Monthly Archives: July 2024

Source: Hack a Day

Angry Birds, flash mobs, Russell Brand, fidget spinners. All of these were virtually unavoidable in the previous decade, and yet, like so many popular trends, have now largely faded into obscurity. But in a recent announcement, the developers of LightBurn have brought back a relic of the past that we thought was all but buried along with Harambe — popular software not supporting Linux.

But this isn’t a case of the developers not wanting to bring their software to Linux. LightBurn, the defacto tool for controlling hobbyist laser cutters and engravers, was already multi-platform. Looking forward, however, the developers claim that too much of their time is spent supporting and packaging the software for Linux relative to the size of the user base. In an announcement email sent out to users, they reached even deeper into the mid-2000s bag of excuses, and cited the number of Linux distributions as a further challenge:

The segmentation of Linux distributions complicates these burdens further — we’ve had to provide three separate packages for the versions of Linux we officially support, and still encounter frequent compatibility issues on those distributions (or closely related distributions), to say nothing of the many distributions we have been asked to support.

We’re not sure how much of their time could possibly be taken up by responding to requests for supporting additional distributions (especially when the answer is no), but apparently, it was enough that they finally had to put their foot down — the upcoming 1.7.00 release of LightBurn will be the last to run on Linux.

To really add insult to injury, LightBurn is paid software, with users having to purchase a yearly license after the time-limited demo period. Accordingly, any Linux users who recently purchased a year’s license for the software can ask for a refund. Oh, and if you’re holding out hope that the community can swoop in and take over maintaining the Linux builds, don’t — LightBurn is closed source.

While there are open source projects like LaserWeb that can be used to control these types of machines regardless of what operating system you’re running, losing LightBurn on Linux definitely hurts. While we try not to put our stamp on closed source proprietary software because of situations exactly like this one, we have to admit that LightBurn was a nice tool, especially when compared to the joke software that many of these lasers ship with.

The developers end their notice to Linux users with what seems like a particularly cruel kick while they’re already down:

Rest assured that we will be using the time gained by sunsetting Linux support to redouble our efforts at making better software for laser cutters, and beyond. We hope you will continue to utilize LightBurn on a supported operating system going forward, and we thank you for being a part of the LightBurn community.

So take comfort, Linux users — LightBurn will emerge from this decision better than ever. Unfortunately, you just won’t be able to use it.

Source: Slashdot

A decade ago, the Gates Foundation announced it will cease covering open-access publishing costs for its grantees from 2025. This shift, following a decade of support for free access to research, sparked concerns in the scientific community. Experts fear the move could undermine the open-access model, which aims to make taxpayer-funded studies freely available. The decision also marked a significant change in the foundation's approach to disseminating research findings, potentially impacting global access to critical scientific information. So where do we go from here? From a report: [The Gates Foundation] notes that open access in its current form has resulted in "some unsavory publishing practices," including unchecked pricing from journals and publishers, questionable peer review, and paper mills -- people or organizations that produce fake or subpar papers and sell authorship slots on them. "Last year was a really pivotal year in scholarly publishing since lots of people who were really pushing gold open access for many years are now thinking, 'Oh, what beast have we created?'" says James Butcher, an independent publishing consultant in Liverpool, England, who writes the newsletter Journalology. "It plays into the hands of the big corporates because it's all about scale." Gold OA creates incentives for journals to publish as many papers as possible to make more money. Some publishers, often referred to as gray OA publishers, have been criticized for exploiting the gold OA model to churn out high volumes of low-quality studies. Butcher says that because subscription- based publishers traditionally couldn't increase revenues by publishing more papers, they tended to keep volumes fairly level. In contrast, Johan Rooryck, a French linguistics researcher at Leiden University and a proponent of open access, points to a "very rapid rise" in gold OA journals and papers in the past decade. The Gates Foundation is now suggesting that authors post online preprints of their author-accepted manuscripts -- near-final versions of studies accepted by journals for publication before they are typeset or copyedited -- and then publish in whichever journals they like.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge (credit: Westend61 | Westend61)

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) easily passed the Senate today despite critics' concerns that the bill may risk creating more harm than good for kids and perhaps censor speech for online users of all ages if it's signed into law.

