Category Archives: News

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The Brewintosh, a 3D Printed Full-Size Macintosh [video]

Source: Hacker News

Article note: I watched the video earlier and at every single step the design is way way more sophisticated and polished than you expect.
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Apex Legends finals postponed after suffering unprecedented hack

Source: Hacker News

Article note: This is _completely_ absurd. I especially love how EA and the anti-cheat vendor are pointing fingers at each other. Turns out running "Anti-Cheat" rootkit with a network connection (or just games as privileged processes in general) is also an "everything else" rootkit. Just like everyone who completely reasonably freaked out at the mere suggestion that it was reasonable to demand users install a rootkit on their general-purpose computers to make it marginally more challenging to _cheat_ at _video games_ (OWE NOES) said.
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Thebroken (2003)

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The band of budding little hackers I went to high school with and I used to get together and watch these, it's so nostalgic.
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table of contents for Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook

Source: loriemerson

Article note: This is going to be a fun book.

At long last, I can share the final table of contents for Other Networks: A Radical Technology Sourcebook (forthcoming from Anthology Editions…sometime…soon!)–a coffee table book that is equal parts speculative, playful, and serious. In the introduction I write about the need for “other networks,” how taxonomies shape and determine knowledge, why I decided on this network taxonomy in particular, and how the future of the internet is the future of networks. But just in terms of how I’m defining “other networks”…

My initial goal was to compile an inventory of networks that preceded the internet, by which I meant any network that existed before the widespread adoption of TCP/IP. This would have been simple enough, if it weren’t for the fact that the adoption of TCP/IP took over a decade (or longer) to happen, and also for the fact that (as it turns out) one may run a network on TCP/IP but not necessarily connect that network to the internet. Moreover, it also turns out that nearly countless computer networks emerged throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s—so many, in fact, that this book would need to expand to another two or three volumes in order to include them all. These networks also present intriguing complications when it comes to classification: according to the taxonomy used in this book, these networks would mostly be considered “hybrid,” in that they used (often undocumented, frequently proprietary) combinations of wireless and wired infrastructures, and they also often relied upon a wide range of protocols and/or software that this book’s structure, biased as it is toward material infrastructure, cannot quite account for. My imperfect solution, then, has been to include only one digital computer network (time-sharing networks) as a way to gesture to all the other “other networks” that remain to be documented and to try to account for many (not all and not even most) networks that did not use TCP/IP. For the sake of not allowing my definition of ‘network’ to remain tied only to computer networks, I have also defined a network simply as the connection between two or more nodes that facilitates human communication (thereby excluding networking technologies such as radar, that are mostly used for tracking).

Anyways, I hope this list intrigues!

*

Chronological List of Networks
Chronological List of Network Experiments
Acknowledgements
Foreword
Introduction

Wireless Networks:
Sound Networks
[1] Drums
[2] Whistling

Air Networks
[3] Fire or Smoke Signals
[4] Pneumatic Tubes
[5] Skywriting

Water Networks
[6] Hydraulic Semaphore

Optical Networks
[7] Flag Signaling
[8] Optical Telegraph
[9] Infrared Communication
[10] Signal Lamp
[11] Heliograph
[12] Photophone
[13] Ultraviolet Communication
[14] Laser Communication
[15] Visible Light Communication

Radio Networks
[16] Amateur Radio
[16.1] Radiotelegraphy
[16.2] Radioteletype
[16.3] Amateur Television
[16.4] Hellschreiber
[16.5] Earth-Moon-Earth Communication
[16.6] Amateur Radio Satellite
[16.7] Amateur Packet Radio
[17] Radio Broadcast
[18] Pirate Radio
[19] Radiofax
[20] Two-Way Radio
[21] Pager
[22] Meteor Burst Communication
[23] Slow Scan Television
[24] Project West Ford
[25] Pirate Television
[26] Packet Radio Network
[27] Microbroadcast
[28] Software Defined Radio
[29] Wi-Fi
[30] Bluetooth

Microwave Networks
[31] Microwave Radio-Relay
[32] Communications Satellite

Wired Networks:

Electrical Wire Networks
[33] Electrical telegraph
[33.1] Electrical Printing Telegraph
[33.2] Image Telegraph
[33.3] Fire Alarm Telegraph
[33.4] Pantelegraph
[33.5] Telephonic Telegraph
[34] Telephone
[35] Wired Radio
[36] Telautograph
[37] Telefacsimile
[38] Videophone
[39] Telex

Barbed Wire Networks
[40] Barbed Wire Telegraph
[41] Fence Phones

Hybrid Networks:

[42] Library
[43] Book
[44] Postal System
[44.1] Pigeon Post
[44.2] Projectile Post
[44.3] Balloon Mail
[44.4] Pony Express
[44.5] Airgraph and V-Mail
[44.6] Email Letter
[45] Sneakernet
[46] Radio Broadcast Network
[47] Broadcast Television
[48] Cable Television
[48.1] NABU
[49] Cellular Network
[50] Time-Sharing Network
[51] Teletext
[52] Videotex

Imaginary Networks:

[53] Necromancy
[54] Pasilalinic-Sympathetic Compass
[55] Telephonoscope
[56] Telepathy
[57] Ley Lines
[58] Mundaneum
[59] World Brain
[60] Memex
[61] Faster-Than-Light Communication Networks
[62] Project Xanadu
[63] Metaverse
[64] The Clacks
[65] Pandoran Neural Network
[66] Cosmic Internet

Alphabetical Index

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FCC scraps old speed benchmark, says broadband should be at least 100Mbps

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Finally.
FCC scraps old speed benchmark, says broadband should be at least 100Mbps

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images | Yuichiro Chino)

The Federal Communications Commission today voted to raise its Internet speed benchmark for the first time since January 2015, concluding that modern broadband service should provide at least 100Mbps download speeds and 20Mbps upload speeds.

