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A Nice Little Cryptography Primer

By itss | 28/06/2021
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Pun Intended.

Category: Technology
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  • Amazon's New Stargate Series Is Officially Dead
    by BeauHD on 04/06/2026 at 7:00 am

    Amazon has reportedly killed its planned new Stargate series despite giving it a series order in 2025. According to Variety, studio executives were worried it would only appeal to longtime fans. ScreenRant reports: Reports of what became Gero's Stargate series started in 2022, after Amazon acquired MGM Studios. Dean Devlin, who co-wrote the 1994 Stargate movie with Emmerich, was another executive producer for the Amazon show, as were Joby Harold and Tory Tunnell via Safehouse Pictures. The project also had Brad Wright and Joe Mallozzi as consulting producers, with both having had extensive history working within the Stargate franchise. On X, Michael Shanks, who played Daniel Jackson in Stargate SG-1, posted in response to the news that: "Yep. They did that." Mallozzi was resistant to the idea that the series was being geared toward diehard fans: "Nope. No. Sorry. Gonna have to push back on this. We were ever mindful of creating a show that would have broad appeal." In an additional post, Mallozzi went into further detail about why the cancellation is so disappointing: Before the new series was canceled by Amazon, Stargate began with Emmerich and Devlin's movie starring Kurt Russell and James Spader. This paved the way for 10 seasons of Stargate SG-1, followed by five seasons of Stargate Atlantis. There has also been the two-season Stargate Universe, the one-season animated show Stargate Infinity, the web miniseries Stargate Origins, and the 2008 direct-to-video movies Stargate: The Ark of Truth and Stargate Continuum, along with numerous games. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Demand Is Booming For New No Tech, Repairable Tractor
    by BeauHD on 04/06/2026 at 3:30 am

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The secondary market for decades old, low-tech John Deere tractors has been booming for years as farmers have sought reliable tractors that they can actually fix without having to deal with John Deere's repair monopoly. A Canadian company has seen that demand and came up with a radical thought: What if they made a new, repairable, "no-tech" tractor to solve what has become a gigantic pain point for farmers? Alberta's Ursa Ag says that it has been inundated with demand after announcing its tractor, which costs roughly half as much as a Deere and has the benefit of not being a repair nightmare. [...] Ursa Ag markets its tractors as "no frills" and "built to last." Ursa Ag's Doug Wilson told me that the company designed the tractor because of a need in the marketplace for a new machine that isn't loaded with tech and is easy to maintain. The company follows in the footsteps of consumer electronics companies like Fairphone, which makes a repairable smartphone and Framework, which makes modular, repairable laptops. The demand Ursa Ag has seen is part of the backlash to manufacturer repair monopolies and the injection of technology and internet-connected sensors and terms of use into even the most basic of gadgets. "I talk to farmers every day and I hear from farmers every day about how they went out and bought machinery from 1987 so that it wouldn't have a computer on it," Wilson said. "All of this came from a simple discussion with a customer who wanted to be able to turn [the tractor] on at the start of the day, to use it, and shut it off at the end of the day. It needed to work, so that's what we built." Ursa Ag's tractor has been hyped in agriculture circles after Wilson showed the tractor off at a Canadian farm show and it was featured by Farms.com. Wilson said more than a thousand farmers have contacted him after that show, from roughly 30 countries. "I got a handwritten letter from a farmer in France who doesn't own a computer and wanted us to mail him information about the tractors," he said. He said the company has thus far made a couple fewer than 100 tractors but is working on tripling its production capacity and has seen a lot of demand over the last few months. "Given the number of my customers that carry flip phones, I would say there is consumer pressure to back away from some of the technology that is unnecessary to perform everyday tasks," Wilson said. "So that is definitely transferable to dishwashers and washing machines, refrigerators. Refrigerators that have screens on them that'll tell you what's inside. It's a little crazy." "That high-tech stuff, the million-dollar John Deere tractor has a place. It has technology that is well worth the money," Wilson said. "But that technology is needed for 5 percent of what a farm does. There are so many applications for tractors on farms that don't require technology. The technology that goes into even a calculator is not required for most farming applications." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Fedora Linux 43 Exposes 20-Year-Old Microsoft Outlook Security Failure
    by BeauHD on 03/06/2026 at 11:00 pm

    BrianFagioli writes: Fedora Linux 43 users upgrading to the latest Dovecot mail server discovered something rather unsettling: some older Microsoft Outlook configurations may have been silently ignoring SSL/TLS settings for POP3 email connections for years. According to a Fedora community blog post, affected Outlook clients reportedly continued using insecure port 110 connections even when encryption was enabled in the application settings. The issue surfaced after Dovecot 2.4 disabled plaintext authentication on non secure connections by default, causing Outlook users to suddenly lose mailbox access after the Fedora 43 upgrade. The report suggests the behavior may date back as far as Outlook 2007, although modern Outlook builds were not fully tested. Fedora admins stress that the problem could be limited to legacy account configurations rather than current versions of Outlook itself. Still, the discovery has sparked discussion among Linux admins and security folks because many users likely assumed their email traffic was encrypted simply because Outlook claimed SSL/TLS was enabled. The incident also highlights how stricter defaults in modern open source infrastructure can expose ancient assumptions and questionable behaviors that quietly survived for decades. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • EU Plots To Abandon US Tech
    by BeauHD on 03/06/2026 at 10:00 pm

