Source: Hacker News
Source: The Register
Opinion The US Justice Department's proposed remedies to address Google's monopoly control of the search services and search text advertising markets should be reconsidered in light of the broader problems with technology platforms.…
Source: OSNews
Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an “opt-out” feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems. This setting is turned on by default, and you have to manually uncheck a box in order to opt out.
If you are a writer who uses MS Word to write any proprietary content (blog posts, novels, or any work you intend to protect with copyright and/or sell), you’re going to want to turn this feature off immediately.
↫ Dr. Casey Lawrence
The author of this article, Dr. Casey Lawrence, mentions the opt-out checkbox is hard to find, and they aren’t kidding. On Windows, here’s the full snaking path you have to take through Word’s settings to get to the checkbox: File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings > Optional Connected Experiences > Uncheck box: “Turn on optional connected experiences”. That is absolutely bananas. No normal person is ever going to find this checkbox.
Anyway, remember how the “AI” believers kept saying “hey, it’s on the internet so scraping your stuff and violating your copyright is totally legal you guys!”? Well, what about when you’re using Word, installed on your own PC, to write private documents, containing, say, sensitive health information? Or detailed plans about your company’s competitor to Azure or Microsoft Office? Or correspondence with lawyers about an antirust lawsuit against Microsoft? Or a report on Microsoft’s illegal activity you’re trying to report as a whistleblower? Is that stuff fair game for the gobbledygook generators too?
This “AI” nonsense has to stop. How is any of this even remotely legal?
Source: Hack a Day
After 22 years of development, FreeCAD has at long last reached the milestone of version 1.0. On this momentous occasion, it’s good to remember what a version 1.0 is supposed to mean, as also highlighted in the release blog post: FreeCAD is now considered stable and ready for ‘real work’. One of the most important changes here is that the topological naming problem (TNP) that has plagued FreeCAD since its inception has now finally been addressed using Realthunders’ mitigation algorithm, which puts it closer to parity here with other CAD packages. The other major change is that assemblies are now supported with the assembly workbench, which uses the Ondsel solver.
Other changes include an updated user interface and other features that should make using FreeCAD easier and closer in line with industry standards. In the run-up to the 1.0 release we already addressed the nightmare that is chamfering in FreeCAD, and the many overlapping-yet-uniquely-incomplete workbenches, much of which should be far less of a confabulated nightmare in this bright new 1.0 future.
Naturally, the big zero behind the major version number also means that there will still be plenty of issues to fix and bugs to hunt down, but it’s a promising point of progress in the development of this OSS CAD package.
Source: OSNews
I’ve linked to quite a few posts by OpenBSD developer Solène Rapenne on OSNews, mostly about her work for and knowledge of OpenBSD. However, she recently posted about her decision to leave the OpenBSD team, and it mostly comes down to the fact she hasn’t been using OpenBSD for a while now due to a myriad of problems she’s encountering. Posts like these are generally not that fun to link to, and I’ve been debating about this for a few days now, but I think highlighting such problems, especially when detailed by a now-former OpenBSD developer, is an important thing to do.
Hardware compatibility is an issue because OpenBSD has no Bluetooth support, its gamepad support is fractured and limited, and most of all, battery life and heat are a major issue, as Solène notes that “OpenBSD draws more power than alternatives, by a good margin”. For her devops work, she also needs to run a lot of software in virtual machines, and this seems to be a big problem on OpenBSD, as performance in this area seems limited. Lastly, OpenBSD seems to be having stability issues and crashes a lot for her, and while this in an of itself is a big problem already, it’s compounded by the fact that OpenBSD’s file system is quite outdated, and most crashes will lead to corrupted or lost files, since the file system doesn’t have any features to mitigate this.
I went through a similar, but obviously much shorter and far less well-informed experience with OpenBSD myself. It’s such a neat, understandable, and well-thought out operating system, but its limitations are obvious, and they will start to bother you sooner or later if you’re trying to use it as a general purpose operating system. While it’s entirely understandable because OpenBSD’s main goal is not the desktop, it still sucks because everything else about the operating system is so damn nice and welcoming.
Solène found her alternative in Linux and Qubes OS:
I moved from OpenBSD to Qubes OS for almost everything (except playing video games) on which I run Fedora virtual machines (approximately 20 VM simultaneously in average). This provides me better security than OpenBSD could provide me as I am able to separate every context into different spaces, this is absolutely hardcore for most users, but I just can’t go back to a traditional system after this.
↫ Solène Rapenne
She lists quite a few Linux features she particularly likes and why, such as cgroups, systemd, modern file systems like Btrfs and ZFS, SELinux, and more. It’s quite rare to see someone of her calibre so openly list the shortcomings of the system she clearly otherwise loves and put a lot of effort in, and move to what is generally looked at with some disdain within the community she came from. It also highlights that issues with running OpenBSD as a general purpose operating system are not confined to less experienced users such as myself, but extend towards extremely experienced and knowledgeable people like actual OpenBSD developers.
I’m definitely not advocating for OpenBSD to change course or make a hard pivot to becoming a desktop operating system, but I do think that even within the confines of a server operating system there’s room for at least things like a much improved and faster file system that provides the modern features server users expect, too.
Source: Hacker News
Source: OSNews
One of my favourite devices that never took on in the home is the thin client. Whenever I look at a fully functional Sun Microsystems thin client setup, with Sun Rays, a Solaris server, and the smartcards instantly loading up your desktop the moment you slide it in the Ray’s slot, my mind wonders about the future we could’ve had in our homes – a powerful, expandable, capable server in the basement, running every family member’s software, and thin clients all throughout the house where family members can plug their smartcard into to load up their stuff.
