110899816
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
Project Veritas has released alarming new undercover video, leaked documents, and testimony from a Google insider revealing the tech giant’s plans to meddle in US politics and “prevent a Trump situation in 2020.”
One aspect of the report features undercover footage of longtime Google employee and Head of Responsible Innovation, Jen Gennai, arguing against Senator Elizabeth Warren’s suggestion that the company should be broken up because a smaller company would not be able to prevent “the next Trump situation.”
“Elizabeth Warren is saying we should break up Google. And like, I love her but she’s very misguided, like that will not make it better it will make it worse, because all these smaller companies who don’t have the same resources that we do will be charged with preventing the next Trump situation, it’s like a small company cannot do that,” Gennai says.
108215434
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
A SOLAR storm is expected to close out the Easter weekend with a bombardment of solar particles set to hit our planet on Easter Monday. "Estimated time of arrival: April 22nd. Geomagnetic unrest and polar auroras are possible when the gaseous material arrives.”
107642988
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
Office Depot, Inc. and a California-based tech support software provider have agreed to pay a total of $35 million to settle Federal Trade Commission allegations that the companies tricked customers into buying millions of dollars’ worth of computer repair and technical services by deceptively claiming their software had found malware symptoms on the customers’ computers.
Also story on Hackaday
107399304
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
New Zealand police have sent notice to the owner of the Kiwi Farms internet message board demanding the preservation of IP addresses and email addresses associated with posts related to the Christchurch shootings, believed to have been committed by 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant.
KiwiFarms response is entertaining:
Tell your superiors they're going to make the entire country and its government look like clowns by trying to censor the Internet. You're a small, irrelevant island nation barely more recognizable than any other nameless pacific sovereignty. You do not have the clout to eradicate a video from the Internet and you do not have the legal reach to imprison everyone whose posted it. If anyone turns over to you the information they're asking for they're not only cowards, but they're fucking idiots. ...
If you're wondering, no. Kiwi Farms has nothing to do with New Zealand. Our name is a pointed jab at some of the mushmouthed autistic people we make fun of. Absolutely nothing about our community is NZ oriented.
107387698
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
Scientists have discovered that that in worms, a section of non-coding or ‘junk’ DNA controls the activation of a ‘master control gene’ called early growth response (EGR) which acts like a power switch, turning regeneration on or off.
“We were able to decrease the activity of this gene and we found that if you don't have EGR, nothing happens," said Dr Mansi Srivastava, Assistant Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University.
Humans also carry EGR, and produce it when cells are stressed and in need of repair, yet it does not seem to trigger large scale regeneration.
107111128
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) is running a climate change debate on his bloc, inviting experts to put forth their best arguments for and against.
Scott takes the position of "an intelligent person who doesn't happen to know the science" and is trying to sort out what people can believe or not. He's an expert at persuasion and detecting bogus arguments, and digs into the claims made by both sides.
His blog posts on the subject are pretty interesting and... climate change is losing. Badly. Some of the arguments posted *against* the climate change narrative are:
Multi-dimensional problems can’t be reduced to a single variable like CO2
People don’t understand math and physics, they’re being bamboozled
CO2 doubled already, temp should be up 4 degrees, per models
The models are NOT supported by the data
Actual temperature increase has only been half degree
Scientists are keeping quiet about climate change model problems
Climate change is BS, the data confirming BS is overwhelming
Grant money ONLY exists for those who believe and promote the climate change hoax
This might be a good topic for discussion on Slashdot. Are there datasets or arguments that the climate change side hasn't yet presented?
106946002
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
Free speech social network Gab has launched a new comments platform, Dissenter, which allows users to make comments on every single website on the Internet without fear of censorship or banning.
The Dissenter platform, which integrates with Gab as either a website or a browser extension, allows users to comment on any web page in the world, with the ability to upvote, downvote, and reply to other comments.
“A free, open-source utility that allows people to dissent from orthodoxy and express what they are really thinking, without fear of reprisal, is essential in order to wrest control of the Internet and public discourse from Silicon Valley tech giants,” [Gab founder Andrew Torba] concluded. “Gab.com and dissenter.com lead the way in keeping the Internet free. All people are welcome to use our products to express themselves freely.”
One example of recent comment censorship was review website Rotten Tomatoes’ removal of comments for unreleased movies this week, which the review website claimed was due to “trolling.”
Despite Rotten Tomatoes removing the ability for users to comment on unreleased movies, like Captain Marvel, users can comment instead through Dissenter — either through Dissenter’s website, or directly from the Rotten Tomatoes movie page through a Dissenter browser extension.
