Same for me.

I have a family/friend mail server setup with proper SPF, DKIM and DMARC where I get reports back, reports I actually look at.

The strange thing is that the only fail-reports I get are either from servers that have been spammed, i.e. the messages they received did not pass SPF (nor DKIM), or from Microsoft-run servers (outlook.com, hotmail.com and other systems that use Exchange server). Never from Google or Yahoo or any other, non-MS server.

So, Microsoft get your house in order! Do a proper check of DKIM signatures, before you mangle the headers and do check the SPF records properly, even if DNS lookups take more than 20 milliseconds!

Interesting!

Extrapolation from one person ... That is not exactly the scientific way.

Of course there are some people that react to the vaccines and we all know you are not alone, but on the other hand, you are not by far a majority. You react to that vaccine, just like there are people that react to peanuts, nuts, milk, celeriac, mustard, egg, shrimps, penicillin, and so much else, even water. Should that stop the whole world from consuming such items?

Of course not!

I wonder...

I think they lost an opportunity for another ridiculous name for the ACT: AM for Every Real or Imagined Car Act, AMERICA

And it doesn't scare you to see how easily other people are swayed by even immensely bad fakes? Remember that most of the world does not think for themselves or check facts —, much less offending pictures and videos.

This scares me no end!

I appreciate your Star Trekkiesque enthusiasm that technology is used to better the world for all. Unfortunately, history has shown it betters the world for the few, relatively. If technology should be used to better the world for everyone, don't you think John Deere, Massey Ferguson and their ilk should start using their profits making tractors for farmers in the developing countries instead of making investors rich? I know this smacks of Socialism, but if we truly want technology to benefit everyone, we cannot just let it be for the rich.

And regarding robots fighting wars, how would that go? Wars are mostly won by how many people you kill or how much infrastructure you can demolish. Since there are no soldiers for robots to kill, if both warring factions use robots, what should they kill then? The answer is: You and me ⦠and all the other civilians. Especially those that haven't the means and wherewithal to flee to a more safe region Ââ" provided such a region can be found.

This scares me even more!

I agree that surveillance is not so much getting worse by AI, but the combining ubiquitous surveillance with AI to look for, say, criminals may lead to an increase in false arrests, especially in view of the possibilities of adversarial, AI generated deep fakes that may implicate anyone in anything. Let's not go there, please.

This is scary, but maybe not quite as much as the other factors.

I very much agree with the Agile approach and the scalability, which inherently adds to the robustness of the solution if scale-out (as in your example) is used — especially if the infrastructure supports true redundancy/fail-over and they are hosted in independent data centres (or hosting providers) so simple things like a data centre fall-out does not take everything down.

That they are considered more buggy is neither due to Agile nor to the microservice architecture but rather due to the implementation not applying other methodologies like test-driven development (TDD) or something equivalent.

Well-designed microservices are normally easy to test automatically as the open, well-defined APIs make it possible to test each service completely independently of any other service and without disrupting anything running. This also means that you can easily check that a microservice does not break backward compatibility when new features are added and that a refactoring works as it must pass the same (as-complete-as-possible) test suite as the service it replaces.

What could possibly be the problem here? I mean, the service providers would obviously use this opportunity to improve their service for the well-being of all — right?

I think it is more likely that they would start to offer super-high-speed connections, say 100 Gbps, at a reasonable price and when you buy it on their short-term, non-cancelable 48 months contract, you realise that the offered speed is only available when connecting to Netflix, Speedtest and servers in North Korea. The last one just so they can claim they cover ordinary internet connections, knowing that North Korea probably doesn't have anywhere available that can handle such speeds, apart from their secret services, perhaps.

Net neutrality is a good thing to have so you know that your internet provider does not stop you from fair and equitable access to anywhere in the internet.

I am crying dry tears for the shareholders now their profit is down to only $2.1 billion.

As the laws stand, you are right.

I think we will have to redefine the concept of expectation of privacy, as today's technology has made it possible to aggregate information gleaned from public spaces that goes far beyond what was possible at the turn of the millennium.

The no expectation of privacy in public spaces has actually been eroded as historically no-one could realistically track everyone in public. These days that is no longer true (at least for heavily surveilled areas) and the law should be updated to acknowledge this encroachment and put severe brakes on how such surveillance can be used.

Actually not really, as anonymity is a relative concept.

To trace an individual before automation became really feasible, you would have to dedicate people who would follow/shadow the specific individual. And if you wanted to do it surreptitiously and for longer periods, quite a few people.

Also, you could not easily go back in time and find out where that individual had been, say, a week ago or a month ago, as you would have to manually go through droves of surveillance videos. And going further back than a month (probably even just a week) would be impossible as the recordings would have been overwritten with newer recordings.