    Ancient Slashdot reader whitroth shares a report from Politico, with the caption: "shutting down Microsoft Office for the International Criminal Court (ICC) was clearly a wake-up call." From the report: The EU is moving to counter American dominance in technology by reaching for one of the oldest tools in its arsenal: industrial strategy. As the European Commission unveiled a plan Wednesday to reduce Europe's reliance on the foreign technology providers that underpin the modern economy, it was careful to stress that it was not picking a fight with U.S. digital giants. Instead, the tech sovereignty package -- motivated in no small part by U.S. President Donald Trump's weaponization of Europe's dependence on American firms -- takes a longer-term view: boost the continent's players so they can eventually challenge their U.S. rivals. [...] If adopted, the package will direct public money toward products that contribute to Europe's economy and independence from foreign firms; cut red tape for data centers; beef up research and innovation through "leadership initiatives"; incentivize countries to share digital capacities in a new "Eurocloud" forum; and require EU governments to come up with national strategies to boost the adoption of cutting-edge tech, including AI. The package will also seek to ramp up the bloc's demand for advanced chips -- a response to criticism by the industry -- with a series of industrial initiatives to revise a 2023 chips law. [...] As part of its proposal to keep a list of trustworthy countries, the Commission would require EU governments to run a so-called "sovereignty risk assessment" for every digital service they rely on, measuring foreign control, potential access to sensitive data and the risk of operational disruption. Within a year, they would have to determine the appropriate level of protection for each public sector and procure digital services accordingly -- unless they can prove doing so would come at a "disproportionate cost," the proposal reads. However, the Commission reserves the right to overrule their assessment in future legislation if it believes they downplayed the risks. The Commission estimated that just one percent of Europe's public services are so sensitive that they would be required under the proposed certification scheme to rely on the strict level that totally excludes foreign technology. "We cannot afford to depend on others for the technologies that keep our hospitals running, our energy grids stable and our services secure," Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement. "This is about protecting our citizens, defending our interests and making our own choices." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • MacBook Neo is So Popular That Apple Reportedly Doubled Production
    by BeauHD on 03/06/2026 at 9:00 pm

    According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Apple has reportedly doubled 2026 MacBook Neo production from 5 million to 10 million units after stronger-than-expected demand for its $599 budget laptop. MacRumors reports: On an earnings call in late April, Apple's CEO Tim Cook said that customer response to the MacBook Neo was "off the charts," and the popularity of the laptop has reportedly led the company to significantly boost production. [...] Apple was very optimistic about the MacBook Neo before announcing it, but the company still "undercalled" the level of enthusiasm that the laptop would generate, according to Cook. He said that MacBook Neo demand exceeded Apple's expectations and helped to drive a record number of first-time Mac buyers last quarter. New figures from market research firm IDC support Apple's claim that the MacBook Neo is selling well, and the Windows PC industry has taken notice. For example, Dell recently introduced a redesigned XPS 13 laptop from $699 and said it has features "you won't find on a MacBook Neo," such as a touch screen and a backlit keyboard. "Apple's MacBook Neo is a capable machine, and its arrival confirms that there's real appetite for premium quality at accessible prices," admitted Dell. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Google Launches 'Gemma 4 12B' AI Model That Can Run On Your Laptop
    by BeauHD on 03/06/2026 at 8:00 pm

    Google has launched Gemma 4 12B, a 12-billion-parameter open AI model designed to run locally on your laptop without depending entirely on cloud infrastructure. WION reports: According to Google, the new model delivers performance close to much larger AI systems while requiring significantly less memory. The company says Gemma 4 12B can run locally on devices equipped with just 16GB of VRAM, making advanced AI more accessible to developers, researchers and businesses. The launch highlights a growing trend across the AI industry: bringing powerful AI models directly to personal computers instead of relying solely on remote data centers. Gemma is Google's family of open AI models built using technology and research from its Gemini program. The new Gemma 4 12B model contains 12 billion parameters and has been designed to handle multiple types of information, including text, images and audio. Unlike traditional AI systems that focus only on text, Gemma 4 12B can understand visual content, process audio inputs and perform advanced reasoning tasks. This makes it suitable for a wider range of applications, from software development and content creation to research and automation. Google says the model is available under the Apache 2.0 licence, allowing developers and organizations to use, modify and deploy it with relatively few restrictions. [...] One of the most significant technical changes in Gemma 4 12B is its new unified architecture. Traditionally, multimodal AI systems use separate components known as encoders to process images, audio and text before combining the information. Google says Gemma 4 12B removes the need for separate multimodal encoders. Instead, the model processes different types of information through a unified architecture. According to the company, this helps improve efficiency while reducing memory requirements and computational overhead. The result is a model that can deliver advanced multimodal capabilities while remaining small enough to run locally on modern hardware. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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