Learn
  I just saw an announcement from November of 2020 in which the Federal Transit Administration proposes to study international best practices… in on-demand public transit. It goes without sayin…
• How the Pre-Raphaelites Became Obsessed with the Wombat
• Want to Learn Programming and Microcontrollers?
• RotaJakiro: A long live secret backdoor with 0 VT detection
  Overview
  On March 25, 2021, 360 NETLAB’s BotMon system flagged a suspiciousELF file
  (MD5=64f6cfe44ba08b0babdd3904233c4857) with 0 VT detection, the sample
  communicates with 4 domains on TCP 443 (HTTPS), but the traffic is not of
  TLS/SSL. A close look at the sample revealed it to be a backdoor targeting
  Linux X64 systems, a family that has been around for at least 3 years.

  We named it RotaJakiro based on the fact that the family uses rotate encryption
  and behaves differently for root/non-root

• U.S. government probes VPN hack within federal agencies, races to find clues
• Inheritance was invented as a performance hack
• Learn Linux without internet and stack overflow: Linux HOWTOs
• Piano teacher gets copyright claim for playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata
  Five years on YouTube. If you want to keep in touch, email me and ask to be on my mailing list: marina@thepianokeys.com. All links below:🎹 LEARN JAZZ PIANO:…
• Linux Hypervisor Setup (Libvirt/QEMU/KVM)
  Let’s explore how you can setup a hypervisor on any Linux host! We’ll dig into the libvirt/qemu/kvm stack with a focus on how these pieces interact with each other.
• Pixar Uses Hyper-Colors to Hack Your Brain
  The animation studio’s artists are masters at tweaking light and color to trigger deep emotional responses. Coming soon: effects you’ll only see inside your head.

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.