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Comment I missed something there (Score 1) 38

How exactly did they got from a thing that can identify and pinpoint you just by your body, without using cameras, using a piece of equipment which is ubiquitous in all civilized parts of the World to a thing that is a "privacy-preserving biometric modality"???

Or is it just a 2025 dystopian version of the old /. meme:

1. Do stupid thing
2. ?????
3. profit?

Comment No problem! (Score 1) 162

Just tell them I've stopped using Windows at Windows 95. Let them mind their business.

(being slightly less rude: I had to work in Windows machines recently, and I found out the WSL enviromment is completely usable, so, safe for some UI quirks(*), they are doing a good job)

(*) Among which the "black windows with black borders" theme for _some_ apps, which makes it a PITA each time you have one window on top of other - how that ever became the default for anything???

Comment One had it comming (Score 1) 32

Putting a passphrase seed in an image that naturally gets uploaded to the cloud, if not explicitly, automatically by google and other software is just the equivalent to broadcasting it.

Sorry for people who'd expect any privacy in that. The hard part nowadays is having __any__ photo not being uploaded and OCRed.

And one have still to be aware of ubiquitous security cameras, besides mobile cams, when going in public (or at home) with ANY secret which can be recovered from images (including door keys)

Comment Re:Hmmm (Score 1) 164

Indeed - I have been transporting project trees from one computer to another over the years, and a quite similar search yielded 5409258 files for me. It is interesting to prepend a "time" to the find call, and see it takes less than a minute to this result on SSD, compared to the "night long" windows scans.

Comment Hydrogen "internal combustion" car? (Score 1) 265

Wait? do they actually inject hydrogen in a pysthon and explode it like it were gas ?

I thought hydrogen vehicles all used fuel-cell tech, in which hydrogen is quietly combined with oxygen in a electricity liberating reaction,
and then you run on the electricity.

Comment "how it will repair the damage to consumers" (Score 2) 26

This is some form of joke. The thing is simply non-repairable.

Data leaked include all forms of identifiers and secondar data used across hundreds of thousands of places
to authenticate one person. Not to mention credit information, such as those used to calculate
the credit score itself.

And 220 million is a number larger than Brazil population: which means everyone got their data leaked.

The country will have to overhaul all forms of person/consumer/tax payer identification and authorization over
the next couple of years in order to mitigate some of the damages in this leak.

Meanwhile anyone is subjet to identity theft at will, and can do nothing to prevent it.

Comment Re:That is a reality in Brazil for sometime (Score 1) 95

And no, I am not saying it is "perfectly safe" and that "nothing could go wrong", or that it does have any special safeguards towards privacy or security. On the contrary. But so far I have seen no one close, nor one in the news, victim of this being mishandled. (it is a matter of time, in my opinion).

Comment That is a reality in Brazil for sometime (Score 1) 95

Last year when we (as a househld couple) renewed the car licensing, we found out that the printed paper for the car document licensing was no longer needed: there is an officially issued app (for android and iphone) that will receive and display the car papers. But, along with that, the same app calls the electronic drivers-license version. And the drivers license is an official ID around here, as any other, besides carrying the official numbers for other required documents.
The app authentication is done through one of three different possible ways - I don't know all details, but one of them is through the use of the banking app for Banco do Brasil (of which I have an account), which is also an official institution.

There is also a feature that allows the car owner to allow the car documentation to be displayed in the app of third parties, which can be revoked - and that is THE way to allow others to drive your car, if you are not carrying the printed documents.

If anyone really cares about this stuff, here is one of the governamental sites explaining how it works, step by step, with instructions to download and have your ID: https://www.detran.sp.gov.br/w...

Comment Re:iWoz (Score 1) 39

> why couldn't you use Bitcoin or one of the gazillion other cryptocurrencies out there?

he actually is re-unsing an existing blockchain - the token is not a "coin", but
a token on the Ethereum network.

I am actually amazed on how hard it was to get this information trying to cut
through the media announcements and press releases -

It can be read on PAGE 31 on the company's Token whitepaper, though:
https://efforce.io/WP_ENG_V1.p... (Open link and search for "Ethereum")

The token and its smart contract statistics can be seen here:

https://bloxy.info/address/0x3...

As a side note it is worth saying that just this week the Ethereum network took
the step to move from "proof of work" to "proof of stake", which will
allow it to actually be any "green".

PHP

Is PHP Still a Worthwhile Language To Learn? (stitcher.io) 137

mbadolato (Slashdot reader #105,588) shares this post from Belgium-based programmer Brent Roose: It's no secret among web developers and programmers in general: PHP doesn't have the best reputation. Despite still being one of the most used languages to build web applications; over the years PHP has managed to get itself a reputation of messy codebases, inexperienced developers, insecure code, an inconsistent core library, and what not. While many of the arguments against PHP still stand today, there's also a bright side: you can write clean and maintainable, fast and reliable applications in PHP.

