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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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  • Stripe and Advent Ditch $50 Billion PayPal Takeover Bid
    by BeauHD on 28/08/2026 at 5:00 pm

    Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have ditched their $53 billion pursuit of PayPal, ending a deal that would have been the largest fintech acquisition ever. "Stripe last week agreed to pay $8 billion for AI model marketplace OpenRouter, but a source said that the OpenRouter and PayPal deals were operating on independent tracks," reports Axios. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Roblox Is Cracking Down On Games That Reward Kids For Doomscrolling
    by BeauHD on 28/08/2026 at 4:00 pm

    Roblox is restricting games that reward younger players for endlessly consuming autoplaying media feeds. The new restrictions are specifically targeting Roblox experiences like "Steal an Egg," which encouraged players to watch TikTok-style clips for in-game benefits. "Roblox's official alert does not expressly mention SAE, but the new policy is most certainly targeting the viral game first and foremost," reports TechSpot. From the report: The company said games that reward ongoing media consumption are now unavailable to players with a Roblox Kids (ages 5 to 8) or Roblox Select (ages 9 to 15) account. The policy will affect games designed to combine media feeds, autoplay, infinite scrolling, and systems that reward players for doomscrolling through TikTok videos of questionable value. "Steal an Egg" fits perfectly into this new category. The game tasks players with raising eggs, but they can also steal eggs from other NPCs. Players are incentivized to increase their characters' speed either by spending in-game currency (Robux) or by watching a video feed on a virtual treadmill. "Steal an Egg" was recently removed from Roblox but is now back in the store without its troublesome video-feed feature. [...] Roblox also highlights that the new anti-doomscrolling restriction does not apply to the rewarded video ads feature, which rewards players for watching a short clip but does not include autoplay or other infinite-scroll-like design choices. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • US Considers Fresh Round of Tariffs On Semiconductors
    by BeauHD on 28/08/2026 at 3:00 pm

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is reportedly considering new tariffs on semiconductors used in the U.S., as tech giants race to beat China in the artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out. The duties will be imposed on an expanded range of tech products made alongside chips, including laptops, data center servers and gaming hardware, eight people familiar with the matter told Politico in a report published Thursday. The measures, which are still in the early phases and subject to significant changes over the next few months, will be introduced via a staggered rollout period, according to the report. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CNBC, but told Politico: "Reshoring semiconductor manufacturing is a top priority for President Trump, whose policies have already secured hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in this key sector." The tech industry is pushing back on the tariffs, warning they could raise chip costs, slow data-center construction, and undermine the very AI expansion the administration wants to promote. "This may be the single dumbest way imaginable to pursue American dominance in AI," said one tech official from a major industry group that also served in the first Trump administration. "It's like kneecapping yourself at the starting line." Lobbyists say they have repeatedly urged officials to "tread carefully" because U.S. demand is surging while domestic chip capacity remains far too limited. The industry argues that factories take years to build and current domestic production cannot come close to satisfying demand. One tech representative said "the math literally just does not work," noting that proposed duty-free allowances "wouldn't cover the hyperscalers alone." Meanwhile, the Computer and Communications Industry Association warned that higher costs and uncertainty could put the massive data-center buildout "in jeopardy." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Gemini Notebook Now Lets You Reference Books, Turn Them Into Different Formats
    by BeauHD on 28/08/2026 at 11:00 am

    Google is adding an "Expert Intelligence" feature to Gemini Notebook (formerly known as NotebookLM) that lets users cite and work directly from more than 100,000 books they own through Google Play Books. Those books can be used as sources for things like quizzes, infographics, and Audio Overviews. Digital Trends reports: For now, Google is offering one free book to users in the US as part of the launch campaign, with a caveat -- "while supplies last." At the moment, Expert Intelligence is only available in the Gemini Notebook app and its web dashboard, but down the road, Google says that it will also appear within the core Gemini app and AI mode in Search. The broad idea behind expert intelligence is to combine what you can already do with Gemini, and expertise sourced from your favorite books. So, if you're asking Gemini to create a meal plan that is based entirely on chicken and spinach, you can ask the AI assistant to look for relevant recipes in one of Martha Stewart's cookbooks that you own. You can use these books as a source and turn them into Infographics, Audio Overviews, and Quizzes, among other formats. Google has partnered with select authors on Featured Notebooks that provide extra insights and context beyond their books. It's also worth noting that access is still tied to book ownership, so anyone using a shared Gemini notebook must own or purchase the book to fully use the feature. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away From Top US Universities
    by BeauHD on 28/08/2026 at 7:00 am

