The Associated Press reports that an F-16 performing aerial combat tests at 550 miles per hour was "controlled by artificial intelligence, not a human pilot."
And riding in the front seat was the U.S. Secretary of the Air Force...
AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning for an AI-enabled fleet of more than 1,000 unmanned warplanes, the first of them operating by 2028.
It was fitting that the dogfight took place at [California's] Edwards Air Force Base, a vast desert facility where Chuck Yeager broke the speed of sound and the military has incubated its most secret aerospace advances. Inside classified simulators and buildings with layers of shielding against surveillance, a new test-pilot generation is training AI agents to fly in war. [U.S. Secretary of the Air Force] Frank Kendall traveled here to see AI fly in real time and make a public statement of confidence in its future role in air combat.
"It's a security risk not to have it. At this point, we have to have it," Kendall said in an interview with The Associated Press after he landed... At the end of the hourlong flight, Kendall climbed out of the cockpit grinning. He said he'd seen enough during his flight that he'd trust this still-learning AI with the ability to decide whether or not to launch weapons in war... [T]he software first learns on millions of data points in a simulator, then tests its conclusions during actual flights. That real-world performance data is then put back into the simulator where the AI then processes it to learn more.
"Kendall said there will always be human oversight in the system when weapons are used," the article notes.
But he also said looked for to the cost-savings of smaller and cheaper AI-controlled unmanned jets.
Slashdot reader fjo3 shared a link to this video. (More photos at Sky.com.)
Last month Reuters reported that Venezuela's state-run oil company "plans to increase digital currency usage in its crude and fuel exports as the U.S. reimposes oil sanctions on the country, three people familiar with the plan said."
[The oil company] since last year had been slowly moving oil sales to USDT, a digital currency also known as Tether whose value is pegged to the U.S. dollar and designed to maintain a stable value. The return of oil sanctions is speeding up the shift, a move to reduce the risk of sale proceeds getting frozen in foreign bank accounts due to the measures, the people said...
Tether said in an email it respects the U.S. Treasury's list of sanctioned entities and "is committed to working to ensure sanction addresses are frozen promptly."
This week Reuters reported that now experts are saying the situation "will require greater scrutiny by regulators and law enforcement." They spoke to Kristofer Doucett, national security leader at U.S. blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis, who said "Structures must be set up to combat this type of money laundering." Reuters writes:
Technology for digital transactions is changing fast and transactions are rapidly growing in developing regions including Latin America and Africa benefiting people without access to the banking system. But some corrupt governments are moving faster, making it difficult to prevent fraud, the experts said. Doucette and Sigal Mandelker, a lawyer who previously worked at the U.S. Treasury Department, said during a conference organized by the Wilson Center in Washington that the U.S. administration is making efforts to increase regulation and encourage other countries to improve supervision.
Slashdot reader RossCWilliams asks a loaded question. Whether this is "the beginning of the end of unregulated cryptocurrencies... the recognition of cryptocurrency as a national security threat that threatens international financial controls."
The blog Its FOSS has 15,000 followers for its Mastodon account — which they think is causing problems:
When you share a link on Mastodon, a link preview is generated for it, right? With Mastodon being a federated platform (a part of the Fediverse), the request to generate a link preview is not generated by just one Mastodon instance. There are many instances connected to it who also initiate requests for the content almost immediately. And, this "fediverse effect" increases the load on the website's server in a big way.
Sure, some websites may not get overwhelmed with the requests, but Mastodon does generate numerous hits, increasing the load on the server. Especially, if the link reaches a profile with more followers (and a broader network of instances)... We tried it on our Mastodon profile, and every time we shared a link, we were able to successfully make our website unresponsive or slow to load.
Slashdot reader nunojsilva is skeptical that "blurbs with a thumbnail and description" could create the issue (rather than, say, poorly-optimized web content). But the It's Foss blog says they found three GitHub issues about the same problem — one from 2017, and two more from 2023. And other blogs also reported the same issue over a year ago — including software developer Michael Nordmeyer and legendary Netscape programmer Jamie Zawinski.
And back in 2022, security engineer Chris Partridge wrote:
[A] single roughly ~3KB POST to Mastodon caused servers to pull a bit of HTML and... an image. In total, 114.7 MB of data was requested from my site in just under five minutes — making for a traffic amplification of 36704:1. [Not counting the image.]
Its Foss reports Mastodon's official position that the issue has been "moved as a milestone for a future 4.4.0 release. As things stand now, the 4.4.0 release could take a year or more (who knows?)."
They also state their opinion that the issue "should have been prioritized for a faster fix... Don't you think as a community-powered, open-source project, it should be possible to attend to a long-standing bug, as serious as this one?"
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Guardian:
Newly deciphered passages from a papyrus scroll that was buried beneath layers of volcanic ash after the AD79 eruption of Mount Vesuvius may have shed light on the final hours of Plato, a key figure in the history of western philosophy. In a groundbreaking discovery, the ancient scroll was found to contain a previously unknown narrative detailing how the Greek philosopher spent his last evening, describing how he listened to music played on a flute by a Thracian slave girl. Despite battling a fever and being on the brink of death, Plato — who was known as a disciple of Socrates and a mentor to Aristotle, and who died in Athens around 348BC — retained enough lucidity to critique the musician for her lack of rhythm, the account suggests....
In a presentation of the research findings at the National Library of Naples, Prof Graziano Ranocchia, of the University of Pisa, who spearheaded the team responsible for unearthing the carbonised scroll, described the discovery as an "extraordinary outcome that enriches our understanding of ancient history". He said: "Thanks to the most advanced imaging diagnostic techniques, we are finally able to read and decipher new sections of texts that previously seemed inaccessible... For the first time, we have been able to read sequences of hidden letters from the papyri that were enfolded within multiple layers, stuck to each other over the centuries, through an unrolling process using a mechanical technique that disrupted whole fragments of text."
The University of Mississippi has opened at least one student conduct investigation after videos of pro-Palestinian protesters surrounded by counter protesters circulated online, including one that many have singled out as racist.
University of Mississippi students demonstrate on campus against the admission of African American student James Meredith in Oxford, Miss., on Sept. 20, 1962.
South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott on Sunday did not directly answer multiple questions about whether he'd accept the results of the 2024 presidential election, regardless of who wins.
"A leap in our ability to see the chemistry of matter in three-dimensions at the nanoscale was achieved, allowing scientists to understand how nanomaterials are chemically arranged," writes Slashdot reader Hovden:
Traditionally, seeing matter at the smallest sizes requires too many high-energy electrons for 3D chemical imaging. The high beam exposure destroys the specimen before an experiment is completed. Even larger doses are required to achieve high resolution.
Thus, chemical mapping in 3D has been unachievable except at lower resolution with the most radiation-hard materials.
High-resolution 3D chemical imaging is now achievable near or below one-nanometer resolution. A team from Dow Chemical and the University of Michigan used a newly introduced method, called multi-modal data fusion, high-resolution chemical tomography, that provides 99% less dose by linking information encoded within both elastic and inelastic scattered signals. The researchers showed sub-nanometer 3D resolution of chemistry is measurable for a broad class of geometrically and compositionally complex materials.
"Here are the pretty pictures," adds long-time Slashdot reader thoper.
Phys.org also has this quote from Robert Hovden, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Michigan and corresponding author on the study published in Nature Communications. "Seeing invisible worlds, far smaller than the wavelengths of light, is absolutely critical to understanding the matter we are engineering at the nanoscale, not just in 2D but in 3D as well."
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday that his government has voted unanimously to shut down the local offices of Qatar-owned broadcaster Al Jazeera.
Six months from Election Day, American voters confront a presidential race that looks stable at a glance — and is roiling with uncertainty beneath the surface.
Enlarge/ When you're a legendary F1 designer like Adrian Newey, it's easy to persuade the team to let you have a go in one of your own creations. (credit: Andrew Hone/Getty Images for Red Bull)
In Formula 1, the car isn't quite everything, but ultimately, how well the team's designers did their job creating a racing car is a more important factor in a team's success on track than how good their drivers are. It's not that F1 drivers don't matter, but even the best driver on the grid will struggle to earn points if they're not in a competitive car.
One designer has been responsible for creating competitive cars more than any other, penning 12 championship-winning cars in 32 years. His name is Adrian Newey, and this week, we discovered he's looking for a new job.
As in other sports, F1's "silly season" is what they call that time period when contracts are up and people are switching to new teams; it's named as such because it's what happens when there's no real news to report but you need a story anyway.
Cloud storage is fairly essential for everybody these days, but nobody likes paying the monthly fees — especially when they increase as you need more storage. So, stop paying a monthly fee by getting 500GB of cloud storage for a one-time payment to Amaryllo cloud storage.
