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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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  • TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds
    by EditorDavid on 22/06/2026 at 3:48 am

    "About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account's For You feed are AI slop," writes Search Engine Journal, "according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation tool company. That's roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube." The company manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and ran a separate fresh-account test, counting AI-generated content in the first 500 For You videos. Kapwing ran the same fresh-account test on YouTube and found that 104 of the first 500 Shorts, or 21%, were AI slop. On TikTok, 294 of 500 For You videos hit that threshold... Of the 2,000 videos Kapwing reviewed in TikTok's Kids category, 57% were AI slop. That was the highest rate of any category in the analysis. The highest-rate tag was #cartoonkids, where 97 of 100 featured videos were AI-generated. Tags like #cartoons and #babysong both reached 83%, and #forkids came in at 79%. After Kids, the next highest AI slop rates were in Science and Education (35%), Health (33%), and History (33%). All three are categories where visual illustration and voiceover narration make up much of the content. On the other end, categories where on-camera presence or physical demonstration are central had the lowest rates. Fashion came in at 1.3%, Music at 1.5%, and Fitness at 1.6%. The article notes that by last November, TikTok "had already labeled 1.3 billion videos as AI-generated, according to the report." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Someone Forked systemd Over Its New Birth Date Field
    by EditorDavid on 22/06/2026 at 1:48 am

    The blog Linuxiac reports: A new systemd fork has appeared with a specific purpose: removing systemd's recently added support for storing a user's birth date in JSON user records. The fork, called Liberated systemd, published its first tagged release as v261 shortly after the official systemd 261 release. In other words, the fork follows upstream systemd while reverting the change that added the new optional birthDate field. Importantly, this is not a new init system, a wider redesign of systemd, or a general-purpose alternative to the upstream project. Its stated purpose is to remain close to upstream systemd while removing what the author describes as "surveillance enablement"... The author recommends testing the fork in a virtual machine before using it on real hardware and warns nightly builds are more likely to be unstable than named releases. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • The Secret Revolution in Battery Technology: 3-D Printing
    by EditorDavid on 21/06/2026 at 11:27 pm

    "There's a revolution in battery technology hiding in plain sight," reports The Wall Street Journal. "The 3-D printing of batteries has the potential to put energy storage inside any device. "This will enable lightweight and long-lasting consumer gadgets, long-range military drones and even nanoscale robots." Almost all the innovations we regularly hear about — from cheaper, tougher electric-vehicle batteries to "Holy Grail" solid-state batteries — are about changing the chemistry of batteries. The promise of battery-tech 3-D printing (aka additive manufacturing) is simple: What if batteries could fill any available space, even structural elements of our gadgets, rather than always taking a rigid shape like a pouch or cylinder? The new approach has obvious appeal. The entire airframe of a drone could be filled with energy storage for increased range. Smartglasses could have sleek battery-packed frames, so they look like everyday eyewear rather than "Revenge of the Nerds" props. One of the biggest advantages of 3-D printing is that it works with any battery, regardless of its cell chemistry. It could advance today's lithium-ion as well as emerging sodium-ion and solid-state tech... Some [startups] are trying to use 3-D printing to create efficiencies in existing battery manufacturing systems. A brave handful of startups are pursuing radical new designs and approaches. They're starting with defense applications, where cost and scale are less of an issue... At Silicon Valley-based Sakuu... [r]ather than trying to 3-D-print whole batteries, the company is working on replacing one of battery manufacturing's biggest pain points, says Arwed Niestroj, Sakuu's chief operating officer, who is also a nuclear physicist and former head of Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America. Existing battery assembly lines include football-field-long ovens for drying layers of material that have been dissolved in solvents. This requires a huge amount of energy and is a significant contributor to manufacturing costs, a big reason EV batteries aren't cheaper. Sakuu's process, under development for years, uses additive manufacturing to lay down key battery components without solvents, eliminating the need for ovens, says Niestroj. Sakuu is currently working to commercialize this tech with a major battery manufacturer... Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Is Tesla Planning To Sell Modular AI Data Center Hardware?
    by EditorDavid on 21/06/2026 at 9:55 pm

