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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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  • Instead of Fighting AI, Some Teachers Work It Into Their Lessons
    by EditorDavid on 07/09/2026 at 8:34 pm

    Last year the writing program at the University of Baltimore used an app that tracks students while they're writing in Google Docs, offering teachers a video playing back revisions "with a scoreboard of all the edits, pastes and minutes spent on it," writes the Washington Post. "Is it surveillance? Yes, I think obviously," says the program's director. But was there a better way? She is one of a dozen educators around the country who told The Post that they're experimenting with a different approach to student use of generative artificial intelligence this school year. Teachers and professors are throwing out old assignments, installing new policies and protocols, and incorporating AI built for the classroom, rather than feeling forced to choose between returning to pencil and paper or acting like the AI police. Her new lesson plan even incorporates generative AI in a controlled way to let her evaluate students' critical thinking skills. She created chatbots using BoodleBox, the university's AI vendor, that allow instructors to see both sides of the conversation. For an assignment testing students' ability to make evidence-based arguments, they participate in a simulated school board meeting about banning books. It involves debating chatbots designed by Zeleny with names like the Confrontational Parent. Writing students usually turn in business proposals and research papers. This semester, instructors are starting to ask instead for transcripts of conversations a student had with a chatbot, a handwritten outline of their composition, and a video reflection of how they felt about the work. "In a lot of ways, we have made these assignments harder, but writing should have always had more detailed checkpoints along the way," she said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • A Man Charged His EV at a Dealership - and Was Billed $418
    by EditorDavid on 07/09/2026 at 5:34 pm

    The EV blog Electrek reports: A Clinton Township, Michigan man was charged $418 for a single EV charging session at Elder Hyundai's Macomb Township store after finding the charger listed as publicly available on the EVgo app, but didn't discover the charges until after wrapping up his 40-ish minute charging session. "I was flabbergasted," explained Stanley Kpenkann, who had been driving a rented Chevy Bolt EV at the time. "Never in my wildest dreams did I think I would be saddled with a bill of $418 for a charging session." After calling EVgo to report the error, he found that the exorbitant charge wasn't a mistake at all - Elder Hyundai was charging customers an eye-gouging $5 per kWh, plus another $5 for every minute connected. A local news report notes that "After back-and-forth with EVgo, the company processed what it called a goodwill refund of $405." (And the dealership argued their charger was reserved for its own customers and vehicles, so they set prices high to deter outside use.) But Electrek argues the story "speaks to much larger problems among the EV charging business in particular and car dealerships in general..." [In June] Plug & Play EV's Steve Birkett took to LinkedIn to call out his local Hyundai dealer in Union, NJ for charging a ridiculous $15 per kWh to top off his IONIQ 5 (!)... Even worse, he noted that a number of area dealerships that had listed their ports as "public" were actively discouraging public use with signs and stickers designed to turn people away... [U]nlike gas stations, EV charge point operators in many states aren't required to clearly advertise what they'll charge before a driver plugs in in the same way that gas stations are: with clearly legible signage that's visible from the street. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • 'She Lost Her Sight. Her Billionaire Father Bet On a Daring New Treatment.'
    by EditorDavid on 07/09/2026 at 2:34 pm

    "Billionaire Bill Ackman's life was upended this February when his 26-year-old daughter collapsed in her Brooklyn apartment, suffering a brain hemorrhage that would render her unable to move, speak or see," writes the Washingon Post. But then... The hedge fund manager did what any good father would do — at least, any father with vast financial resources and what friends describe as a "Mr. Fix-It" tendency. He sprung into action, getting her topline care at New York City's Mt. Sinai Hospital and consulting a network of well-connected friends all over the world. He helped her access a novel cell therapy that has been gaining traction among longevity enthusiasts, who are seeking ways to prolong human life. And then — motivated by a newfound desire to accelerate scientific research — he vowed to spend more than $400 million to launch an institute dedicated to longevity and brain health... He posted this week that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, in May, gave his daughter Lucy's medical team a first-time emergency authorization to transplant mitochondria — the energy-producing part of human cells — from her leg muscle to her eyes, in the hopes that the tiny cell powerhouses would facilitate healing in her optic nerves and perhaps even restore her vision. Ackman's story highlights the increasingly prominent role of the ultra-wealthy in making expensive medical bets on longevity treatments and other novel therapies, altering the direction of research as federal funding for science declines in the second Trump administration. But his saga is a deeply personal one, spurred by his daughter's medical crisis. The focus on longevity by Ackman, who made billions on Wall Street as a hedge fund manager, is aligned with similarly ambitious efforts from some of Silicon Valley's biggest names. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has backed Retro Biosciences, a start-up whose goal is to add 10 healthy years to the human lifespan through cellular reprogramming. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is reportedly a funder of Altos Labs, which focuses on cellular rejuvenation and resilience... Billionaire investor Peter Thiel, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison are also deeply invested in life-extension methods and attempts to rewrite the biology of aging... The therapy given to Ackman's daughter Lucy, known as mitochondrial transplantation, is of great interest not only to people who have suffered injuries, but to longevity-focused scientists who believe that mitochondria may hold promise for reversing some of the effects of aging... In recent years, scientists have discovered that mitochondria have many other functions beyond converting food into energy. They serve as clearinghouses for damaged cells, opening up the possibility that they can help with cell regeneration and healing, said Daria Mochly-Rosen, professor of chemical and systems biology at the Stanford University School of Medicine and co-author of " The Life Machines: How Taking Care of Your Mitochondria Can Transform Your Health." "I am one of those who believes that focusing on mitochondrial health is a way to address many human diseases, including aging itself," she said. "It's exciting." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • 'The Jobs Apocalypse Is Postponed. An AI Jobs Boom Is Here'
    by EditorDavid on 07/09/2026 at 11:34 am

