179612810
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
The Taliban have ordered internet and mobile phone data services to be cut across Afghanistan, diplomatic and industry sources said on Tuesday, as residents and monitoring services reported no connectivity and disruption to flights and financial services.
The Taliban administration offered no immediate explanation for the outage and could not be reached for comment.
The UN called on authorities to fully restore connections.
178098867
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
U.S. Vice President JD Vance joined Bluesky with the post "Hello, Bluesky, I've been told this app has become the place to go for common sense political discussion and analysis. So I'm thrilled to be here to engage with all of you." His post included a screenshot from the United States Supreme Court Decision that upheld Tennessee's law barring "gender-affirming" treatments on minors.
He then wrote "To that end, I found Justice Thomas's concurrence on medical care for transgender youth quite illuminating. He argues that many of our so-called 'experts' have used bad arguments and substandard science to push experimental therapies on our youth. I might add that many of those scientists are receiving substantial resources from big pharma to push these medicines on kids. What do you think?".
He was banned 11 minutes later.
177352185
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
Previous studies have consistently shown a long-term trend of mass loss, particularly in West Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, while glaciers in East Antarctica appeared relatively stable. However, a recent study led by Dr. Wang and Prof. Shen at Tongji University has found a surprising shift: between 2021 and 2023, the AIS experienced a record-breaking increase in overall mass.
177352079
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
Protests from furious factory workers in China demanding back pay are spreading across the country after President Trump’s tariffs on Chinese imports began impacting the communist nation’s economy.
Unrest has been reported across the country as workers have taken to the streets protesting unpaid wages and challenging unfair dismissals following the closures of factories squeezed by US tariffs, according to Radio Free Asia.
177351243
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
Ubuntu 25.10 is set to adopt sudo-rs by default. Sudo-rs is a memory-safe reimplementation of the widely-used sudo utility, written in the Rust programming language. This move is part of a broader effort by Canonical to improve the resilience and maintainability of core system components.
176893669
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
On Monday night (31 Mar 2025), SpaceX had a successful launch of Fram2, the first crewed mission to orbit Earth’s North and South poles. Lifting off at 9:46 p.m. EDT from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, the Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule carried four civilians from four nations into low-Earth orbit for a historic five-day journey. Upon orbital insertion, the crew of Fram2 became the first humans to have ever entered polar orbit and the first humans to view Earth’s poles from space.
174631678
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has initiated a new development effort called TRACTOR (Translating All C TO Rust) that "aims to achieve a high degree of automation towards translating legacy C to Rust, with the same quality and style that a skilled Rust developer would employ, thereby permanently eliminating the entire class of memory safety security vulnerabilities present in C programs."
174477301
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
Time is winding down on Olympic organizers’ plans to stage open-water swimming events in Paris’ iconic Seine River later this month. The city spent $1.5 billion on new infrastructure to clean up the Seine, yet water samples continue to show high levels of potentially toxic E. coli.
The river has been closed to swimmers for the past 100 years because of pollution, but Olympic organizers hope to stage the triathlon and marathon swimming events in the water flowing in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
Katherine Graham, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Civil and Environmental Engineering who studies the fate and transport of pathogens and their indicators in water, commented “Paris, like most large cities, has a lot of concrete and not much dirt and grass for water to soak into. Pollution builds up, and rainwater sweeps it into the sewer system. When the city gets too much rain, like it did in May, treatment centers can’t hold all the water and much of it flows into the river.”
171386321
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
A research team at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has developed a contact-separation mode triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG) with a simple structure for harvesting wave energy and powering marine sensors and transmitters.
Triboelectrification is the process by which two originally uncharged bodies become charged when brought into contact and then separated.
The key is a new mechanism for wave-driven energy-harvesting TENGs that can convert the low-amplitude, low-frequency ocean waves into high-frequency mechanical motion for more effective power generation. This new TENG must be able to operate and be triggered by any wave conditions, even in the middle of the ocean where waves have uniform or random low amplitude and frequency.
150666357
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
After many months of development, the memfd_secret() system call was finally merged for the upcoming 5.14 release of Linux. There have been many changes during this feature's development, but its core purpose remains the same: allow a user-space process to create a range of memory that is inaccessible to anybody else — kernel included. That memory can be used to store cryptographic keys or any other data that must not be exposed to others. Reportedly, it is even safe from processor vulnerabilities like Spectre because secret memory is uncached mapped.
149759417
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
For the sixth-year, Rust is the most loved language, while Python is the most wanted language for its fifth-year, in Stack Overflow's 2021 survey of 80,000 developers.
148981579
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
An interesting take on SQL and its issues. The author writes:
"The relational model is great ... But SQL is the only widely-used implementation of the relational model, and it is inexpressive, incompressible, and non-porous...
"The core message ... is that there is potentially a huge amount of value to be unlocked by replacing SQL, and more generally in rethinking where and how we draw the lines between databases, query languages and programming languages."
144370392
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
Some low-income families of color in Oakland will soon receive $500 a month in no-strings-attached cash as part of a privately funded program, Mayor Libby Schaaf said in a Tuesday announcement.
The Oakland Resilient Families program has raised nearly $7 million dollars to help families of color with at least one minor child making less than $30,000 a year.
Under the plan, participants will be randomly selected, but white people are not eligible.
“We have designed this demonstration project to add to the body of evidence, and to begin this relentless campaign to adopt a guaranteed income federally,” Schaaf said.
142950160
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
The developers at Discord have seen success with Rust on their video encoding pipeline for Go Live and on their Elixir NIFs' server. Recently, they've penned a post explaining how they have drastically improved the performance of a service by switching its implementation from Go to Rust.
From the post, "Remarkably, we had only put very basic thought into optimization as the Rust version was written. Even with just basic optimization, Rust was able to outperform the hyper hand-tuned Go version. This is a huge testament to how easy it is to write efficient programs with Rust compared to the deep dive we had to do with Go."
129852952
submission
RoccamOccam writes:
The United States Space force now has offensive power, though it might not be the massive orbiting weapons system that you're envisioning.
The new weapons system delivered to the space force is a jammer type array that can prevent military or intelligence combatants from accessing their military satellites. This functionality allows the space force to neutralize orbiting satellites in a matter of minutes.
