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Paid influencers must label posts as ads, German court rules | Reuters #internet #advertising

Social media influencers who receive money from companies to promote products must clearly label such posts as advertisements, a top German court ruled on Thursday.

Hong Kong: Police raid Tiananmen Square museum - BBC News #politics #history

A museum commemorating the deadly 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown has been raided by Hong Kong police.

Officers were later seen carrying exhibits out of the June 4 Museum.

Four members of the group that ran the museum, the Hong Kong Alliance, were detained on Wednesday - including prominent pro-democracy activist and barrister Chow Hang Tung.

The arrests were made under the national security law, which has a maximum sentence of life imprisonment.

New Math Book Rescues Landmark Topology Proof | Quanta Magazine #science #stem

One of the most important pieces of mathematical knowledge was on the verge of being lost, maybe forever. Now, a new book hopes to save it.

The Disc Embedding Theorem rewrites a proof completed in 1981 by Michael Freedman — about an infinite network of discs — after years of solitary toil on the California coast. Freedman’s proof answered a question that at the time was one of the most important unsolved questions in mathematics, and the defining problem in Freedman’s field, topology.

Groundbreaking Technique Yields Important New Details on Silicon, Subatomic Particles and Possible ‘Fifth Force’ | NIST #science #engineering #nature

Using a groundbreaking new technique at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), an international collaboration led by NIST researchers has revealed previously unrecognized properties of technologically crucial silicon crystals and uncovered new information about an important subatomic particle and a long-theorized fifth force of nature.

By aiming subatomic particles known as neutrons at silicon crystals and monitoring the outcome with exquisite sensitivity, the NIST scientists were able to obtain three extraordinary results: the first measurement of a key neutron property in 20 years using a unique method; the highest-precision measurements of the effects of heat-related vibrations in a silicon crystal; and limits on the strength of a possible “fifth force” beyond standard physics theories.

No One Ever Saw the Snow Cruiser Again… | OrangeBean Indiana #history #engineering

When the Snow Cruiser chugged through the open doors of Chicago’s Pullman Company in 1939, it didn’t resemble a vehicle designed by the Armour Institute of Technology as much as something from a Toys R’ Us catalog. The convex driver’s perch resembled a bullfrog sitting on a block. The Cruiser nonetheless grabbed national headlines: ugly or not, no one had ever built anything like her before.

The Snow Cruiser’s blocky girth blazed fire-engine red and surprised reporters. The beast stretched about 56 feet, as long as a professional bowling lane, and its wide frame spanned 17 feet—almost the length of a Coupe Deville. This “car” wasn’t built for sport or luxury. Designer Thomas Poulter created the boxy behemoth for one purpose: survival in the Antarctica, the harshest landscape on Earth.

Facebook, Ray-Ban debut picture-taking smart glasses - Axios #technology #privacy

Ray-Ban Stories, the smart glasses being debuted by Facebook and Ray-Ban today, are most notable for just how much they look like a standard pair of the brand's sunglasses.

Why it matters: That speaks to both the most promising and troublesome aspect of the $299 glasses: They look and feel just like a standard pair of Ray-Bans while adding the ability to capture photos and video.

Plutarch • Sayings of Spartan Women #literature #culture #history

Lacaenarum Apophthegmata by Plutarch as published in Vol. III of the Loeb Classical Library edition, 1931.

The text is in the public domain.

The 'megacomet' Bernardinelli-Bernstein is the find of a decade. Here's the discovery explained. | Space #space #astronomy

Even Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein admit they're an unlikely pair of scientists to end up with a record-breaking comet named in their honor.

Scientists briefly estimated that Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, as it's now known, was the largest such icy body identified to date, perhaps more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) across. Additional observations have cast that into doubt, but given the "megacomet" a new distinction: it sprouted a tail remarkably far from the sun, suggesting more revelations to come. All told, the object offers astronomers an unprecedented opportunity to watch the antics of a comet.

Kei car - Wikipedia #engineering #culture

Kei car (or keijidōsha, kanji: 軽自動車, "light automobile", pronounced [keːdʑidoːɕa]), known variously outside Japan as Japanese city car, ultramini, or Japanese microcar, is the Japanese vehicle category for the smallest highway-legal passenger cars. Similar Japanese categories exist for microvans, and kei trucks. These vehicles are most often the Japanese equivalent of the EU A-segment (city cars).

NLOS Keyhole Imaging Can See Inside a Closed Room #technology #privacy #futurism

Being able to see inside a closed room was a skill once reserved for super heroes. But researchers at the Stanford Computational Imaging Lab have expanded on a technique called non-line-of-sight imaging so that just a single point of laser light entering a room can be used to see what physical objects might be inside.

Free online book - Nuclear War Survival Skills #reading #book #link

Nuclear War Survival Skills Updated and Expanded 1987 Edition Cresson H. Kearny

Latacora - Stop Using Encrypted Email #privacy #security

Email is unsafe and cannot be made safe. The tools we have today to encrypt email are badly flawed. Even if those flaws were fixed, email would remain unsafe. Its problems cannot plausibly be mitigated. Avoid encrypted email.

Technologists hate this argument. Few of them specialize in cryptography or privacy, but all of them are interested in it, and many of them tinker with encrypted email tools.

