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Comment Re:Bizarre Experiment (Score -1) 114

Because I have a hard time believing that, for example, an engineering student would benefit from participating in something like this.

It's a Pie Cookie Corral for investigators and investors with Gila Monsters. It's helicopters and butlers. Father & Son(s) stores with 235 years of combined military experience with either Delta Prawn, Ranger Brick, or Seal Sitter Sam.

Comment Re:FYI (Score 1) 111

by buravirgil (#63888431) Attached to: $260 Million AI Startup Releases 'Unmoderated' Chatbot Via Torrent
Given /.'s rendering of unicode across platforms (amusing to read how it should be "fixed" over the years), the likelihood the link is functional is non-zero.

My first question: How big's the file?
Second: Does it phone home?

And, of course, it does. So, go ahead and enjoy your Trilogy of Terror E.T. version bound for a municipal dump.

Comment Re:I'm Not Very Demanding (Score 1) 181

by buravirgil (#62594622) Attached to: 'The Cynic's Guide to Desktop Linux'
I turned off Tiles and between work spaces, hot corners, and gestures, tweaked a UI identical to how I configured a Mac laptop. I couldn't be happier about buying a System76 and configuring PopOS.

I had been buying Mac laptops since 2008, but when Apple limited its ports and added the Touch Bar, I was done.

Submission + - Bacterial made magnets used to Target viral Cancer cure

Submitted by Falconhell
Falconhell writes: An interesting new approach to help target Tumour destroying virus.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fsc...
‘’ Scientists are developing magnetically guided microscopic projectiles that can be injected into patients’ blood to attack breast, prostate and other tumours.

The project – led by researchers at Sheffield University – builds on progress in two key medical fields. The first involves viruses that specifically attack tumours. The second focuses on soil bacteria that manufacture magnets which they use to align themselves in the Earth’s magnetic field.

“The essence of this approach is straightforward: we are using bugs as drugs,” said Dr Munitta Muthana, one of the project’s leaders. “We are taking a class of viruses that naturally target tumours and are developing ways to help them reach internal tumours by exploiting bacteria that make magnets. It’s a twin approach and it has a lot of promise, we believe.”

Submission + - The Dystopian Reality of Productivity Culture

Submitted by theodp
theodp writes: Employee monitoring software became the new normal during COVID-19," reports James Purtill. "It seems workers are stuck with it. In early 2020, as offices emptied and employees set up laptops on kitchen tables to work from home, the way managers kept tabs on white-collar workers underwent an abrupt change as well. Bosses used to counting the number of empty desks, or gauging the volume of keyboard clatter, now had to rely on video calls and tiny green "active" icons in workplace chat programs. In response, many employers splashed out on sophisticated kinds of spyware to claw back some oversight. 'Employee monitoring software' became the new normal, logging keystrokes and mouse movement, capturing screenshots, tracking location, and even activating webcams and microphones. At the same time, workers were dreaming up creative new ways to evade the software's all-seeing eye."

And in The Diminishing Returns of Productivity Culture, Anne Helen Petersen writes, "This is the dystopian reality of productivity culture. Its mandate is never 'You figured out how to do my tasks more efficiently, so you get to spend less time working.' It is always: 'You figured out how to do your tasks more efficiency, so you must now do more tasks.' She adds, "We've reached the point of diminishing returns. I think we know this. You can see it explicitly manifest in anti-hustle culture, in the renewed embrace of unions and the labor movement, in the popularity of books like How to Do Nothing and movements like The Nap Ministry. Some people have known it for a long time, some are just gradually coming to terms with it. A lot of it, I've found, depends on just how inculcated you were by productivity culture. Were you surrounded with examples of productivity as success? Or were the "productive" people in your life the most exhausted and pissed off?"

So, what's the state-of-the-art in software developer productivity monitoring (and creative workarounds) these days — do you feel tools like GitHub, Jira, Microsoft Teams, and SonarQube monitoring reports and metrics are being used more for or against you?

Submission + - Got a Coupon For That College Course? Marketing Gimmicks Come to Higher Ed (edsurge.com)

Submitted by jyosim
jyosim writes: As online education has become mainstream, new providers have moved to the same marketing tactics as selling any widget. Especially upstart providers like Udemy, Coursera and edX. In some cases the courses are offered by well-known universities partnering with those companies.

Students sometimes buy courses when they're on sale intending to take them, but then never get around to it. It’s the academic equivalent of signing up for a gym membership in January in the burst of new-year’s-resolution optimism and then rarely going to work out.

Is this helping to change the perception of higher ed that is leading to less trust of college, as it becomes seen as more of just any other product?

