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Submission + - Thanks to robots, Ukraine is now talking about winning, not just surviving (defenseone.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: A small but growing number of European officials and analysts are saying what four years ago was unthinkable: Ukraine isn’t just surviving its grueling war with Russia, it is in some ways thriving and may even be on a path to victory.

This isn’t yet captured in headlines—for example, about last weekend’s barrage of Russian drones and missiles around Ukraine—but in the details, like how some 90 percent were intercepted.

Several long-term trends have shifted in Ukraine’s favor, and the core reason is its fierce focus on AI and robotics.

Submission + - Microsoft Deliberately Bricking All Office for Mac 2019/2021 Installations (osnews.com) 2

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: MacOS users who opted to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for macOS back in 2019 or 2021, eschewing the Office 365 subscription, so you could keep on using Office 2019/2021 forever if you wanted to. Just like in the old days.

Consumer Rights Wiki reports:

"Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires.[1] After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would "continue to function."[2] The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined "reduced functionality mode," in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved.[1][3] By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft's site; the "continue to function" clause was removed.[4][2]" https://consumerrights.wiki/w/...

Microsoft’s advice to the users they’re stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it’s not because the software industry is a clown show.

Comment Re:"Just eat less, keep input output" know-it-alls (Score 1) 116

by Aviation Pete (#66169092) Attached to: Ozempic May Be Reshaping the Brain, Scientists Say

Your constant hunger is as much a result of habits or boredom as of an empty stomach.

When I did my masters, I was forced to use the crappy MS Fortran compiler of the day, and resolved I will not go to lunch before the code compiles. Turns out that I reached this state only at 3 or 4 in the afternoon when the canteen had long closed. Did that for a week and felt no hunger around lunchtime anymore.

So your habit of stuffing something in your mouth every two hours makes sure you will feel hungry after the next two hours. Yes, it does cost some discipline to break that habit, but you will be surprised how quickly you will adapt and will be able to work for a longer stretch. Same with boredom - your visit at the fridge is as much a result of desiring variety as of being hungry. Kick that habit, do something that keeps your mind occupied, and you will go without feeling the need to eat something for much longer stretches.

It is a matter of eating less, after all.

Submission + - I found a second vote.gov -- and it's registered to the White House

Submitted by As_I_Please
As_I_Please writes: The Drey Dossier reports that the National Design Studio, an office created by executive order and which reports only to the White House, has been building copies of federal agency websites like vote.gov, passports.gov, login.gov and others.

What [the National Design Studio] is doing is taking the parts of the federal government that touch you directly, your prescription, your voter registration, your passport, your federal login, out of the agencies that legally own them and rebuilding them on White House infrastructure. Vote.gov belongs to the Election Assistance Commission, and the studio built a copy. Passports belong to the State Department, and the studio is building a replacement this week. Login.gov belonged to GSA, and the studio’s guy runs it now.

Trump has said publicly that this infrastructure is for other presidents, and he is right about that. It is the one thing in this story I take him at his word on. The infrastructure outlasts him. Whoever wins in 2028 inherits the websites, the vendors, the data, and the hardware, sealed and waiting.

NDS Infrastructure Map — my live working github map of every National Design Studio subdomain I have found, filterable by status, registrant, and parent domain. If you want to retrace this investigation or watch new subdomains appear in real time, start here.

Submission + - China Is Testing Its State Surveillance Model Abroad (nytimes.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: When a remote Pacific village asked for help with rowdy youth, the Chinese police arrived with a surveillance system. Then came the backlash.

Their solution was to introduce an obscure Mao-era community surveillance system: the Fengqiao Experience.

Named after Fengqiao, a town in eastern China, the system encouraged neighbors to spy and snitch on one another to root out political enemies. The system has been revived under Mr. Xi as part of a push to snuff out any challenges to the Chinese Communist Party.

In China, the system calls for the police to monitor individual households in sprawling apartment complexes, in one example assigning each unit a color code that denoted whether occupants presented a security risk. The police have also visited the homes of minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs to promote party policies. Government workers have visited churches to give “anti-cult” lectures. And companies are required to register their employees in police databases.

