Category Archives: News

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Google blocks news content for some Canadians in response to proposed rules

Posted on 2023-02-24 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: As much as I'm not usually a cheerleader for megacorps, it seems _completely reasonable_ to me that if you decide you don't want to participate in the open internet and demand payment from search and aggregation sites for directing traffic to you via snippets and/or links, the search and aggregation sites deist you.
An illustration of the Google logo.
Illustration: The Verge

Google is running tests that block access to news for some Canadian users in response to a new bill that could force it and other large platforms like Meta’s Facebook to negotiate deals with news publishers to pay them for content, Reuters reports. The tests will reportedly impact less than four percent of Canadian users, run for around five weeks, and will “limit the visibility of Canadian and international news to varying degrees.”

The tests come in response to Canada’s Online News Act, also known as “Bill C-18,” which is currently being considered by the Canadian Senate, according to The Globe and Mail.

In a tweet, Canadian Heritage Minister Pablo Rodriguez said Canadians won’t be intimidated by Google’s behavior. “It’s...

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There is a worrying amount of fraud in medical research

Posted on 2023-02-23 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: There's a worrying amount of fraud in _all_ research because the global research engine is actually a prestige engine that sometimes incidentally produces research. If all the incentives are set up to encourage fraud, you get fraud.
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ThinkPad 701C with a Framework brain transplant

Posted on 2023-02-23 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Neat. A sleeper in one of the niftiest chassis ever made.
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Rovio delists original Angry Birds from PlayStore because it’s still too popular

Posted on 2023-02-22 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Making it difficult to obtain and play old games to herd customers into your modern whale-hunting microtransaction driven shovelware. This seems to be a common gross practice lately.
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Debian 12 “Bookworm” Enters Its Soft Freeze

Posted on 2023-02-20 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Naturally, within a day of when I finally got around to upgrading my webserver from 10 to 11. It looks like 12 is going to be a good release, it lined up with nice LTS declarations for components (Kernel 6.1, KDE 5.27)
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C-rusted: The advantages of Rust, in C, without the disadvantages

Posted on 2023-02-19 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Interesting. The premise that you can get your Rust-y static analysis features out of something that will pass through a standards compliant C compiler with pain comparable to actually writing rust is pretty compelling, especially for portability and gradual-improvement reasons. ... On the other hand, it appears to depend on BUGSENG's proprietary ECLAIR Software Verification Platform, which seems to be priced in the "If you have to ask, you can't afford it" range, and requires annotation that make's Rust's slightly obstinate features look convenient.
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Haiku’s package management

Posted on 2023-02-18 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: It's _such_ a cool design.

The way Haiku handles package management and its alternative approach to an “immutable system” is one of those ideas I find really cool. Here’s what it looks like from a desktop user’s perspective – there’s all the usual stuff like an “app store”, package updater, repositories of packages and so on.

It’s all there and works well – it’s easily as smooth as any desktop Linux experience. However, it’s the implementation details behind the scenes that make it so interesting to me. Haiku takes a refreshingly new approach to package management.

A deep dive into Haiku’s surprisingly robust and full-featured package management system.

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OpenPA and internet history

Posted on 2023-02-18 by pappp

Source: OSNews

Article note: I've been (slowly) working on an HP Apollo 9000/735, OpenPA has been indispensable for figuring out the unfamiliar platform.

Paul Weissmann, maintainer of OpenPA, the definitive source of information on HP’s PA-RISC hardware and software, has published an article about how the state of information preservation on this topic has changed substantially since OpenPA’s founding in 1999.

The main challenges for OpenPA at the time were both finding all the available information, as search engines were still young in the late 1990s, as well as making sense of it all as it was just so much and new sources kept appearing. This went on until the mid to late 2000s, when solid and stable sources could be found and referenced, which OpenPA did.

The Internet and information on it changed since then, slowly but surely, in a profound way. Many original sources have disappeared and so much information has been lost in only two decades – making OpenPA the authoritative source for PA-RISC in some ways. A long journey from documenting complex information of the 1990s to an historic archive on the PA-RISC era.

OpenPA is an amazing resource, so if you happen to have any information worth sharing with Weissmann, please do so.

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Half of Americans now believe that news organizations deliberately mislead them

Posted on 2023-02-16 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Only half?
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The Israelis Destabilizing Democracy and Disrupting Elections Worldwide

Posted on 2023-02-15 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: On one hand, this is always horrifying. On the other hand, this kind of shenanigans used to be accomplished much more easily; by the late 1800s, the same resources would let one basically have a whiskey with William Randolf Hearst for the same effect.
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