Amaryllo offers an iOS/Android app or desktop software to help you manage your digital life. It offers zero-knowledge privacy so only you and your approved users can see your data, and makes it easy to upload multiple files at once and share your cloud with up to nine other Amaryllo members. You can manage your cloud easily with smart search and smart albums, and share files of any size with people with just a few clicks. It’s an intuitive way to get organized and stay organized.
Thursday the Verge reported that a new report from Microsoft "outlines the steps the company took to release responsible AI platforms last year."
Microsoft says in the report that it created 30 responsible AI tools in the past year, grew its responsible AI team, and required teams making generative AI applications to measure and map risks throughout the development cycle. The company notes that it added Content Credentials to its image generation platforms, which puts a watermark on a photo, tagging it as made by an AI model.
The company says it's given Azure AI customers access to tools that detect problematic content like hate speech, sexual content, and self-harm, as well as tools to evaluate security risks. This includes new jailbreak detection methods, which were expanded in March this year to include indirect prompt injections where the malicious instructions are part of data ingested by the AI model.
It's also expanding its red-teaming efforts, including both in-house red teams that deliberately try to bypass safety features in its AI models as well as red-teaming applications to allow third-party testing before releasing new models.
Microsoft's chief Responsible AI officer told the Washington Post this week that "We work with our engineering teams from the earliest stages of conceiving of new features that they are building."
"The first step in our processes is to do an impact assessment, where we're asking the team to think deeply about the benefits and the potential harms of the system. And that sets them on a course to appropriately measure and manage those risks downstream. And the process by which we review the systems has checkpoints along the way as the teams are moving through different stages of their release cycles...
"When we do have situations where people work around our guardrails, we've already built the systems in a way that we can understand that that is happening and respond to that very quickly. So taking those learnings from a system like Bing Image Creator and building them into our overall approach is core to the governance systems that we're focused on in this report."
They also said " it would be very constructive to make sure that there were clear rules about the disclosure of when content is synthetically generated," and "there's an urgent need for privacy legislation as a foundational element of AI regulatory infrastructure."
Come 2029, all cars sold in the U.S. "must be able to stop and avoid contact with a vehicle in front of them at speeds up to 62 mph," reports Car and Driver.
"Additionally, the system must be able to detect pedestrians in both daylight and darkness. As a final parameter, the federal standard will require the system to apply the brakes automatically up to 90 mph when a collision is imminent, and up to 45 mph when a pedestrian is detected."
Notably, the federal standardization of automated emergency braking systems includes pedestrian-identifying emergency braking, too. Once implemented, the NHTSA projects that this standard will save at least 360 lives a year and prevent at least 24,000 injuries annually. Specifically, the federal agency claims that rear-end collisions and pedestrian injuries will both go down significantly...
"Automatic emergency braking is proven to save lives and reduce serious injuries from frontal crashes, and this technology is now mature enough to require it in all new cars and light trucks. In fact, this technology is now so advanced that we're requiring these systems to be even more effective at higher speeds and to detect pedestrians," said NHTSA deputy administrator Sophie Shulman.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader sinij for sharing the article.
In 2016, an online "swarm intelligence" platform generated a correct prediction for the Kentucky Derby — naming all four top finishers, in order. (But the next year their predictions weren't even close, with TechRepublic suggesting 2016's race had an unusual cluster of just a few top racehorses.)
So this year Decrypt.co tried crafting their own system "that can be called up when the next Kentucky Derby draws near.
There are a variety of ways to enlist artificial intelligence in horse racing. You could process reams of data based on your own methodology, trust a third-party pre-trained model, or even build a bespoke solution from the ground up. We decided to build a GPT we named HorseGPT to crunch the numbers and make the picks for us...
We carefully curated prompts to instill HorseGPT with expertise in data science specific to horse racing: how weather affects times, the role of jockeys and riding styles, the importance of post positions, and so on. We then fed it a mix of research papers and blogs covering the theoretical aspects of wagering, and layered on practical knowledge: how to read racing forms, what the statistics mean, which factors are most predictive, expert betting strategies, and more. Finally, we gave HorseGPT a wealth of historical Kentucky Derby data, arming it with the raw information needed to put its freshly imparted skills to use.
We unleashed HorseGPT on official racing forms for this year's Derby. We asked HorseGPT to carefully analyze each race's form, identify the top contenders, and recommend wager types and strategies based on deep background knowledge derived from race statistics.
So how did it do? HorseGPT picked two horses to win — both of which failed to do so. (Sierra Leone did finish second — in a rare three-way photo finish. But Fierceness finished... 15th.) It also recommended the same two horses if you were trying to pick the top two finishers in the correct order — a losing bet, since, again, Fierceness finished 15th.
But even worse, HorseGPT recommended betting on Just a Touch to finish in either first or second place. When the race was over, that horse finished dead last. (And when asked to pick the top three finishers in correct order, HorseGPT stuck with its choices for the top two — which finished #2 and #15 — and, again, Just a Touch, who came in last.)
When Google Gemini was asked to pick the winner by The Athletic, it first chose Catching Freedom (who finished 4th). But it then gave an entirely different answer when asked to predict the winner "with an Italian accent."
"The winner of the Kentucky Derby will be... Just a Touch! Si, that's-a right, the underdog! There will be much-a celebrating in the piazzas, thatta-a I guarantee!"
Again, Just a Touch came in last.
Decrypt noticed the same thing. "Interestingly enough, our HorseGPT AI agent and the other out-of-the-box chatbots seemed to agree with each other," the site notes, adding that HorseGPT also seemed to agree "with many expert analysts cited by the official Kentucky Derby website."
But there was one glimmer of insight into the 20-horse race. When asked to choose the top four finishers in order, HorseGPT repeated those same losing picks — which finished #2, #15, and #20. But then it added two more underdogs for fourth place finishers, "based on their potential to outperform expectations under muddy conditions."
One of those two horses — Domestic Product — finished in 13th place.
But the other of the two horses was Mystik Dan — who came in first.
Mystik Dan appeared in only one of the six "Top 10 Finishers" lists (created by humans) at the official Kentucky Derby site... in the #10 position.
Donald Trump compared President Joe Biden’s administration to the secret police force of Nazi Germany in remarks at a private, closed-door donor retreat on Saturday afternoon.
Lightly regarded Mystik Dan scored a thrilling upset at the Kentucky Derby on Saturday, winning by a nose and bringing a career Triple Crown to trainer Kenny McPeek.
An anonymous reader shared this report from the New York Times:
American officials are trying to increase international pressure on Russia not to deploy an antisatellite nuclear weapon in space, and have obtained information that undermines Moscow's explanation that the device it is developing is for peaceful scientific purposes, a senior State Department official said on Friday...
On Friday, Mallory Stewart, the assistant secretary of state for arms control, said that while the United States had been aware of Russia's pursuit of such a device for years, "only recently have we been able to make a more precise assessment of their progress." Ms. Stewart, speaking at the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said the orbit the Russian satellite would occupy is in a high-radiation region not used by other satellites, information that undercuts Russia's defense that it is not developing a weapon.
CircleID reports that Multinational internet service provider Cogent recently announced that it was offering $206 million in secured notes (a corporate bond backed by assets). "The unusual part is what it's using as security: some of its IPv4 addresses and the leases on those IPv4 addresses."
All internet service providers (ISPs) give IP addresses to their users, but Cogent was among the first to lease those addresses independently of internet access. (Internet access customers normally require a unique address as part of their service.) Sources are hard to find, but prevailing wisdom is that they have over 10M addresses leased for about $0.30 per month, or $36M per year in revenue.
The notes are expected to be repaid in five years.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader penciling_in for sharing the article.
Pro-Palestinian activists have launched encampments at more than 70 campuses to bring attention to Israel’s monthslong military assault on the Gaza Strip and to demand that schools divest from companies doing business with the country.
See photos of all the grit and glam from the 2024 Kentucky Derby. The annual horse-racing event, hosted at Churchill Downs, celebrated its 150th anniversary this year.
The blog It's FOSS is "pissed at the casual arrogance of Ubuntu and its parent company Canonical..... The sheer audacity of not caring for its users reeks of Microsoft-esque arrogance."
If you download a .deb package of a software, you cannot install it using the official graphical software center on Ubuntu anymore. When you double-click on the downloaded deb package, you'll see this error, "there is no app installed for Debian package files".
If you right-click and choose to open it with Software Center, you are in for another annoyance. The software center will go into eternal loading. It may look as if it is doing something, but it will go on forever. I could even livestream the loading app store on YouTube, and it would continue for the 12 years of its long-term support period.
Canonical software engineer Dennis Loose actually created an issue ticket for the problem himself — back in September of 2023. And two weeks ago he returned to the discussion to announce that fix "will be a priority for the next cycle". (Though "unfortunately we didn't have the capacity to work on this for 24.04...)