An FCC press release after today's 3-2 vote said the 100Mbps/20Mbps benchmark "is based on the standards now used in multiple federal and state programs," such as those used to distribute funding to expand networks. The new benchmark also reflects "consumer usage patterns, and what is actually available from and marketed by Internet service providers," the FCC said.

The previous standard of 25Mbps downstream and 3Mbps upstream lasted through the entire Trump era and most of President Biden's term. There has been a clear partisan divide on the speed standard, with Democrats pushing for a higher benchmark and Republicans arguing that it shouldn't be raised.

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The Mark Williams Company and the COHERENT operating system

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Some details I hadn't read before in this telling - It's surprising how many parallels there are between early-mwc and early-microsoft's activities.
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The 2024 Moto G Power packs wireless charging, 8GB RAM in a $300 phone

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: Shoot, I'd prefer it was an OLED, but that power model checks more boxes for me than anything else in the US market. MicroSD, 3.5mm jack, wireless charging, decent camera, not too much other bullshit. A little bigger than I'd prefer but not not comically large (...we still would have derided it as a phablet 10 years ago).
  • The 2024 Moto G and Moto G Power. [credit: Motorola ]

Motorola is launching the 2024 version of its "Moto G" budget phone. Today we've got two versions, the "Moto G 5G 2024" and the "Moto G Power 5G 2024" to pick from. The base Moto G 2024 is $199.99, while the Power version is $299.99.

The specs on the base model Moto G are all over the place. We've got a low-resolution, high refresh rate 6.6-inch, 120 Hz, 1612×720 LCD and a Snapdragon 4 Gen 1. The phone has a whopping 8GB of RAM, 128GB of storage, and a 5000 mAh battery with 18 W wired charging. You get a lot of extras: a 3.5 mm headphone jack, NFC (!), a side fingerprint reader, and a microSD slot. The Snapdragon 4 Gen 1 is about as cheap of a chip as you can get from Qualcomm, a 6 nm chip with two Cortex A78 CPUs and six A55 CPUs. It seems criminal that these budget Qualcomm chips prioritize barely there 5G bands yet only support 802.11ac, AKA "Wi-Fi 5," which first hit smartphones in 2013.

On the back of the base-model Moto G is one real camera, a 50MP rear sensor, and a just-for-looks 2MP "macro" sensor. The front camera is 8MP.

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Can We Just Throw in the Towel on Airport Security Theater Already?

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Yes please. We know it's almost entirely ineffective and was simply imposed by post 9-11 panic, but it's turned into an extremely inefficient jobs program for the marginally-unemployable and a vast grift for rent-seeking security gadget and background check contractors, so it's become hard to kill.
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Superconductivity scandal: the inside story of deception in a physics lab

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Yeah, that sounds like academia. I have a recurring bit in my thesis where I make jokes about academia treating information from "stable pseudonyms on the Internet" as unreliable, even though, both from experience and study of structural incentives, it's way _way_ more reliable than any traditional academic output.
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Nikon buys high-end cinema camera company RED

Source: Engadget

Article note: Huh, their raw video compression lawsuit is tangentially relevant to some research I've been working on so I was recently reading about them as adversaries. This seems like a pretty reasonable pairing, they aim at a similar prosumer/independent-pro niche in the still and video markets, and the underlying tech is largely the same.

Nikon has announced it is buying RED, the high-end cinema camera company, for an undisclosed sum. In a statement, the camera giant, which has suffered along with most of the imaging industry in recent years, said RED will become a wholly-owned subsidiary, as found by The Verge. RED currently has about 220 employees, and no layoff plans have been made public in response to the sale. 

RED was founded in 2005 and has since had its cameras used in popular productions, including Squid Game, Peaky Blinders and Captain Marvel — a market Nikon plans to expand into with this acquisition. Nikon has withdrawn from less profitable areas of the camera market in recent years, including ending development on new DSLRs

The move could benefit both parties, as RED's president Jarred Lang shared on Facebook: "This strategic partnership brings together Nikon's extensive history and expertise in product development, know-how in image processing, as well as optical technology and user interface with RED's revolutionary digital cinema cameras and award-winning technologies." RED's 2018 attempt to expand on its own (into smartphones, no less) didn't last long, and the products soon were discontinued. 

Interestingly, RED sued its new owner in 2022, claiming that Nikon knowingly used RED's patented data compression technology in its Z9 camera. Nikon, in turn, argued the legitimacy of RED's patents before the two companies agreed to a dismissal. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/nikon-buys-high-end-cinema-camera-company-red-100243796.html?src=rss
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