Article note: What a weird object.
Data General field data terminal thingy, running WinowsCE, on a PowerPC chip.
Possibly the last new product introduced before EMC ate DG.
Article note: Turns out google understands privacy when it's them.
Enlarge/ Kenneth Dintzer, litigator for the US Department of Justice, exits federal court in Washington, DC, on September 20, 2023, during the antitrust trial to determine if Alphabet Inc.'s Google maintains a monopoly in the online search business. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)
Near the end of the second day of closing arguments in the Google monopoly trial, US district judge Amit Mehta weighed whether sanctions were warranted over what the US Department of Justice described as Google's "routine, regular, and normal destruction" of evidence.
Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google's revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements. These agreements, the DOJ and state attorneys general argued, work to maintain Google's monopoly over search.
According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ's attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law."
Article note: ...I was talking to a buddy in the Navy about how they're one of the last places with genuinely traceable, trustworthy supply lines.
Apparently only in specific niches.
Enlarge/ Cisco Systems headquarters in San Jose, California. (credit: Getty)
A Florida resident was sentenced to 78 months for running a counterfeit scam that generated $100 million in revenue from fake networking gear and put the US military's security at risk, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) announced Thursday.
Onur Aksoy, aka Ron Aksoy and Dave Durden, pleaded guilty on June 5, 2023, to two counts of an indictment charging him with conspiring with others to traffic in counterfeit goods, to commit mail fraud, and to commit wire fraud. His sentence, handed down on May 1, also includes an order to pay $100 million in restitution to Cisco, a $40,000 fine, and three years of supervised release. Aksoy will also have to pay his victims a sum that a court will determine at an unspecified future date, the DOJ said.
According to the indictment [PDF], Aksoy began plotting the scam around August 2013, and the operation ran until at least April 2022. Aksoy used at least 19 companies and about 15 Amazon storefronts, 10 eBay ones, and direct sales—known collectively as Pro Network Entities—to sell tens of thousands of computer networking devices. He imported the products from China and Hong Kong and used fake Cisco packaging, labels, and documents to sell them as new and real. Legitimate versions of the products would've sold for over $1 billion, per the indictment.
Article note: The Gnome folk's "Let's break the ecosystem to support oUr ViSiOn, then act condescending to anyone who complains" behavior has been going on for over a decade.
I essentially stopped using xfce as my daily driver because of trickle-down brain damage, and they just keep breaking more things. At least KDE has been generally good lately.
Article note: Interesting. OpenCASCADE geometry with SolveSpace's constraint solver, glued together by the HorizonEDA guy.
FreeCAD >0.19 isn't _as_ horrible as people like to act, but I always like to see reasonable options in the FOSS CAD space.
I compiled and made a quick NEMA17 mount plate just to jam a dimensioned thing in to it, it has some quirks about commit vs. cancel and not entering input fields when I expect, but the basic experience seems pretty decent.
Article note: Enshittification, full speed ahead...
Illustration: The Verge
Roku has a plan to boost ad revenue. The company will start showing video ads on your homescreen at some point. Roku CEO Anthony Wood told investors during the company’s earnings call last week that the company will put the video ads in the “premier video app we called the Marquee” where static image ads live now.
It sounds like Wood is referring to the box on the homescreen that sits to the right of your Roku apps, which hopefully means the video ads won’t be full-screened. He said the company is also testing out “other types of video ad units” and looking into other ways to “innovate more video advertising” on the homescreen. The company’s push comes after it performed its third layoff in less than a year last September amid a slower...
Article note: That fine is small enough to be minor cost-of-doing business.
Intentionally mishandling sensitive user data should come with existential-threat fines.
Article note: We knew the board was going to rubber stamp it, but it's still repugnant.
As best I can make out, the entire premise is "We can't squeeze any more money to support administrative bloat and monument-building construction projects out of the pool of qualified students, so we need to start admitting more unqualified students to pump those numbers."
This power grab apparently kicked off because the faculty senate wanted to reinstate test requirements for admission (which our vast pandemic-era forced experiment has demonstrated generally improves the diversity of admitted students, because standardized tests are one of the few good way for students from disadvantage backgrounds to distinguish themselves in a portable way), and the administration didn't want that getting in the way of expanding enrollment into taking a couple semesters of tuition from more students who are grossly unprepared for college.
University of Kentucky faculty and staff attend the board of trustees meeting on April 26, 2024. The board heard from nine people opposed to a proposed change to the university’s governance structure, which would move the university senate to an advisory role.
