Forgot your password?
Close
typodupeerror

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.

Comment Re:Seagate Sparks Memory Sell-Off (Score 1) 70

I, too, was confused by the article summary and the original article on CNBC itself.

I found this article that does a better job of explaining what happened to the stocks of interest that day, and why:

https://www.investing.com/news...

It's interesting to note that Seagate's stock has recovered its loss from Monday already (and probably the other ones, too).

Submission + - As measles takes toll on kids, anti-vaxxers have change of heart (msn.com)

Submitted by fjo3
fjo3 writes: Katie Jennings was scrolling on her phone last April when a headline stopped her cold. A second unvaccinated child had died of measles in her home state of Texas.

It was a tipping point for the 40-year-old stay-at-home mom who had grown up in a staunchly anti-vaccine, fundamentalist Christian community. “What are we doing? Why are we doing this?” she remembers thinking. “I wanted to protect my kids.”

She took all six of them to get the measles, mumps and rubella shot. Then she posted an emotional TikTok aimed at the anti-vax crowd she used to be a part of: “You can change your mind,” she said in the video that’s been watched more than 422,000 times.

Submission + - Feeling Cranky About AI and CS Education

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Over at the Communications of the ACM, Bard College CS Prof Valerie Barr explains why she's Feeling Cranky About AI and CS Education. Having seen CS education go through a number of we-have-to-teach-this moments over the decades — introductory programming languages, the Web, Data Science, etc. — Barr turns her attention to the next hand-wringing "what will we do" CS education moment with AI.

"We're jumping through hoops without stopping first to question the run-away train," Barr writes. "In much discussion about CS education:
a.) There’s little interest in interrogating the downsides of generative AI, such as the environmental impact, the data theft impact, the treatment and exploitation of data workers.
b.) There’s little interest in considering the extent to which, by incorporating generative AI into our teaching, we end up supporting a handful of companies that are burning billions in a vain attempt to each achieve performance that is a scintilla better than everyone else’s.
c.) There’s little interest in thinking about what’s going to happen when the LLM companies decide that they have plateaued, that there’s no more money to burn/spend, and a bunch of them fold—but we’ve perturbed education to such an extent that our students can no longer function without their AI helpers."

Barr calls for stepping back from "the industry assertion that the ship has sailed, every student needs to use AI early and often, and there is no future application that isn’t going to use AI in some way" and instead thoughtfully "articulate what sort of future problem solvers and software developers we want to graduate from our programs, and determine ways in which the incorporation of AI can help us get there."

Comment Re:isn't the involvement of Chinese gov in the chi (Score 1) 125

by Yesfan001 (#65604714) Attached to: Trump Confirms US Is Seeking 10% Stake In Intel

Please mod the parent comment up. I don't have any mod points right now, or I would have done so.

Thank you, Jayhawk0123, for a cogent and clear summation of the approaches the US government ought to take to help a struggling company deemed important to the nation, whether for national security, financial, technological, or social benefit reasons.

I also want to note that (as magzteel noted previously), contrary to the assertion by the White House Press Secretary, the concept of the US government buying stock in a company has occurred previously, with recent examples being the Capital Purchase Program (CPP) in 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_Purchase_Program) and the Capital Assistance Program (CAP) in 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_Assistance_Program). Both of these programs were part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) of 2008 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubled_Asset_Relief_Program), which was the largest component of the US government's response to the 2008 financial crisis.

While the TARP programs generated concerns and controversies at the time, I believe that the goal of the programs (namely, preventing a collapse of the financial system) was laudable. With the current Administration, I fear the "real" goal of this proposal is to normalize the concept of the US government controlling businesses outright, to make them do whatever the Administration wants. I also suspect that the profits from this proposed investment in Intel will eventually line the pockets of those in power, as another example of the endemic corruption and grift associated with this Administration.