In this post, I want to look at this bright side of PHP development. I want to show you that, despite its many shortcomings, PHP is a worthwhile language to learn. I want you to know that the PHP 5 era is coming to an end. That, if you want to, you can write modern and clean PHP code, and leave behind much of the mess it was 10 years ago.

The article notes PHP's opt-in type system and performance-enhancing rewrites (including the ability to store compiled chunks of PHP code in memory). And it argues that PHP "is still evolving today," with a package repository averaging over 25 million downloads a day. There's also PHP web application frameworks (as well as asynchronous frameworks), so "PHP isn't just WordPress anymore."

And in keeping with the core team's yearly release cycle, PHP 8 is expected at the end of 2020, which will include a JIT compiler, "allowing PHP to enter new areas besides web development..."
Science

Gravity: We Might Have Been Getting It Wrong This Whole Time (phys.org) 152

Motoko Kakubayashi, from the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, writes via Phys.org: Physicists have been looking for laws that explain both the microscopic world of elementary particles and the macroscopic world of the universe and the Big Bang at its beginning, expecting that such fundamental laws should have symmetry in all circumstances. However, last year, two physicists found a theoretical proof that, at the most fundamental level, nature does not respect symmetry. There are four fundamental forces in the physical world: electromagnetism, strong force, weak force, and gravity. Gravity is the only force still unexplainable at the quantum level. Its effects on big objects, such as planets or stars, are relatively easy to see, but things get complicated when one tries to understand gravity in the small world of elementary particles.

To try to understand gravity on the quantum level, Hirosi Ooguri, the director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo, and Daniel Harlow, an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, started with the holographic principle. This principle explains three-dimensional phenomena influenced by gravity on a two-dimensional flat space that is not influenced by gravity. This is not a real representation of our universe, but it is close enough to help researchers study its basic aspects. The pair then showed how quantum error correcting codes, which explain how three-dimensional gravitational phenomena pop out from two dimensions, like holograms, are not compatible with any symmetry; meaning such symmetry cannot be possible in quantum gravity.

Comment I assembled a PS3 cluster back in the time (Score 2) 50

I configured a 10-box arrangement at the time (the infamous "beowulf cluster") for the local university, and I can confirm that even with software that did not make use of the specialized cores in the powerpc CPUs, the boxes were cheaper, more reliable, and twice as performant than white-boxes x86 systems available at the time.

(I did maintain a PC-based cluster on the same university, and the headache was enormous)

NASA

NASA Wants To Send Nuclear Rockets To the Moon and Mars (wired.com) 111

NASA engineers want to create a rocket engine powered by nuclear fusion. "A nuclear rocket engine would be twice as efficient as the chemical engines powering rockets today," reports Wired. "But despite their conceptual simplicity, small-scale fission reactors are challenging to build and risky to operate because they produce toxic waste. Space travel is dangerous enough without having to worry about a nuclear meltdown. But for future human missions to the moon and Mars, NASA believes such risks may be necessary." From the report: At the center of NASA's nuclear rocket program is Bill Emrich, the man who literally wrote the book on nuclear propulsion. "You can do chemical propulsion to Mars, but it's really hard," says Emrich. "Going further than the moon is much better with nuclear propulsion." Emrich has been researching nuclear propulsion since the early '90s, but his work has taken on a sense of urgency as the Trump administration pushes NASA to put boots on the moon ASAP in preparation for a journey to Mars. Although you don't need a nuclear engine to get to the moon, it would be an invaluable testing ground for the technology, which will almost certainly be used on any crewed mission to Mars.

Let's get one thing clear: A nuclear engine won't hoist a rocket into orbit. That's too risky; if a rocket with a hot nuclear reactor blew up on the launch pad, you could end up with a Chernobyl-scale disaster. Instead, a regular chemically propelled rocket would hoist a nuclear-powered spacecraft into orbit, which would only then fire up its nuclear reactor. The massive amount of energy produced by these reactors could be used to sustain human outposts on other worlds and cut the travel time to Mars in half. [...] But before a nuclear rocket engine gets its first flight, NASA needs to overhaul its regulations for launching nuclear materials. In August, the White House issued a memo that tasked NASA with developing safety protocols for operating nuclear reactors in space. Once they're adopted by NASA, the stage will be set for the first flight of a nuclear engine as soon as 2024. This coincides with Trump's deadline to return American astronauts to the moon; maybe this time they'll be hitching a ride on a nuclear rocket.

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