Nowadays the machines do it for you. Put up cameras in sufficiently many places, have them feed into a central system and that's it. An initial capital outlay followed by (relatively) low running costs and you can do track-and-trace to your heart's delight. And deleting data seems to be an absolute no-no too, meaning that some people living in metropolitan areas may already have had their whole lives so far documented in government recordings. Brrrr!

I agree with you that the modern day surveillance needs legislation.

The erosion of privacy should result in changes to the law. Until electronic surveillance reached the current stage with all sorts of automatic recognition like facial, gait and license plates, people had an expectation of privacy in the form of anonymity. Nobody could trace someone else unless they actually literally followed them or installed a radio transmitter, which normally would have a limited time span too.

And absolutely nobody could do a retroactive trace — at least not unless somebody has invented a time machine without telling me.

But this has completely changed with surveillance cameras slurping up images of everyone and everything, and having AI identify it.

We need to stop this indiscriminate surveillance and make the point that it violates the expectation of privacy people would have, even in public spaces.

I absolutely abhor the idea that someone should look into my life for any reason and see how mundane it is.
Officer #1: "Look, SemperOSS has gone to the supermarket again."
Officer #2: "Wow, he did that every week as far back as we can see ... except for once, in June this year."
Officer #1: "That's odd. He's hiding something! We'd better arrest him and question him. I'll fetch him and you prepare for the waterboarding, right?"
Officer #2: "OK."

As Cardinal Richelieu ostensibly said, "If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him."

The problem is that light does not interact with any kind of fields and the only ways to change light's path are with gravity (not really an option) or with some sort of physical object like a Dyson sphere, which was proposed to harness the energy of a star, or maybe a smaller version that covers the Earth to a certain degree.

The problem could possibly be solved with some large panels at the primary Earth-Sun Lagrange point, which would put them permanently between the Earth and the sun, thus creating shadow. To make this feasible there are huge challenges that have to be overcome: the building of these structures; the transport of the structures to the Lagrange point; and not the least, how to keep them in place.

The structures, when placed at the Lagrange point, will effectively act as solar sails and be inexorably pushed towards Earth, which means they would need some sort of propulsion to create a counter-push. Since this counter-push needs to go on all the time, currently known propulsion systems would probably not be able to handle it without constant refuelling, which would be extremely costly, and an ongoing expense.

The only real possibility seems to find some sort of electrical powered propulsion system that does not require a physical propellant, which leads to solutions like using the Earth's and the sun's magnetic fields (very weak and not likely to be possible), a photonic drive (never tried and probably not strong enough to counter the sun's pressure, even when powered with fusion reactors) or some sort of reactionless drive like the RF resonant cavity thruster (not actually known to work).

This leaves us with diddly-squat nothing, it seems. So back to the drawing board with creative solutions closer by, like adding shades in Earth orbit, increasing Earth's albedo or emigration to another sun where we can repeat our failures.

On my Linux laptop I always have a lot of tabs open and Firefox have a number of cycle-eating "Web Content" processes running (top shows at least ten at the moment) and those processes take up about 25% of one core all together. I do not feel it a lot on this machine but the previous laptop got completely bogged down at times and more or less stopped responding unless I had re-niced the processes before it was too late.

I hope Mozilla finds a way to reduce the resource usage on Linux as well as I have a number of older machines that struggle under the strain.

Why not aim for a hybrid solution?

The original poster does not specify what the video processing algorithm does, so it could in principle be anything from compression and motion detection to some sort of artificial intelligence, so my comment lends itself more to the first two options than the last.

All modern recording devices and players have a CPU with all the benefits it accomplishes, so why not employ that and offload only the hard to do operations to an ASIC (and use an FPGA as a prototype)?

Image processing algorithms normally work on fixed size blocks of pixels, which part could better be offloaded to an ASIC/FPGA as opposed to full pictures that could be of variable size and thus be difficult to implement as an ASIC/FPGA (like 100 megapixels with 14 bits per colour, which comes to about 525MB of memory, thus requiring external memory with the implementation difficulties this entails).

It is much more difficult if the video processing requires comparison of whole frames to work, but I think that is unlikely. To make an algorithm feasible it would most likely have to work on localised data as the processing time would seem to be O(n*n) or worse for almost any purpose of the algorithm, which can be reduced to O(n) for the whole image by working on fixed size, local data.

TL;DR: In short, it may be more appropriate to have a hybrid solution with an accelerator that offloads the crucial parts of the algorithm.

Many calculation-based solutions (like this) are — provided they are correct, of course — better than an iterative solution inasmuch the calculation-based solution is O(1) (i.e. takes the same amount of time no matter how many years in the interval) whereas the iterative solution is O(n) (i.e. the running time gets progressively longer as the number of years increase).

I always try to find calculation-based solutions to problems like this. I not only like the O(1) aspect of it but also find it mentally satisfying to suss out how to do it.