    Canada is recruiting 64 researchers to universities across the country (source paywalled; alternative source), including 48 from U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. The hires are backed by more than $364 million in government funding and are part of a broader effort to attract researchers in fields such as AI, climate science, and medicine. The New York Times reports: While scientists often shy away from political discourse, some are saying the Trump administration's assault on science is behind their departure. "I used to live in the country that I thought was the most enthusiastic about the prospects for science improving the human condition, of any country in the world," said Phillip Zamore, the chair of RNA Therapeutics Institute at the University of Massachusetts. "And I woke up one day and that wasn't true anymore." He has been recruited to McGill University in Montreal, which has also hired five other researchers, and will join the medical faculty. "If scientists don't stand up for truth, no one will," Dr. Zamore said. The Canada-bound brain drain from U.S. institutions began last year as the Trump administration put forward policies that targeted foreign students, academic freedom and funding for equity-related programs. Kevin Hall, a nutrition scientist who left the U.S. National Institutes of Health last year, accusing federal officials of censoring his research on ultraprocessed foods, has been hired at the University of Ottawa. "While certain countries are cutting research and turning their back on academic freedom, we're doubling down on science," Melanie Joly, Canada's industry minister, told reporters at the announcement, in Vancouver, of the new university hiring. She billed it as the world's "largest talent attraction" project. The European Union has made a similar push. "Years from now, we will look back at today's announcement, and we will be able to seize the lasting impact of our choices," Ms. Joly said. Unpredictable decisions about funding prompted Seth Guikema, a professor in civil and environmental engineering, who has specialized in natural hazards modeling at the University of Michigan, to look elsewhere. His work focuses on how climate hazards inequitably affect communities, and that work has become harder to fund, he said. "Every country sets its priorities in terms of what is going to get funded, and I think Canada has done a very good job of supporting research in areas that really matter to society," said Dr. Guikema, who will start at Western University in London, Ontario in January. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Is ChatGPT Changing How You're Writing?
    by BeauHD on 28/08/2026 at 3:30 am

    An anonymous reader quotes a report fro SFGATE: From "rizz" to "meat proxy," words and phrases have fallen in and out of favor for centuries. Culture, politics and technological development have long influenced these trends, and now, new research shows that ChatGPT is beginning to influence how humans communicate. The findings from a team at the Pew Research Center show how, in a short time since OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022 and other chatbots followed, the use of certain words and phrases has spiked on the web. The researchers, led by data scientist Samuel Bestvater, studied nearly half a million English language webpage texts in snapshots over the past five years. Not only has AI-written text become more common, but it could also be influencing how people write, such as trying to avoid using the "tells" that have become associated with AI-generated text. Bestvater and his team detected double the number of em dashes, double the frequency of particular words -- such as "delve," "testament" and "interplay" -- and nearly triple the use of a phrasing known as negative parallelisms ("it's not X, it's Y"), as well as a 63% increase in Oxford commas. But while AI labs continually try to tweak their models to generate more humanlike text, the people they're mimicking aren't staying the same. "Human writers might also be changing the way that they write in response to AI. I've seen some anecdotal evidence of people saying, 'Now I avoid em dashes,'" Bestvater said. "If human writers are adjusting their choices of words and phrases and punctuation to try to differentiate their writing from AI-generated text, then you would see a pattern that looks sort of like that in the chart." "You can see changes in people's speech. People are tending to more commonly use these low-frequency words in their speech because they're spending a lot of time listening to or reading AI-generated content," said Roger Kreuz, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Memphis who recently wrote about how difficult it is for people to identify bot-written text. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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