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Submission + - Carbonyl Lets You Use a Graphical Web Browser in Your Linux Terminal (makeuseof.com)

Submitted by destinyland
destinyland writes: Someone made a Chromium fork... for your terminal. The terminal-based browser Carbonyl "adheres to, and is compatible with modern standards," writes MUO, "meaning that pages behave as they should, and you can even watch streaming video, within the Linux terminal!"

But best of all, "Pages connect and render in an instant—seemingly quicker than a desktop GUI browser, and every page we visited was rendered correctly."

There are a bunch of good reasons to browse the internet from the comfort of your terminal. It could be that eschewing the bloat of X.org and Wayland, a terminal is all you have. Maybe you like SSHing into remote machines and browsing the internet from there.

Perhaps you, like us, just really, really like terminals.

Whatever the reason, your choices of web browsers have, until recently, been limited, and your experience of the world wide web has been a janky, barely-functional one.... We tested Carbonyl in a range of Linux terminals, including the XFCE terminal. GNOME terminal, kitty, and the glorious Cool Retro Terminal. Carbonyl was smooth, fast, and flawless in all of them.

We even connected to our Raspberry Pi via SSH in CRT, and ran Carbonyl remotely, watching Taylor Swift music videos on YouTube. No problem.

Submission + - Google is working on Blink-based iOS browser, contrary to Apple's WebKit rule (theregister.com)

Submitted by Dotnaught
Dotnaught writes: Google's Chromium developers have begun work on an experimental web browser for Apple's iOS using the search giant's Blink engine. That's unexpected because the current version of Chrome for iOS uses Apple's WebKit rendering engine under the hood. Apple requires every iOS browser to use WebKit, per its App Store Guidelines. Google insists this is an experiment and isn't intended for release. But the stripped-down, Blink-based browser could be preparation for European competition rules that look like they will require Apple to stop requiring that other browser makers use its WebKit engine.

Submission + - GitHub CEO On Why Open Source Developers Should Be Exempt From the EU's AI Act (techcrunch.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke says that open source developers should be made exempt from the European Union’s (EU) proposed new artificial intelligence (AI) regulations, saying that the opportunity is still there for Europe to lead on AI. “Open source is forming the foundation of AI in Europe,” Dohmke said onstage at the EU Open Source Policy Summit in Brussels. “The U.S. and China don’t have to win it all.” The regulations in question come via The Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act), first proposed back in April 2021 to address the growing reach of AI into our every day lives. The rules would govern AI applications based on their perceived risks, and would effectively be the first AI-centric laws introduced by any major regulatory body. The European Parliament is set to vote on a draft version of the AI Act in the coming months, and depending on what discussions and debates follow, it could be adopted by the end of 2023.

As many will know, open source and AI are intrinsically linked, given that collaboration and shared data are pivotal to developing AI systems. As well-meaning as the AI Act might be, critics argue that it could have significant unintended consequences for the open source community, which in turn could hamper the progress of AI. The crux of the problem is that the Act would likely create legal liability for general purpose AI systems (GPAI), and bestow more power and control to the big tech firms given that independent open source developers don’t have the resources to contend with legal wrangles. [...] “The AI act is so crucial,” Dohmke said onstage. “This policy could well set the precedent for how the world regulates AI. It is foundationally important. It is important for European technological leadership, and for the future of the European economy itself. It must be fair and balanced to the open source community.”

Dohmke said that the AI Act can bring “the benefits of AI according to the European values and fundamental rights,” adding that lawmakers have a big part to play in achieving this. “This is why I believe that the open source developers should be exempt from the AI act,” he said. “Because ultimately this comes down to people. The open source community is not a community of entities. It’s a community of people and the compliance burden should fall on entities, it should fall on companies that are shipping products. OSS developers are often just volunteers, many of them are working two jobs. They are hobbyists and scientists, academics and doctors, professors and university students all alike, and they don’t usually stand to profit from their contributions. They certainly don’t have big budgets, or their own compliance department.”

Submission + - Judge Uses ChatGPT To Make Court Decision (vice.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: A judge in Colombia used ChatGPT to make a court ruling, in what is apparently the first time a legal decision has been made with the help of an AI text generator—or at least, the first time we know about it. Judge Juan Manuel Padilla Garcia, who presides over the First Circuit Court in the city of Cartagena, said he used the AI tool to pose legal questions about the case and included its responses in his decision, according to a court document (PDF) dated January 30, 2023.

