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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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  • A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
    by msmash on 19/02/2026 at 10:20 am

    India's digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it's a cheap plastic speaker that sits on a shopkeeper's counter and reads out incoming payments aloud. The roughly 23 million soundboxes deployed across India earn about $220 million a year in rental fees, more than every explicitly UPI-linked revenue line in the ecosystem combined, according to estimates from Bernstein. Each device costs $7-12 to manufacture and earns its platform $7-10 a year in rent. A story adds: PhonePe processes about 48% of all UPI transactions in India. Its net payment processing revenue in H1 FY26 was about $83 million. Its device revenue was about $34 million. Running nearly half of India's real-time payment infrastructure earns PhonePe only 2.4 times what it makes from renting speakers to shopkeepers. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Claims That AI Can Help Fix Climate Dismissed As Greenwashing
    by BeauHD on 19/02/2026 at 10:00 am

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector's explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacenters, the analysis of 154 statements found. The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate Action Against Disinformation, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google's Gemini or Microsoft's Copilot were leading to a "material, verifiable, and substantial" reduction in planet-heating emissions. Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry's tactics were "diversionary" and relied on tried and tested methods that amount to "greenwashing." He likened it to fossil fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture. "These technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business," said Joshi. "Big tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it." [...] Joshi said the discourse around AI's climate benefits needed to be "brought back to reality." "The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacenter expansion," he said. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Trump Has Prepared Speech On Extraterrestrial Life
    by BeauHD on 19/02/2026 at 7:00 am

    According to Lara Trump, Donald Trump has prepared but not yet delivered a speech about extraterrestrial life, though the White House says such a speech would be "news to me." White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt continued: "I'll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I'm sure all of you in this room and apparently former President Obama, too." The Hill reports: Lara Trump, speaking on the Pod Force One podcast, said the president has played coy when she and her husband Eric have asked about the existence of UFO's and aliens. "We've kind of asked my father-in-law about this... we all want to know about the UFOs... and he played a little coy with us," Lara Trump said. "I've heard kind of around, I think my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time, I don't know when the right time is, he's going to break out and talk about and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life." Obama has clarified in recent days that he has seen no evidence that aliens are real, after comments he made on a podcast with Brian Tyler Cohen seeming to confirm his knowledge of extraterrestrial life went viral. "They're real but I haven't seen them," Obama said on the podcast. "And they're not being kept in... what is it? Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States." Later, in a post on Instagram, Obama clarified that he was trying to answer in the light-hearted spirit of a speed round of questions and that, "Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there." "But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we've been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!" Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • EPA Faces First Lawsuit Over Its Killing of Major Climate Rule
    by BeauHD on 19/02/2026 at 3:30 am

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The first shot has been fired in the legal war over the Environmental Protection Agency's rollback of its "endangerment finding," which had been the foundation for federal climate regulations. Environmental and health groups filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, arguing that the E.P.A.'s move to eliminate limits on greenhouse gases from vehicles, and potentially other sources, was illegal. The suit was triggered by last week's decision by the E.P.A. to kill one of its key scientific conclusions, the endangerment finding, which says that greenhouse gases harm public health. The finding had formed the basis for climate regulations in the United States. The lawsuit claims that the agency is rehashing arguments that the Supreme Court already considered, and rejected, in a landmark 2007 case, Massachusetts v. E.P.A. The issue is likely to end up back before the Supreme Court, which is now far more conservative. In the 2007 case, the justices ruled that the E.P.A. was required to issue a scientific determination as to whether greenhouse gases were a threat to public health under the 1970 Clean Air Act and to regulate them if they were. As a result, two years later, in 2009, the E.P.A. issued the endangerment finding, allowing the government to limit greenhouse gas emissions, which cause climate change. "With this action, E.P.A. flips its mission on its head," said Hana Vizcarra, a senior lawyer at the nonprofit Earthjustice, which is representing six groups in the lawsuit. "It abandons its core mandate to protect human health and the environment to boost polluting industries and attempts to rewrite the law in order to do so." [...] Also on Wednesday, two other nonprofit law firms filed their own lawsuit against the E.P.A. over the endangerment finding, on behalf of 18 youth plaintiffs. That suit, by Our Children's Trust and Public Justice, argues that the E.P.A.'s move was unconstitutional. Separate legal challenges to E.P.A. rules are generally consolidated into one case at the D.C. Circuit Court, which is where disputes involving the Clean Air Act are required to be heard. But the sheer number of groups involved could make the legal battle lengthy and complicated to manage. A three-judge panel at the Circuit Court is expected to pore over several rounds of legal briefs before oral arguments begin. Those may not take place until next year. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Uber Putting $100 Million into EV Charging for Robotaxis
    by BeauHD on 19/02/2026 at 1:25 am

    Uber plans to invest $100 million in EV charging infrastructure to support current and future robotaxi fleets in cities like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Dallas, "eventually partner[ing] with multiple robotaxi companies on actual robotaxi deployment -- WeRide, Waabi, Lucid, Nuro, May Mobility, Momenta, and Waymo of course," reports CleanTechnica. From the report: "Cities can only unlock the full promise of autonomy and electrification if the right charging infrastructure is built for scale. That infrastructure needs to work for today's drivers and the fleets of the future," said Uber's global head of mobility, Pradeep Parameswaran. In addition to building some infrastructure itself, the company is making "utilization guarantee agreements" with EVgo for various major US cities as well as Electra, Hubber, and Ionity in Europe. On Uber's latest shareholder call, CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said that the company would make "targeted growth-oriented investments aligned with the 6 strategic areas of focus." That includes self-driving vehicles/robotaxis. "With the benefit of learning from multiple AV deployments around the world, we're more convinced than ever that AVs will unlock a multitrillion-dollar opportunity for Uber. AVs amplify the fundamental strengths of our platform, global scale, deep demand density, sophisticated marketplace technology, and decades of on-the-ground experience matching riders, drivers, and vehicles, all in real time," Khosrowshahi added. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Google's Pixel 10a Is the Same Damn Phone As the Pixel 9a
    by BeauHD on 19/02/2026 at 12:45 am

    Google's Pixel 10a is essentially a flatter version of last year's Pixel 9a, keeping the same Tensor G4 chip, camera hardware, RAM, storage, and $500 price while dropping features like Pixelsnap Qi2 charging and advanced Gemini AI capabilities found in higher-end models. Gizmodo reports: We use words like "candy bar" or "slab" to describe our full-screen smartphones, but Google has designed what is likely the slabbiest phone of the modern era. During an hour-long hands-on with Google's all-new Google Pixel 10a, I slid the phone across a desk and felt oddly satisfied that it could glide as neatly as a figure skater without any hint of a camera bump hindering its path. It's the first thing I need to bring up regarding the Pixel 10a, because there's no other discernible difference between this phone and the previous-gen Pixel 9a. And that seems to be the point. The Pixel 10a starts at $500, exactly how much the Pixel 9a cost at launch. In a Q&A with journalists, Google told Gizmodo that the company wanted to offer the same price point as before. That apparently required Google to stick with the same Tensor G4 chip as last year. You still have the same storage options of 128GB or 256GB and the minimum of 8GB of RAM. Think of the Pixel 10a as a Pixel 9a with a reduced camera bump. If you're one of the heretics who uses a phone without a case, that fact alone may be enough to pay attention. Otherwise, you'll be scrounging to find any real difference between the Pixel 10a and one of last year's best mid-range phones. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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