canopic jug writes:The videos from Southern California Linux Expo 20x (SCaLE 20X) are now online.(Alternative via Invidious and its mirrors). SCaLE 20X took place in Pasadena, California from Thursday, March 9 through Sunday, March 12, 2023.The keynote speakers were Arun Gupta, Dr. Kitty Yeung, and Ken Thompson. There were nearly 100 sessions covering everything from open government to embedded, security, and FOSS@HOME to name only a few. Ceph, DevOps LA, Kubernetes and PostgreSQL also had presences at the event. Ken Thompson's keynote covered several topics including a long running project of his regarding music playback, which now includes a Raspberry Pi powered jukebox with tens of thousands of albums available. For the older material, the jukebox does playback through a player piano.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
quietus writes:If you still want your Mao memorabilia, you better hurry down to Tiananmen Square, Beijing, while you still have the chance.In China, the State Council is somewhat comparable to the Cabinet. Headed by the Prime Minister and consisting of the heads of the various Ministries (Defense, Commerce, Education, Agriculture and Rural Affairs, Justice, Civil Affairs, State Security, Public Security and so on), it handles the day-to-day running of the country while formulating economic policy.Its operational procedures are described in a document, conveniently titled "Working Procedures for the State Council". On March 18, an updated version of that document was published, and it has a couple of changes.First off, the State Council now has to "report any major decisions, major events and important situations" to the Central Committee "in a timely manner." Previous edition sentences like "administration according to law, seeking truth from facts, democracy, openness, pragmatism and integrity" have been scrapped, as has the requirement for the State Council "to correct illegal or inappropriate administrative actions", or to "guide and supervise" the bureaucracy. In other words, its wings have been seriously clipped.Secondly, any and all references to Marxism/Leninism, Mao Zedong Thought, the thought of Deng Xiaoping and the ideologies of former presidents Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao are now verboten. Only references to Xi Jinping Thought are allowed, as that is "the essence of Chinese culture and the spirit of the times".To drive the point home, the Central Committee of the CCP launched another nationwide disciplinary campaign among its 96 million members.This round will check them for loyalty to supreme leader Xi Jinping, weeding out "black sheep" and "two-faced" officials.Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
An Anonymous Coward writes:gCaptcha is the leading rival for quality captcha services against Google's renowned and universally despised recaptcha. When Google increased the price for recaptcha competing services took off taking what Google started from to improve the experience significantly. Some experiences with smiling dogs and cloudy horses were deemed to take this too far but these experiments showed that there are improvements to be made in the captcha game.With hackers out to solve any captcha programmatically captcha services need to stay one step ahead. The slider method was found to be easily bypassed. Rotating puzzle pieces is harder to solve but involves more user interaction and has moving parts in the code that can break.Recently hCaptcha has introduce a test that challenges the user to click on the center of an owl's head. This is an improvement over selecting a type of ball from a grid of 9 or going through the excruciating experience Google inflicts on users. There must be a better way to prove that the person viewing the web page is a human and not a bot. How about it, Soylentils? What's your best idea for a captcha system given the state of the systems we have today?[Ed's Comment: Bonus points if you can suggest a system that does not rely on graphics (not everyone uses the latest browsers or even anything more than a simple line of text) to access some sites - our own included. We have the need for a robust captcha system for people creating accounts in order to reduce the number of fake accounts being created by a bot.]Original SubmissionRead more of this story at SoylentNews.
NotSanguine writes:Ars Technica is reporting that Twitter has convinced a judge to issue a subpoena to Github, requiring them to provide all personal details in their possession of a user called "FreeSpeechEnthusiast".
fliptop writes:Jenny Blessing and Ross Anderson have evaluated the security of systems designed to allow the various Internet messaging platforms to interoperate with each other:
fliptop writes:Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist who has been called "the godfather of artificial intelligence", says it is "not inconceivable" that AI may develop to the point where it poses a threat to humanity:
hubie writes:Brain activity imaging coupled with computer vision reveals how neuron populations in different individuals synchronize during social interactions:
guest reader writes:Experts acknowledge the apparent technical achievement of the research but highlight the ethical issues raised by being able to choose the sex of an offspring:
fliptop writes:[R]esearchers at Carnegie Mellon University have created soft robots that can seamlessly shift from walking to swimming, for example, or crawling to rolling:
Preliminary Court Setback for Libraries and Digital Lendingcanopic jug writes:The Internet Archive has published a post about their ongoing fight in the lower courts over Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), specifically from the case Hachette v Internet Archive. This potentially affects all libraries with digital resources and the Internet Archive will appeal the court's decision.