But Its Foss accused Canonical of "cleverly booting out deb in favor of Snap, one baby step at a time" (noting the problem started with Ubuntu 23.10):
There is also the issue of replacing deb packages with Snap, even with the apt command line tool. You use 'sudo apt install chromium', you get a Snap package of Chromium instead of Debian
The venerable Linux magazine argues that Canonical "has secretly forced Snap installation on users."
[I]t looks as if the Software app defaults to Snap packages for everything now. I combed through various apps and found this to be the case.... As far as the auto-installation of downloaded .deb files, you'll have to install something like gdebi to bring back this feature.
The long-awaited fourth season of the Prime Video series, The Boys, premieres on June 13, 2024
Last summer's Hollywood strikes delayed a number of releases, among them the fourth season of Prime Video's The Boys. We're longtime fans of this incredibly violent, darkly funny anti-homage to superheroes, and thus are thrilled to see there's finally an official trailer for S4. It's filled with the bloody mayhem we've come to expect from the show, as well as a tantalizing glimpse of the chief villain, Homelander (Antony Starr), performing in what appears to be an ice skating extravaganza.
(Spoilers for prior seasons below, especially S3.)
As I've written previously, the show is based on the comic book series of the same name by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson. The Boysis set in a fictional universe where superheroes are real but are corrupted by corporate interests and a toxic celebrity-obsessed culture. The most elite superhero group is called the Seven, operated by the Vought Corporation, which created the supes with a substance called Compound V. The Seven is headed up by Homelander, a violent and unstable psychopath disguised as the All-American hero. Homelander's counterpart as the head of the titular "Boys" is Billy Butcher (Karl Urban), a self-appointed vigilante intent on checking the bad behavior of the Seven—especially Homelander, who brutally raped Butcher's wife, Becca (Shantel VanSanten), unknowingly fathering a son, Ryan, in the process..
"No one is safe from the truth" in new trailer for The Acolyte.
It's Star Wars Day, and to mark the occasion, Disney+ has dropped a new trailer for Star Wars: The Acolyte. As previously reported, a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the Galactic Republic and its Jedi masters symbolized the epitome of enlightenment and peace. Then came the inevitable downfall and outbreak of war as the Sith, who embraced the Dark Side of the Force, came to power. Star Wars: The Acolyte will explore those final days of the Republic as the seeds of its destruction were sown.
The eight-episode series was created by Leslye Headland. It's set at the end of the High Republic Era, about a century before the events of The Phantom Menace. Apparently Headland rather cheekily pitched The Acolyte as "Frozen meets Kill Bill." She drew on wuxia martial arts films for inspiration, much like George Lucas was originally inspired by Westerns and the samurai films of Akira Kurosawa. Per the official premise:
In Star Wars: The Acolyte, an investigation into a shocking crime spree pits a respected Jedi Master (Lee Jung-jae) against a dangerous warrior from his past (Amandla Stenberg). As more clues emerge, they travel down a dark path where sinister forces reveal all is not what it seems…
In addition to Lee (best known from Squid Game) and Stenberg (Rue in The Hunger Games), the cast includes Manny Jacinto (Jason on The Good Place) as a former smuggler named Qimir; Dafne Keen (Logan, His Dark Materials) as a young Jedi named Jecki Lon; Carrie-Ann Moss (Trinity in The Matrix trilogy) as a Jedi master named Indara; Jodie Turner-Smith (After Yang) as Mother Aniseya, who leads a coven of witches; Rebecca Henderson (Russian Doll) as a Jedi knight named Vernestra Rwoh; and Charlie Bennet (Russian Doll) as a Jedi named Yord Fandar.
In addition, Abigail Thorn plays Ensign Eurus, while Joonas Suotamo plays a Wookiee Jedi master named Kelnacca. Suotamo portrayed Chewbacca in the sequel trilogy of films (Episodes VII-IX) and in Solo: A Star Wars Story. Also appearing in as-yet-undisclosed roles are Dean-Charles Chapman, Amy Tsang, and Margarita Levieva.
The first trailer dropped in March, in which we saw young padawans in training; Indara battling a mysterious masked figure; learned that somebody is out there killing Jedi; and were told that there is a growing sense of darkness. This latest trailer reinforces those themes. The assassin, Mae (Stenberg), once trained with Master Sol (Lee), and he thinks he should be the one to bring her in—although Master Vernestra correctly suspects Mae's killings are a small part a larger plan, i.e, the eventual return of the Sith.
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Washington Post:
The heat shield of the Orion spacecraft intended one day to carry astronauts to the moon under NASA's Artemis program suffered unexpected damage in more than 100 places as the spacecraft returned to Earth during an uncrewed test flight in 2022, according to a watchdog report released late Wednesday.
While the capsule withstood the fiery tumult of reentry, when temperatures reached 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it plunged through the atmosphere at nearly 25,000 mph, the damage the heat shield suffered was far greater than NASA engineers had expected and more severe than NASA had revealed previously. Photos of the heat shield in the report showed gouges that look like small potholes. "Should the same issue occur on future Artemis missions, it could lead to the loss of the vehicle or crew," the report, by NASA's inspector general, concluded...
The IG report provides the most detailed description of the issue to date. It also highlighted other problems with the spacecraft that could create significant challenges for the space agency as it seeks to return humans to the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years.
Portions of the heat shield "wore away differently than NASA engineers predicted, cracking and breaking off the spacecraft in fragments that created a trail of debris rather than melting away as designed," according to the report. That, in turn, "could have caused enough structural damage to cause one of Orion's parachutes to fail...." In addition to the heat shield erosion on Orion, which is manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the IG said several bolts on the crew module "experienced an exposed gap that allowed for increased heating to the bolt interior and greater than expected melting and erosion."
Earlier this year, NASA announced the next flight for its moon program — sending a crew of four around the moon — would be delayed, according to the article. The moon-orbiting mission would now occur "no earlier than September 2025, largely because officials wanted to study the heat shield issue further and understand why it eroded as it did."
The article adds that this new report "casts doubt on both NASA's rosy original assessment of the test flight" — as well as the likelihood that a lunar landing will occur by late 2026.
The Washington Post reports that wind turbines "only take up five percent of the land where they've been built, new research shows."
The rest of the space can be used for other purposes, such as agriculture, according to a study published recently in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology. This means developers could fit turbines in places that are often perceived as unsuitable for a wind farm.
The new study highlights that turbines and existing human development, such as agriculture, cannot only share the same area, but also that building wind farms where there are already roads and other infrastructure could help reduce impacts on the land. "Clever siting, use of existing infrastructure, multiple use of landscapes — all these things ... can really contribute to solutions in areas where wind power is acceptable to the local people," said Sarah Jordaan, the study's principal investigator.
Historically, planning studies for wind farms have often assumed that turbines would disturb all the land at the site and leave the area unusable for anything else, said Jordaan, an associate professor in the department of civil engineering at McGill University. The study's findings provide a more accurate accounting of how much land is needed for wind farms, she added.
An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog Bitcoinist:
Jack Dorsey's financial services and digital payments company, Block Inc., announced it will begin investing 10% of its monthly Bitcoin-related gross profits into BTC purchases. This announcement was made following the release of Block's first-quarter earnings for 2024, which demonstrated substantial profits from its Bitcoin operations.
Block reported Bitcoin-related gross profits amounting to $80 million in the first quarter alone. If this trend continues, the implementation of the new dollar cost averaging (DCA) program could see the company investing approximately $24 million in Bitcoin within one year... Dorsey also shared a detailed document [PDF] titled "Bitcoin Blueprint For Corporate Balance Sheets," which serves as a comprehensive guide for other corporations interested in integrating BTC into their financial strategies.
According to the document, Block, formerly known as Square, began its substantial acquisitions in October 2020, purchasing 4,709 BTC at an aggregate price of $50 million. The company later bought an additional 3,318 BTC in February 2021 for $170 million. As of March 31, 2024, Block holds approximately 8,038 BTC, representing about 9% of its total cash and marketable securities.
Markos Moulitsas is the poll-watching founder of the political blog Daily Kos. Thursday he wrote that in 2021, future third-party presidential candidate RFK Jr. had sued their web site.
"Things are not going well for him."
Back in 2021, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sued Daily Kos to unmask the identity of a community member who posted a critical story about his dalliance with neo-Nazis at a Berlin rally. I updated the story here, here, here, here, and here.
To briefly summarize, Kennedy wanted us to doxx our community member, and we stridently refused.
The site and the politician then continued fighting for more than three years. "Daily Kos lost the first legal round in court," Moulitsas posted in 2021, "thanks to a judge who is apparently unconcerned with First Amendment ramifications given the chilling effect of her ruling."
But even then, Moulitsas was clear on his rights:
Because of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, [Kennedy] cannot sue Daily Kos — the site itself — for defamation. We are protected by the so-called safe harbor. That's why he's demanding we reveal what we know about "DowneastDem" so they can sue her or him directly.
