technology

I recently had a memory come back to being on aol sometime in 2001 and chatting with someone who claimed to be from Japan. This was in an anime chat room I used to visit.

Was the service available outside the USA?

On Friday night, cryptocurrency scammers briefly hacked the LEGO website to promote a fake Lego token that could be purchased with Ethereum.

During the breach, the hacker replaced the main banner for the official LEGO website with an image showing crypto tokens branded with the "LEGO" logo and text stating, "Our new LEGO Coin is officially out! Buy the new LEGO Coin today and unlock secret rewards!"

According to LEGO Reddit moderator "mescad," the breach took place at 9 PM EST and lasted approximately 75 minutes until 10:15 PM ET, when the site was restored.

Unlike many cryptocurrency scams, this one did not promote a malicious site with a crypto drainer that stole your assets when you connected your wallet.

Instead, clicking the "Buy now" link brought visitors to the Uniswap cryptocurrency platform, where you could purchase the LEGO scam token using Ethereum.

LEGO confirmed the breach to BleepingComputer but would not share details on how the threat actors gained access to their website.

"On 5 October 2024, an unauthorised banner briefly appeared on LEGO.com. It was quickly removed, and the issue has been resolved," LEGO told BleepingComputer.

"No user accounts have been compromised, and customers can continue shopping as usual. The cause has been identified and we are implementing measures to prevent this from happening again."

Overall, the attack was a failure, with only a few people purchasing the LEGO token for a few hundred dollars.

For years and decades now the concept of terraforming Mars has kept researchers and science experts on their feet scratching their heads to find a solution. This enthusiasm came from various fictional novels and movies that have given scientists hope that perhaps they can implement this idea. According to research, Mars has the potential to be humanity’s second home and they are trying to make this concept a reality.

If Mars is ever to be terraformed, it will be a monumental task. Terraforming Mars could take decades or even centuries in its initial stages. Additionally, we do not have the technological capacity to implement this initiative. This sobering realisation highlights the enormous obstacles that stand in our way of realising the aim of altering the Red Planet. NASA needs to reassess the grand dream of Terraforming Mars

The dream or vision of making Mars a planet that can give life to humanity is an interesting one. This concept has been part of scientific language and conversation for decades now and it promises not to just give humanity a different perspective, but, also to serve as plan B as the Earth is changing. Scientists have hypothesised that humanity may establish conditions conducive to human life on Mars by releasing greenhouse gases and altering Martian.

NASA has admitted to this impossible mission stating that It is not possible to terraform Mars with current technology. Mars’ thin atmosphere and deficiency in vital resources such as enough carbon dioxide that would be required to start a greenhouse effect and warm the planet are the main obstacles. The idea of converting Mars into an environment more like Earth is significantly more difficult than first thought due to the harsh reality of the planet’s current status.

Therefore, the issue is not entirely based on technology, but also based on the enormity of the resources needed. Less than 1% of Earth’s atmosphere is found on Mars, and the planet does not have a magnetic field to shield it from cosmic radiation. It is therefore a wise idea for scientists and researchers to discard this idea since reports state that it could take thousands of decades to implement this idea. Unless a new technology advances enough to take on this big idea. Obstacles on the journey to a habitable Mars: Scientific, material, and time

Mars does not have the nature or resources that are similar to Earth that can even give us hope. If it comprises less than 1% of what the Earth attributes, then it could be a waste of time, resources and investments. Due to the abundance of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere (earth), heat is retained and a rather stable climate is produced. Mars’s sparse atmosphere prevents the planet from efficiently retaining heat.

According to Bonsor (n.d.), NASA is reportedly developing a solar sail propulsion technology that would harness solar energy to power spaceships through the use of enormous reflective mirrors. Placing these massive mirrors a few hundred thousand kilometres away from Mars would be another way to use them: to heat the Martian surface by reflecting solar radiation.