The idea of introducing such a heavy-handed style of state surveillance in the Solomon Islands alarmed local politicians and observers in nearby countries like Australia, who worried it could give the government the tools to stifle freedoms.

The Fengqiao pilot was suspended after an outcry. And the election this month of Matthew Wale, a prime minister who has historically been skeptical of Beijing, raises questions about China’s foothold in the country, and whether its ideas travel as easily as the party hopes.

Comment Re:What was the argument against Airbus? (Score 1) 43

Airbus has a flight laws system. That flight laws system which would have told the pilot they were in a stall failed because of ice accumulation during a thunderstorm.

The pilot didn't know they were in the stall because the otherwise highly redundant system which should have warned him didn't work.

WRONG. The system was off, precisely because the sensor had faulty readings. Any pilot with a bit of Airbus training should have been able to read the state the autopilot was in (Direct Law), because there is an illuminated indicator for this. In an Airbus A340, a reversion from Normal Law to Direct Law is explicitly indicated to the crew on the FMA (Flight Mode Annunciator) at the top of each Primary Flight Display. In Direct Law, most protections are off and the stick commands are directly used for control deflections precisely because the basis for the proper functioning of the protections is not present anymore. This is to protect the pilot from computer errors. Of course, this assumes a halfway competent pilot at the controls and not a complete idiot.

To use a car analogy: You are basically arguing that the car shouldn't have skidded with the brake pedal fully depressed, because the antilock system should have worked. But in that case, the equivalent to the antilock system had switched itself off because the inputs for its proper operation were not available.

Submission + - Leaked Documents Show Cisco Systems' Relationship with Israeli Security State (dropsitenews.com)

Submitted by Alain Williams
Alain Williams writes: Internal documents show Cisco’s growing collaboration with the Israeli military over the course of the genocide in Gaza.
Cisco makes a point of publicly highlighting its commitment to corporate social responsibility, and building “an inclusive future for all” in the dozens of countries around the world in which it operates. Yet the company’s aggressive pursuit of contracts with the Israeli government and military—a small yet growing part of its global business—has led to accusations that behind this sunny facade the networking giant is profiting from genocide.

Submission + - CIA whistleblower claims Anthony Fauci part of lab leak 'cover-up' (nypost.com)

Submitted by RoccamOccam
RoccamOccam writes: A CIA whistleblower appeared publicly for the first time Wednesday to testify to a Senate panel that Dr. Anthony Fauci improperly “influenced” intelligence analyses about the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic to downplay findings that it most likely resulted from a laboratory accident in China.

Submission + - Trump on Iran war's cost: "I don't think about American financial situation." (the-independent.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the plight of Americans finding it harder and harder to make ends meet and rising gas and consumer prices simply aren’t on his mind as the months-long Iran war and impasse over the Strait of Hormuz continue to fuel surging inflation in the United States.

Trump made the stunning brush-off statement as he departed the White House for Beijing, where he will be feted by Chinese leader Xi Jinping at a state visit, including a lavish Thursday night banquet at the Great Hall of the People.

Submission + - There's an Unhinged New Video Game About Trump and the Iran War (wired.com) 1

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: A new video game about President Donald Trump’s war in Iran features fights with the pope and New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani. It’s impossible to win, and that’s the point.

The game, Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell, was developed by Secret Handshake, an anonymous group of artists behind a handful of satirical works mocking the Trump administration. The game is available to play online, but three fully functional arcade cabinets are currently installed at the Washington, DC, War Memorial. The games will remain there for the next few days.

In the game, Trump is the playable character, on a quest to collect barrels of oil and ideas for Truth Social posts, to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and win the war. During the game, Trump’s social media posts do little to move the needle, creating an endless cycle of tasks and threats that ultimately lead nowhere. Even if the game is unwinnable, players can lose, and do so abruptly.

Submission + - How is it that Youtube's auto-generated subtitles are so appallingly bad?