Moulitsas also stressed that his own 2021 blog post was "reiterating everything that community member wrote, and expanding on it. And so instead of going after a pseudonymous community writer/diarist on this site, maybe Kennedy will drop that pointless lawsuit and go after me... consider this an escalation." (Among other things, the post cited a German-language news account saying Kennedy "sounded the alarm concerning the 5G mobile network and Microsoft founder Bill Gates..." Moulitsas also noted an Irish Times article which confirmed that at the rally Kennedy spoke at, "Noticeable numbers of neo-Nazis, kitted out with historic Reich flags and other extremist accessories, mixed in with the crowd.")
So what happened? Moulitsas posted an update Thursday:
Shockingly, Kennedy got a trial court judge in New York to agree with him, and a subpoena was issued to Daily Kos to turn over any information we might have on the account. However, we are based in California, not New York, so once I received the subpoena at home, we had a California court not just quash the subpoena, but essentially signal that if New York didn't do the right thing on appeal, California could very well take care of it.
It's been a while since I updated, and given a favorable court ruling Thursday, it's way past time to catch everyone up.
New York is one of the U.S. states that doesn't have a strict "Dendrite standard" law protecting anonymous speech. But soon the blog founder discovered he had allies:
The issues at hand are so important that The New York Times, the E.W.Scripps Company, the First Amendment Coalition, New York Public Radio, and seven other New York media companies joined the appeals effort with their own joint amicus brief. What started as a dispute over a Daily Kos diarist has become a meaningful First Amendment battle, with major repercussions given New York's role as a major news media and distribution center.
After reportedly spending over $1 million on legal fees, Kennedy somehow discovered the identity of our community member sometime last year and promptly filed a defamation suit in New Hampshire in what seemed a clumsy attempt at forum shopping, or the practice of choosing where to file suit based on the belief you'll be granted a favorable outcome. The community member lives in Maine, Kennedy lives in California, and Daily Kos doesn't publish specifically in New Hampshire. A perplexed court threw out the case this past February on those obvious jurisdictional grounds....
Then, last week, the judge threw out the appeal of that decision because Kennedy's lawyer didn't file in time — and blamed the delay on bad Wi-Fi...
Kennedy tried to dismiss the original case, the one awaiting an appellate decision in New York, claiming it was now moot. His legal team had sued to get the community member's identity, and now that they had it, they argued that there was no reason for the case to continue. We disagreed, arguing that there were important issues to resolve (i.e., Dendrite), and we also wanted lawyer fees for their unconstitutional assault on our First Amendment rights...
On Thursday, in a unanimous decision, a four-judge New York Supreme Court appellate panel ordered the case to continue, keeping the Dendrite issue alive and also allowing us to proceed in seeking damages based on New York's anti-SLAPP law, which prohibits "strategic lawsuits against public participation."
Thursday's blog post concludes with this summation. "Kennedy opened up a can of worms and has spent millions fighting this stupid battle. Despite his losses, we aren't letting him weasel out of this."
The world's highest astronomical site is officially open for business after being in the works for 26 years. Space.com reports: The Japanese University of Tokyo Atacama Observatory, or TAO, which was first conceptualized 26 years ago to study the evolution of galaxies and exoplanets, is perched on top of a tall mountain in the Chilean Andes at 5,640 meters (18,500 feet) above sea level. The facility's altitude surpasses even the Atacama Large Millimeter Array, which is at an elevation of 5,050 meters (16,570 feet).
TAO is located on the summit of Atacama's Cerro Chajnantor mountain, whose name means "place of departure" in the now-extinct Kunza language of the indigenous Likan Antai community. The region's high altitude, sparse atmosphere and perennially arid climate is deadly to humans, but makes an excellent spot for infrared telescopes like TAO as their observational accuracies rely on low moisture levels, which render Earth's atmosphere transparent in infrared wavelengths.
TAO's 6.5-meter telescope consists of two science instruments designed to observe the universe in infrared, which is electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength longer than visible light but shorter than microwaves. One of the instruments, named SWIMS, will image galaxies from the very early universe to understand how they coalesced out of pristine dust and gas, a process whose specifics remain murky despite decades of research. The second, named MIMIZUKU, will aid the overarching science goal by studying primordial disks of dust within which stars and galaxies are known to form, according to the mission plan. Constructing the telescope on the summit of Mt. Chajnantor "was an incredible challenge, not just technically, but politically too," Yuzuru Yoshii, a professor at the University of Tokyo in Japan who spearheaded TAO since 1998, said in a statement. "I have liaised with Indigenous peoples to ensure their rights and views are considered, the Chilean government to secure permission, local universities for technical collaboration, and even the Chilean Health Ministry to make sure people can work at that altitude in a safe manner."
"Thanks to all involved, research I've only ever dreamed about can soon become a reality, and I couldn't be happier," he added.
One of the most under-appreciated Mac features is the services menu, which you can find by right-clicking just about anything—highlighted text, say, or any image. Hover over the "Services" section and you'll see a bunch of quick actions. You can find this same collection in the menu bar: just click the name of the application that's currently open and hover over Services.
Credit: Justin Pot
There are all kinds of useful options here. You can, for example, look up a word in the dictionary, or add a bit of text to your to-do list. You can open a URL using IINA, a great video player for Mac. You get the idea: you can automate whatever it is that is selected. You can take control of which things do, and do not, show up by open System Settings and heading to Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Services. From here you can check or uncheck items. You can also set custom keyboard shortcuts for these services.
Credit: Justin Pot
Where things get really fun, though, is when you look into the custom services you can download. Here are a few of the best apps I could find that add cool features to the services menu on your Mac.
Dictater reads text to you out loud
Credit: Justin Pot
The Mac comes with a built-in service for reading text, but I don't really like it very much. Dictater, in my experience, works a lot better. With this application you can highlight any text, in any app, and have it read out loud. There's a pop-up window with buttons to play and jump forward and backward, and an optional window you can open to see the text on screen as it is read. You can change the voice used in System Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content, if you like—I prefer to use one of the high-quality Siri voices.
CalcService does math
CalcService is a free download that lets you do math in any text field. With the app installed you can highlight any mathematical formula in any app—for example, (62*7)/4, and get an answer right in place, like this: (62*7)/4 = 108.5. It's magic, and even better once you create a keyboard shortcut for the feature.
WordService
Credit: Justin Pot
WordService comes as a free download from Devon Technologies, the same company that made CalcService. This one offers all kinds of tools for working with text, the most obviously useful of which allows you to get a word count and character count for any text you highlight. This is useful for all kinds of things, from composing social media posts to long-form writing. But there's so much more here to dig into. There are actions for converting text that's in all caps to lowercase, and vice versa. There are actions for inserting the current time, or the current date. And there are actions for adding or removing smart quotes from a block of text. If you publish things online regularly, this is a good collection of tools to have around.
SearchLink quickly looks for a link and adds it
SearchLink is a little harder to explain but I love it. Basically, you can highlight any text, trigger the service, and the tool will automatically search the web for the term and add a markdown-formatted link. So, for example, here's a text document with my name in it:
Credit: Justin Pot
If I run SearchLink on the highlighted text, which is my name, the document looks like this:
Credit: Justin Pot
The link has been added, without me having to open a browser. This can save you a lot of time while writing, assuming that you do that writing in markdown. And there are more advanced features you can dig into, including one that will fill in all the links in a document. It's a great tool to have around.
Shortcuts can work this way too
Credit: Justin Pot
Didn't quite find the app you want? You could try building one yourself. Any shortcut you build in Apple Shortcuts can function as a service. Just make sure Use as Quick Action and Services Menu are highlighted in the Shortcut details pane. Check out our list of the most helpful Shortcuts on macOS if you need a few ideas of how to put this to work.
Your IP address is something you usually don't need to think about—in fact you might never have heard of it before—but it's an important little piece of information attached to every device on your home network. Knowing the ins and outs of IP addresses can be useful in configuring the wifi network in your home, troubleshooting connection problems, and keeping your devices safe while they're online. Here's where you can find them, and what they do.
What is an IP address?
Every connected device has at least one IP address.Credit: Lifehacker
An IP address is an Internet Protocol address: It works a bit like a postal address does for the place where you live, enabling websites and web servers to find you and maintain a working connection. It's an essential bit of code in making the internet work, and it looks like a series of numbers and letters with a bit of punctuation thrown in.
Every device connected to your router at home will have a local (or private) IP address, which helps the router figure out which gadget is which and keep everything running smoothly. In addition, your router has an external (or public) IP address it broadcasts to the world, which helps everything else on the internet find you.
