Facial Recognition on Public Buses? Kansas City Says Yes
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:

Officials in Kansas City, Missouri, are preparing to equip cameras on some public buses with facial recognition software capable of identifying passengers who appear on a list of banned riders or missing persons. Supporters and opponents alike view the effort as a major litmus test for tapping the … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Hmmmmmm. Can you at least see those? ’ „ “ ”

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org My thermometer claims 27 °C now but I don’t trust it. It’s hot, it’s humid, it’s horrible.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de We’re already at 29°C now. Five more to go. It’s terrible!

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Sounds lovely! (I think. Not sure about spider webs and such. 😅)

I woke up to 26°C this morning. 🥵

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com (I still hate that these photos look so good, despite being made with a telephone. 😝 I mean, the (probably built-in) filters are easy to spot, but it looks super convincing when you don’t pay attention.)

For this week’s (slightly delayed) #caturday post, we catch Bowie as he contemplates whether to play Arkham City (again).

Image

Spoilers: he opted for a nap instead (as is his way).

🎶 “Woken Furies” - Gunship https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDb6eNUPScU

The perfect music for late-night urban roving.

Polymarket Paid Dozens to Post Videos of Themselves ‘Winning’ With Fake Bets
In January a college student posted a video showing him winning $100,000 on Polymarket — one of 145 that appeared to show bets adding up to almost $410,000, reports the Wall Street Journal. “But none of those bets were real.”

Instead its creator was “one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film thems … ⌘ Read more

Gamers Sue PlayStation: It’s Not Clear They’re Selling Licenses Rather Than Ownership of Games
The gaming news site Aftermath reports:

Four gamers are suing Sony Interactive Entertainment for allegedly breaking a California law that requires digital storefronts selling games to make it clear people are buying licenses, not actually owning the games.

Sony Interactive Entertainment … ⌘ Read more

Broadcom Working On VMware Zero-Copy Buffer Sharing Between VMs And Hypervisor
Interesting feature work for VMware virtualization on Linux now being pursued by Broadcom is to support zero-copy buffer sharing between the VM(s) and host hypervisor, which would equate to an efficiency and performance win… ⌘ Read more

How Millions of Digital Home Devices Are Secretly Powering Cyberattacks
The Wall Street Journal reports on internet-connected devices — and how every year millions of them “can contain a secret digital backdoor that opens up access to your home internet, so that anyone… can surf the web as if they were you.” (And this is especially true for “knockoffs that you buy online”…)

In a video report this wee … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Announces Benchmarks for AI Life Sciences Research. Its Best Model Failed 63.9% of the Test
This week OpenAI announced a 750-task test to to measure “whether AI systems can support realistic life science research tasks, not just answer biology questions.”

But while OpenAI’s top-performing GPT-Rosalind model led the rankings, Slashdot reader BrianFagioli notes that “it a … ⌘ Read more

How truly wonderful! I went out tonight and the first thing I noticed was the temperature drop. It felt actually quite pleasing. What a welcome surprise, I didn’t expect that at all. It was warmer in the forst than between the fields. The tiniest breeze helped to cool off the surroundings I think. Right now, the temperature shows 23°C. It’s supposed to reach 18°C at 5 in the morning before it rapidly shoots through the sky again.

When I left the house I even saw the very end of a nice sunset. A bat was around, too. The several thousand fireflies delivered a fantastic show. It’s such a pity that I cannot show this to you. :-(

There were many frogs or toads around. Luckily, the light tan gravel road made for a good constrast to the darker hopping amphibians. So, I spotted them just in time. No animals were harmed.

The moon was out and lit up the scenery. I was perfectly chasing my own shadow for several hundred meters on a forest road. I had the moon right in my back. That moon light shadow felt magical. <3

It must have set a new record on picking up spider webs along the way. The threads around arms and legs always feel quite yucky. People were blasting music somewhere in town. You could here that noise in the entire forest. I found that rather annoying. All street lamps are operational again, so I got already blinded right at the entrance to the town. But other than that, this was a very nice evening stroll. Totally recommended. Already looking forward to tomorrow. :-)

Remembering When Alan Turing Developed a Portable Voice Encryption Device
Long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat writes: Alan Turing, one of the more famous people who worked at Bletchley Park to decipher the German Enigma coding machine, was also working on a separate project. His private papers, known as the Bayley papers for his assistant Donald Bayley who held onto the papers until his death in 2020 … ⌘ Read more

Tech Pundit Cringely Co-Founds Startup ‘2Brains Inc’ to Solve LLM Hallucinations
Long-time tech pundit Robert Cringely started his career at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab back in 1978. Last month 73-year-old Cringely explained why his site went on a two-year hiatus — and it’s not just because of a heart attack and a stroke last July:

Just like everyone else, I’ve been busy all this time on … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Yeah, that would also be fine with me. I certainly do like the “arbitrary” in your comment.

