CNN looks back to when "dial-up internet (and its iconic dial tone) was 'still a thing..." "File-sharing services like Napster and LimeWire were just beginning to take off... And in sweaty dorm rooms and sparse basements across the world, people brought their desktop monitors together to set up a local area network (LAN) and play multiplayer games — "Half-Life," "Counter-Strike," "Starsiege: Tribes," "StarCraft," "WarCraft" or "Unreal Tournament," to name just a few. These were informal but high-stakes gatherings, then known as LAN parties, whether winning a box of energy drinks or just the joy of emerging victorious. The parties could last several days and nights, with gamers crowded together among heavy computers and fast food boxes, crashing underneath their desks in sleeping bags and taking breaks to pull pranks on each other or watch movies...

It's this nostalgia that prompted writer and podcaster Merritt K to document the era's gaming culture in her new photobook "LAN Party: Inside the Multiplayer Revolution." After floating the idea on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, she received an immediate — and visceral — response from old-school gamers all too keen to share memories and photos from LAN parties and gaming conventions across the world... It's strange to remember that the internet was once a place you went to spend time with other real people; a tethered space, not a cling-film-like reality enveloping the corporeal world from your own pocket....

Growing up as a teenager in this era, you could feel a sense of hope (that perhaps now feels like naivete) about the possibilities of technology, K explained. The book is full of photos featuring people smiling and posing with their desktop monitors, pride and fanfare apparent... "It felt like, 'Wow, the future is coming,'" K said. "It was this exciting time where you felt like you were just charting your own way. I don't want to romanticize it too much, because obviously it wasn't perfect, but it was a very, very different experience...."

"We've kind of lost a lot of control, I think over our relationship to technology," K said. "We have lost a lot of privacy as well. There's less of a sense of exploration because there just isn't as much out there."
One photo shows a stack of Mountain Dew cans (remembering that by 2007 the company had even released a line of soda called "Game Fuel"). "It was a little more communal," the book's author told CNN. "If you're playing games in the same room with someone, it's a different experience than doing it online. You can only be so much of a jackass to somebody who was sitting three feet away from you..."

They adds that that feeling of connecting to people in other places "was cool. It wasn't something that was taken for granted yet."

There's actually "a global trend toward increased air safety," notes a Wall Street Journal columnist.

And even in the case of the two fatal Boeing crashes five years ago, he stresses that they were "were two different crashes," with the second happening only "after Boeing and the FAA issued emergency directives instructing pilots how to compensate for Boeing's poorly designed flight control software.

"The story should have ended after the first crash except the second set of pilots behaved in unexpected, unpredictable ways, flying a flyable Ethiopian Airlines jet into the ground." Boeing is guilty of designing a fallible system and placing an undue burden on pilots. The evidence strongly suggests, however, that the Ethiopian crew was never required to master the simple remedy despite the global furor occasioned by the first crash. To boot, they committed an additional error by overspeeding the aircraft in defiance of aural, visual and stick-shaker warnings against doing so. It got almost no coverage, but on the same day the Ethiopian government issued its final findings on the accident in late 2022, the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, in what it called an "unusual step," issued its own "comment" rebuking the Ethiopian report for "inaccurate" statements, for ignoring the crew's role, for ignoring how readily the accident should have been avoided.
So the Wall Street Journal columnist challenges whether profit incentives played any role in Boeing's troubles: In reality, the global industry was reorganized largely along competitive profit-and-loss lines after the 1970s, and yet this coincided with enormous increases in safety, notwithstanding the sausage factory elements occasionally on display (witness the little-reported parking of hundreds of Airbus planes over a faulty new engine).

The point here isn't blame but to note that 100,000 repetitions likely wouldn't reproduce the flukish second MAX crash and everything that followed from it. Rather than surfacing Boeing's deeply hidden problems, it seems the second crash gave birth to them. The subsequent 20-month grounding and production shutdown, combined with Covid, cost Boeing thousands of skilled workers. The pressure of its duopoly competition with Airbus plus customers clamoring for their backordered planes made management unwisely desperate to restart production. January's nonfatal door-plug blowout of an Alaska Airlines 737 appears to have been a one-off when Boeing workers failed to reinstall the plug properly after removing it to fix faulty fuselage rivets. Not a one-off, apparently, are faulty rivets as Boeing has strained to hire new staff and resume production of half-finished planes.

Boeing will sort out its troubles eventually by applying the oldest of manufacturing insights: Training, repetition, standardization and careful documentation are the way to error-free complex manufacturing.
As he sees it, "The second MAX crash caught Boeing up in a disorienting global media and political storm that it didn't know how to handle and, indeed, has handled fairly badly."

Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov and others spoke at the Game Developers Conference about Tetris Reversed, reports VentureBeat — and told the story of "a lost prototype of a Tetris game that was never published." But little did Pajitnov know that an engineer in charge of the game, Vedran Klanac, had kept a copy of it. Through the help of intermediaries, he showed it to Pajitnov and the two shared their memories of what happened to the lost game...

Pajitnov has lived in the U.S. since 1991, where he has been involved in the development of games such as Pandora's Box and worked with companies such as Microsoft and WildSnake Software... Klanac is the CEO of Ocean Media, and he is originally from Zagreb, Croatia. He was an aerospace engineer who started his career in the games industry with Croteam where he built the physics engine for Serious Sam 2.