You'll come across both the older, simpler IPv4 addresses and the newer, more complex IPv6 addresses for your devices. Most current hardware makes use of both, but eventually it's expected that IPv4 will be phased out, albeit very slowly—IPv6 was introduced all the way back in 1995 because the internet was quite simply running out of addresses to use.
All of this is handled behind the scenes by your wifi router and your internet provider, fortunately. In fact, most routers and internet providers give dynamic IP addresses for local and external use, which are changing all the time (it's a bit easier and more cost-effective that way)—but your connection to the internet at large isn't affected.
You'll only really need to know your IP address for specific scenarios, usually involving some change in network configuration: Maybe you're connecting up a network drive to the web that you need to access remotely, for example, or you're trying to get online multiplayer features working on a games console. Here's how to find out what your IP addresses currently are.
How to find your external IP address
There's no shortage of websites around to tell you your IP address.Credit: Lifehacker
A host of different websites will tell you your IP address: It's a piece of information you give to every site you visit in exchange for connecting to them, though you can switch to a different external IP address by setting up a VPN. Remember, too, that as we've said, most internet providers give you a dynamic IP address that regularly changes.
VPNs will broadcast the IP address of one of their servers somewhere in the world, which means your external IP address stays hidden from the sites you load up. If you want to get at your external IP address, make sure you're not currently using a VPN.
With that check completed, all you need to do is visit a website such as the aptly named WhatIsMyIPAddress and you'll get both your IPv6 and IPv4 addresses on screen. (Depending on how the network you're using has been set up, across both hardware and software, you may only see an IPv4 or an IPv6 address.) You can also just type "what is my IP?" into Google and the search engine should tell you (though it might not be the top result).
How to find your internal IP address
Getting your IP address on Windows.Credit: Lifehacker
On a Windows computer, go to Settings from the Start menu, open up the Network & internet page and click either wifi and then the network name, or Ethernet, depending on how you're connected. Your local IPv6 and IPv4 addresses are then included in the information on screen, with a handy Copy button next to the details.
Over in macOS land, you need to open the Apple menu, then choose System Settings and Network. Pick wifi or Ethernet, depending on how you're currently connected to the internet, then select Details next to the network you're on. The Mac's local IP address is listed on the next screen, together with your router's IP address.
Next, the iPhone. From the main iOS Settings screen, tap wifi, then the small blue information bubble next to your current network to see your IP addresses. Note that phones will often have several listed—sometimes for extra privacy protection, and also to account for both wifi and cellular connections.
As usual for Android, the exact menu names and structure vary depending on your phone: On Pixels, open Settings and tap Network and Internet and Internet. Next to the network you're currently on there will be a gear icon: Tap this, then scroll down to see the IP address of your device.
With Samsung Galaxy phones, open Settings and select Connections, wifi, and then the gear icon next to the network you're currently hooked up to. Choose View more to see the relevant IPv4 and IPv6 addresses. If you're not using a Pixel or Galaxy phone, you should be able to find something along these lines through the internet options in Settings.
Even as we move into gardening seasoning outside, I am keeping all of my indoor gardens going through the summer months. I've been surprised by how handy it is to have these gardens nearby and how it leads to me using crops like fresh herbs more often. The side effect I didn't expect was how much I enjoy having the actual plants and greenery around in my bedroom and living room: The gardens produce a calming tickling-water sound, like a creek, and I love the smell of the plants. If gardening outside isn't for you, you might find one of these indoor gardening sets that require almost no skill to be just the trick.
These commercial sets include everything you might need, from the seed cups and growing medium, to the lights, and the use a pump to recirculate the water at regular intervals. Small sets like the Aerogarden Harvest or Letpotcan sit on a countertop and large ones like Rise need their own space on the floor. Here are the tips I’ve developed to use these gardens more effectively.
Buy a level
Hydroponic gardens work by keeping the roots of the plant constantly hydrated either in a pool of recirculating water or by routinely “watering” them via a pump. For this to work effectively, the entire system has to be level. Usually, bigger kits like Rise will have leveling feet to help with this, but a system like LettuceGrow doesn’t, so you’ll need shims. You still need to ensure your countertop garden is level. When they’re not, the water will list to one side of the garden, and some roots might not get hydrated. If only one side of your garden is germinating, this might be the cause.
Grow the right crops
Hydro gardens grow crops in a tight space, with a finite amount of “sunlight” and no soil for roots to steady themselves in. While almost anything will still grow, crops that are going to require a lot of support like squash can’t flourish. Crops with a really long grow period, like pumpkins, also are not ideal for the system, since you’ll need to turn the garden system over before the pumpkin is done and it will grow out of the “sunlight.” Moreover, while smaller and smaller vegetable plants are always being bred (I recently grew actual tomatoes on eight-inch tall plants from Aerogarden), it doesn’t mean they’ll taste good. I’ve been really disappointed by fruit and vegetables grown in hydroponic environments; while they still receive nutrition, sunlight and water, they usually just don’t taste great. So while you can grow almost anything, I’ve found that simply growing herbs or simpler, short crops like peas is the best way to go.
Learn how to self-pollinate
Since your hydroponic garden won’t be visited by bees to do the work of carrying pollen from plant to plant, you’ll need to do that if you grow any type of fruit or vegetable. I’ve seen many of these gardens advise casually shaking the plants from time to time, but this is disingenuous. To achieve good pollination rates, you need to really vibrate the plants and do it often while there are flowers. The best way I’ve found to do this is with a real vibrator or massage wand and to use a smart automation to have it run for a minute every few hours. I specifically looked for one that plugged in and used a manual switch, rather than a button to be powered on each time. This way, I could leave the want plugged in and on, and just set an automation for the outlet it was plugged into. I just left it set on top of the garden, but you could also tape it to the back. As long as it’s attached in some way to the garden, it will vibrate it enough that the pollen will be freed and form a cloud of yellow dust that will settle onto the blossoms and pollinate them.
Grow any seed you’d like
Most companies that make hydroponic gardens sell seed packs or starts for those gardens, and they’re quite expensive. But the gardens provide everything a plant needs to grow: sunlight, nutrition, and water. You can always purchase aftermarket pods and growing medium and plant your own seeds. There’s nothing particularly special about the lettuce or herb seeds they’re using, and you likely have seeds or can purchase a packet of them, cheaply. While small “patio” vegetables are bred specifically for these purposes, you can usually purchase similar varieties online (although, again, growing them is mostly for sport as they don’t taste great).
Be vigilant about pest prevention
Plants will attract pests like aphids and gnats on their own with little work. Hydro gardens seem to worsen the problem, so you have to be proactive. Always ensure there is no standing water around, from a leaking unit or when you add water to the unit. Using traps nearby is a good idea—I like the Zevo flying insect traps that use UV light to attract the insects. You can consider adding nasturtium flowers to your garden—not in abundance, but in one of the growing pods since they work to “trap” aphids. The aphids are attracted to the nasturtium, and just hang out on it, avoiding your other plants; you just leave the nasturtium to do it’s work.
The secret sauce, for me, has been using smaller gardens for growing herbs, which I use consistently, making sure I am hacking the plants back on a regular basis to keep them from bolting. For larger gardens, I grow greens like lettuce, celery, celery, chard, and spinach. Using small, compact plants like these means that nothing is crowded out, there’s no fruit to be disappointed by or that will take too much time, and you ultimately end up pretty satisfied with the experience.
To support Zero Trust deployments trying to lock down devices to only access approved network destinations, we are announcing the development of Zero Trust DNS (ZTDNS) in a future version of Windows. ZTDNS was designed to be interoperable by using network protocols from open standards to satisfy Zero Trust requirements such as those found in OMB M-22-09 and NIST SP 800-207. ZTDNS will be helpful to any administrator trying to use domain names as a strong identifier of network traffic.
ZTDNS integrates the Windows DNS client and the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) to enable this domain-name-based lockdown. First, Windows is provisioned with a set of DoH or DoT capable Protective DNS servers; these are expected to only resolve allowed domain names. This provisioning may also contain a list of IP address subnets that should always be allowed (for endpoints without domain names), expected Protective DNS server certificate identities to properly validate the connection is to the expected server, or certificates to be used for client authentication.
If you think I know nothing about programming – wait until you hear me talk about networking. I consider it to basically be arcane magic, and my knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond “plug in cable to make light blinky” and “unplug from power to fix light no blinky”. Network administrators are the real heroes in my eyes.
Anyway, what I do get from painfully reading this announcement over and over again until my eyes started bleeding is that ZTDNS will give network administrators more finegrained control over which DNS servers and domains are accessible, and perhaps more importantly, it will encrypt traffic between clients and the DNS server. I have no idea if this is unique, or if it even makes any sense to do so, but it seems like a good idea, especially for corporate and government networks.
