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Submission + - US Teachers Spent $3.24 Billion of Their Own Money on Classroom Expenses in 2023 (myelearningworld.com) 2

Submitted by LookMan
LookMan writes: The latest research reveals that the average teacher spent $853.90 out of pocket on school supplies in 2023, setting a new record for the highest amount ever reported. This is a significant increase from last year and underscores the growing financial burden shouldered by educators.

The discrepancy between the allowable tax deduction and actual spending means that teachers are spending nearly 2.8 times more on classroom supplies than they can deduct.

Collectively, teachers in the United States spent an estimated $3.24 billion on essential classroom items in 2023, like pencils, paper, cleaning supplies, books, software, and other materials.

Submission + - Toyota's hydrogen future is crumbling. Owners suing. (insideevs.com)

Submitted by whoever57
whoever57 writes: Toyota Mirai owners are fed up and disillusioned. Hydrogen fuel pumps are hard to find and, rather than new pumps opening, they are closing down. Owners feel misled about the costs and availability of hydrogen fuel stations. Even if a Mirai owner can find a fuel station, it may not be operating.

Moreover, refuelling is frequently a long and problematic process, with pumps taking over an hour to fill a tank and cars getting stuck to the fuel pump for hours. It would be quicker to charge a battery EV.

Naturally, resale values of these cars are plummeting. Even without those problems, once the hydrogen fuel cars that Toyota gives now owners has expired or is out of funds, the hydrogen fuel is very expensive.

Submission + - Study: Alphabetical order of surnames may affect grading (umich.edu)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Knowing your ABCs is essential to academic success, but having a last name starting with A, B or C might also help make the grade. An analysis by University of Michigan researchers of more than 30 million grading records from U-M finds students with alphabetically lower-ranked names receive lower grades. This is due to sequential grading biases and the default order of students’ submissions in Canvas — the most widely used online learning management system — which is based on alphabetical rank of their surnames.

What’s more, the researchers found, those alphabetically disadvantaged students receive comments that are notably more negative and less polite, and exhibit lower grading quality measured by post-grade complaints from students.

Submission + - GPT-4 can exploit real vulnerabilities by reading security advisories (theregister.com)

Submitted by tippen
tippen writes:

In a newly released paper, four University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) computer scientists – Richard Fang, Rohan Bindu, Akul Gupta, and Daniel Kang – report that OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM) can autonomously exploit vulnerabilities in real-world systems if given a CVE advisory describing the flaw.

"To show this, we collected a dataset of 15 one-day vulnerabilities that include ones categorized as critical severity in the CVE description," the US-based authors explain in their paper.

"When given the CVE description, GPT-4 is capable of exploiting 87 percent of these vulnerabilities compared to 0 percent for every other model we test (GPT-3.5, open-source LLMs) and open-source vulnerability scanners (ZAP and Metasploit)."

Submission + - Canada's Disastrous ArriveCan App Received a Procurement Award

Submitted by belmolis
belmolis writes: During Covid, the Canada Border Services Agency created ArriveCan, an app that allows travelers entering Canada to electronically submit travel documents and customs declarations. The app was so buggy that many could not use it, and erroneously ordered thousands of travelers to quarantine. At C$59.5 (US$48.4) million it was far more expensive than the initial C$80,0000 estimate.The procurement process was recently severely criticized by Auditor General Karen Hogan in a scathing report. It has now been reported that the team responsible for ArriveCan received an Unsung Heroes award from the Canadian Institute for Procurement and Material Management for its work.

Submission + - The legendary Zilog Z80 CPU is being discontinued after nearly 50 years (techspot.com)

Submitted by AmiMoJo
AmiMoJo writes: Zilog is retiring the Z80 after 48 years on the market. Originally developed as a project stemming from the Intel 8080, it eventually rose to become one of the most popular and widely used 8-bit CPUs in both gaming and general computing devices.

The iconic IC device, developed by Federico Faggin, will soon be phased out, and interested parties only have a few months left to place their orders before Zilog's manufacturing partner ends support for the technology. Federico Faggin, an Intel engineer, founded Zilog in 1974 after his work on the Intel 4004, the first 4-bit CPU. The Zilog Z80 was then released in July 1976, conceived as a software-compatible "extension" and enhancement of the Intel 8080 processor.

Submission + - Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger Speaks Out (city-journal.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Wikipedia co-founder discusses Katherine Maher and the corruption of the Internet.

Larry Sanger remembers the promise of the web. He co-founded Wikipedia in 2001, with the hope that it could sustain a “free and open” Internet—a place where information, dissent, and creativity could thrive.