    Electrek reports: Tesla wants to sell modular AI data center hardware, according to a new trademark application for a product called "Megapod." The filing describes a complete, self-contained computing system for AI workloads... Tesla filed the "Megapod" trademark (serial number 99893717) with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month, through its longtime IP counsel. It's an intent-to-use application, meaning Tesla is claiming the name for a product it hasn't launched yet. The goods-and-services description is unusually specific for a trademark. Megapod covers "modular data center hardware systems for artificial intelligence computing, comprised of computer servers, computer hardware for artificial intelligence data processing, networking equipment, power distribution units, and cooling systems." It also covers "self-contained modular computing hardware systems for artificial intelligence workloads," integrated platforms sold as a single unit — an enclosure bundling compute, power distribution, and cooling — and downloadable software to monitor, manage, and optimize those systems. In plain terms: Tesla wants to sell a turnkey AI data center building block. Not a battery, not a chip on its own, but the full rack-and-room of servers, networking, power, and cooling that AI training and inference run on. Tesla's offering would have to compete with Nvidia's liquid-cooled, rack-scale systems that simulates a giant GPU, the article points out. But "The bigger issue is that Tesla has no merchant compute-hardware business to build on." Tesla's own AI training cluster, Cortex at Gigafactory Texas, runs on roughly 67,000 Nvidia H100-equivalent GPUs. In other words, Tesla is one of Nvidia's customers, not a competitor selling alternative hardware... Where Tesla does have a real AI-data-center business is power, not compute. Its Megapack and new Megablock energy storage products are selling into AI data centers as grid buffers — Musk's own xAI has bought roughly $1 billion of Megapacks to keep its training runs powered. That energy-storage strength is the one credible thread here. A Megapod that bundles Tesla's power electronics, thermal management, and the enclosure — the "shell" around the chips rather than the chips themselves — would at least sit adjacent to a business Tesla actually runs. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • UK Official Promises Statements 'Around VPNs' and Further Teen Restrictions on Chatbots and Social Media
    by EditorDavid on 21/06/2026 at 8:54 pm

    PC Gamer reports: The UK government is considering an Australia-style ban on social media for under-16s, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying that the ban could take effect as soon as spring next year. As for the much nearer future, Science and Technology Secretary Liz Kendall told BBC Breakfast earlier this week, "We will make further statements in July about VPNs and further restrictions." To be clear, no specific restrictions have yet been announced and Kendall sounded somewhat cautious about an outright ban during a parliament debate that took place the same day. "I have commissioned further research about their usage. There are really important issues to balance here," she says. "Many people want to use VPNs for privacy — that is important — but we know that some children use them to get around restrictions. I will come back to that in July in our response to the consultation." So, we'll have to wait until next month for anything definite, but it's hard not to feel like a full ban on VPNs is already on the table. If that does come to pass, more than the contents of my Bluesky inbox will be at stake. Utah in the US has already tried to implement a full VPN ban (though this was postponed until September after Aylo, the parent company of Pornhub, challenged the law in court)... [T]he UK could just be the next domino after Utah, potentially setting off a chain reaction that affects users around the world. The article also argues that age checks can also be a privacy nightmare "with the security breach that exposed the personal info of 70,000 Discord users last year being one case in point." Here's the complete statement from UK Technology Secretary Kendall. "I'll come back in July with a further statement around VPNs but also additional measures that we want to look at, further restrictions on AI chatbots that parents have found very worrying, more about overnight curfews or breaks in doomscrolling for 16- and 17-year-olds." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock's Cameras to Stalk People
    by EditorDavid on 21/06/2026 at 7:40 pm

    404 Media remembers how a Florida police office looked up his ex-girlfriend's license plate in the Flock automated license plate reader system at least 69 times in 2024 — even searching for her mom's license plate at least 24 times. The police office was charged with stalking and hacking-related offenses, serving one day in prison with five years of probation — but his case "was not a one-off." [Alternate link via Bruce Schneier] Local news reports from around the country repeatedly detail police abusing the Flock surveillance system in order to stalk their partners or ex-partners. The contours of each story are much the same, with the police officer in question using their access to the system to repeatedly track a specific person over the course of weeks or months. The cases highlight the fact that Flock can be used to track the whereabouts of individual people, that police do not get a warrant in order to use the system, and that, if they have access to the system, they have the technical ability to look up any license plate they want for any reason they want. An April study by the civil rights group Institute for Justice found that at least 18 police officers have been caught around the country using Flock to stalk a romantic interest in the last few years; another database, called the ALPR Abuse Library, has documented 20 specific cases of "stalking/targeting" around the country. The known cases of police stalking are almost certainly a vast underreporting of the overall abuse, because they largely include only cases in which the behavior was so egregious that it led to police officers being fired, arrested, or both. Flock told 404 Media that it is "aware of 15 incidents of abuse, each surfaced because of the transparency and accountability features deliberately built into our platform.... There are also 140,000 monthly active users of Flock, so the relatively rare instances of abuse, while obviously wrong and awful, are exactly that — rare," a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. [One in 10,000.] "Humans are fallible; unlike most tools society provide law enforcement, Flock ensures that in the instances when our technology is misused, the evidence used to hold responsible parties accountable, is right there in our system. We also encourage all our customers to have a usage policy, regular training, and to implement our Audit Assistance tool, which proactively flags unintended use...." But it is also the case that Flock has strenuously fought against lawsuits and potential regulations that are seeking to require police to get a warrant to use the system. And many cases of abuse have not been detected by police departments themselves but by those private citizens, journalists, and stalking victims who have found patterns of abuse in public records files they have obtained from their local police departments. In most cases of Flock-related stalking reviewed by 404 Media, the abuse occurred over the course of months or years, and the victims were subjected to dozens or hundreds of lookups. Other abuse cases have been discovered using the website HaveIBeenFlocked.com, a website that compiles Flock searches released via public records requests and turns them into a searchable database. Flock has repeatedly tried to get that website taken down, as we have previously reported. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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