With some products, like phones, you have a myriad of options to sort through. But if you want to buy one of Peloton's spin bikes, you only have two choices: the Bike or the Bike+ (pronounced “bike plus”). That little “+” costs an extra thousand dollars, so is it really worth it? Let’s dive in.
Overview of the important features
I’ll go over the details below, but here’s the short answer: if you just want “a Peloton,” the regular Bike is the original. It’s the one most people have, it’s cheaper, and it does the job just fine. I have a regular Bike and I’ve never felt like I’m missing out. The regular price for a Bike is $1,445, but with a good sale you can find it closer to $1,000. If you're willing to look at used models, they can often be had in the mid to high triple digits.
The Bike+ costs significantly more, so what are you paying for? The tech components are nicer, so the on-screen experience will feel a bit faster and smoother. Other than that, the big features are auto-resistance (the bike will follow along with classes without you having to turn the knob) and a swiveling screen so you can turn it to the side for things like strength workouts and guided yoga sessions. List price on the Bike+ is $2,495, with deals sometimes bringing it as low as $1,995. Refurbished and used models will, of course, cost a bit less.
Most of the differences between the two bikes are tech-related, and we’ll get into those in a minute. But first, you should know what’s the same between the two bikes.
First, they’re the same size. Both have the same footprint, 4 feet by 2 feet—Peloton recommends that you allow 24 inches on each side of the bike, and that you put it in an area with at least 8-foot-high ceilings. This allows even tall riders to be able to stand up and pedal. (If you don’t care about standing, or if you’re shorter, you might be able to squeeze into a tighter space. I’m 5’6” and never had an issue with my attic’s 7-foot ceilings.)
The controls and the frame are the same, with the exception that the original Bike had a seat post recall, and the Bike+ did not. (If you’re buying used, make sure that the seat post was replaced.) Both have a hard wired 3.5mm headphone jack, although it’s probably more common to use the onboard speakers or a bluetooth headset rather than plugging in a pair of headphones.
Both flavors of bike can accommodate a rider who is anywhere between 4’11” and 6’4” and weighs up to 297 pounds. The Bike itself weighs 135 pounds, and the Bike+ weighs 140, due mainly to the hefty flywheel (with spin bikes, the heavier the flywheel, the better).
Both the Bike and Bike+ have access to the same subscription options. For the $44/month All-Access subscription, you get:
Classes on the bike—these are the classic offering, with a charismatic instructor leading you through a structured workout (and often peppering it with motivational speeches).
Scenic rides on the bike, with “Peloton radio” for music (I usually mute it and just play my own music from my phone).
Lanebreak (a sort of ride-along video game) on the bike.
Access to classes through the Peloton app on your phone.
The ability to create multiple profiles for family members, so you can all share the bike without additional subscriptions.
Besides cycling classes, the bikes and the app can also provide follow-along classes for strength, stretching, yoga, and more. You can take bike classes on the phone app as well, a handy feature when you have access to a spin bike but it’s not a Peloton (for example, at a gym).
Now that we know what’s the same, let’s dig into the differences.
The Bike+ has a swiveling screen, but don’t buy it just for that
The first thing you’ll notice about the Bike+ (and arguably its only visually distinctive feature) is the fact that its screen is on a swivel. This lets you set up a space next to the bike, perhaps with a mat and dumbbells, to do other types of workouts. Hop off the Bike+, point the screen toward your mat, and you can do a yoga class without having to crane your neck to see over the seat.
The screen on the regular Bike doesn’t swivel, but it does tilt. This lets you adjust it for the most comfortable angle or to avoid glare while you’re riding. If you want that swiveling feature, though, you don’t have to pony up an extra grand for a whole new bike—an aftermarket swivel mount is only about 50 smackers.
The Bike+ has auto-resistance and a real power meter
If the Bike+ has a killer feature, it’s this. When an instructor tells you to set your resistance to 30, you don’t need to touch the knob—the Bike+ will adjust the resistance for you.
You can turn this feature on or off during a ride by tapping the lock icon next to the resistance numbers. On regular rides, the Bike+ will adjust the resistance whenever the instructor announces that the resistance is changing; on power zone rides, it will adjust as needed to keep you in your power zone.
The catch is that auto-resistance only works for rides where “target metrics” are programmed. This includes most rides from Peloton’s back catalog, but it does not include rides where you’re following along with an instructor in real time. After those live rides, Peloton will add the target metrics, but they say it can take up to 24 hours for that feature to become available for a given ride.
The Bike+ also has a power meter built in, so that it can tell exactly how many watts your output is. (The regular Bike will show you an estimated wattage, but Bikes can become miscalibrated and the wattage may be off.) While you can calibrate a regular Bike, the Bike+ always knows how hard you are actually pedaling, and you may appreciate this extra accuracy.
The Bike+ has better quality tech in its tablet
The screen on the front of your Bike or Bike+ isn’t just a screen; it’s a whole tablet computer with its own processor, RAM, and other electronic components. An under-appreciated part of the Bike+ upgrade is just that everything in the tablet is nicer, better, and faster. The screen itself is larger: a 23.8” diagonal instead of 21.5”. The Bike+ also has:
4 gigabytes of RAM instead of just two
A 2.5 gigahertz Qualcomm processor instead of a 2.0 GHz Mediatek
A 26-watt sound system with front- and rear-facing speakers instead of a 16-watt system with just rear-facing speakers
Bluetooth 5.0 instead of 4.0
A USB-C port so you can charge your devices while you ride (the regular Bike has a charging port, but it’s micro-USB, so most of us would need to get an adapter).
A smudge-proof, reduced-reflection coating on that big ol' screen.
There are also two features that are better on paper but that won’t matter to most of us. First, the Bike+ supports GymKit, a protocol for connecting your Apple Watch to the Bike+ for heart rate data. (They briefly stopped supporting GymKit, since there’s a Peloton Apple Watch app that does most of what GymKit does, but got enough complaints that they brought it back.)
Second, the Bike+ has a nicer selfie camera, 8 MP versus 5 MP (and a privacy cover for said camera). Wait, the Peloton has a camera?? I hear you say. Yep, and according to Peloton its only use is for taking a selfie to use as your profile picture. (You can also just take a photo on your phone and add it to your profile through the app.) That said, Peloton users have said they’ve used the camera for video chat—but nobody seems to actually like that feature.
Ultimately, these features mean that your experience will be just a little bit faster and smoother. Some Peloton riders say that the nicer tech means that Lanebreak is less likely to have that occasional lag when you change “lanes” during the ride, and that the interface is just generally a bit more responsive.
The bottom line: Peloton Bike vs. Bike+
The Bike is a solid choice that will fulfill pretty much all your Peloton dreams. The Bike+ has some features that are nice-to-haves.
Buy the Bike if:
You just want a dang Peloton.
You don’t want to pay an extra $1,050 for minor upgrades.
Buy the Bike+ if:
You want the fastest and smoothest tech experience.
You’d like the Bike to adjust itself during (most) classes.
You’re a numbers nerd and want to know your exact wattage and know that the bike is perfectly calibrated.
Ultimately, both are good choices. The exact price differential between the two models will depend on whether you can find your chosen bike on sale, used, or as a rental (I crunch the numbers for those scenarios here).
Credit card points and airline miles are strange aspects of the modern economy. On the one hand, they’re not really worth all that much—airline miles, hotel points, and credit card reward points max out at about 1.5 cents per point, with most valued significantly less than a penny. On the other hand, they’re basically free money—you get them whenever you use the card, so as long as you’re traveling places you need to go to and buying stuff you need anyway (and not paying interest on those purchases), those points will eventually add up to something of value you wouldn’t otherwise have.
If you’ve got an airline-affiliated credit card like the United MileagePlus card or something similar, you’ve probably used the points you accrue mainly to offset the costs of travel. Points can be pretty easily used to pay for flights, hotels, and rental cars, and if the exchange rate is awful it’s still essentially free. But hotels and flights aren’t the only ways to cash in those points.
Donations
The points and miles you earn via credit card purchases or airline loyalty programs may not have much cash value, but they have some cash value. If you want to make the world a slightly better place without actually taking a hit in your bank account, you can probably donate your miles or points to charity. Most loyalty programs already have built-in relationships with charities that make this pretty easy. Keep in mind that these donations are probably not tax-deductible; the IRS views points and miles as discounts, not income.
Magazines
Your loyalty program or credit card website might have a built-in option to subscribe to magazines or newspapers, or you can check out MagsForMiles to see if you can trade those points for reading material. If you’ve got nothing else to do with your miles and you will actually get something out of the periodical, this could make sense—especially because points and miles are often high-value when used this way, for some reason. For example, with MileagePlus miles you can get a 15-issue subscription to Wine Spectator for 1,000 miles; that sub costs about $72 annually if you bought it directly, which values your point at about 7 cents each, which is not bad at all.