NASA has found that, even in the event that all of Mars’ CO2 could be released, the atmospheric pressure required for human survival without a spacesuit would not be produced. The entire accessible carbon dioxide is insufficient to generate a habitable atmosphere, and transferring more gases from Earth or other celestial planets is currently beyond our technical capabilities.

The lack of a magnetic field on Mars presents another significant difficulty. The Earth’s magnetic field is essential for protecting the world from solar winds and dangerous cosmic radiation, which would otherwise remove our atmosphere. Mars has a thin atmosphere now because billions of years ago, the planet lost its magnetic field. It is just not possible to build an artificial magnetic shield using the technologies available today in order to terraform Mars.

The idea of terraforming may not be fully realised for several millennia, even though humans might visit Mars this century. It took the Earth billions of years to develop into a planet on which plants and animals could flourish. It is not an easy task to change the Martian landscape to resemble Earth. To create a livable environment and introduce life to the icy, arid planet of Mars, generations of human creativity and labour will be required (Bonsor, n.d).

I want to get one.

The neat part of this is that they're requiring Google to give up their library of apps to other stores and won't allow them to buy up exclusives for at least 3 years. I suspect we will see a lot of scam app stores really soon, though.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/20849407

The Fediverse has been teaching me how to be a better digital citizen. Actually, let me rephrase that: without the shadow of a doubt, the Fediverse has made me a better digital citizen.

You may have heard in passing how Fediverse networks are considered to be “ethical social media” – but this description has rarely been followed up by an explanation of how and why. I’d like to give it a shot, through the prism of my personal experience.

this is cool but all my homies hate turing machines, boolean circuits are better

I'm not a lawyer, but I know tech companies run social media platforms to create data models about users for ad platforms. It seems to me that they could attempt to integrate themselves into a fediverse network and still harvest data, and not even provide services. So perhaps a software license could require that content posted to the platform by users is by default licensed under CC-BY-SA-NC or something that would prevent this.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/05/asia/hong-kong-police-cameras-facial-recognition-intl-hnk-dst/index.html

Been playing around with it a bit, very easy to theme, although I think that creating some sort of icon maker for it would be a good idea.

Link here: http://aap.papnet.eu/pub/plan9/themes/Themes.html

Hey c/technology,

I've been enamored by this idea of an internet that runs solely off of solar power. To my surprise, a project like this already exists. It's not exactly like I pictured it, and it leans off a lot of existing infrastructure, but it actually exists unlike my imagination. I'm not involved with this project in any way, I only found it recently and well, I think it looks pretty fucking cool.

Anyways, after seeing the discussion on the Mozilla post yesterday (https://hexbear.net/post/3606323), there seems to be a lot of real desire amoung users here for an alternative to the bloated cesspool known as the modern internet. A common thread I read was this desire to return a more text-based, less rich media focused content. Oh, and LESS ADS. The limitations of a solar web server not only encourage a focus on these but actually require it. An excerpt from the Solar Protocol Manifesto says it way better than I ever could:

"In response and by working within natural limitations, we have deliberately chosen not to use large assets nor energy-intensive tracking technologies on this website. A solar-powered web could reduce the opportunity for these kinds of surveillance and data-driven practices and the business models that go with them, something that is likely to have desirable political effects. As Timothy Mitchel points out in Carbon Democracy, different energy regimes create different political possibilities. "

Sounds tight to me. I didn't see any previous posts here so I figured I'd create this discussion to see what c\technology thinks. As for me, I'm pretty close to ordering a few panels myself and get my hands dirty using the blueprints from Solar Protocol. I think it looks fun as hell.

Anyways, enough of my rambling. What does c\technology think about this? Follow up question: would there be any desire to make a solar protocol-compatible Hexbear instance?

So I use Chromium for work. I installed it through Discovery and selected the "From Fedora Linux" option. It's worked fine for months. Then this morning, I closed out of it then opened it up later and it simply would not launch. It gives the little bouncy icon for a moment, then nothing. So I fiddle around with it, and downloaded the flatpak version, which worked, but I don't want it. Any idea how I can get it back up and running?