Submission + - California's Corporate Cover-Up Act Is a Privacy Nightmare (eff.org)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: California lawmakers are pushing one of the most dangerous privacy rollbacks we’ve seen in years. S.B. 690, what we’re calling the Corporate Cover-Up Act, is a brazen attempt to let corporations spy on us in secret, gutting long-standing protections without a shred of accountability.

The Corporate Cover-Up Act is a massive carve-out that would gut California’s Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA) and give Big Tech and data brokers a green light to spy on us without consent for just about any reason. If passed, S.B. 690 would let companies secretly record your clicks, calls, and behavior online—then share or sell that data with whomever they’d like, all under the banner of a “commercial business purpose.”

Simply put, The Corporate Cover-Up Act (S.B. 690) is a blatant attack on digital privacy, and is written to eviscerate long-standing privacy laws and legal safeguards Californians rely on. If passed, it would:
  • Gut California’s Invasion of Privacy Act (CIPA)—a law that protects us from being secretly recorded or monitored
  • Legalize corporate wiretaps, allowing companies to intercept real-time clicks, calls, and communications
  • Authorize pen registers and trap-and-trace tools, which track who you talk to, when, and how—without consent
  • Let companies use all of this surveillance data for “commercial business purposes”—with zero notice and no legal consequences

This isn’t a small fix. It’s a sweeping rollback of hard-won privacy protections—the kind that helped expose serious abuses by companies like Facebook, Google, and Oracle.

Submission + - NYT: Inside DOGE's Chaotic Takeover of Social Security

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: In The Bureaucrat and the Billionaire: Inside DOGE’s Chaotic Takeover of Social Security, the New York Times begins: "Throughout the early months of this Trump presidency, Mr. Musk and his allies systematically built a false narrative of widespread fraud at the Social Security Administration based on misinterpreted data, using their claims to justify an aggressive effort to gain access to personal information on millions of Americans, a New York Times investigation has found. [...] At Social Security, Mr. Musk’s efforts amount to a case study in what happened when his team of government novices ran a critical government agency through misinformation and social media blasts. The Times’s investigation found that Mr. Musk became fixated on the program in early February after members of his team misread government spending data — a pivotal and previously unreported moment that DOGE believed had exposed massive fraud inside the agency." (Spoiler Alert: Things only go downhill from there.)

Comment Re: Oracle defines employees as temporary, agents, (Score 2) 30

Hey, jabuzz.

Did you mean "anything after 2019", rather than "before"?

Otherwise I'm not following you.

If I'm not understanding what you were trying to convey, please explain.

P.S. I work for a U.S. university. Our IT groups ran some kind of scanning tools on all our network drives to look for newer builds of Java (either JREs orJDKs), back when the licensing changed. Our affiliated hospital group (we're an academic health center, too) did the same. The hospital side also recently migrated from their entrenched VMware setup to Citrix, due to the outrageous Broadcom licensing fee increases.

Submission + - HHS Secretary Kennedy Halts Clinical Trial of New Covid-19 Oral Vaccine (foxnews.com)

Submitted by As_I_Please
As_I_Please writes: From Fox News:

Kennedy issued a 90-day stop-work order on Friday related to the HHS (Health and Human Services) contract with American biotech company Vaxart Inc., which is working to develop a new COVID-19 vaccine that can be taken orally. The stop-work order comes as 10,000 individuals were slated to begin clinical trials on Monday.

As for the reason for the work stoppage, Secretary Kennedy explained:

"While it is crucial that the Department [of] Health and Human Services (HHS) support pandemic preparedness, four years of the Biden administrationÃ(TM)s failed oversight have made it necessary to review agreements for vaccine production, including VaxartÃ(TM)s," Kennedy said in comments provided to Fox News Digital on Tuesday.

"I look forward to working with Vaxart and medical experts to ensure this work produces safe, effective, and fiscal-minded vaccine technology."

