Technology And Tech News

> The Break key is a keyboard key whose original purpose was to immediately halt execution of a running a program. On modern computers, it has no default function. It is not commonly used, although any software may use it for its own purpose. The Break key may also be remapped with a program like AutoHotkey.

> We will all have seen disabled people who do not have the use of their hands, attempting to communicate using 'unicorn sticks' or even eye-tracking technology. I considered this and wondered if the simple Makey Makey board could be pressed into service to provide a quicker and lower-cost way to replace a mouse and thus facilitate a whole host of ways to communicate.

> We all know how sensitive and controllable our tongues are. We can easily send our tongue to any tooth and the tip can easily determine items as small as a piece of trapped food or even a human hair.

> Since many disabled people still have the full use of their tongue, it occurred to me that it may be possible to put together a mouth controller using the Makey Makey interface to connect to an onscreen keyboard.

Was brainstorming some ideas like this and found something that already exists that I thought was interesting to share

Instagram recommends sexualized content to young teenagers within minutes of their first log in, according to studies from The Wall Street Journal and Northeastern computer-science professor Laura Edelson.

The studies, which consisted of scrolling through Instagram Reels using new test accounts with listed ages of 13, found that adult sex-content creators appeared in the test accounts’ feeds in as little as three minutes, according to The Wall Street Journal. Additionally, if a test account chose to skip other forms of content and watch sexually suggestive content to completion, its feed would be dominated by sexualized content in under 20 minutes.

The US has announced plans to ban the sale of antivirus software made by Russian firm Kaspersky due to its alleged links to the Kremlin. Moscow's influence over the company was found to pose a significant risk to US infrastructure and services, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on Thursday.

She said that the US was compelled to take action due to Russia's "capacity and... intent to collect and weaponise the personal information of Americans".

"Kaspersky will generally no longer be able to, among other activities, sell its software within the United States or provide updates to software already in use," the Commerce Department said. Kaspersky said it intended to pursue "all legally available options" to fight the ban, and denied it engaged in any activity that threatened US security.

The plan uses broad powers created by the Trump administration to ban or restrict transactions between US firms and tech companies from "foreign adversary" nations like Russia and China.

The plan will effectively bar downloads of software updates, resales and licensing of the product from 29 September and new business will be restricted within 30 days of the announcement.

https://freenet.org

> The centralization of the internet poses a fundamental threat to individual freedom. In 2024, a few corporations control most internet services and infrastructure. These corporations wield immense power over most of us with little accountability, enabling them to censor content, exploit our data, and exclude users from services they depend on —all with profound implications for democracy. We need a solution urgently.

> Introducing Freenet — a decentralized replacement for the world wide web. Acting as a global, shared, decentralized computing platform, Freenet can either be accessed via a standard web browser or integrated into third-party applications.

> The Ironwood bicycle is a wooden framed bike that people could make themselves with commonly available materials. It has a laminated wooden frame and fork to which standard bicycle components are bolted. The frame can be made with basic carpentry and metalwork skills, without the need for welding or soldering. The design is intended for small scale bicycle production that would support local employment as an alternative to importing bicycles from around the world. More: http://www.ironwoodbicycle.com.

They say one extra copy, one copy off site, maybe a backup to a "cloud" of choice ("3-2-1 rule")... and you could do more than one of each of these

What are your tips on making backups?

Did anyone ever get in to these?

AutoKey (Linux): https://github.com/autokey/autokey

> a desktop automation utility for Linux and X11

see maybe the wiki for some ideas of what it can do? https://github.com/autokey/autokey/wiki

AutoHotkey (Windows): https://www.autohotkey.com/

> The ultimate automation scripting language for Windows.

see maybe features https://www.autohotkey.com/#keyfeatures

Did this project figure out how to deal with the API issues from last year? The "Teddit" project worked well as a frontend until then; I forgot to try this "Redlib" frontend until again just now

It will live in the cloud forever.

I started thr processes but I'm not finished. Gunna see if I even still wanna do it after some sleep on it.

!

Policy takes effect April 9, 2025 for new accounts, or until April 9, 2026 for current accounts (a year or two). Just have to log in every year to keep an account active.

I think this is maybe part of a broader conversation that needs to happen about limited resources and data; like with Gab.com limiting uploading media to paid users. Sounds like protonmail probably has a lot of junk accounts they want to clear to keep their service running smoothly.

edit: https://proton.me/support/inactive-accounts

The most interesting part of the story is how it got there. xz Utils is open-source software, meaning that its code is public and can be inspected or modified by anyone. In 2022 Lasse Collin, the developer who maintained it, found that his “unpaid hobby project” was becoming more onerous amid long-term mental-health issues. A developer called Jia Tan, who had created an account the previous year, offered to help. For more than two years he, she or they contributed helpful code on hundreds of occasions, building up trust. In February they smuggled in the malware.

The significance of the attack is “huge”, says The Grugq, a pseudonymous independent security researcher who is widely read by cyber-security experts. “The backdoor is very peculiar in how it is implemented, but it is really clever stuff and very stealthy”—perhaps too stealthy, he suggests, because some of the steps taken in the code to hide its true purpose may have slowed it down and thus raised Mr Freund’s alarm. Jia Tan’s patience, supported by several other accounts who urged Mr Collin to pass the baton, hints at a sophisticated human-intelligence operation by a state agency, suggests The Grugq.

