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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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  • Ask Slashdot: What are the Costs of Switching Between Windows, MacOS, and Chrome?
    by EditorDavid on 09/08/2026 at 8:15 pm

    UI changes, lost productivity, untransferrable knowledge... Long-time Slashdot reader theodp notes the folly of switching to an unfamiliar new environment to be "more productive"... Champions of the switch often insist workers will be able to hit the ground running and get the same or even more work done from the get-go in the new unfamiliar environment because it's 'more productive', a conclusion often shaped by conventional wisdom or their 'gut' feeling. Decision makers may also mistake their own 'light-user experience' for universal experience and believe all platforms are fungible. And while it's one thing for a business to delay their delivery dates and increase costs of by introducing a switch in computing environments that's of unquantified and possibly dubious value, how about when a switch in computing environments is made that affects schoolchildren's ability to learn for a period of time? While a MacBook Neo is indeed cute, what might be the possible consequences of a decision to move 25,000 students off Windows and onto MacBook Neos...? Or even the impact on a single kid who moves from a MacBook school to a Windows or Chrome school (or whose home computing environment isn't aligned with their school). Or students whose teachers decide learning in their classrooms should now additionally require an understanding of the Minecraft computing platform/UI (used in over 40,000 school systems.). Learning Management Systems and now various AI Edtech tools used by schoolkids are also subject to change. "Even if students and schools eventually benefit from a new platform, one wonders how much learning is lost during the switch," theodp asks, "and what the financial and educational ROI and payback period look like." Are there bigger problems than we realize? Share your own thoughts and experiences in the comments. What are the costs of switching between Windows, MacOS, and Chrome? Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Slashdot Reader Builds 'Spaced Linux', a New Devuan-Based, User-Friendly Desktop Distro
    by EditorDavid on 09/08/2026 at 5:41 pm

    "I've been a Linux IT administrator for 30 years now," says crhylove (Slashdot reader #205,956), in a new video on his YouTube channel. "I used to be a data center architect, at one point I was the IT director for 13 school districts... I just haven't been happy overall with all the other operating systems out there... " I've been working really diligently for the last few weeks on a new distro called Spaced Linux that is exactly what I want to use. It's heavily focused on the [zoom-friendly 3D] Compiz desktop, very efficient using the rolling Devuan Ceres backend, and avoids dependency hell by promoting mostly Flatpak usage. It's still early, but it's already working great for me, it's been my daily driver for a few weeks now. There's also user-friendly themes — everything from Linux, Android, GeoWorks, and Mac OS X to Windows 11, Windows XP, and even Windows 3.11 (dark or light theme). And you can also run Windows apps under Wine. "And let me tell you, Nvidia runs perfectly on here now..." he adds in the video. "It just works really, really well out of the box." He's now working on voice-command features, bur argues that Spaced Linux "is already extremely usable, extremely efficient, extremely fast, and extremely reliable.... And it's only going to get better and better." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • OpenAI Announces It's Enhancing Security Controls, Pausing Some Work for New AI Model Astra
    by EditorDavid on 09/08/2026 at 4:41 pm

