176837469
submission
wiggles writes:
The US Space Force has a contract worth up to US$60 million to develop and fly a kind-of aircraft carrier in space. With Russia and China both pursuing very aggressive policies to develop weapons on both the ground and in space designed to disable or destroy Western satellites,the Space Force needs to have assets in the form of maneuverable spacecraft in orbit at all times â" not as individual vehicles, but stored in a mothership that can launch them as needed, rather like the fictional Battlestar Galactica or Babylon 5, though not quite as cool.
172609671
submission
wiggles writes:
Whenever chaos engulfs a proprietary technology relied on by millions, the default knee-jerk reaction from many seems to be: “Hey, let’s see what the open source world has to offer.”
Case in point: X’s (Twitter) steady demise since Elon Musk took over last year led many to search for more “open” alternatives, be it Mastodon or Bluesky.
This scenario became all too familiar throughout 2023, as established technologies relied on by millions hit a chaos curve, making people realize how beholden they are to a proprietary platform they have little control over.
The OpenAI fiasco in November, where the ChatGPT hit-maker temporarily lost its co-founders, including CEO Sam Altman, created a whirlwind five days of chaos culminating in Altman returning to the OpenAI hotseat. But only after businesses that had built products atop OpenAI’s GPT-X large language models (LLMs) started to question the prudence of going all-in on OpenAI, with “open” alternatives such as Meta’s Llama-branded family of LLMs well-positioned to capitalize.
Even Google seemingly acknowledged that “open” might trump “proprietary” AI, with a leaked internal memo penned by a researcher that expressed fears that open source AI was on the front foot. “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI,” the memo noted.
145886752
submission
wiggles writes:
The Office of the New York Attorney General said in a new report that a campaign funded by the broadband industry submitted millions of fake comments supporting the 2017 repeal of net neutrality.
The Federal Communications Commission’s contentious 2017 repeal undid Obama-era rules that barred internet service providers from slowing or blocking websites and apps or charging companies more for faster speeds to consumers. The industry had sued to stop these rules before they were repealed but lost.
The proceeding generated a record-breaking number of comments — more than 22 million — and nearly 18 million were fake, the attorney general’s office found. It has long been known that the tally included fake comments.
14075630
submission
wiggles writes:
The federal government is launching an expansive program dubbed "Perfect Citizen" to detect cyber assaults on private companies and government agencies running such critical infrastructure as the electricity grid and nuclear-power plants, according to people familiar with the program.The surveillance by the National Security Agency, the government's chief eavesdropping agency, would rely on a set of sensors deployed in computer networks for critical infrastructure that would be triggered by unusual activity suggesting an impending cyber attack, though it wouldn't persistently monitor the whole system, these people said.
How do we feel about NSA spyware in all of our infrastructure?
98030
submission
wiggles writes:
According to the Chicago Tribune, the recent surge of video sites such as youtube and Google video are pushing the limits of the internet's bandwidth, or soon will be. Pieter Poll, chief technology officer at Qwest Communications, says that traffic volumes are growing faster than computing power, meaning that engineers can no longer count on newer, faster computers to keep ahead of their capacity demands. Further, a recent report from Deloitte Consulting raised the possibility that 2007 would see Internet demand exceed capacity. Admittedly, this seems sensationalistic, but are we headed for a massive slowdown of the whole internet?