Submission + - SPAM: Apple Silicon Exclusively Hit With World-First 'Augury' DMP Vulnerability

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A team of researchers with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Tel Aviv University, and the University of Washington have demonstrated a world-first Data Memory-Dependent Prefetcher (DMP) vulnerability, dubbed "Augury," that's exclusive to Apple Silicon. If exploited, the vulnerability could allow attackers to siphon off "at rest" data, meaning the data doesn't even need to be accessed by the processing cores to be exposed. Augury takes advantage of Apple Silicon's DMP feature. This prefetcher aims to improve system performance by being aware of the entire memory content, which allows it to improve system performance by pre-fetching data before it's needed. Usually, memory access is limited and compartmentalized in order to increase system security, but Apple's DMP prefetch can overshoot the set of memory pointers, allowing it to access and attempt a prefetch of unrelated memory addresses up to its prefetch depth.

If you feel your mind grasping at a certain familiarity with this, it's likely because the infamous Spectre/Meltdown vulnerabilities also try and speculate what data will be required by the system before it's even requested (hence the term speculative execution). But while side-channel vulnerabilities such as Spectre and Meltdown are only capable of leaking in-use data, Apple's DMP can potentially leak the entire memory content even if it's not being actively accessed. The nature of Apple's DMP also renders void some of the already-engineered fixes for speculative execution vulnerabilities — those that rely on controlling what is visible to the processing cores.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Cable Giants, ISPs, Telcos End Legal Fight Against California's Net Neutrality (theregister.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Wednesday welcomed the decision by a group of telecom and cable industry associations to abandon their legal challenge of the US state's net neutrality law SB822. "My office has fought for years to ensure that internet service providers can't interfere with or limit what Californians do online," said Bonta in a statement. "Now the case is finally over. Following multiple defeats in court, internet service providers have abandoned this effort to block enforcement of California's net neutrality law. With this victory, we’ve secured a free and open internet for California's 40 million residents once and for all."

In December 2017, then Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chair Ajit Pai tossed out the 2015 net neutrality rules put in place during the Obama administration, freeing broadband providers to block, throttle, and prioritize internet traffic, among other things – all of which were disallowed under the 2015 rules. On September 30, 2018, then California Governor Jerry Brown signed into law Senate Bill 822 (SB822), which more or less restored those rules. That same day, the Justice Department under the Trump administration challenged the law, as subsequently did the broadband companies benefiting from what Pai at the time referred to as a "light-touch approach."

The Justice Department, under the Biden administration, ended its opposition to California's net neutrality law back in February, 2021. The industry plaintiffs continued fighting SB822 in court but faced a setback in January, 2022, when the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to block the law's enforcement as litigation progressed. Now those groups – ACA Connects (America’s Communications Association), CTIA (The Wireless Association), NCTA (The Internet & Television Association), and USTelecom (The Broadband Association) – have withdrawn too. The trade associations, with the agreement of Bonta, filed a joint stipulation of dismissal without prejudice [PDF], which ends the telco legal challenge but allows the claim to be refiled at some later date.

Submission + - NASA Needs Your Help Building A VR Mars Simulator (vrscout.com)

Submitted by Iamthecheese
Iamthecheese writes: The Mars XR Operations Support System is a virtual environment making use of Unreal Engine 5. There is a $70,000 prize to be split between 20 contestants. It will be awarded to those with the best assets and scenarios.

There are five (5) different categories to participate in, with particular scenarios to explore in each category:

-Set Up Camp
-Scientific Research
-Maintenance
-Exploration
-Blow Our Minds

I'm guessing little green men will feature heavily in submissions. In any case it's not just a chance to earn money, but prove oneself to potential employers. Prize and contest information here.

Submission + - Square Enix sells all of its Western game studios—and their games—to (arstechnica.com)

Submitted by Hmmmmmm
Hmmmmmm writes: On Monday, Japanese game publisher Square Enix confirmed that it was selling all three of its Western video game studios, along with many significant game series and intellectual property attached to those studios, to the European game publisher Embracer.

The sale includes game studios Crystal Dynamics, Eidos Montreal, and Square Enix Montreal. All three had previously been wholly owned by Square Enix, and Embracer will acquire their entire staffs, combined at roughly 1,100 people, along with popular IP such as Tomb Raider, Deus Ex, and Legacy of Kain, and a game-publishing catalog of "over 50 games," for $300 million.

Not all of the deal's IP has been confirmed thus far, however, and an announcement from Square Enix indicates that its Western operations "will continue to publish franchises such as Just Cause, Outriders, and Life Is Strange." This suggests that Square Enix will retain some of its Western-specific IP and that its future collaborations with Western game makers will come via publishing deals with outside developers.

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