While writing the article, I also thought about something like that:

date := time.Date(2026, 6, 19,
    17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)

Or possibly:

date := time.Date(
    2026, 6, 19,
    17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC,
)

But it’s four lines for a damn timestamp. I also contemplated whether a comment acting as a separator is all that’s needed:

date := time.Date(2026, 6, 19, /**/ 17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)

I might like that the most. Not entirely sure yet. It kinda feels like a hack, but still a little elegant. Add your comment on top and we’re golden. Maybe?

I deliberately excluded them as this only distracted from the points I wanted to make. And I also realized that this example was just not ideal at all. Perhaps I should add them nevertheless?

If I ever invented a programming language, a much more human readable timestamp representation of some sort, RFC 3339 or very close to that would be part of that language. Something along the lines of /pattern/ for regexes in certain languages.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh wow, we’re talking about such a detailed level. 🤔

I agree with most of what you said.

I probably would have written it like this:

// Arbitrary reference date.
//                   Y  m   d   H  M  S  nano
date := time.Date(2026, 6, 19, 17, 0, 0, 0, time.UTC)

Would this be better or worse? 😅

Waymo Recalls About 3,900 Robotaxis After Some Drove Into ‘Freeway Construction Zones’
CNBC reports:

Waymo is recalling almost 3,900 robotaxis in the U.S. to fix software issues after some cars drove into freeway construction zones, according to notices filed with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The voluntary recall, the Alphabet-owned company’s second in just over a mon … ⌘ Read more

Cellphone Alert System Breached in Brazil, Message Sent in Leetspeak
CNN reports:

An unauthorized alert bearing a mysterious message that was sent to cell phones in several states across Brazil on Saturday morning is suspected to be the work of hackers, the Brazilian government said. Devices lit up with the word “misantropi4,” an alphanumeric spelling of the Portuguese word “misantropia,” which in English … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Nice boxes, yeah. :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Haha, thanks! :-D Some deliberately crude GIMP work.

SMPTE Opens Entire Standards Catalog for Free, Removing Century-Old Paywall
The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers has published over 800 technical standards over the years (as a professional association for the media and entertainment industry).

But this week SMPTE “announced that its complete Standards catalog, the technical backbone behind everything from SDI and timecode to IP-ba … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Apparently some new ones, yeah, like these: 🫠🫩

@movq@www.uninformativ.de What kind of Unicode do you use? All the new emojis?

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com

But it also wouldn’t surprise me to find out that people like Bezzos, Musk, and Zuckerberg are actually ghoulish aliens

Yeah, that’s easier to accept, isn’t? “Phew, they’re not human after all. They’re not absolute psychopaths with zero empathy – they’re just aliens. Humans are good!” 😅

@bender@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Ta! I don’t know about regional differences. But at the moment, they first start slowly appearing at around 21:45 to 22:00. And then it gets more and more. You’ve got about an hour until it’s over.

People often say that they are in and over the meadows close to the edges of the forest. But at least over here, there are literally magnitudes more in the forest. So far, I’ve maybe seen thirty, fourty (30-40) fireflies outside at the meadows, but one or two thousand (1000-2000) inside. Exactly like last year.

They like a little bit openish spots in the forest. Not like a clearing, but if you can see ~10 meters from the path into the woodland, chances are that fireflies will pop up. But if it’s really thick brush, the odds are very slim. The hotspots also slowly wander around over time. So, I just keep on walking after a few minutes of stopping to enjoy the show.

Microsoft Discovers Cryptocurrency Stealer That Spreads Through USB Drives and Uses Tor
Ars Technica’s senior security editor reports:

Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers.

The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the cont … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Congrats, I guess. ;-) I’m not gonna dive into the comments either. :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Definitely silly in places (and the back-alley fistfight is AWESOME).

But it also wouldn’t surprise me to find out that people like Bezzos, Musk, and Zuckerberg are actually ghoulish aliens here to keep us into a state of reduced consciousness while they extract what they can. “Their third-world.”

It’s like the bearded-man says: “We could be pets, we could be food, but all we really are is cattle.”

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Same, I only (vaguely) remember the more interesting bits. Most of the subjects weren’t my cup of tea. ;-)

@movq@www.uninformativ.de That’s what I believe as well. But again, it shows a similar thing when a video cannot be downloaded. Anyway.