Gift cards
If you want to convert your miles or points into something a little more flexible, a solution most people overlook is a gift card. Most of these programs will happily sell you a gift card (you can also sometimes exchange your unwanted gift cards for points—United’s MileagePlus program does this—creating a weird kind of circular economy of craptastic gift cards). As with all points/miles transactions, you have to dig in to see if you’re getting any sort of value. A $5.00 Starbucks card through MileagePlus will cost you 1,666 points, making those points worth about 3 cents each. On the other hand, a gift card makes it a lot easier to actually buy things at Starbucks, so it might make sense. Plus, it’s a way to give someone a gift without spending any real money, you cheap weirdo.
Experiences
Yeah, the word “experiences” is kind of silly, but if you’ve got a stash of miles or points sitting in an account somewhere, you should look into the “experiences” you can either buy or bid on. MileagePlus offers a bunch of sporting experiences you can bid on with your miles, and Hilton Honors members can bid on a wide range of special events, like concerts, sporting events, or special dinners. Since these are usually auctions of some kind, you might get tempted into using more points or miles than you want—but since those miles and points are more or less free, it might be fun to just yeet them into an adventure you might otherwise never pay for.
Cash
While it’s generally legal to sell your points or miles to a third party like MilesBuyer, it’s not a great idea because most airlines and credit cards prohibit the practice. If you’re caught, you could lose your account and all your accrued points or miles.
But there are some options. Many rewards programs have options to cash out your points—Citi, for example, makes it pretty easy to convert your ThankYou points into a direct deposit into your bank account, a credit to your credit card balance, or even a check in the mail. That transforms your difficult-to-redeem points into actual cash, so it’s worth checking into the details of your program to see what your options are. But do the math before you jump on it—generally speaking, you want to get at least a penny a point before you convert to cash; otherwise waiting to redeem them for other goods or services might make more sense. For example, Citi’s ThankYou points are worth exactly one penny each when you turn them into cash, so 5,000 points becomes a $50 deposit in your account.
Once you decide on a decluttering method to clean out your home, the real work begins. Almost every popular technique out there requires you to group your items into three or four categories: Keep, throw, donate, and possibly, sell. Putting each item in its correct pile is not as easy as the step-by-step rules make it seem, but there’s a trick called the five-second rule that you can use to keep the process efficient.
What is the five-second rule?
The five-second rule is a widely-adaptable technique from organizational coach Mel Robbins, who advocates for it in her books. According to Robbins, you should make major decisions in under five seconds, actually counting down five, four, three, two, one. Your brain will know that at the end of that countdown, it has to make a choice; there’s a sense of urgency to it. This will push you to make quick, efficient decisions. I do this all the time, like when I have to rip off a bandage or open one of those popping cans of biscuits (which really freaks me out). There’s just something about the countdown that amps you up to do the thing you don’t want to do or are deliberating about.
How does the five-second rule apply in decluttering?
Adapting the five-second rule for decluttering is a big tip that floats around minimalist spaces online. You can use it to spur yourself to start cleaning if you’re feeling overwhelmed, but most often, it’s applied to the moments you spend debating internally about whether or not something should be kept or tossed out.
The less time you give yourself to make the choice, the better off you’ll be. You can rationalize keeping anything if you give yourself long enough to do it, but the goal of decluttering is to minimize the amount of stuff you have and organize the stuff that’s leftover, not make a bunch of excuses for why you can’t downsize. When you pick something up in the process of decluttering, you usually know instinctively if you really need it. Holding it and considering it for too long doesn’t take away from what you already know to be true so much as it gives you time to come up with reasons the thing should be kept. Commit to sorting everything you touch into a keep or get-rid-of pile as soon as you pick it up and in no more than five seconds, employing the countdown if you have to in a tough moment.
For anything that really makes you struggle and can’t be so easily sorted in five seconds, follow the Minimalists’ 20/20 rule, asking yourself whether the thing you’re debating keeping could be replaced for under $20 and in under 20 minutes in the unlikely event you ever need it again. If you answer those questions with a yes, throw it out.
Training yourself to be quick and decisive in these instances will help you build the habit of parting with things easily and not assigning false sentimentality or need to items that simply have no business sticking around.
Sometimes it feels like privacy, as a concept, has vanished from the world. Advertisers certainly seem to know everything about you, serving up frighteningly accurate ads that make you think your phone’s microphone has been turned on and marketers are actively listening to your every mumble.
They’re not—yet. But they are engaged in something called “data mining,” which is the process of collecting enormous amounts of anonymous data from your every connected activity and then analyzing that data to infiltrate your life with advertisements and other influences. And it’s not just corporate America—criminals can mine your data in order to rip you off.
If that bugs you—and it should—you can take some steps to minimize data mining in your life. You can’t completely escape it unless you plan to live off-grid with zero Internet connection, but you can reduce your exposure. After all, it’s your data, you’re not being compensated for it, and it’s creepy that some anonymous marketing team knows you’re really into RPGs and craft beer.
Read those EULAs
One of the biggest vectors for mining your data is your smartphone, especially the apps you’ve installed on it. Every time you install an app you agree to its terms—the end user license agreement (EULA) and other requirements.
A first line of defense against data mining is to take the time to review those EULAs. You can’t negotiate, but if you see you’re being asked for blanket permission to send data back to the mothership, you might at least look for an alternative. The key warning signs that the app is just a data-mining vessel are granting permission to monitor your Internet activity, to explicitly collect personal information, or to use your computer or device for their own purposes. If you see anything that gives you pause, think twice before agreeing.
Check settings
When you install an app on your device, you probably click through a series of permissions that grant that app access to everything it needs to gather data about you. This is a data-mining goldmine.
A few years ago, for example, an investigation found that about 5,400 apps were siphoning data from just one person’s smartphone—1.5 gigs of data in all. And back in 2017, an app maker called Alphonso was caught tracking what people were watching on TV by activating the microphone on their smartphones.
If an app requires a lot of unnecessary permissions—does a game really need access to your microphone, location, and camera?—you should assume it’s more of a data-mining app than anything else. Your next line of defense: Stop installing garbage free apps and spend that dollar. Every app wants to make money from you, and if you’re not paying up front, you’re paying in some other way, most likely by having your data stripmined.
Be boring on social
Social media is very obviously a dumpster fire when it comes to privacy. You’re literally posting a photo of you at the store with the hashtag #LiveToShop, so you shouldn’t be surprised when that store’s ads start popping up all over your life.
If you’re concerned about data mining, you can take a few simple steps to reduce the access that data miners have to your social media:
Set your profile to private. If your main goal on social media is to connect with friends or colleagues, restrict the reach of your posts to just those folks.
Be a snob. Don’t accept every request you receive to connect—if you don’t know that person, they don’t need to be let in to your inner circle.
Discretion. Don’t blast your travel plans, spending habits, or product reviews out into the universe.
Using social media compromises your privacy, but if you’re mindful of the information data miners want, you can at least refuse to make it easy.
Log out
When you log into platforms like Google or Facebook, that platform can pretty easily track what you’re doing. And as long as you’re signed in, that ability persists—even if you leave the site. These companies are really data mining companies, and they have perfected the art of following you around.
It’s a pain in the butt, but logging out of those services when you’re not actively using them (and clearing cookies and browsing history regularly) can slow down the vacuuming of data. It’s inconvenient to do so by design, but it has a real impact on how much information is being mined from your online activities.
Avoid memes
Data mining isn’t just about advertisers selling your stuff. It can also be weaponized by scammers to get personal info they can use to rob you blind, steal your identity, or steal your identity and then rob you blind.
One easy way they can do this is to just wait for you to respond to a phishing meme. These memes look like innocent fun quizzes where you supply some seemingly innocuous bits of personal information and receive a chuckle in response. Common examples include posting your “porn name” (a combination of common security question answers like your middle name or the model of your first car or something similar) or using the last digits of your phone number to do some math magic.
Luckily, there’s an easy way to avoid data mining via phishing memes: Ignore the memes. Your life will actually be incrementally better anyway.
Tech solutions
One of the most effective ways to cut down your exposure to data mining requires a bit more effort. Various privacy tools exist that can really stem the flow of your data to the unappeasable black hole of marketing:
VPNs. Virtual Private Networks are useful for privacy because they obscure your location and IP address, which makes it a lot harder for data miners to collate the data they get. Since your data appears to come from a wide range of random locations, it’s impossible to build a coherent profile of your preferences and habits. Installing a VPN on your computer, phone, and devices will go a long way towards cutting off the flow of private information.
Tor. The Tor Browser routes your web surfing traffic through many encrypted nodes, making it basically impossible to track your travels on the Internet. If you really want to go dark, combine Tor with a VPN and you’ll be practically invisible. If you’re not ready to use Tor as your everyday browser, use a privacy-focused browser like DuckDuckGo or Brave, or at least adjust the privacy settings in your browser to make it as secure as possible.
