It is fortunate that Germany now has a foreign minister with a background in international law. She knows her stuff and can spout such clunkers as:

Putin is trampling on international law.

Source: Annalena Baerbock

It might have been even better if they had had someone older who still remembers the Kosovo referendum. And that Putin said at that time: Don’t do this, or someone will take this as a precedent and use it against you.

Funnily enough, that was under the last Green foreign minister in Germany, Joschka Fischer. One would think that Baerbock would at least have known the landmines that her party comrades left her.

More than 700 thousand human deaths from mosquito bites are observed annually in the world. It is more than 2 times the number of annual murders in the world. In this regard, the invention of new more effective methods of protection against mosquitoes is necessary. In this article for the first time, comprehensive studies of mosquito neutralization using machine vision and a 1 W power laser are considered. Developed laser installation with Raspberry Pi that changing the direction of the laser with a galvanometer. We developed a program for mosquito tracking in real. The possibility of using deep neural networks, Haar cascades, machine learning for mosquito recognition was considered. We considered in detail the classification problems of mosquitoes in images. A recommendation is given for the implementation of this device based on a microcontroller for subsequent use as part of an unmanned aerial vehicle. Any harmful insects in the fields can be used as objects for control.

Source: Rakhmatulin, I. Raspberry PI for Kill Mosquitoes by Laser. Preprints 2021, 2021010412 (doi: 10.20944/preprints202101.0412.v1).

Are you tired? Do you sit at home alone in your home office and are not motivated in any way to do your work? Do you feel how you’re getting stupid with every day you sit at home, watch TV and there’s no challenge at all? Well, you don’t have to anymore. Thanks to this scientific formula, formulated by scientists you’ll get what your brain wants.

Moscow residents say they have found that the only way to get the council to clear snow is to write the name of opposition leader Alexei Navalny on it.

Source: BBC

Physical locks are one of the most prevalent mechanisms for securing objects such as doors. While many of these locks are vulnerable to lock-picking, they are still widely used as lock-picking requires specific training with tailored instruments, and easily raises suspicion. In this paper, we propose SpiKey, a novel attack that significantly lowers the bar for an attacker as opposed to the lock-picking attack, by requiring only the use of a smartphone microphone to infer the shape of victim’s key, namely bittings (or cut depths) which form the secret of a key. When a victim inserts his/her key into the lock, the emitted sound is captured by the attacker’s microphone. SpiKey leverages the time difference between audible clicks to ultimately infer the bitting information, i.e., shape of the physical key. As a proof-of-concept, we provide a simulation, based on real-world recordings, and demonstrate a significant reduction in search space from a pool of more than 330 thousand keys to three candidate keys for the most frequent case.

Source: ACM Digital Library

President Trump said late on Tuesday that he would support Oracle’s buying TikTok, the Chinese-owned viral video app that his administration says must be sold in the next few weeks.

In comments to reporters at an event in Arizona, Mr. Trump called Oracle a “great company” and said the firm, which specializes in enterprise software, could successfully run TikTok.

“I think that Oracle would be certainly somebody that could handle it,” he said.

Source: New York Times

Oracle’s one of those companies which has successfully managed to kill technology in the past. Just think of Sun and Java. So, if he really wants TikTok to be dead Oracle is the right choice.

Just keep in mind that he talks about lots of things he isn’t capable of to understand.

San Diego Comic-Con — like just about every large conference, convention, and gathering in 2020 — has had to switch to an online-only, virtual format this year due to the continuing pandemic. Media companies that usually have a large presence at events like SDCC worked hard to create streaming alternative content — but it seems they forgot to tell their copyright bots.

ViacomCBS kicked things off today with an hour-long panel showing off its current slew of current and upcoming Star Trek projects: Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds.

The panel included the cast and producers of Discovery doing a read-through of the first act of the season 2 finale, “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2.” The “enhanced” read-through included sound effects, effects shots, and storyboard images meant to bolster the actors as they delivered lines from their living rooms and home offices.

Even if the presentation didn’t look like a real episode of Discovery to the home viewer, it apparently sounded close enough: after the Star Trek Universe virtual panel began viewers began to lose access to the stream. In place of the video, YouTube displayed a content ID warning reading: “Video unavailable: This video contains content from CBS CID, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.”

Source: arstechnica

A compelling case of suicide among bots.

In addition to the Dilbert parser I created a parser for the Cyanide and Happiness comic strips. It’s not optimized; I just created it with the idea in mind to get some results fast. So, I don’t check the webpage of a comic for its next comic id, but just increment by one. If the page doesn’t exist, put that id on the blacklist to skip future processing, otherwise download the comic.