This is the future they took from us.
Well, not entirely. They took this future, made it infinitely worse by replacing that big server in our basement with massive datacentres far away from us in the “cloud”, and threw it back in our faces as a shittier inevitability we all have to deal with. The fact this model relies on subscriptions is, of course, entirely coincidental and not all the main driving force behind taking our software away from us and hiding it stronghold datacentres.
So anyway Microsoft is launching a thin client that connects to a Windows VM running in the cloud. They took the perfection Sun gave us, shoved it down their throats, regurgitated it like a cow, and are now presenting it to us as the new shiny. It’s called the Windows 365 Link, and it connects to, as the name implies, Windows 365. Here’s part of the enterprise marketing speak:
Today, as users take advantage of virtualization offerings delivered on an array of devices, they can face complex sign-in processes, peripheral incompatibility, and latency issues. Windows 365 Link helps address these issues, particularly in shared workspace scenarios. It’s compact, lightweight, and designed to maximize productivity with its highly responsive performance. It takes seconds to boot and instantly wakes from sleep, allowing users to quickly get started or pick up where they left off on their Cloud PC. With dual 4K monitor support, four USB ports, an Ethernet port, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3, Windows 365 Link offers seamless connectivity with both wired and wireless peripherals.
↫ Anthony Smith at the Windows IT Pro Blog
This is just a thin client, but worse, since it seemingly can only connect to Microsoft’s “cloud”, without the ability to connect to a server on-premises, which is a very common use case. In fact, you can’t even use another vendor’s tooling, so if you want to switch from Windows 365 to some other provider later down the line, you seemingly can’t – unless there’s some BIOS switches or whatever you can flip. At the very least, Microsoft intends for other vendors to also make Link devices, so perhaps competition will bring the price down to a more manageble level than $349.
Unless an enterprise environment is already so deep into the Microsoft ecosystem that they don’t even rely on things like Citrix or any of the other countless providers of similar services, why would you buy thousands of these for your employees, only to lock your entire company into Windows 365? I’m no IT manager, obviously, so perhaps I’m way off base here, but this thing seems like a hard sell when there are so, so many alternative services, and so many thin client devices to choose from that can use any of those services.
Source: Ars Technica
University of Rochester physicist Ranga Dias made headlines with his controversial claims of high-temperature superconductivity—and made headlines again when the two papers reporting the breakthroughs were later retracted under suspicion of scientific misconduct, although Dias denied any wrongdoing. The university conducted a formal investigation over the past year and has now terminated Dias' employment, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“In the past year, the university completed a fair and thorough investigation—conducted by a panel of nationally and internationally known physicists—into data reliability concerns within several retracted papers in which Dias served as a senior and corresponding author,” a spokesperson for the University of Rochester said in a statement to the WSJ, confirming his termination. “The final report concluded that he engaged in research misconduct while a faculty member here.”
The spokesperson declined to elaborate further on the details of his departure, and Dias did not respond to the WSJ's request for comment. Dias did not have tenure, so the final decision rested with the Board of Trustees after a recommendation from university President Sarah Mangelsdorf. Mangelsdorf had called for terminating his position in an August letter to the chair and vice chair of the Board of Trustees, so the decision should not come as a surprise. Dias' lawsuit claiming that the investigation was biased was dismissed by a judge in April.
Ars has been following this story ever since Dias first burst onto the scene with reports of a high-pressure, room-temperature superconductor, published in Nature in 2020. Even as that paper was being retracted due to concerns about the validity of some of its data, Dias published a second paper in Nature claiming a similar breakthrough: a superconductor that works at high temperatures but somewhat lower pressures. Shortly afterward, that paper was retracted as well. As Ars Science Editor John Timmer reported previously:
Dias' lab was focused on high-pressure superconductivity. At extreme pressures, the orbitals where electrons hang out get distorted, which can alter the chemistry and electronic properties of materials. This can mean the formation of chemical compounds that don't exist at normal pressures, along with distinct conductivity. In a number of cases, these changes enabled superconductivity at unusually high temperatures, although still well below the freezing point of water.
Dias, however, supposedly found a combination of chemicals that would boost the transition to superconductivity to near room temperature, although only at extreme pressures. While the results were plausible, the details regarding how some of the data was processed to produce one of the paper's key graphs were lacking, and Dias didn't provide a clear explanation.
The ensuing investigation cleared Dias of misconduct for that first paper. Then came the second paper, which reported another high-temperature superconductor forming at less extreme pressures. However, potential problems soon became apparent, with many of the authors calling for its retraction, although Dias did not.
Source: Ars Technica
After Ars spent Half-Life 2's 20th anniversary week looking back at the game's history and impact, Valve marked the occasion with a meaty two-hour YouTube documentary featuring insider memories from the team behind the game itself. Near the end of that documentary, longtime Valve watchers also get a chance to see footage of the long-promised but never-delivered Half-Life 2: Episode 3 and hear more about what led the project to be abandoned.
The Episode 3 footage included in the documentary focuses heavily on a new ice gun that would have served as the episode's main new feature. Players would have been able to use that gun to freeze enemies, set up ice walls as makeshift cover, or construct icy ledges to make their way down sheer cliff faces. The developers also describe a so-called "Silver Surfer mode" that would have let players extrude a line of ice in their path then slide along it at slippery speeds.
The Episode 3 developers were also working on a new, blob-like enemy that could absorb other blobs to grow or split into segments to get around small barriers or pass through grates.
Source: Hacker News
