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Submission + - Microsoft faces new complaint for allegedly aiding Israeli war crimes in Gaza (aljazeera.com)

Alain Williams writes: The Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL) has announced it filed a complaint against Microsoft, accusing the global tech giant of unlawfully processing data on behalf of the Israeli military and facilitating the killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

In the complaint, the council asked the Data Protection Commission – the European Union’s lead data regulator for the company – to “urgently investigate” Microsoft Ireland’s processing.

“Microsoft’s technology has put millions of Palestinians in danger. These are not abstract data-protection failures — they are violations that have enabled real-world violence,” Joe O’Brien, ICCL’s executive director, said in a statement.

“When EU infrastructure is used to enable surveillance and targeting, the Irish Data Protection Commission must step in — and it must use its full powers to hold Microsoft to account.”

After months of complaints from rights groups and Microsoft whistleblowers, the company said in September it cancelled some services to the Israeli military over concerns that it was violating Microsoft’s terms of service by using cloud computing software to spy on millions of Palestinians.

Submission + - European Union May Not Ban Combustion Cars After All (caranddriver.com)

sinij writes:

The European Union's plan to ban new combustion cars starting in 2035 may be over before it has a chance to go into effect, if Germany's leader has anything to say about it.

2035 target was simply infeasible with current technology. While some promising new developments, like solid state batteries, are being worked on, they are not yet ready for mass production.

Comment Re:study confirms expectations (Score 1) 192

That's actually a good question. Inks have changed somewhat over the past 5,000 years, and there's no particular reason to think that tattoo inks have been equally mobile across this timeframe.

But now we come to a deeper point. Basically, tattoos (as I've always understand it) are surgically-engineered scars, with the scar tissue supposedly locking the ink in place. It's quite probable that my understanding is wrong - this isn't exactly an area I've really looked into in any depth, so the probability of me being right is rather slim. Nonetheless, if I had been correct, then you might well expect the stuff to stay there. Skin is highly permeable, but scar tissue less so. As long as the molecules exceed the size that can migrate, then you'd think it would be fine.

That it isn't fine shows that one or more of these ideas must be wrong.

Comment It's a lot harder to make 3000 glyphs (Score 1) 93

Among widely available fonts under OFL, GNU GPL for Fonts, or other free licenses, not many of them cover the 2,100-odd Jouyou (regularly used) kanji and 1,000 name kanji that BadDreamer mentioned. It's a lot easier to make a font that covers 100-200 characters from two alphabets, such as Chilanka that covers the Latin and Malayalam scripts in a distinctive and dyslexia-friendly handwritten style, than one that covers 3,000 different kanji made of 600 radicals (as iggymanz mentioned) with manually-tuned slight variations to their shapes to make them fit next to each other in a character.

Comment Switching to kana is homophonic (Score 2) 93

you could still [write Japanese] in native language with a manageable scope by sticking to the phonetic scripts.

Exclusive use of kana (Japanese phonetic characters) was common in games for MSX, Famicom, and other 8-bit platforms. The one problem with that is the sheer number of homophones in both Chinese and Japanese, words spoken the same and written differently. Kana normally don't even distinguish which syllable a word is accented on, which would be like writing Chinese without its tones. Yet somehow Korean avoided this and switched from Chinese characters (Hanja) to a suitable phonetic alphabet (Hangul).

Submission + - new high-temp superconducting material (nature.com) 1

bobdevine writes: A Chinese group found superconductivity up to 96 K under high pressure in bilayer nickelate single crystals. The difference is that they synthesized the material at ambient pressure.

Submission + - How Long Poop Stays in Your Body Could Impact Your Health, Study Finds (sciencealert.com)

alternative_right writes: According to a 2023 review that brought together data from dozens of studies, distinct differences can be seen between the gut microbiomes of 'speeders' and 'slowpokes'.

Since the human gut microbiome is intrinsically linked to health, this could have implications that have gone unnoticed before now.

In particular, slow transit times and constipation have been linked with metabolic and inflammatory disorders, as well as neurological disorders such as Parkinson's disease.

Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 1) 43

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 5, Informative) 43

Here's where the summary goes wrong:

Artificial intelligence is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs.

Artificial Intelligence is in fact many kinds of technologies. People conflate LLMs with the whole thing because its the first kind of AI that an average person with no technical knowledge could use after a fashion.

But nobody is going to design a new rocket engine in ChatGPT. They're going to use some other kind of AI that work on problems on processes that the average person can't even conceive of -- like design optimization where there are potentially hundreds of parameters to tweak. Some of the underlying technology may have similarities -- like "neural nets" , which are just collections of mathematical matrices that encoded likelihoods underneath, not realistic models of biological neural systems. It shouldn't be surprising that a collection of matrices containing parameters describing weighted relations between features should have a wide variety of applications. That's just math; it's just sexier to call it "AI".

Submission + - The internet works thanks to a shared infrastructure that nobody owns (elpais.com) 1

alternative_right writes: In the 21st century, every government should understand that ensuring software sovereignty and security is part of its job, not only for themselves but also for businesses, society, and researchers. In the 21st century, software is the invisible infrastructure of our everyday life, like roads and bridges. Everything runs on software, and a significant portion of this is made possible by open source, which is maintained by people selflessly. If this open source breaks down, it’s as if a road or bridge collapses: everything else becomes much more complicated and dangerous.

Comment Tablet as a substitute for a netbook (Score 1) 87

I distinctly remember people recommending use of a tablet with external keyboard as a substitute for entry-level subnotebook computers when the latter were discontinued in fourth quarter 2012. This despite that major tablets ship with operating systems locked down not to run the sort of lightweight software development environments that could run on the desktop operating system of a netbook.

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