It’s 34°C and all the shutters are closed. Walking past the front door, I was surprised that there is light sneaking through the covered glass next to it. I somehow thought it’s already the middle of the night. :-D

FSF Patches Two-Year-Old Vulnerability Found by AI Researchers in GNU Savannah Repository
The Free Software Foundation’s GNU Savannah hosts thousands of free software projects — both GNU and non-GNU projects, including Drupal.

But in early May, security researchers from Hacktron.AI reported vulnerabilities and demonstrated an exploit, according to a new statement Friday from the FSF:
… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Sometimes, views on quality code are 180° apart.

Here we are, it took me a bit longer: https://lyse.isobeef.org/code-readability/

Linux Finally Eliminates The strncpy API After Six Years Of Work, 360+ Patches
Linux 7.2 has finally eliminated the strncpy API from the Linux kernel. The strncpy() function for copying up to a specified number of bytes has long been deprecated and after six years of work and hundreds of patches, no more users of the strncpy within the Linux kernel remained that it has now been eliminated… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org … I also meant to comment on the very neat and stylish Play Button, but forgot to do so. 😅😅😅

Linux’s ARM64 NEON Intrinsics CRC64 Code Adapted To Work On 32-bit ARM
Merged for Linux 7.1 was ARMM64 NEON-accelerated CRC64-NVMe support for around 6x the performance out of that checksumming algorithm. The generic code had been a bottleneck in NVMe and other storage subsystem code of the Linux kernel with CRC64-NVMe being used to help verify against data corruption. Now for Linux 7.2, the NEON-accelerated code will also work for those still relying on 32-bit ARM… ⌘ Read more

Student Loan Borrowers Will Get Interest Rate Cut If They Sign Up For Auto Pay
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Student loan borrowers who enroll in automatic payments will get a much bigger discount on interest starting July 1, the U.S. Department of Education says. Auto pay has long offered a modest discount off borrowers’ interest rate – .25 percentage points – but after millions … ⌘ Read more

GIMP v0.54 From 1996 With Motif Toolkit Now Flatpak’ed For Modern Linux Desktops
The open-source world waited long enough for the GIMP 3.0 release that finally came last year with its GTK3 port and more, but for those with time on their hands this weekend and want to relive GIMP’s past from long ago, GIMP 0.54 has been adapted for Flatpak to work on modern Linux desktops. What makes this version of GIMP from 1996 notable is that it was the last to use the Motif toolkit… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Making It Easier To Configure Multi-Monitor Setups
With KDE’s Plasma 6.7 desktop having released this week, more development attention is turning to feature work toward Plasma 6.8 but there are also some fixes already accumulating for the Plasma 6.7.1 point release… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Retaliated Against Workers Who Supported Regulating Data Centers, Complaint Says
Three Amazon employees have filed a civil-rights complaint alleging the company retaliated against them for publicly supporting Seattle regulations on data centers. “The complaint was filed on the workers’ behalf by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an independent group of corporate employees at Amazon … ⌘ Read more

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com When I first watched that movie (decades after it was released, probably like 10 years ago), I didn’t expect that. 😅 Feels super silly today, and all the fighting and the “look at me, I’m a strong man” stuff. 😂

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org Oh wow, nice. 😲 Never seen those in the wild myself.

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org If I were to guess: They might have done so to avoid bug reports from users with heavily outdated versions. 🫤

@itsericwoodward@itsericwoodward.com Apologies not necessary 😅

Using Sound Waves To Make Espresso Could Cut Coffee-Brewing Energy Use By 75%
Researchers developed an ultrasonic espresso process that uses high-frequency sound waves instead of hot water to produce espresso-strength coffee at room temperature. And, not only did coffee drinkers find it comparable to traditional espresso, but the brewing process cut energy use by up to 75%. An anonymous reade … ⌘ Read more

But also: “I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass… and I’m all out of bubblegum.”

And: “You know, you look like your head fell in the cheese dip back in 1957.”

And: “Brother, life’s a bitch… and she’s back in heat.”

And: “There’s gonna be hell to pay. ‘Cause I ain’t daddy’s little boy no more.”

Just finished watching They Live (1988) again, one of my favorite movies, and one that has (sadly) remained relevant for nearly 40 years (some might even argue it’s more relevant today than ever).

Obey. Consume. No independent thought. Honor apathy. Do not question authority.

They live, we sleep.

@prologic@twtxt.net Very cool! Like @movq@www.uninformativ.de, I don’t think I’m the target audience for this (as I’m already a DevOps hobbyist managing a small server “victory garden”), but I love the idea.

Apologies for hitting it early, I initially overlooked the sign-up form and thought I would try it for 💩s and 😁s.