He suspects the svr, Russia’s foreign-intelligence service, which in 2019-20 also compromised SolarWinds Orion network-management software to gain extensive access to American government networks. Analysis by Rhea Karty and Simon Henniger, published on their Substack, suggests that Jia Tan made an effort to falsify their time zone but that they were probably two to three hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time—suggesting they may have been in eastern Europe or western Russia—and avoided working on eastern European holidays. For now, however, the evidence is too weak to nail down a culprit.

The attack is perhaps the most ambitious “supply-chain” attack—one that exploits not a particular computer or device, but a piece of back-end software or hardware—in recent memory. It is also a stark illustration of the frailties of the internet and the crowdsourced code upon which it relies. For defenders of open-source software, Mr Freund’s eagle eyes are a vindication of its premise: code is open, can be inspected by anyone, and errors or deliberate backdoors will eventually be found through collective scrutiny.

>Federal investigators have ordered Google to provide information on all viewers of select YouTube videos, according to multiple court orders obtained by Forbes. Privacy experts from multiple civil rights groups told Forbes they think the orders are unconstitutional because they threaten to turn innocent YouTube viewers into criminal suspects.

>In a just-unsealed case from Kentucky reviewed by Forbes, undercover cops sought to identify the individual behind the online moniker “elonmuskwhm,” who they suspect of selling bitcoin for cash, potentially running afoul of money laundering laws and rules around unlicensed money transmitting. In conversations with the user in early January, undercover agents sent links of YouTube tutorials for mapping via drones and augmented reality software, then asked Google for information on who had viewed the videos, which collectively have been watched over 30,000 times.

>The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos. The cops argued, “There is reason to believe that these records would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators.”

via Wiki:

> A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information. A mind map is hierarchical and shows relationships among pieces of the whole.[1] It is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those.

I remember trying software only so long ago and didn't really like the offerings, any recommended software or do you just like to use a graphics editor where you can manually draw and write them?

What this has resolved to for me is more thinking in mind maps by creating table-of-contents organized plain text notes in a hierarchical way.

Thoughts on "mind maps" in general?

Comments elsewhere also mention this project: https://github.com/gildas-lormeau/SingleFile

So basically privacy is done? Like done DONE

Saw a blurb about this but don't know much about it, anyone's thoughts on "heat pumps"?

Apparently they use electricity to bring heat from outside in to the house in winter, and draw heat out in summer?

Example article: https://www.energy.gov/articles/pump-your-savings-heat-pumps Now

So I looked in to "cron" a while ago, and am looking in to it again:

> The software utility Cron is a time-based job scheduler in Unix-like computer operating systems.

Immediately one problem is cron won't execute if a system is down, so this isn't suitable for computers people turn on and off, or some workaround is needed for that case. I have not been able to figure out what the best workaround is. I did see there were some "asynchronous" programs that could execute if/when the computer boots back up, but they started to seem more complex or with complicated syntaxes. I'm literally just asking for a simple "time / program to execute" format.

This seems like a really simple issue, I basically want to set a bunch of alarms to execute programs when they go off: some recurring, some one time alarms.

In researching this, I found a multiplicity of complicated systems all over the place, I'm still not sure if any do what I'm looking for or what workaround would be best.

There is an "at" command for one time execution of tasks... but why does it have to split in to "cron" for recurring tasks, and "at" for one time tasks, why can't they just be one program that specifies if a task is a one time program or recurring, and can execute code upon a reboot?

So I've been stuck with something of a "manual cron" system where I just try to remember to manually execute commands on a written schedule... so far I'm not sure if anything is more efficient.

Or basically like "Tasker" on Android, which seems to run "tasks" on a schedule?

Or should I just create a ton of "at" jobs that repeat? That seems like a bloated approach but would work?

Create a program that checks time and executes commands if it is past that time and just remember to run it frequently?

I admit that I feel like I am reinventing the wheel and am somehow needlessly complicating things, however I have seen a variety of cron-like projects and reimplmentations that seem to indicate that something is amiss in this discussion.

Also, what would you like to use cron for? This was another puzzling question, a ton of links were on how to code cron but not really discussing what people want to use it for (I saw a lot of similar ideas discussed with use of "Tasker" that seemed helpful to this end).

Has anyone figured out or solved this issue for themselves?

(Note that I don't necessarily advocate for donating to this cause or things they promote, just the idea of people being offline for the day or enjoying low tech activity or thinking about the impact of technology in their lives)

> We are here to answer the US Surgeon General’s call to end loneliness and eager to help you up your game with your tech habits.

> Since 2009, Global Day of Unplugging has been celebrated annually in March. Whether it is 1 hour or 24 hours, at some point during the first weekend of March, people all over the world, will step away from their screens and intentionally shift into an offline activity, an in-person interaction, a real-life gathering or simply a meaningful conversation about their relationship with technology

cross-posted from: https://hilariouschaos.com/post/2142

> cross-posted from: https://hilariouschaos.com/post/2141 > > > > Box86 can be found on https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86 > > > > > Box64 can be found on https://github.com/ptitSeb/box64

> What is the Unlicense?

> The Unlicense is a template for disclaiming copyright monopoly interest in software you've written; in other words, it is a template for dedicating your software to the public domain. It combines a copyright waiver patterned after the very successful public domain SQLite project with the no-warranty statement from the widely-used MIT/X11 license.

I tried mint but it doesnt work on my display out of the box, ik you can always try tinkering but i'd love to switch to something that works no terminal needed. Im gonna give fedora budgie a try, anything else i should try? im interested in photo and video editing but i hate win 11.

phone numbers are only required when signing up

Sounds exciting, disruptive, like the heaviest use of computer hardware by AI projects yet