Most email encryption on the Internet is performative, done as a status signal or show of solidarity. Ordinary people don’t exchange email messages that any powerful adversary would bother to read, and for those people, encrypted email is LARP security. It doesn’t matter whether or not these emails are safe, which is why they’re encrypted so shoddily.

The World's Oldest Active Torrent Turns 18 Soon * TorrentFreak #inernet #copyrights

The world's oldest active torrent file turns 18 years old this month and it's still being seeded by dozens of people. "The Fanimatrix" torrent was published in 2003 when BitTorrent was still a relatively new protocol. At the time, the torrent's creator saw it as the only affordable option to share the Matrix fan film with the world.

Physics-based Deep Learning #book #online #link #datascience

Germany's federal police agency secretly purchased and used controversial spyware 'Pegasus' | TechSpot #privacy #eu

Why it matters: According to reports out of Germany, the German Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) purchased spyware from Israel-based developer NSO. The software in question is the controversial spyware known as Pegasus. Pegasus has been used by other governments to spy on journalists and other non-criminal individuals.

German news outlet Deutsche Welle (DW) notes that the federal government held a closed-door session with the parliamentary Interior Committee of the Bundestag. In the meeting, it confirmed that the BKA bought Pegasus software from NSO Group in 2019. The agency made the purchase in "the utmost secrecy" against the advice of lawyers and privacy advocates who argued the software could do much more than German privacy laws allow.

Contrary to popular and academic belief, Adam Smith did not accept inequality as a necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy | British Politics and Policy at LSE #economy #society

The assumption that Adam Smith accepted inequality as the necessary trade-off for a more prosperous economy is wrong, writes Deborah Boucoyannis. In reality, Smith’s system precluded steep inequalities not out of a normative concern with equality but by virtue of the design that aimed to maximise the wealth of nations. Much like many progressive critics of current inequality, Smith targets rentier practices by the rich and powerful as distorting economic outcomes.

Inequality is widely accepted as inevitable today, with disagreement confined to the desirability of redistributive action, its extent, and the role of government in the process. It is taken for granted even by the most progressive (and contentious) calls for high taxation on the top income earners, which aim to mitigate its effects.

Company must pay $65K to Mound man fired for refusing fingerprinting due to Christian faith - StarTribune.com #society #privacy

A Twin Cities employer has agreed to pay $65,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by a man fired for refusing to follow company orders and be fingerprinted owing to his Christian beliefs.

AscensionPoint Recovery Services (APRS), a company with operations in Coon Rapids and St. Louis Park that manages debt recovery for creditors, agreed this week to pay Henry Harrington $28,000 in back pay and $37,000 in compensatory damages, according to the settlement agreement filed this week in U.S. District Court in Minnesota.

why we use IRC nodes #internet

Why is IRC distributed across multiple servers?

I have been wondering for a long time why IRC networks have multiple servers. Wouldn't it be simpler just to use a single server?

One of the problems of having multiple servers is that netsplits can occur. Anybody who has been on IRC for a while will have witnessed one. Hundreds of people suddenly ripped out of the chat. This can also screw up channel and user modes, and 'some people' have been known to wait for netsplits in order to takeover channels or enter password protected channels.

So lets compare situation (A) a single IRC server everyone connects to with the current setup people use (B) multiple servers. Let's say you run an IRC network with u = 40,000 users and n = 20 server nodes that people connect to via round robin DNS (meaning that when people resolve the DNS it gives them a random server from the set of 20 to connect to). These are vaguely realistic numbers modelled after libera.chat.

So in (B) you have roughly u/n = 2000 clients connected to each server node, and each server node also connects to some number 1 <= b <= n-1 of the other servers. Maybe a typical server is connected to b = 3 other servers in the network. They need to do this to so that messages from clients connected to one server reach clients connected to other servers.

We can analyze the usage of 3 resources: bandwidth, RAM and CPU.

Bandwidth

Imagine 10% of the clients send a message at one instant in time. What happens?

A

• Input: The server recieves 4,000 messages from 40,000 different TCP connections.
• Output: The server must send every message it gets to every other user: 4000 * (u - 1) = 159,996,000 messages sent out across all 40,000 connections.
• RAM/CPU: The server software has to maintain 40,000 connections, parsing data from them.

B

• Input: The server recieves a total of 4,000 messages as before, but it comes in as lots of small messages from its 2000 clients and in large packages from the b = 3 other servers.
• Output: The output is quite different. The server needs to relay the 400 messages it got to the 3,999 clients that didn't send it, but it also needs to relay these messages out to the b = 3 other servers it's connected to. So it sends out a total of 400 * (3999 + 3) = 1,600,800 messages. This is about 160x less than with a single server.
• RAM/CPU: The server software has to maintain 2000+3 connections. Far fewer, so this will take up much less RAM and CPU.

Conclusion

So distributing an IRC network across multiple servers means your server does not have to manage as many connections which will reduce RAM and CPU. Will output much less data over the network but will recieve the same amount of data in.                  view raw        IRC.md        hosted with ❤ by GitHub

Stratospheric Polar Vortex returns for Winter 2021/2022, together with a strong easterly wind anomaly high above the Equator, impacting the Winter season #climate #nature

A new stratospheric Polar Vortex has now emerged over the North Pole and will continue to strengthen well into the Winter of 2021/2022. It will interact with a strong easterly wind anomaly high over the tropics. This interaction happens every few years and has actually brought colder winters to Europe and the United States in the past.

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