Technology

Karlena Hamblin was sitting on a stool in her Brownsville, Brooklyn apartment waiting for the Administration for Children’s Services to knock on her door for a weekly check-in. She’d just fed her infant daughter, who she held cradled in her arms.

ACS, which is responsible for investigating child welfare in New York City, had been watching her and her family since she was three months pregnant, when the agency held a pre-birth conference to talk over her family’s future. “The baby’s not even here yet and you’re already talking about removing her?” she said. “I didn’t even know what I was having yet.” She sobbed at night from fear.

Now, investigators check her daughter for signs of abuse or neglect, and could report anything they learn to a family court judge. Hanging over every visit is the chance that a misstep leads to her losing her daughter, who’s now just a few months old, to the foster care system.

“I’m always worried,” Hamblin said. “I get more anxious around any court date, and even though I tell myself, ‘No, I’m not doing nothing wrong, I don’t have nothing to hide,’ it’s like I’m programmed to be scared because I’ve been afraid since day one.”

Hamblin has a good idea why she’s under surveillance. She grew up in foster care. Shortly after aging out, she got pregnant and later, she says, developed symptoms of postpartum depression. She checked herself into the psych ward while her sister cared for her infant son. She lost him to foster care in 2017.

• Huawei is no longer running Windows OS on its latest laptops, as the company has opted instead for its home-grown system.
• HarmonyOS 5 will be running on brand new MateBook Pro and MateBook Fold models.
• The PC-version of the OS looks strikingly similar to Windows, at least in official promotional images.

• Young Indonesians applying for tech jobs via Facebook and Telegram are trafficked to scam farms.
• Scammers use deepfakes, voice clones, and other technologies to dupe victims around the world.
• Americans alone lost $12.5 billion last year, mostly to investment scams.

I post this here because I think there is a interesting discussion out of this, what do you people think about this?

In the summer of 2020, two issues dominated the headlines: the COVID pandemic and the widespread unrest surrounding George Floyd, Black Lives Matter, and the “racial reckoning.” It was in this environment, with the country also at or near the apex of “cancel culture,” that the University of Central Florida tried to fire associate professor of psychology Charles Negy for his tweets about race and society. Negy fought back and sued.

Five years later, his lawsuit continues — and last week, it brought good news not just for Professor Negy but for everyone who cares about free speech on campus.

Last week, Judge Carlos E. Mendoza of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida ruled that Negy’s lawsuit could proceed against four of the five administrators he sued. Importantly, the court denied claims of qualified immunity, a doctrine that says public officials aren’t liable for unconstitutional activity unless they knew or should have known their actions were unconstitutional. By denying qualified immunity to UCF’s administrators, Judge Mendoza formally recognized what was obvious from the very beginning: UCF knew or should have known that what it was doing violated the First Amendment, but they went ahead and did it anyway.

Let’s set the stage. Picture a semi-governmental company. Around $130 million in annual revenue. They build and operate very expensive things — in space. Hundreds of physical hosts. Nearly 4,000 VMs. Most of their IT stack, in fact, runs on our platform.

Are they paying customers?

No.

Are they using the fully open-source version, from source?

Also no.

Instead, they discovered our Xen Orchestra Appliance (XOA): a turnkey virtual machine, with Xen Orchestra pre-installed, regularly tested, easy to deploy and update (and yes, still running fully on-prem). A supported and stable experience, designed for teams that don’t want to git pull on master branch in production.

But they didn’t want to pay for it. So they came up with a creative workaround: abusing our 30-day trial (initially 15 days until recently), over and over again.

It all started back in April 2015 — yes, a full decade ago. At first, they used their corporate emails to request trials. One here, one there. Nothing suspicious. But over the years, the pattern grew. More emails. More trials. Enough that, when we looked back, we realized we could chart it. Literally. Here's what the "creative licensing strategy" has looked like over time:

As you can imagine, we ended up with what looked like the entire staff directory. Developers, sysadmins, managers… pretty sure we even had the janitor signed up for a trial at some point.