At Wikipedia, he proposed a system of rules that encouraged users to “avoid bias” and maintain a “neutral point of view.”

That Internet is gone.

Submission + - "David Bray is going on unhinged racist rants on LinkedIn" (campusreform.org)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: “David Bray is going on unhinged racist rants on LinkedIn. Clearly suffering from mental illness and too unstable to be teaching classes.”

  Bray's outspoken LinkedIn posts garnered the attention of conservatives who agreed with him, as well as of campus progressives who saw his sentiments as problematic.

  One former administrator told Campus Reform that he believes that 'the university administration is persecuting Dr. Bray and altering its standard procedures.'

Submission + - The Windows Registry Adventure #1: Introduction and research results (blogspot.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In the 20-month period between May 2022 and December 2023, I thoroughly audited the Windows Registry in search of local privilege escalation bugs.

  The hive binary format is not very well suited for trivial bitflipping-style fuzzing, because it is structurally simple, and random mutations are much more likely to render (parts of) the hive unusable than to trigger any interesting memory safety violations.

  On the other hand, the registry has many properties that make it an attractive attack surface for further research, especially for manual review. It is 30+ years old, written in C, running in kernel space but highly accessible from user-mode, and it implements much more complex logic than I had previously imagined.

Submission + - Protecting Airport Data Privacy & Control from Cyber Threats

Submitted by SeanFaber
SeanFaber writes: This article on aviation cybersecurity strategies is highly informative and thought-provoking. It sheds light on the critical importance of protecting the aviation industry from cyber threats and offers valuable insights into effective security measures. The detailed analysis and expert recommendations make it a must-read for anyone interested in aviation security.

Submission + - Police responded to alarm around time of $30 million L.A. heist, but thieves... (latimes.com)

Submitted by echo123
echo123 writes: Police responded to alarm around time of $30 million Los Angeles heist, but thieves went undetected

The Los Angeles Police Department responded to three separate alarms at GardaWorld’s Sylmar cash storage facility on the day that thieves stole as much $30 million from its vault during the biggest heist in the city’s history.

Despite the officers’ presence at the property in the early hours of Easter Sunday — including around the time it is believed the sophisticated burglary was carried out — the criminals remained undetected, according to three law enforcement officials familiar with the investigation of the incident.

During at least one of the responses by a patrol car, GardaWorld was alerted, according to the officials, but the Montreal-based security services company did not register the intrusion.

The Times has previously reported that GardaWorld did not learn of the crime until opening the vault the following day, April 1. It wasn’t until then, officials said, that LAPD investigators were notified that a substantial amount of money had been taken.

Click to read more

Submission + - Ocean Spray Emits More PFAS Than Industrial Polluters, Study Finds (theguardian.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Ocean waves crashing on the world’s shores emit more PFAS into the air than the world’s industrial polluters, new research has found, raising concerns about environmental contamination and human exposure along coastlines. The study measured levels of PFAS released from the bubbles that burst when waves crash, spraying aerosols into the air. It found sea spray levels were hundreds of thousands times higher than levels in the water. The contaminated spray likely affects groundwater, surface water, vegetation, and agricultural products near coastlines that are far from industrial sources of PFAS, said Ian Cousins, a Stockholm University researcher and the study’s lead author. “There is evidence that the ocean can be an important source [of PFAS air emissions],” Cousins said. “It is definitely impacting the coastline.”

The Stockholm researchers several years ago found that PFAS from ocean waves crashing are released into the air around shorelines, then can travel thousands of kilometers through the atmosphere before the chemicals return to land. The new research looked at levels in the sea spray as waves crash by testing ocean samples between Southampton in the UK and Chile. The chemicals’ levels were higher in the northern hemisphere in general because it is more industrialized and there is not much mixing of water across the equator, Cousins said. It is unclear what the findings mean for human exposure. Inhalation of PFAS is an issue, but how much of the chemicals are breathed in, and air concentrations further from the waves, is still unknown.

Submission + - Dutch Privacy Watchdog Recommends Government Organizations Stop Using Facebook (reuters.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The Dutch privacy watchdog AP on Friday said it was recommending that government organizations should stop using Facebook as long as it is unclear what happens with personal data of users of the government's Facebook pages. "People that visit a government's page need to be able to trust that their personal and sensitive data is in safe hands," AP chairman Aleid Wolfsen said in a statement. Junior minister for digitalization Alexandra van Huffelen said Facebook parent company Meta had to make clear before the summer how it could take away the government's concerns on the safety of data. "Otherwise we will be forced to stop using Facebook, in line with this advice," she said.

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