Ad blockers. Almost every single website you visit tracks your activities and gathers data about you. While using a privacy browser is an effective way to stifle that, ad-blocking plugins can go the extra mile by denying intrusive access to your browsing experience altogether.
This year's Free Comic Book Day coincided with Star Wars Day. So there's two new free Star Wars titles being handed out today in comic shops around the world.
They're among several geek-friendly titles among the 48 free comics that fans will get to choose from during this once-a-year event, including:
- Street Fighter vs Final Fight
- Jonny Quest
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
- Conan the Barbarian
- Flash Gordon
And, of course, four from Marvel Comics.
More details from IGN:
DC is about to kick off Absolute Power, a major crossover event that involves Amanda Waller teaming with Batman's rogue android Failsafe and the Brainiac Queen to drain the world's heroes of their power. This prologue issue serves as a primer for the event...
Alongside their Conan issue, Titan is also releasing a new Doctor Who comic that has the distinction of being the first story to feature Ncuti Gatwa's Fifteenth Doctor...
Robert Kirkman's Skybound has been busy establishing a new shared Energon Universe, one which comprises Kirkman and Lorenzo De Felici's Void Rivals as well as the Transformers and G.I. Joe franchises... This issue features new stories for all three series and is designed to be an easy gateway into this rapidly growing comic book line.
There's a Stranger Things story, an Archie Horror comic, and the story of how Popeye lost his eye.
The event is designed to help the industry by attracting comic book readers to independent comic book stores -- and in 2017 NPR offered this advice for visiting comics fans. "While you're there, buy something... The comics shops still have to pay for the 'free' FCBD books they stock, and they're counting on the increased foot traffic to lift sales."
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Join your localMilitia or III% Patriot Group," a post urged the more than 650 members of a Facebook group called the Free American Army. Accompanied by the logo for the Three Percenters militia network and an image of a man in tactical gear holding a long rifle, the post continues: "Now more than ever. Support the American militia page." Other content and messaging in the group is similar. And despite the fact that Facebook bans paramilitary organizing and deemed the Three Percenters an "armed militia group" on its 2021 Dangerous Individuals and Organizations List, the post and group remained up until WIRED contacted Meta for comment about its existence.
Free American Army is just one of around 200 similar Facebook groups and profiles, most of which are still live, that anti-government and far-right extremists are using to coordinate local militia activity around the country. After lying low for several years in the aftermath of the US Capitol riot on January 6, militia extremists have been quietly reorganizing, ramping up recruitment and rhetoric on Facebook -- with apparently little concern that Meta will enforce its ban against them, according to new research by the Tech Transparency Project, shared exclusively with WIRED.
Individuals across the US with long-standing ties to militia groups are creating networks of Facebook pages, urging others to recruit "active patriots" and attend meetups, and openly associating themselves with known militia-related sub-ideologies like that of the anti-government Three Percenter movement. They're also advertising combat training and telling their followers to be "prepared" for whatever lies ahead. These groups are trying to facilitate local organizing, state by state and county by county. Their goals are vague, but many of their posts convey a general sense of urgency about the need to prepare for "war" or to "stand up" against many supposed enemies, including drag queens, immigrants, pro-Palestine college students, communists -- and the US government. These groups are also rebuilding at a moment when anti-government rhetoric has continued to surge in mainstream political discourse ahead of a contentious, high-stakes presidential election. And by doing all of this on Facebook, they're hoping to reach a broader pool of prospective recruits than they would on a comparatively fringe platform like Telegram. "Many of these groups are no longer fractured sets of localized militia but coalitions formed between multiple militia groups, many with Three Percenters at the helm," said Katie Paul, director of the Tech Transparency Project. "Facebook remains the largest gathering place for extremists and militia movements to cast a wide net and funnel users to more private chats, including on the platform, where they can plan and coordinate with impunity."
Paul has been monitoring "hundreds" of these groups and profiles since 2021 and found that they have been growing "increasingly emboldened with more serious and coordinated organizing" in the past year.
Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is facing a threat a few of his Republican predecessors can relate to: members of his own party vowing to oust him from power.
Closing arguments in the United States v. Google monopoly trial have wrapped up. How the judge decides this case could set a precedent for several other antitrust suits against Big Tech companies.
NPR's Scott Simon speaks with Gregory Rosston of Stanford University about the FCC's decision to reinstate net neutrality policies and what the last 6 years on the internet has been like without them.
After installing Windows 11, you should check some settings and adapt them to your needs and streamline its use. Here, we’ll show you the 13 most important Windows 11 settings to adjust that maximize security and improve the operating system with just a few clicks.
This article is based on Windows 11 version 23H2, the most recent major version of the operating system. Most of the settings can also be implemented in Windows 10 and older Windows 11 versions and work in the same way in Windows 11 version 24H2, this year’s upcoming update.
Customize Explorer – show file extensions and drives
Windows has been hiding known file extensions for years by default. This is initially annoying because it means that the correct file name is not displayed in full. There is also the security risk. For example, the file “important-document.doc.exe” is displayed as “important-document.doc”, in this case because Windows simply hides the file extension “exe”.
This turns an executable file, such as malware/ransomware, into an unsuspicious Word document at first glance. You can quickly work around the problem by activating View > Show > File name extensions in Explorer.
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You can also find the setting in other Windows versions in the Folder Options > View under “Hide extensions for known file types.” In this case, you must deactivate the option.
In the folder options, you can also select the option “This PC” within the “General” tab under “Open File Explorer for.” In this case, Explorer starts with the view of the drives, not with the rarely desired “Start view.” You can also open the Start view with a single click on “Start” in the top left-hand corner.
After updating to Windows 11 or installing the operating system, you should first go to “Windows Update” in the settings. You should first make sure that the message “You are up to date” appears in the upper area. Click on “Check for updates” and make sure that all updates are installed. Windows also updates the malware protection definition files in this way.
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It can also be useful to activate the option “Get the latest updates as soon as they are available.” This ensures that your Windows system receives updates faster than other users. Microsoft distributes many updates in waves. If you activate this option, you can get ahead of the waves, but be warned that riding the bleeding-edge of updates leaves you more open to potential bugs.
In addition, click on “Advanced options” and activate “Receive updates for other Microsoft products.” This will ensure that the other Microsoft software on your PC (like Office, Edge, and the Xbox app) are always up to date.
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At this point, it may also be useful to specify when you work on the PC under “Active hours.” This ensures that Windows does not start within this time after installing updates.
Important: Optimize malware protection settings for drivers
After installing Windows 11, open the Windows Security app from the Start menu. You should see a green icon with a tick next to all settings. If this is not the case, check the area by clicking on the relevant icon.
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For “Device security,” you should ensure that the “Memory integrity” option is activated in Core isolation > Core isolation details. This prevents successful attacks by malware. If this option cannot be deactivated, this is due to an outdated and therefore insecure driver.
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You should also ensure that “Microsoft blacklist of vulnerable drivers” is activated. This allows you to block insecure drivers that attackers can use to introduce malware onto the system.
Important: Adjust virus and threat protection
In the Windows Security app, you should switch to “Virus and threat protection” after installation. Click on “Manage settings” under “Virus and threat protection settings” and make sure that all options are switched on here, primarily “Real-time protection,” “Cloud-based protection,” and “Automatic transmission of samples.”
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Download protection updates for the malware scanner
It is also important that you ensure that the security information for “Virus and threat protection updates” is up-to-date. Use “Protection updates” and then “Check for updates” to update them directly.
If you are using external virus protection, these adjustments are not necessary as this deactivates the internal virus protection in Windows.
Check Windows activation
In the settings, you will find the option to check whether Windows is activated via System > Activation. Without activation, the operating system will stop working after a while and many settings will not be available. Here you can see whether the activation is working and, if necessary, you can use “Change” to re-enter your product key for Windows 10 or Windows 11.
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Are all drivers installed?
Use the command “devmgmt.msc”, which you enter in the search field of the taskbar, to see whether all drivers are installed for all existing devices on the PC. If unknown or other devices are still displayed here, you should obtain the latest driver from the manufacturer and install it.
Professionals still activate drive encryption
On notebooks in particular, you should ensure that you use Bitlocker for drive encryption. To do this, enter “bitlocker” in the search field of the taskbar and activate the protection.
Bitlocker is available in Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise. Bitlocker isn’t available in Windows 11 Home, alas, but you can use device encryption instead. This can be found in the Windows 11 settings.
TEL AVIV — A high-level Hamas delegation arrived in Cairo on Saturday as months of stop-start talks for a cease-fire and hostage release deal appear to have reached a crucial stage, even as Israel continued to threaten a ground offensive in Gaza’s southern city of Rafah that United Nations officials have warned will worsen the civilian death toll and deepen the enclave’s humanitarian crisis.
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