When those ran out, they switched to personal Outlook or Gmail addresses. Every time: starting with a new (real!) person with their… personal email, a new 30-day trial. And then go incrementally with it. johndoe01@outlook.com, then johndoe02@outlook.com… We're now well past johndoe60. Same company name, every time… which is impressive considering the field isn’t even required in order to register your account. Hard to say if it was a mistake, a flex, or just their way of making sure we didn’t miss who was milking the trials.

Yes, they’re that committed. Committed to not paying.

• TikTok’s recommendation algorithm began quickly and progressively populating our For You Page with right-wing conspiracy theories and toxic masculinity content.
• Of the 425 videos coded, 121 (28%) contained conspiracy theories and 70 (16%) contained toxic masculinity content.
• Our For You Page also contained content promoting medical misinformation, doomsday prepping, racism, right-wing media, and transphobia.

Backlog getting you down? Drowning in technical debt? Delegate issues to Copilot so you can focus on the creative, complex, and high-impact work that matters most. Copilot coding agent makes this possible.

Simply assign an issue (or multiple issues) to Copilot just as you would another developer. You can do this from github.com, GitHub Mobile, or the GitHub CLI. Copilot works in the background, using its own secure cloud-based development environment powered by GitHub Actions. Copilot explores the repository, makes changes, and even validates its work with your tests and linter before it pushes.

After 2,5 years of intensive research and programming efforts, the entire Openwebsearch.eu project team is excited to grant access to its pilot of the first-ever federated pan-European Open Web Index (OWI).

The 19th explains how the new law on nonconsensual intimate imagery will be implemented — and how you can request the takedown of explicit images created or shared without permission.

The Texas Legislature has already passed a bill requiring age verification to download apps and is seriously considering another to ban children from social media.

Imagine wearing a T-shirt that measures your breathing or gloves that translate your hand movements into commands for your computer. Researchers at ETH Zurich, led by Daniel Ahmed, Professor of Acoustic Robotics for Life Sciences and Healthcare, have laid the foundations for just such smart textiles. Unlike many previous developments in this area, which usually use electronics, the ETH researchers rely on acoustic waves passed through glass fibres. This makes the measurements more precise and the textiles lighter, more breathable and easier to wash. “They are also inexpensive because we use readily available materials, and the power consumption is very low,” says Ahmed.

This is called a superinfection—a file or system that has been infected several times. It typically occurs on systems that do not have antivirus software. It also fits that Cameron had a warning for Floxif. Systems that have been neglected in terms of basic security often become hosts to multiple types of self-replicating malware.

The virus infection also explains why a total of 39 files in the downloads section of Procolored were infected. SnipVex likely replicated itself on a developer’s system or the build servers.

It made a bit of money for the threat actor along the way. Blockchain explorer shows that the threat actor’s BTC address has received a total of 9.30857859 BTC—equivalent to approximately $100.000,00 or 90.000,00 EUR today.

It’s nearly impossible to use the internet without being asked about cookies. A typical pop-up will offer to either “accept all” or “reject all”. Sometimes, there may be a third option, or a link to further tweak your preferences.

These pop-ups and banners are distracting, and your first reaction is likely to get them out of the way as soon as possible – perhaps by hitting that “accept all” button.

But what are cookies, exactly? Why are we constantly asked about them, and what happens when we accept or reject them? As you will see, each choice comes with implications for your online privacy.

An advisor to al-Qaida. One of the founders of Hezbollah. The head of an Iraqi militia group known for attacks on U.S. troops. And a top official with the Houthi rebels who recently lashed out at the “criminal Trump.”

These are among the U.S.-sanctioned terrorists who appear to have paid, premium accounts on Elon Musk's X, a new Tech Transparency Project investigation has found, raising questions about the platform's dealings with individuals who have been deemed a threat to U.S. national security.

Regulations enforced by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) prohibit U.S. companies from engaging in transactions with sanctioned individuals or entities unless they are licensed or otherwise authorized by the government. X’s policies explicitly state that its premium services are off limits to users subject to OFAC sanctions.