Submission + - Is Confirmation Bias Driving Elon Musk to Jump to Sensationalistic Conclusions? 2

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: "According to the Social Security database," said Dept. of Government Efficiency (DOGE) Chief Elon Musk in a tweet that's been viewed 54.2+ million times (and counting), "these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE! Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security." In lieu of presenting a thoughtful, evidenced-based audit report, Musk made his case with a couple of ROTFL icons and a single screenshot of a simple table that seems designed to suggest nearly 400 million people — more than the population of the United States — are receiving Social Security benefits. That "there are FAR more 'eligible' social security numbers than there are citizens in the USA," Musk added, "might be the biggest fraud in history." Never mind that Social Security Beneficiary Statistics published by the SSA are much lower than those floated without explanation by Musk. Or that non-citizens including students and workers are also issued Social Security Cards (including Tesla's non-citizen workers) and can be entitled to benefits.

There are undoubtedly big fraud problems to solve at Social Security, just as there are at Musk-founded PayPal and other organizations. But Musk may want to take steps to help ensure that DOGE's work is driven more by informed consideration of evidence and less by jumping to conclusions based on confirmation bias. "Narrowly pursuing an investigation into what you initially suspect doesn’t just trip up scientists," warns 5 Ways Auditors Can Overcome Confirmation Bias. "Confirmation bias—one of five common judgment biases—has the potential to lead auditors up the wrong path just as easily. [...] The deeper one gets into investigating a particular hypothesis, the more difficult it becomes to consider contradictory ones. Rather, it’s common to seek evidence that supports suspicions and overlook data that don’t. Result: You’ve confirmed your bias—bypassing both the scientific method and best practices in auditing."

Writing about the resignation of acting SSA Commissioner Michelle King after members of Musk's DOGE team sought access to the agency's data, the New York Times reports that Martin O’Malley, who served as commissioner of the SSA in the Biden administration, said the claims of Musk and his team about the agency were not true. “They’re just making” things up, he said, referring to Musk’s suggestion that more than a million people in the Social Security database are in the 150 to 159 age range.

Submission + - Techdirt: A Coup Is In Progress In America (techdirt.com) 4

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A coup is underway in the United States, and we must stop pretending otherwise. The signs are unmistakable and accelerating: in just the past 48 hours, Elon Musk’s DOGE commission has seized control of Treasury payment systems and gained unauthorized access to classified USAID materials, while security officials who followed protocols were removed. Career civil servants across agencies are being systematically purged for having followed legal requirements during previous administrations. The president openly declares he won’t enforce laws he dislikes, while Congress watches in complicit silence. This isn’t happening through tanks in the streets or soldiers at government buildings—it’s occurring through the systematic dismantling of constitutional governance and its replacement with a system of personal loyalty to private interests. Those who resist are being removed, while those who enable this transformation are being rewarded with unprecedented control over government functions. The time for euphemisms and careful hedging has passed. We are watching, in real time, the conversion of constitutional democracy into something darker and more dangerous. To pretend otherwise isn’t prudence—it’s complicity.

Submission + - Amazon takes away more than it gives with Prime Music change

Submitted by ayjaym
ayjaym writes: I've always justified my Prime subscription with the Prime Music benefit; I listen on the train to and from work. Sure, you only had two million tracks and not the 100 million in the full Amazon Music catalogue, but that still left a lot of great music to explore.
Until today.
Amazon gives, and Amazon takes away. What they give is access to the full 100 million tracks available in Amazon Music. What they take away is that now all of these — including the albums that were available on Prime Music previously — can only be played in random order. You can't skip forward or back while playing a song either. And, if you like to listen to classical music you now have the travesty of having great works chopped up and reshuffled into a random play order. Over Roll Beethoven!.

So I've cancelled my Prime subscription. I was starting to get nervous anyway recently when Prime Music started asking for permission to access nearby Bluetooth devices 'to improve the experience'. When someone on Reddit tried to find out why this permission was suddenly required, Amazon support hung up on him.
I wish the big tech companies were less arrogant, but I get that we are the product these days. Still, Mr. Bezos will have a tiny bit less cash to finance his penis substitute rockets now. I can get a small amount of satisfaction from knowing that, at any rate.

