Comment Bit of trivia (Score 1) 139
Where is one of the last places you'd expect a rear-view mirror?
The SR-71 had one.
The practical use case was checking the deployment of the landing parachute.
Comment Re:Shitty Extrapolation (Score 1) 34
Speaking of forensics, if you're a law-abiding citizen who just wants to keep private information private, iOS lockdown mode will reported halt the Coruna forensics tool in its tracks. Source, Eva Galperin at EFF. It's a royal PITA to use though.
Comment Re:Big picture problem (Score 1) 34
Or, as Robert Morris Sr. said about breaking confidential communications, "Look for plaintext. It comes up in the darnedest place", or words to that effect.
Comment Re:Where does the data live? (Score 4, Informative) 26
Thanks for your questions, Freenet caches data but it isn’t meant to be a long-term storage network. It’s better to think of it as a communication system. Data persists as long as at least one node remains subscribed to it. If nobody subscribes (including the author), it will eventually disappear from the network. So yes, if only your node subscribes then the data will only exist there and won’t be available when your machine is offline. But if other nodes subscribe it will be replicated automatically and remain available even if your node goes offline.
Comment Re:2023 (Score 1) 26
Not from 2023, the linked video is from last month. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Submission + - New Freenet Network Launches With River Group Chat (freenet.org)
Sanity writes: Freenet’s new generation peer-to-peer network is now operational, along with the first application built on the network: a decentralized group chat system called River.
The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure.
An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube.
Slashdot previously covered the reboot of Freenet in 2023 in this article.
The new version is a complete redesign of the original project, focusing on real-time decentralized applications rather than static content distribution. Applications run as WebAssembly-based contracts across a small-world peer network, allowing software to operate directly on the network without centralized infrastructure.
An introductory video demonstrating the system is available on YouTube.
Slashdot previously covered the reboot of Freenet in 2023 in this article.
Comment Re:This Is How It Starts (Score 1) 107
Starts? This has been ongoing for a long time.
Comment Re: Make them occasionally? (Score 1) 186
...you realize that pennies don't solve that "problem," right? We already have to round the final total for virtually all purchases after calculating the tax.
Comment Re:Substack is trash (Score 1) 28
FWIW, they did say the push notification promoting a Nazi was an error that got debugged. https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
Comment Re:Chilling (Score 1) 200
There is a school of thought which holds that past a certain scale, effective moderation becomes impossible. I've done moderation work and it took tons of judgement.
Comment Re:seems excessive (Score 1) 79
I know what that would do to my morale.
Comment SF explored this a very long time ago (Score 1) 65
The story "Q. U. R." had an inventor simplify robots which were going insane from having humanoid features they had no use for. 1943.
Comment Don't believe this for one second. (Score 4, Informative) 42
Just last week, we received notification that IBM is rolling out a "program" to upper-level employees with decades of experience. The idea is that we would work reduced hours for the next year at full pay, and then leave IBM after a year (next March, I believe.)
Of course, this is for US employees only. I think we can be sure that the replacements for these employees (if there are any) won't be in the US.
Comment Misleading... (Score 4, Interesting) 31
You didn't "cut cable" if you didn't have it in the first place; the number they're citing is a percentage of total households without cable, not the number of total households that had cable and got rid of it.
Submission + - Another large Black hole in "our" Galaxy (arxiv.org)
RockDoctor writes: A recent paper on ArXiv reports a novel idea about the central regions of "our" galaxy.
Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.
This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)
The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.
This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")
Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.
As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.
Remember the hoopla a few years ago about radio-astronomical observations producing an "image" of our central black hole — or rather, an image of the accretion disc around the black hole — long designated by astronomers as "Sagittarius A*" (or SGR-A*)? If you remember the image published then, one thing should be striking — it's not very symmetrical. If you think about viewing a spinning object, then you'd expect to see something with a "mirror" symmetry plane where we would see the rotation axis (if someone had marked it). If anything, that published image has three bright spots on a fainter ring. And the spots are not even approximately the same brightness.
This paper suggests that the image we see is the result of the light (radio waves) from SGR-A* being "lensed" by another black hole, near (but not quite on) the line of sight between SGR-A* and us. By various modelling approaches, they then refine this idea to a "best-fit" of a black hole with mass around 1000 times the Sun, orbiting between the distance of the closest-observed star to SGR-A* ("S2" — most imaginative name, ever!), and around 10 times that distance. That's far enough to make a strong interaction with "S2" unlikely within the lifetime of S2 before it's accretion onto SGR-A*.)
The region around SGR-A* is crowded. Within 25 parsecs (~80 light years, the distance to Regulus [in the constellation Leo] or Merak [in the Great Bear]) there is around 4 times more mass in several millions of "normal" stars than in the SGR-A* black hole. Finding a large (not "super massive") black hole in such a concentration of matter shouldn't surprise anyone.
This proposed black hole is larger than anything which has been detected by gravitational waves (yet) ; but not immensely larger — only a factor of 15 or so. (The authors also anticipate the "what about these big black holes spiralling together?" question : quote "and the amplitude of gravitational waves generated by the binary black holes is negligible.")
Being so close to SGR-A*, the proposed black hole is likely to be moving rapidly across our line of sight. At the distance of "S2" it's orbital period would be around 26 years (but the "new" black hole is probably further out than than that). Which might be an explanation for some of the variability and "flickering" reported for SGR-A* ever since it's discovery.
As always, more observations are needed. Which, for SGR-A* are frequently being taken, so improving (or ruling out) this explanation should happen fairly quickly. But it's a very interesting, and fun, idea.
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