    OpenAI announced Friday it's pausing work on its Astra AI model because of security concerns. The Guardian reports: The company had evaluated the agent, Astra, and found "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity", which had moved to a "critical" threshold... OpenAI stated that the model was not involved in an incident in which one of its AI agents went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a startup, Hugging Face... The reports have increased concerns about advancements in AI models and humans' ability to control them. Still, critics of the AI industry have warned that such disclosures from OpenAI and its competitors Anthropic and Meta could be designed to generate hype about the technology's power and thus spur additional interest from investors. To prevent potential rogue behavior from AI agents, OpenAI is "implementing stricter security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities, including isolated testing environments, restricted network and tool access", the company's blogpost stated. It will also install "enhanced model weight protections and encryption, additional monitoring and detection capabilities". The company will pause internal activities involving Astra that do not meet these new requirements. "We believe it's important to be transparent with the public and the safety and security communities about this potential shift in capabilities..." OpenAI wrote in a blog post titled "Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities." Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches the Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal. While we continue to benchmark and assess this model, our preliminary evaluations indicate strong enough performance that we cannot rule out Critical capability level at this time... Accordingly, we have scaled up robustness testing of our safeguards and security controls so that they are appropriate for a deployment of these capabilities... - We are implementing stricter security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities, including isolated testing environments, restricted network and tool access, enhanced model weight protections and encryption, additional monitoring and detection capabilities, and sandboxed execution. - We are pausing internal activities involving Astra that do not yet meet these strengthened security control requirements. - We have implemented universal monitoring for risky actions and misalignment across all agentic applications of Astra, including training and evaluation. Monitors evaluate the model's Chain of Thought and trigger a security response to review and interrupt high risk activity. - We will work with relevant government agencies and select AI safety organizations to test the capabilities for this model... We believe advanced cyber-capable models should help defenders identify and address vulnerabilities before attackers do. We're committed to working alongside governments, safety institutes, and civil society to ensure that the frontier capabilities of models like Astra, and those that follow, are deployed responsibly and broadly for the benefit of all humanity. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Brain Activity Reveals the Melodies That People Imagine
    by EditorDavid on 09/08/2026 at 3:34 pm

    Researchers believe they've found evidence that brain signals reveal the pitches of notes in imagined musical melodies, reports Medical Express: Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children's tunes, then imagined the melodies of subsequent bars before humming their imagined melodies. Brain activity from the patients carried information about relative pitches within the imagined melodies. Combining note-level pitch predictions over time allowed the research team to recreate melodic changes that reflected the structure of the imagined songs... "The model we created decodes relative pitch classes — such as do, re, mi, fa, sol, and la — rather than exact, absolute pitches," [said tudy co-lead Jii Kwon of Seoul National University]. "This is useful because people often recognize melodies by the relationships between notes, even when the same melody is played in a different key." Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • GNOME Receiving Additional Design Help From Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency Fellowship
    by EditorDavid on 09/08/2026 at 2:34 pm

    The new GNOME Boxes app for accessing virtual systems has reached beta, announced This Week in GNOME. There's also been more work on the Sushi file previewer for Nautilus, and Papers 51 Beta can now add visual signatures to PDF documents. But Phoronix noted one more announcement. "Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management... paid to help developers with design feedback and reviews, mock-up creation, and other GNOME design related efforts..." From the blog post by GNOME Design Team member Philipp Sauberzweig: I have been contributing to GNOME design as a volunteer for several years... I believe that it's essential for a free and democratic society to ensure free and independent access to these technologies. To achieve this goal, end-user devices based on free and open-source software are key, and the GNOME desktop and its app ecosystem offer a powerful alternative to proprietary platforms... This two-year fellowship is a great honor and marks a significant change in my life. It is a unique opportunity for me to devote my skills and experience entirely to a project I strongly believe in. During my two-year fellowship, I will support GNOME maintainers and developers with design feedback and reviews, create mockups, and coordinate efforts to standardize design patterns. My other activities focus on lasting improvements through two strategic initiatives: expanding the design community to increase capacity and enhancing our design tooling to reduce overhead and simplify onboarding... To attract new contributors, I will increase the visibility of design work by writing regular blog posts, giving presentations, and running workshops at conferences and hackathons. New contribution opportunities for newcomers will be created with clear instructions for independent activities such as collecting state-of-the-art examples, running accessibility and user tests, and creating mockups. Design reviews will be used as mentorship opportunities, pairing regular design contributors with experienced designers for peer review and knowledge sharing... If you're interested in contributing to GNOME design, check out the Design Team page on the Welcome to GNOME website, familiarize yourself with the Human Interface Guidelines, and join our Matrix channel. If you're a GNOME developer feel free to reach out to me via Matrix and involve me in design reviews. Jakub Beránek from the Rust compiler and infrastructure team also earned a fellowship in Germany's Sovereign Tech program, focusing on improving the Rust toolchain's tooling and infrastructure for Rust's developers. Other fellows include Pablo Neira Ayuso (Linux kernel maintainer for the Netfilter subsystem), CPython core developer Stan Ulbrych, and Python core developer Hugo van Kemenade, FreeBSD contributor Alexander Ziaee. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