    A new article about AI in The Economist argues that "Initial effects of the technology on employment look positive." Perhaps AI will eventually make many humans unemployable — but there is no sign of it yet. On September 4th the Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that the American economy added 162,000 jobs in August, far above expectations. The unemployment rate is just 4.1%, lower than in almost 90% of months over the past half-century. Young workers, often cast as AI's first victims, are holding up remarkably well: the gap between unemployment among 20-24-year-olds and the overall rate is close to a multi-decade low. Some companies and workers are being severely disrupted by AI. Hiring in professional and business services is running about 10% below the average in 2015-19. Tech giants like Microsoft and Meta are trimming headcounts as they reorganise their businesses around the technology. Smaller firms such as Block, the owner of Square and Cash App, and Intuit, the maker of TurboTax and QuickBooks, are replacing people with bots. American companies have announced some 16,000 AI-related job cuts a month on average so far this year, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, an employment consultancy. But AI-related lay-offs gets lost in the churning jobs market where employers shed roughly 1.7m workers in a typical month. And the evidence so far is that AI is already creating a lot of jobs to replace those it has destroyed. The vast sums pouring into data centres and power generation have set off a race for construction and infrastructure workers. AI startups are hiring like there is no tomorrow. Incumbents racing to keep up are creating new AI roles. And by making some workers more productive, AI may be increasing demand for their services. Add it all up, and The Economist estimates that AI has so far created around 1m new jobs in America. That easily exceeds the roughly 200,000 lay-offs attributed to AI since mid-2023, and appears more than enough to offset weaker hiring in many back-office roles. Their article acknowledges that since January 2023 employment has fallen roughly 10% for customer-service workers and 15% for administrative assistants. But when The Economist looked at professions "closest to the AI boom" — engineers, software developers, mathematicians and data scientists — they found that since 2022 they've added roughly 730,000 jobs above trend. They see AI as creating new white-collar jobs for everyone from model and deployment engineers to new data annotators. The chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute agrees, estimating that roughly 1% of professional jobs are now "AI jobs" — about 1 million positions in the U.S. — while in computer occupations and life sciences it's between 4% and 5%. (Data-center construction spending also increased 60% in one year, according to Census Bureau data, creating jobs for electricians, HVAC specialists, grid engineers, and machine technicians.) And "Indeed finds that installation and maintenance jobs at data centres advertise wages about 40% higher than comparable work elsewhere." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Bitcoin-based Liquid Network Says $320 Million Withdrawn in Hack
    by EditorDavid on 07/09/2026 at 7:30 am

    Reuters reports: Liquid Network, a Bitcoin-based payments and settlement network, said on Sunday that about $320 million was withdrawn from its federation wallet in a hack. "Purported white-hat hackers" withdrew around 4,000 of the 4,200 bitcoin held in its Liquid Federation wallet, Liquid Network said in a post on X. "Liquid wallets will be impacted," their post concluded, adding "and we're sorry for any inconvenience." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Roku's 24/7 AI Slop Channel Is Even Worse Than Expected
    by EditorDavid on 07/09/2026 at 4:30 am

    A new streaming TV channel shows films made with genAI, reports Engadget. "Fairground AI Creator TV" is free — and supported with ads — describing its material as "AI Cinema": "AI-generated" can make it sound as though someone typed a sentence into a machine and came back five minutes later to find a finished movie. Fairground's catalog shows why that description can be too simple. Take Lost Garden: The Awakening of the Lantern Knight. According to its Fairground page, creator Frank Houbre wrote the world, characters, mythology, emotional arc and screenplay himself. AI tools were used mainly for animation and visual production, with other tools helping create voices and music before the episode was assembled in conventional video-editing software. There's still one question, the article notes: "whether viewers actually want an AI-focused TV channel." More than 100 AI creators have contributed to the 24-hour slate of programming, although Variety points out several of them were discovered on social media. The channel was recently profiled in an article by the Guardian. Its headline? "'Nightmare fodder': Roku's AI slop channel is even worse than expected." (And its subheading calls it "a 24/7 channel devoted to low-quality AI content for viewers sick of watching real people move...") What about people who hate plot and vision and the sight of people speaking convincing dialogue that synchronises perfectly with the movement of their lips? What about the people who just want to watch an unyielding torrent of eerily weightless nightmare fodder? Well, good news. Roku has finally caught up... Early reactions were, to put it mildly, not great. The Verge compared it to eating from a trough, while Futurism called it "bottom-of-the-barrel slop"... On the plus side, the channel is evidence that artificial intelligence has come on in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years... However, it is still awful. Categorically, catastrophically awful. The channel doesn't so much offer shows as a drifting dreamscape of bad ideas rendered as horribly as possible with no thought paid to scheduling. At one point on Wednesday, a shrill high-frequency anime gave way to a long and staid German-language short about Nazi bureaucracy. After that came a sort of Gladiator ripoff that had all the dynamism of an exhibit you'd see at the fourth-best museum on a poorly planned family holiday. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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