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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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  • SpaceX Launches 29 Starlink Satellites on Memorial Day
    by EditorDavid on 25/05/2026 at 5:10 pm

    "The expansion of SpaceX's Starlink network of internet relay satellites continued Monday with a Memorial Day launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station," reports Spaceflight Now. The mission added another 29 Starlink satellites to more than 10,000 already in low Earth orbit: This was SpaceX's 60th orbital flight of the year, consisting of 59 Falcon 9 rockets and one Falcon Heavy rocket... Nearly 8.5 minutes after liftoff, [Falcon 9 first stage] B1078 landed on the drone ship, 'A Shortfall of Gravitas,' positioned in the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of South Carolina. This was the 151st landing for this vessel and the 614th booster landing to date for SpaceX. Meanwhile, the second stage shut down eight minutes and 39 seconds into flight and entered a coast phase, before short second burn at T+52 minutes. The stack of Starlink satellites deployed 61 minutes and 26 seconds after launch. On X.com SpaceX shared footage of the booster rocket landing, and a longer video showing Starship's 12th test flight Friday. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Will Big Tech Layoffs Bring a Culture Shift to Anxiety and Job Insecurity?
    by EditorDavid on 25/05/2026 at 11:34 am

    Tech industry layoffs may be worse at large tech companies than the rest of the IT industry. The New York Times argues those layoffs have now shifted the culture at Big Tech companies, after interviewing more than two dozen of their workers. "Cooperation and collegiality are on the wane; chumminess between employees and managers has cooled as mutual suspicion pervades their relationships; and a throbbing economic anxiety infects almost every conversation. "Perhaps no site on the internet reflects this transformation more vividly than Blind, where users can post in private channels restricted to employees of a single company, or public channels visible to anyone..." Since 2022, large tech companies have collectively laid off more than 150,000 workers, unraveling what many tech workers once perceived as a guarantee of affluence and employability. The threat of being replaced by artificial intelligence has loomed over those who remain. This year alone, Amazon has indicated that it is laying off more than 15,000 workers, Block 4,000, Meta 8,000 and Oracle an estimated 30,000... By most measures, the sentiments that Blind tracks have taken a turn for the worse. During the nearly four years before tech companies began major layoffs in the fall of 2022, Meta and Microsoft employees posted about career success — topics like how to maximize their salary or win promotions — more than four times as often as they posted about job insecurity, according to Blind. Since then, the ratios have lurched in the opposite direction: Meta and Microsoft employees have posted about job insecurity roughly 1.5 times as often as they post about success... The shift has had practical effects. A Meta employee said in an interview that some workers on her team now used less vacation time and that, in a break with custom, people frequently checked on their projects while on vacation. They increasingly worry about getting a poor performance review or losing their job if they aren't constantly available. The employee, who declined to be identified for fear of retribution, said she and many of her colleagues frequently checked Blind because it could be comforting to see how many other Meta workers shared their anxieties. Employees at several companies said in interviews that their morale was further undermined by the feeling that the layoffs were abrupt and arbitrary, and executed with little empathy. Several tech workers said it was the scarcity of information about possible layoffs that raised their cortisol levels and made it difficult to focus on their jobs. They often fill the vacuum by turning to Blind, which, in addition to posts by workers, features a "tech layoff tracker" that lists both layoff rumors and those it has confirmed. "I was on Blind five days a week," said Faith Wilkins El, a software engineer who was laid off from Oracle in late March, after more than four years at the company. Wilkins El, who is part of the Oracle Workers Collective, a group seeking better severance agreements with the company, said navigating Blind was sometimes stressful because it was hard to know what was true or false. (Blind says it has a security team to weed out bad actors, like those who may try to register under fake email addresses.) Still, she found it more helpful than not because the layoffs came as less of a shock after she spent time on the site. "I was trying to get prepared mentally," she said. Blind is capitalizing on the increased interest with new products. It plans to unveil a service called Blind AI, which will allow employers to simulate their workers' reactions to certain changes, like a stricter in-office mandate. And it is close to releasing a feature to alert users that layoffs are imminent. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • It's Like the Olympics - But Steroids Are Allowed
    by EditorDavid on 25/05/2026 at 7:34 am

    "Think Olympics on steroids. Literally," quips the BBC, describing Sunday's controversial Enhanced Games event in Las Vegas featuring dozens of athletes "using performance-enhancing drugs to try and break world records in track, weightlifting and swimming. Some $25m (£18.6m) in prize money is up for grabs — with cash prizes for winners... The drugs they use must be legal, and approved by the Federal Drug Administration. But substances like testosterone and human growth hormone — banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency — are not only celebrated here, they're encouraged and for sale... Health experts warn that anabolic steroids and growth hormones can cause strokes and cardiovascular damage, among other risks. Event organisers claim Enhanced will push the limits of human performance while critics, especially in the Olympic movement, dismiss it as an affront to the spirit and founding principles of competitive sport... Earlier this month, the Enhanced Group — the company behind the competition — began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. And the competition is seemingly being treated as an opportunity for Enhanced to sell performance-enhancing medicine and supplements online. "The project was founded by entrepreneurs Aron D'Souza and Maximilian Martin in 2023," the artidcle points out, "and has attracted backing from prominent investors including billionaire Peter Thiel and Donald Trump Jr." And NPR adds that "Most of the participating athletes trained for the competition in Abu Dhabi, as part of Enhanced's own study." Enhanced did not break down what specific athletes used which drugs, but they announced on Wednesday in the lead-up to the event that 91% of the athletes competing used testosterone or testosterone esters, 79% used human growth hormone, and 62% used stimulants, such as adderall... The games have been largely panned by outside medical experts and sports governing bodies. Multiple recent studies assess the harm surrounding the Enhanced Games. Travis Tygart, the CEO of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency, called the games a "dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle" in a statement. The International Olympic Committee said the games are a "betrayal of everything that we stand for." The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) last year urged U.S. authorities to stop the games. The International Federation of Sports Medicine said in 2024 that they see the medical oversight as "insufficient" to support the athletes. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • California Executive Order Directs Businesses and State Agencies to Prepare for AI-Driven Workforce Disruption
    by EditorDavid on 25/05/2026 at 4:34 am