Submitted by Anne Thwacks
Anne Thwacks writes: I frequently use the subtitles on YouTube — either not to disturb others in the room, or because my hearing is not very good.
The subtitling is terrible! Almost every sentence has a huge error. Proper names are more often wrong than right. Non-English place names are almost always mangled to barely recognizable, and no effort whatever is made to use context to figure out whether a place name is Russian or Arabic, and often complete garbage is used in place of a common French, Spanish or Italian name.
If AI actually works (I have my doubts about this), surely it would be possible to figure out language contexts: it it is about an event in Italy, then expect a lot of Italian names. If it is about the Russia-Ukraine war, then expect places in Russia or Ukraine to be more plausible than mindless gobbledegook!
Does YouTube not know that there are places in the world that are not in America?
However, plenty of names of people and places famous in America are also regularly screwed up.
I am sure that the vast majority of the foul-ups could be fixed by the use of a dictionary — available from a very popular book retailer who would be happy to have some free publicity. (But they will get nothing free from me).
However, the situation seems to be getting worse!
Do Americans sue people for spelling their names right?
Is there another reason for this appalling stupidity?
Enquiring minds want to know!

Comment Re:ah yes, evil China (Score 1) 73

No moral standing? What countries have higher moral standing than the US (not saying we're top of the heap)?

That list is easy to compile. And long.

Start with the Scandinavians. Add all of the Baltics. Continue in Oceania and then East Asia with Japan and South Korea.

Admittedly, now we move to an area of the world with candidates which will feature at the opposite end of that list.

Submission + - An Amateur just Solved a 60-year-old Math Problem—by Asking AI (scientificamerican.com)

Submitted by joshuark
joshuark writes: Scientific American reports that a ChatGPT AI has proved a conjecture with a method no human had developed. A 23 year old student Liam Price just cracked a 60-year-old problem that world-class mathematicians have tried and failed to solve.

The new solution that Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5.4 Pro and posted on www.erdosproblems.com, a website devoted to the Erds problems.

The question Price solved—or prompted ChatGPT to solve—concerns special sets of whole numbers, where no number in the set can be evenly divided by any other. Erds called these “primitive sets” because of their connection to similarly indivisible prime numbers.Price wasn’t aware of this history when he entered the problem into ChatGPT.

Price sent it to his occasional collaborator Kevin Barreto, a second-year undergraduate in mathematics at the University of Cambridge. The duo had jump-started the AI-for-Erds craze late last year by prompting a free version of ChatGPT with open problems chosen at random from the Erds problems website. Reviewing Price’s message, Barreto realized what they had was special, and experts whom he notified quickly took notice.

Submission + - Europe Demolishes Russian Soyuz Launch Pad in French Guiana (united24media.com)

Submitted by Geoffrey.landis
Geoffrey.landis writes: Up until 2022, the Russians had an agreement with the European Space Agency to launch their Soyuz rockets from the Kourou launch site in French Guiana. The 15-year cooperation program between ESA and Roscosmos conducted 26 successful launches before being suspended after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Kourou launch site's near-equatorial location is advantageous for commercial launches due to the additional velocity rockets gain from Earth’s rotation. The demolition of the Russian launch pad at Kourou included a controlled explosion of a 52-meter mobile service tower. The remaining infrastructure at the site—including the assembly and testing complex, railway lines, liquid oxygen storage facilities, and fueling systems—will be transferred to MaiaSpace, a French startup affiliated with Arianespace. The company plans to reuse up to 80% of the existing infrastructure for its own launch vehicle program.

Submission + - Mozilla Thunderbolt is an open-source AI client focused on control and self-host (nerds.xyz)

Submitted by BrianFagioli
BrianFagioli writes: Mozillaâ(TM)s email subsidiary MZLA Technologies just introduced Thunderbolt, an open-source AI client aimed at organizations that want to run AI on their own infrastructure instead of relying entirely on cloud services. The idea is to give companies full control over their data, models, and workflows while still offering things like chat, research tools, automation, and integration with enterprise systems through the Haystack AI framework. Native apps are planned for Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. Personally, I like the self-hosted concept, but the name âoeThunderboltâ feels like a miss since there are already a ton of unrelated tech products using that name.

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