104116976
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
After it was revealed that the alleged shooter at a Pittsburgh synagogue had made threats on the social network Gab to kill Jews, multiple technology infrastructure firms dropped Gab—including domain registrar GoDaddy, web host Joyent, and payment processors PayPal and Stripe. The moves knocked Gab offline for nearly a week, during which the company painted itself as a martyr for free speech and milked the media for attention. Over the weekend, however, Gab returned to the web.
The extremist-friendly social media site’s reappearance was made possible by two companies and the men behind them: digital security provider Cloudflare, helmed by self-described “free speech absolutist” Matthew Prince, and domain registrar Epik, led by Rob Monster.
102582312
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
WikiLeaks has raised concern after Arjen Kamphuis, an associate of founder Julian Assange, went missing in Norway. The cybersecurity expert was last seen in northern Norway on August 20. WikiLeaks said that Kamphuis, an associate of founder Julian Assange, had a ticket for a flight departing on August 22 from Trondheim, which is over 700 kilometers (435 miles) south of Bodo.
"The train between the two takes (approximately) 10 hours," suggesting he disappeared either in Bodo, Trondheim or on the train, WikiLeaks said.
Norwegian police started looking into the disappearance on Sunday.
"We have started an investigation," police spokesman Tommy Bech told the French news agency AFP, adding that so far they had "no clue" where the Dutch citizen was.
The police "would not speculate about what may have happened to him," Bech said.
101929920
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
Depending on where you live, pointing your browser to Defcad.com yesterday may have shown you something you’d never seen before. It certainly did for [the author]. That’s because I live in one of the two states (as of this writing) in the United States which have scrambled to block access to the online repository of firearm CAD files after they were approved for release by the US State Department.
Anyone using the internet in those states was presented with HTTP status code 451: “Unavailable For Legal Reasons”. This code was named for Ray Bradbury’s dystopian novel “Fahrenheit 451, in which books are burned to censor the information they contain. Rather than simply returning the traditional 403 error, 451 can be used to signal that the server is willing to serve the user the information, but is being prevented from doing so by court order.
101929596
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
[[EDs: Followup to the recent slashdot article about the blocking order]]
After years of litigation, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik issued a temporary restraining order earlier in the day blocking Defense Distributed of Austin, Texas, from relaunching on Wednesday with blueprints for plastic firearms that can be "printed" by machines using computer-assisted design, or CAD.
In response, five gun-rights activist groups based in California and Washington state posted a website called Code Is Free Speech, along with what it advertised were CAD blueprints for several high-powered firearms, including the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, the AR-10 battle rifle and the Beretta 92FS semiautomatic pistol.
101914654
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
Tesla's mission is to accelerate the world toward sustainable energy. This is a daunting task that requires competing against legacy automakers, some of whom have a 100-year-old head start.
So how do you catch a 100-year lead? It appears that Tesla is using a development system known as Scrum. A concept co-founded by Jeff Sutherland and J.J. Sutherland specifically designed to accomplish "twice the work in half the time". When agile development teams use Scrum for hardware it is referred to as Extreme Manufacturing, according to its developer Joe Justice.
101863514
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
Would you like to be a rockstar developer, but without the heartache? No silly incentives, or even guitars required! [Dylan Beattie] can help, because he’s come up with a specification for the Rockstar programming language, a Turing-complete programming language whose syntax follows the conventions of 1980s rock power ballads. Of course, it’s a joke, and an excuse of some “Certified Rockstar Developer” laptop stickers, but it’s also an entertaining journey into lyrical language and compiler parsing, and the discovery that yes indeed, a singable set of classic rock lyrics can also be a compilable program.
[[NB: From the rockstar web site: "The use of comments in Rockstar programs is strongly discouraged." I like it!]]
101838962
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
[[Note to eds: the linked slashdot submission isn't mine, but the article referenced in the submission is absolutely great! It's got a lot of technical mathematical detail that our readers would enjoy, and that you don't generally get elsewhere. It would make an enjoyable read for our audience.]]
101838716
submission
Okian Warrior writes:
Hopes for an easier regulatory road for genetic engineering in European agriculture were dashed today by the Court of Justice of the European Union. In a closely watched decision, the court ruled that plants created with new gene-editing techniques that don’t involve transferring genes between organisms—such as CRISPR—must go through the same lengthy approval process as traditional transgenic plants.
Many researchers had argued that regulators should take a lighter touch when evaluating products created with the new technologies, but environmental groups and their allies successfully argued that they should be subject to the same EU rules that apply to other genetically modified organisms.