Running Plasma 6.1.5, Wayland. I already tried hopping into the Gnome desktop and that didn't work. Thanks in advance!

I know people here are very skeptical of AI in general, and there is definitely a lot of hype, but I think the progress in the last decade has been incredible.

Here are some quotes

“In my field of quantum physics, it gives significantly more detailed and coherent responses” than did the company’s last model, GPT-4o, says Mario Krenn, leader of the Artificial Scientist Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Light in Erlangen, Germany.

Strikingly, o1 has become the first large language model to beat PhD-level scholars on the hardest series of questions — the ‘diamond’ set — in a test called the Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark (GPQA)1. OpenAI says that its scholars scored just under 70% on GPQA Diamond, and o1 scored 78% overall, with a particularly high score of 93% in physics

OpenAI also tested o1 on a qualifying exam for the International Mathematics Olympiad. Its previous best model, GPT-4o, correctly solved only 13% of the problems, whereas o1 scored 83%.

Kyle Kabasares, a data scientist at the Bay Area Environmental Research Institute in Moffett Field, California, used o1 to replicate some coding from his PhD project that calculated the mass of black holes. “I was just in awe,” he says, noting that it took o1 about an hour to accomplish what took him many months.

Catherine Brownstein, a geneticist at Boston Children’s Hospital in Massachusetts, says the hospital is currently testing several AI systems, including o1-preview, for applications such as connecting the dots between patient characteristics and genes for rare diseases. She says o1 “is more accurate and gives options I didn’t think were possible from a chatbot”.

The dialectic of enshitification

I contacted Amazon customer service for the first time since I got my Kindle PW3 in 2017 with "Special Offers". Even after years of ads they want the full $20 to disable the special offers. I said thanks, but not for me! But as part of this process to get them to remove the special offers I preemptively turned on the WiFi on my Kindle for the first time in a long while. Somehow doing so deleted all of my Calibre-managed ebooks. I'm not kidding.

BTW, if you have a kindle do not connect it to WiFi! Especially if it's still on a blessed older firmware. You do not want to let it accidentally upgrade to a version that cannot be jailbroken, not until you are in full control and awareness of the upgrade process yourself.

So with nothing to lose and all my ~~apes~~ ebooks... gone, I said to hell with it. I jailbroke my Kindle following the instructions here (THANK GOODNESS I WAS ON A JAILBREAKABLE FW). This process involves wiping the contents of your Kindle, which effectively already happened to me.

Then I followed the instructions here to install MRPI + KUAL. MRPI is like a command line package installer and KUAL is a GUI one.

In my jailbreak journey I also referenced this page https://blog.fabricemonasterio.dev/kindle-jailbreak/ for some tips and workflow ideas, including how to get a dictionary for the next step...

Which brings me to the Knock Out punch of why this was at all worth it. I installed https://koreader.rocks/. KOReader is an alternative ebook reader interface. By analogy, the experience is like taking your old mp3 player and installing RockBox on it to make it actually good. KOReader is similar, but it isn't a fully alternative operating system. It just kills the default React Native interface process and loads its own when you choose to use it. It also supports epubs natively. It is way more featureful and customizable compared to the default Kindle reader. In fact, it's a bit overwhelming at first. After getting a bit more used to it, I really appreciate what it does, and the advanced customization it offers.

I will admit that navigating its UI is a bit clunkier than Amazon's UI, but I will take a bit of clunky any day when it adds native epub and superior pdf support.

So now I have a Kindle that can load an alternative, superior interface, get epubs pushed to it wirelessly with Calibre, shows me the book I'm reading on the lock screen, and doesn't display or present any advertisements anywhere. I really like my Kindle again.

https://x.com/Tayray_b/status/1841010032768663882