KOSA received broad bipartisan support in the Senate, passing with a 91–3 vote alongside the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Action (COPPA) 2.0. Both laws seek to control how much data can be collected from minors, as well as regulate the platform features that could harm children's mental health.

Only Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and Mike Lee (R-Utah) opposed the bills.

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Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge / Here's an idea: Don't be a deadbeat and do it yourself! (credit: Google)

If you've watched any Olympics coverage this week, you've likely been confronted with an ad for Google's Gemini AI called "Dear Sydney." In it, a proud father seeks help writing a letter on behalf of his daughter, who is an aspiring runner and superfan of world-record-holding hurdler Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone.

"I'm pretty good with words, but this has to be just right," the father intones before asking Gemini to "Help my daughter write a letter telling Sydney how inspiring she is..." Gemini dutifully responds with a draft letter in which the LLM tells the runner, on behalf of the daughter, that she wants to be "just like you."

Every time I see this ad, it puts me on edge in a way I've had trouble putting into words (though Gemini itself has some helpful thoughts). As someone who writes words for a living, the idea of outsourcing a writing task to a machine brings up some vocational anxiety. And the idea of someone who's "pretty good with words" doubting his abilities when the writing "has to be just right" sets off alarm bells regarding the superhuman framing of AI capabilities.

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Source: Hacker News

Source: The Verge - All Posts

While there’s been no shortage of Pixel 9 leaks over the past couple of days, a new ad for the device seems to have leaked in full — and it shows off a new feature that makes sure you aren’t left out of a group photo.

The feature, seemingly called “Add Me,” appears in a leaked ad shared with Android Headlines by OnLeaks. The ad shows someone using a Pixel 9 to take a picture of two friends in front of a van. After snapping a shot, the photographer trades spots with her two friends, allowing her to get a picture in front of the van — only the Pixel’s display shows the phantom-like image of the two friends standing beside her. Her friend snaps a photo, and boom, she appears in the picture as if she were there the entire time.

Judging by...

Continue reading…

Source: Hacker News

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge (credit: sasha85ru | Getty Imates)

In 2012, an industry-wide coalition of hardware and software makers adopted Secure Boot to protect against a long-looming security threat. The threat was the specter of malware that could infect the BIOS, the firmware that loaded the operating system each time a computer booted up. From there, it could remain immune to detection and removal and could load even before the OS and security apps did.

The threat of such BIOS-dwelling malware was largely theoretical and fueled in large part by the creation of ICLord Bioskit by a Chinese researcher in 2007. ICLord was a rootkit, a class of malware that gains and maintains stealthy root access by subverting key protections built into the operating system. The proof of concept demonstrated that such BIOS rootkits weren't only feasible; they were also powerful. In 2011, the threat became a reality with the discovery of Mebromi, the first-known BIOS rootkit to be used in the wild.

Keenly aware of Mebromi and its potential for a devastating new class of attack, the Secure Boot architects hashed out a complex new way to shore up security in the pre-boot environment. Built into UEFI—the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface that would become the successor to BIOS—Secure Boot used public-key cryptography to block the loading of any code that wasn’t signed with a pre-approved digital signature. To this day, key players in security—among them Microsoft and the US National Security Agency—regard Secure Boot as an important, if not essential, foundation of trust in securing devices in some of the most critical environments, including in industrial control and enterprise networks.

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Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge (credit: Getty)

Recent discussions on Reddit are no longer showing up in non-Google search engine results. The absence is the result of updates to Reddit’s Content Policy that ban crawling its site without agreeing to Reddit’s rules, which bar using Reddit content for AI training without Reddit’s explicit consent.

As reported by 404 Media, using "site:reddit.com" on non-Google search engines, including Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Mojeek, brings up minimal or no Reddit results from the past week. Ars Technica made searches on these and other search engines and can confirm the findings. Brave, for example, brings up a few Reddit results sometimes (examples here and here) but not nearly as many as what appears on Google when using identical queries. A standout is Kagi, which is a paid-for engine that pays Google for some of its search index and still shows recent Reddit results.

As 404 Media noted, Reddit's Robots Exclusion Protocol (robots.txt file) blocks bots from scraping the site. The protocol also states, "Reddit believes in an open Internet, but not the misuse of public content." Reddit has approved scrapers from the Internet Archive and some research-focused entities.

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Source: Hacker News