"The arguments for this decision will be determined in line with the use of artificial intelligence (AI),” Garcia wrote in the decision, which was translated from Spanish. “Accordingly, we entered parts of the legal questions posed in these proceedings." "The purpose of including these AI-produced texts is in no way to replace the judge's decision,” he added. “What we are really looking for is to optimize the time spent drafting judgments after corroborating the information provided by AI.”

The case involved a dispute with a health insurance company over whether an autistic child should receive coverage for medical treatment. According to the court document, the legal questions entered into the AI tool included “Is an autistic minor exonerated from paying fees for their therapies?” and “Has the jurisprudence of the constitutional court made favorable decisions in similar cases?” Garcia included the chatbot’s full responses in the decision, apparently marking the first time a judge has admitted to doing so. The judge also included his own insights into applicable legal precedents, and said the AI was used to "extend the arguments of the adopted decision." After detailing the exchanges with the AI, the judge then adopts its responses and his own legal arguments as grounds for its decision.

Submission + - European police arrest 42 after cracking covert messaging app (news24.com)

Submitted by lexios
lexios writes: European police arrested 42 suspects and seized guns, drugs and millions in cash, after cracking another encrypted online messaging service used by criminals, Dutch law enforcement said Friday.

Police launched raids on 79 premises in Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands following an investigation that started back in September 2020 and led to the shutting down of the covert Exclu Messenger service. Exclu is just the latest encrypted online chat service to be unlocked by law enforcement. In 2021 investigators broke into Sky ECC — another "secure" app used by criminal gangs.

After police and prosecutors got into the Exclu secret communications system, they were able to read the messages passed between criminals for five months before the raids, said Dutch police. Those arrested include users of the app, as well as its owners and controllers. Police in France, Italy and Sweden, as well as Europol and Eurojust, its justice agency twin, also took part in the investigation. The police raids uncovered at least two drugs labs, one cocaine-processing facility, several kilograms of drugs, four million euros in cash, luxury goods and guns, Dutch police said.

Used by around 3 000 people, including around 750 Dutch speakers, Exclu was installed on smartphones with a licence to operate costing 800 euros for six months. Exclu made it possible to exchange messages, photos, notes, voice memos, chat conversations and videos with other users. The online service "was praised by the owners and manager for its high level of security", police added.

The earlier Sky ECC probe gave investigators a vast trove of messages sent between secretive drug smuggling gangs.
Breaking that encrypted system allowed police to intercept drug shipments and make a large number of arrests.

Comment this is why smart systems are dumb (Score 5, Insightful) 202

this is why smart systems are dumb.

The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong, it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair. (Douglas Adams)

Comment because it IS hard (Score 1) 526

by johnrpenner (#61629621) Attached to: 'Programming Is Hard' Considered Harmful

programming IS hard — there are all sorts of wierd arcane hoops to jump through, and you have to tackle your way through abstractions and functions and develop the ability to build and sustain a mental model in a completely rigorous way. the compiler is unforgiving — but ultimately your best friend, because it gives you very exact feedback in your logical interrogations. chess might be the best preparation for dealing with code —but once youre in it, it becomes a maze of math and pointers and valiables and missing semicolons.

programming IS hard —but it is also rewarding.
stop trying to dumb it down.

2cents from toronto
j

Comment VM virtual machine (Score 1) 383

they were showing a VM virtual machine running Linux — and bigSUR is using rosetta. is the virtual machine coming with the OS or is it remaining with third parties? does it integrate x86 emulation via rosetta2? they showed usable performance executing x86 code — tomb raider was playable. it would be really nice to get some metrics to see if rosetta cripples legacy application performance.

Comment happy birthday mac! (Score 1) 108

by johnrpenner (#59654338) Attached to: 36 Years Ago Today, Steve Jobs Unveiled the First Macintosh

the event was catalytic in so many ways —the world was still running DOS — and boom! all of the sudden the world had a GUI. it did for the command line what the iPhone did for smartphones —total game changer —i still remember, coming from DOS (LDOS, TRSDOS, NewDOS, and PC-DOS) — and trying to figure out where to type: copy *.* A: and then it was click & drag —and that moment forever changed the way things worked ever after that. i still run windows, and love linux, but the mac has also always been there — and now there are millions and millions of macs. life has never been better. my 2017 macBook pro is the bomb. i can still run microsoft word (which was born on the mac GUI), and photoshop and unix — happy birthday mac!

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