  • Flock Camera Vandalism Continues Around America, While 100 Communities Reject ALPRs
    by EditorDavid on 09/08/2026 at 11:34 am

    Dozens of Flock cameras have been vandalized around Dallas Texas in the last six months, reports a local news station. In Utah, ABC News reports, a county sheriff's office even said Wednesday a Flock camera was even vandalized within days of its being installed. And in the Minnesota city of Winona, "Every Flock license plate reader camera operated by the Winona Police Department has been sawed off and stolen in what investigators believe was a coordinated theft," according to local media: All eight cameras were taken August 1, according to the Winona Police Department. A patrol officer first noticed the cameras had not sent any alerts in 24 hours. When officers checked the locations, they found the cameras had been cut from their poles and taken. The poles were left behind. Two additional Flock cameras on the Mississippi River Bridge, owned by Buffalo County, were also stolen in the same manner... The thefts are part of a broader national trend. Flock cameras have been vandalized and cut down in communities across the country. When someone in Florida filmed a damaged Flock camera lying in the grass in Florida, their footage attracted 980,000 views on social media, according to a local news report, with the uploader saying "Most of the people that are commenting are against Flock cameras." But that report adds it's one of at least five cameras recently damaged just in Florida: - In another incident, investigators "found the black camera and its pole lying on the ground." - Two days later, sheriff's deputies found a camera destroyed "with pieces scattered on the ground. Deputies reported the damage appeared to have been caused by a blunt object." - On July 31, "Police said two camera poles had been intentionally cut in half, causing an estimated $10,000 in damage to the system." In West Virginia 20-year-old Wesley Jackson has been arrested for allegedly vandalizing Flock cameras, with another 20-year-old (a university student) now arrested for being his accomplice, according to a local news report. Ironically, Jackson's arrest was made possible partly by information from... automated license plate readers. But the Washington Post notes there's now a flood of Facebook commenters jokingly offering to provide a fake alibi: "Couldn't have been him — we were out counting blades of grass," said one of the 29,000 commenters on a post about the arrest from the local news station WDTV. Others attested that the man, Wesley Jackson, had been helping them "replace the roof on a homeless shelter," "playing halo 2," "changing the tires" on their car or giving their "doggie a treat" at the time the cameras were destroyed. Meanwhile, the anti-surveillance group DeFlock reports 100 communities have now rejected automated license plate readers. Wednesday an Arizona county sheriff explained to his local Board of Supervisors why he will not renew his office's contract with Flock when it expires next month. Local Arizona media reports: "We have a camera system that can do facial recognition technology and can start building a data set on what our citizens are doing on a day-to-day basis," Teeple told supervisors. "That, in my training and experience, is a huge Fourth Amendment violation." Recently an Arizona man even told his city council he'd be launching AI-powered satellites to monitor "where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home," reports 404 Media: It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said... He said he'd already started compiling profiles on their vehicles, spouses vehicles, children's vehicles, and planned to combine that data with Bluetooth signals, advertising IDs, and commercial data sources, "so our authorized users can replay the movements of every government official and their immediate family," he said. Local businesses would be invited to join the network, to "protect" officials while they shop, eat at restaurants, and move around the city. And CNET reports "a quiet battle is happening across the US" between "towns working to adopt Flock Safety systems and those trying to ban them entirely." From major cities like Los Angeles canceling its Flock contract to towns wrapping Flock AI cams in plastic bags because Flock won't take them down, it's a wild time for surveillance and questions about government accountability. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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