But TTP found premium blue checkmark accounts for multiple terrorists and others under OFAC-enforced sanctions. Some of these accounts even had an “ID verified” badge, meaning that X confirmed their identity after they submitted a government-issued ID and a selfie to the company. Several made use of revenue-generating features offered by X, including a button for tips.

The findings add to questions, first raised by TTP in February 2024, about X’s adherence to sanctions designed to protect U.S. national interests, even as the company maintains it has a “robust and secure” approach to its monetization features. X, formerly known as Twitter, once handed out blue checkmarks to notable figures for free. But after taking over the company, Musk turned the blue checkmark into a paid product and required users to purchase a premium subscription to obtain them.

X’s ongoing dealings with U.S.-sanctioned terrorists on its platform are all the more striking given that Musk, who has been leading the Trump administration’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), chastised the Treasury Department in February for lacking “basic controls” to track payments and ensure they don’t end up going to terrorist organizations and other wrongful recipients. Speaking at a televised Oval Office appearance with Trump, Musk said such controls are “in place in any company.”

X did not provide a comment on the findings when contacted by TTP.

X says it uses three companies for ID verification. Two of the companies, Au10tix and Stripe, declined to comment. A third company, Persona, did not respond to a request for comment.

In an era defined by polarized views on everything from public health to politics, a new Tulane University study offers insight into why people may struggle to change their minds—especially when they turn to the internet for answers.

To start, the team built an alphabet of characters using four different monomers, or molecular building blocks with different electrochemical properties. Each character was composed of different combinations of the four monomers, which yielded a total of 256 possible characters. To test the method, they used the molecular alphabet to synthesize a chain-like polymer representing an 11-character password (‘Dh&@dR%P0W¢’), which they subsequently decoded using a method based on the molecules’ electrochemical properties.

The team’s decoding method takes advantage of the fact that certain chain-like polymers can be broken down by removing one building block at a time from the end of the chain. Since the monomers were designed to have unique electrochemical properties, this step-by-step degradation results in electrical signals that can be used to decipher the sequential identity of the monomers within the polymer.

“The voltage gives you one piece of information —the identity of the monomer currently being degraded—and so we scan through different voltages and watch this movie of the molecule being broken down, which tells us which monomer is being degraded at which point in time,” says Pasupathy. “Once we pinpoint which monomers are where, we can piece that together to get the identities of the characters in our encoded alphabet.”

One downside of the method is that each molecular message can only be read once, since decoding the polymers involves degrading them. The decoding process also takes time—around 2.5 hours for the 11-character password—but the team are working on methods to speed up the process.

Imagine if doctors could precisely print miniature capsules capable of delivering cells needed for tissue repair exactly where they are needed inside a beating heart. A team of scientists led by Caltech has taken a significant step toward that ultimate goal, having developed a method for 3D printing polymers at specific locations deep within living animals. The technique relies on sound for localization and has already been used to print polymer capsules for selective drug delivery as well as glue-like polymers to seal internal wounds.

Website.

The latest addition to neal.fun is a road trip simulator using Google Street View and a custom overlay. Viewers vote every ten seconds to choose a direction. As expected with anything decided by an internet vote, it is total anarchy. The car drives in circles, heads down dead ends, and has at least once barreled down a bike path.

Members of the very chill Discord server dedicated to the road trip, embedded on the site, are in a constant battle to unify the collective, possibly drunk, drivers. The "pathists" are trying to go straight to Canada, while the "detourists" are just looking for cool stuff. Right now, the insane car is taking a detour en route to Bar Harbor, Maine, to make a quick stop at Hadley Beach and possibly drive into the ocean.

Viewers also vote on the embedded FM radio station. The current station is WBOR, the radio station of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, which is likely enjoying its highest listener numbers ever. Don't forget to honk the horn and play with the little tree air freshener. Onward to Canada!

Source

This is republished here under Boing Boing terms.

Chen and a team of UW researchers have designed a headphone system that translates several speakers at once, while preserving the direction and qualities of people’s voices. The team built the system, called Spatial Speech Translation, with off-the-shelf noise-cancelling headphones fitted with microphones. The team’s algorithms separate out the different speakers in a space and follow them as they move, translate their speech and play it back with a 2-4 second delay.