Submission + - IP Stacks Commendary getting an update (satchell.net)

Submitted by satch89450
satch89450 writes: Back in 2000, I asked about funding sources for updating the book Linux IP Stacks Commentary. Things change. Here is what I posted on my LinkedIn account:

History: 20 years ago, Heather BJ Clifford and I wrote a book, Linux IP Stacks Commentary, which walked through the Linux TCP/IP stack code and commented it in detail. (Old-timers will remember the Lion's Unix Commentary, the book published by University xerographic copies on the sly. Same sort of thing.) CoriolisOpen published it. And a bit later sank into the west. Nothing has been done since, at least not by us.

Now: when I was released from my last job, I tried retirement. Wasn't for me. I started going crazy with nothing significant to do. So, going through old hard drives (that's another story), I found the original manuscript files, plus the page proof files, for that two-decade-old book. Aha! Maybe it's time for an update. But how to keep it fresh, as Torvalds continues to release new updates of the Linux kernel? Publish it on the Web. Carefully.

After four months (and three job interviews) I have the beginnings of the second edition up and available for reading. At the moment it's an updated, corrected, and expanded version of the "gray matter", the exposition portions of the first edition. In addition, I have put forth ideas for making the commentary portions easier to keep up to date, after they are initially written.

The URL for the alpha-beta version of this Web book is https://www.satchell.net/ipsta... for your reading pleasure. The companion e-mail address is up and running for you to provide feedback. There is no paywall.

Thanks to the work of Professor Donald Knuth (thank you!) on his WEB and CWEB programming languages, I have made modifications, to devise a method for integrating code from the GIT repository of the Linux kernel without making any modifications (let alone submissions) to said kernel code. The proposed method is described in the About section of the Web book. I have scaffolded the process and it works. But that's not the hard part.

The hard part is to write the commentary itself, and crib some kind of Markup language to make the commentary publishing quality. The programs I write will integrate the kernel code with the commentary verbiage into a set of Web pages. Or two slightly different sets of web pages, if I want to support a mobile-friendly version of the commentary.

Another reason for making it a web book is that I can write it and publish it as it comes out of my virtual typewriter. No hard deadlines. No waiting for the printers. And while this can save trees, that's not my intent.

The back-of-the-napkin schedule calls for me to to finish the expository text in September, start the Python coding for generating commentary pages at the same time, and start the writing the commentary on ICMP in October. By then, Linus should have version 6.0.0 of the Linux kernel released.

I really, really, really don't want to charge readers to view the web book. Especially as it's still in the virtual typewriter. There isn't any commentary (yet). One thing I have done is to make it as mobile-friendly as I can, because I suspect the target audience will want to read this on a smartphone or tablet, and not be forced to resort to a large-screen laptop or desktop. Also, the graphics are lightweight to minimize the cost for people who pay by the kilopacket. (Does anywhere in the world still do this? Inquiring minds want to know.)

I host this web site on a Protectli appliance in my apartment, so I don't have that continuing expense. The power draw is around 20 watts. My network connection is AT&T fiber — and if it becomes popular I can always upgrade the upstream speed.

The thing is, the cat needs his kibble. I still want to know if there is a source of funding available.

Also, is it worthwhile to make the pages available in a zip file? Then a reader could download a snapshot of the book, and read it off-line.

Submission + - Open Source Website To Hunt Down Capitol Insurrectionists (huffpost.com)

Submitted by SysEngineer
SysEngineer writes: Some of the citizen sleuths behind the open-source effort to identify the hundreds of Donald Trump-loving rioters who stormed the U.S. Capitol have launched an impressive new website that organizes the stunning amount of digital evidence collected about the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The website, Jan6evidence.com, was built by a small team of volunteer software developers, using the work of open-source investigators looking into the deadly Capitol attack. The site features a color-coded timeline that reflects the time of day, and allows users to click around on a map of the Capitol and pull up any video evidence from a particular location and time frame. Users can even track an individual suspect’s movements over the course of Jan. 6.

Slashdot Top Deals

Men love to wonder, and that is the seed of science.

Close