    Thursday California's governor issued an executive order "directing state agencies to prepare workers and businesses for AI-driven workforce disruption," reports San Francisco's KQED. In a statement the governor said "This moment demands that we reimagine the entire system — how we work, how we govern, how we prepare people for the future." The order mandates agencies to explore a range of policy options, including severance standards, expanded unemployment insurance, job retraining programs aimed specifically at white-collar workers, worker ownership models and a concept the governor called "universal basic capital," giving all residents a stake in assets such as corporate stocks, bonds or wealth funds... Tom Kemp, executive director of the California Privacy Protection Agency, applauded the fact that the order named data privacy as a consumer protection concern and highlighted the CPPA's automated decision-making technology regulations, which he called "the nation's most comprehensive." Others are more skeptical. "Catastrophic job loss from AI is not inevitable, it's a political choice," Lorena Gonzalez, president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, AFL-CIO, wrote in a statement. However, Gonzalez noted one area of genuine agreement: the order's emphasis on collective bargaining as a tool for protecting workers from AI displacement... According to Stanford HAI's 2026 AI Index, software developers ages 22 to 25 are among those most likely to see their skills made redundant earliest. This year, U.S. employment fell nearly 20% from 2024, even as headcount for older developers continued to grow. Following the job cuts announced at Meta, a union of Alphabet workers in the U.S. and Canada released a statement that suggests Silicon Valley's own labor force may seek to organize... "It's undeniable that our whole industry is being transformed by the corporate push to adopt new AI tools," [Alphabet Workers Union-CWA Local 9009 said in a statement]. "It's hard not to feel anxiety and fear when we can see more and more tech companies cutting huge portions of their workforce both in anticipation of replacing them with AI, and to fund their multi-billion-dollar bets on AI as the future of the industry..." In February, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler and Gonzalez delivered what amounted to an ultimatum to Newsom: regulate AI or lose labor's support for any future presidential run. Shuler called a potential AI-driven economic collapse a coming "crisis." In August 2025, Newsom announced a partnership with Google, Microsoft, IBM and Adobe to expand AI education in California schools and community colleges, a workforce preparation push that now looks like a precursor to Thursday's more sweeping order. The article notes that after signing the bill the governor shared this comment on X.com. "California will pursue new policies that make sure working Californians — not just Big Tech — benefit from the wealth and breakthroughs coming out of this space." Newsom telegraphed Thursday's order earlier this week, when he appeared at the Center for American Progress IDEAS Conference in Washington. "Businesses are going to make a fortune, and that's why you cannot continue to have a payroll tax system that taxes jobs and then subsidizes automation." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • AI 'Crashes the Party' at This Year's Cannes Film Festival - Including Multi-Year Meta Partnership
    by EditorDavid on 25/05/2026 at 1:34 am

    AI "crashed the party" at this year's Cannes Film Festival, writes The Hollywood Reporter. The festival exposed "the fault lines reshaping cinema," their article argues, including how "AI is here — and the industry has stopped pretending otherwise." A humanoid robot spotted marching up and down the Croisette seemed to sum up the worst AI fears of the film industry — the machines have arrived and they are taking your place. But inside the Palais and the market tents, the conversation over artificial intelligence had moved beyond fear into something more like uneasy acceptance. Fighting AI "is a battle we will lose," said Demi Moore, a Cannes jury member this year, at the festival's opening press conference, suggesting the film industry needs to "find ways in which we can work with it." That's not the official Cannes line. The festival has banned films using generative artificial intelligence from its competition lineup. But at the Cannes film market, and in discussions at industry events over the past two weeks, the tone has shifted. AI-friendly tech giant Meta signed on as an official partner to the festival in a multiyear deal. Its AI tools were used to help produce an [out of competition] festival entry: Steven Soderbergh's documentary John Lennon: The Last Interview. [Meta's press release announcing the partnership touts "our creator partnerships," their Meta AI assistant, and "our latest AI and wearable technologies" including Ray-Ban Meta AI features for smartglasses like "AI-powered translations that break down language barriers in real-time".] At the Marché du Film [film market], there was an "AI for Talent Summit" that took the AI revolution as given, focusing instead on ethical AI use, data sovereignty and on the ways the technology can be used to enhance, rather than replace, creativity. For the indie film industry, it felt like a turning point. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • FreeBSD Foundation Executive Director Tries Daily Driving FreeBSD On Laptop
    by EditorDavid on 24/05/2026 at 10:11 pm

    Phoronix reports on a presentation about trying FreeBSD on modern Framework laptop from last week's Open Source Summit hosted by the Linux Foundation: With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBSD, FreeBSD Foundation's Executive Director has been trying to daily drive FreeBSD on laptops... With the Framework Laptop, the touchscreen "just worked" as did other basic functionality from the KDE desktop on FreeBSD, including peripherals like a wireless mouse. Among the challenges were Zoom failing for video calls but eventually working, the web camera took steps to enable, and Microsoft Teams only partially worked. With the help of online resources, ultimately she was able to succeed in her journey of running FreeBSD daily on a laptop. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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