New York Attorney General secured $615,000 from LCX, Lead ID, and Ifficient for supplying millions of fake public comments in 2017 to influence Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) decision to repeal net neutrality rules.
Investigation found fake comments used millions of consumer identities, including thousands of New Yorkers, without their knowledge or permission.
Broadband companies funded a secret campaign to generate comments to FCC that provided 'cover' to repeal net neutrality rules; fraud infected other government proceedings as well.
It is possible to run Llama 13B with a 6GB graphics card, thanks to recent developments in llama.cpp that allow the transformer layers to run on the GPU.
The process involves cloning llama.cpp from git, installing CUDA and Python packages, converting the model, and running it with a prompt file.
The model can generate text with good accuracy, and Nietzsche's concept of noon, midday, twilight, and midnight is used as an example.
Using the appropriate number of CPU cores can result in an additional 25% performance gains.
Users have been able to run large models on mid-range laptops, but good precision is required for the training process, although lower bit depths can be used once the overall network structure is known.
Jimmy Wales, the co-founder of Wikipedia, announced on Twitter that the Supreme Court of Turkey ruled in favor of the online encyclopedia's fight for freedom of expression.
Wales emphasized the importance of standing strong for principles rather than just slogans, highlighting Wikipedia's commitment to the cause.
Wales also mentioned a new alternative pilot project he is working on called wt.social, which is nearing a total software rewrite and requires funding to complete.
Criticisms of Wikipedia include control by certain groups and biases in promoting certain content, but some users still value its non-profit, community-based contributions to human knowledge.
The discussion touches on the relationship between capitalism and non-profit organizations in the tech sector, political nature of the internet, and concerns over censorship in various countries, including Turkey and Pakistan.
The author's father, who passed away recently, was a Bombay Sapper in the Indian Army and participated in the Bangladesh Liberation War as part of the 268 Engineer Regiment.
During the war, the author's father designed a "distribution beam girder" to distribute the load on to a new pier for a bridge that his regiment had to rebuild temporarily using prefabricated parts carried into battle.
The author's father was a peace-loving, creative, and bright man, and his contribution to the engineers' war in Bangladesh was significant.
The caste system in India is banned, but discrimination still occurs, and academics and job reservations are given to former lower castes for socio-economic equity.
The Bangladesh Liberation War had a huge impact on the author's father and many others, with American support for Pakistan being a shameful memory.
The book 'The World Is Built On Probability' by Lev Tarasov argues that probability plays a fundamental role in modern life and nature.
The book is divided into two parts: the first part focuses on probability in decision-making, optimizing queues, and random searches, while the second part shows how probability is fundamental to microscopic phenomena and laws of modern physics and biology.
The book is translated from Russian by Michael Burov and was revised from the 1984 Russian edition. The completely digital version uses LaTeX with EB Garamond font and has all figures reworked in SVG format for clearer presentation.
The collection includes school-level textbooks on physics, calculus, and quantum mechanics, as well as more advanced works in physics and math.
The discussion includes a debate about the use of probability in calculus and physics, covering many-worlds interpretation, wave functions, and quantum mechanics.
The 10th annual Bad Bot Report reveals that 47.4% of all internet traffic in 2022 came from bots, a 5.1% increase from the previous year.
The report also documents the evolution and sophistication of bad bot technology, with 30.2% of bot traffic being identified as malicious automated software applications.
Account takeover attacks increased by 155% in 2022, and travel, retail, and financial services experienced the highest volume of bot attacks.
Cloudflare claims that the bot vs. human traffic is only around 29%, raising questions about Imperva's definition of "internet traffic."
Paid proxy providers charge high bandwidth for mobile and residential proxies, which bots use to view videos, leading to concerns about ad fraud and server overload.
OpenSnitch, the interactive application firewall, is now available in Debian Bookworm, with the latest fixes and a GUI admin tool installed by default.
The package exposes connections made by programs using internet connections on the machine and has already proven useful to many users.
While the package can't build its eBPF module within Debian yet, users can experience the benefits by testing apt install opensnitch in Bookworm.
"The Cathedral and the Bazaar" is an analysis of a successful open-source project called Fetchmail, which supports the argument that open-source development styles may outperform commercial development structures.
There are fundamentally different development styles: the "cathedral" model (used in most commercial development) and the "bazaar" model (used in open-source development).
The success of open-source projects is attributed to the "bazaar" model, which is characterized by releasing software early and often, delegating responsibilities, and being open to many ideas, despite potential organizational confusion.
The Delphi effect, which states that averaged expert opinions are more reliable than a single observer, can tame OS development complexity and improve software quality through bug-seeking experts.
The article helped define the concept of the bazaar model versus the cathedral model, but it also highlighted the limitations of the bazaar model and the challenges of creating large-scale open-source projects.
The article lists the support for the SIXEL graphics format across various terminal emulators, a format that allows displaying bitmap graphics in terminals.
The lsix command can determine if SIXEL is supported, and some terminal emulators natively support it.
Some popular terminal emulators, including Alacritty, GNOME Terminal, and Windows Terminal, do not currently support SIXEL, but some have open issues or related pull requests.
The sixel protocol is discussed for graphical support in the console, but it has downsides and is not universally supported
There are conversations about querying pixel size in terminal windows for graphics software and the challenges and benefits of terminal-based software compared to GUI libraries.