Since 2006, he has been running Ocean Media, a game publishing company with a focus on consoles. During the last 20 years, he was involved in production as a programmer and executive producer in more than 200 projects. And it turns out he was the programmer who created the Tetris Reversed code based on instructions from Pajitnov, who had passed them on through a middleman. In 2011, programmer Vedran Klanac went to the NLGD Festival of Games in Utrecht, The Netherlands. He listened to a talk on a charitable effort from Martin de Ronde, a cofounder of game studio Guerrilla Games. Klanac said in an interview with GamesBeat that he listened to De Ronde's talk and offered to help. De Ronde came back months later saying he had an agreement with Pajitnov about creating a new prototype for a Tetris game.

De Ronde asked if Klanac if he wanted to make Tetris Reversed by Pajitnov.

"Are you kidding me?" Klanac reacted.
The idea is still to survive as long as you can, according to the article — but the entire playfield was accessible. "For the first time in public, they showed the video of the prototype in action," according to the article, which also records Pajitnov reaction. "When you see the gameplay video, and when you look at the design elements. This is Tetris for like 300 IQ people."

No word on yet on whether the game will ever be officially published.

"My favorite kind of science fiction involves stories rooted in real science..." writes NPR's reviewer. "[T]here is something special about seeing characters wrestle with concepts closer to our current understanding of how the universe works."

The Verge calls it an "impressive" and "leaner" story than the book, arguing "it's a good one — and very occasionally a great one" that introduces the author's key ideas, though channelling "the book's spirit but not its brilliance."

And Slate calls it a "downright transformative" adaptation, "jettisoning most of the novel's characters and plucking scenes from all three books," while accusing it of "making the trilogy's expansive and philosophical story into something much more pedestrian and digestible."

But Reuters notes there's huge interest in China over this adaptation (by the co-creator of Mem>Game of Thrones) for the first Asian novel to win the Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. "The new series was trending on Chinese social media platform Weibo on Friday," reports Reuters, "with 21 million views so far." (The show came in first on Weibo's "top hot" trend rankings, they add, "despite Netflix being officially inaccessible in China. Chinese viewers would have had to watch the Netflix series from behind a VPN or on a pirate site.")

So what was their verdict? CNN reports Netflix's adaptation "has split opinions in China and sparked online nationalist anger over scenes depicting a violent and tumultuous period in the country's modern history." Among the country's more patriotic internet users, discussions on the adaptation turned political, with some accusing the big-budget American production of making China look bad. The show opens with a harrowing scene depicting Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution, which consumed China in bloodshed and chaos for a decade from 1966... "Netflix you don't understand 'The Three Body Problem' or Ye Wenjie at all!" read a comment on social media platform Weibo. "You only understand political correctness!"

Others came to the show's defense, saying the scene closely follows depictions in the book — and is a truthful reenactment of history. "History is far more absurd than a TV series, but you guys pretend not to see it," read one comment on Douban, a popular site for reviewing movies, books and music.

Author Liu said in an interview with the New York Times in 2019 that he had originally wanted to open the book with scenes from Mao's Cultural Revolution, but his Chinese publisher worried they would never make it past government censors and buried them in the middle of the narrative. The English version of the book, translated by Ken Liu, put the scenes at the novel's beginning, with the author's blessing... Various other aspects of the show, from its casting and visual effects to the radical changes to the story's original setting and characters, also attracted the ire of Chinese social media users. Many compared it to a Chinese television adaptation released last year — a much lengthier and closer retelling of the book that ran to 30 episodes and was highly rated on Chinese review platforms.

The Netflix adaptation featured an international cast and placed much of the action in present-day London — thus making the story a lot less Chinese.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Former president Donald Trump'sTruth Social, a shameless Twitter clone, is set to become a publicly traded company as soon as next week. Shareholders of Digital World Acquisition Corp. voted on Friday to merge with Trump Media and Technology Group, the company behind Truth Social. The vote is a culmination of a years-long saga attempting to merge Trump Media with a publicly traded company in what's known as a SPAC deal. The company will trade under the ticker DJT once it goes public. [...] Truth Social looks nearly identical to Twitter, with some key distinctions. Instead of "tweeting," users post a "truth." A "retweet" is called a "retruth." Unlike many right-wing Twitter clones, the site functions well, has remained mostly online, and actually appears to have a somewhat active user base. But since launching in February 2022, after Trump was kicked off of mainstream platforms for inciting violence during the January 6 riot at the Capitol, the company has been mired in controversy.

DOJ, in the court filing (PDF): Many prominent, well-financed companies have tried and failed to successfully enter the relevant markets because of these entry barriers. Past failures include Amazon (which released its Fire mobile phone in 2014 but could not profitably sustain its business and exited the following year); Microsoft (which discontinued its mobile business in 2017); HTC (which exited the market by selling its smartphone business to Google in September 2017); and LG (which exited the smartphone market in 2021). Today, only Samsung and Google remain as meaningful competitors in the U.S. performance smartphone market. Barriers are so high that Google is a distant third to Apple and Samsung despite the fact that Google controls development of the Android operating system.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton just sued two more porn sites, xHamster and Chaturbate, alleging they aren't complying with age verification laws. As first reported by local news outlet KXAN, the Office of the Attorney General filed two civil lawsuits on Tuesday afternoon against Hammy Media, which owns xHamster, and Multi Media, which owns Chaturbate. Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 1181 into law in June, which requires porn sites to verify the ages of users through a driver's license or passport. If porn sites don't force consenting adults to hand over a government-issued ID in order to watch other consenting adults have sex on camera, they face heavy fines.

Paxton's lawsuit against xHamster asks the court to force the site to pay a civil penalty of up to $1.67 million, with an additional $10,000 a day since filing. For Chaturbate, it's $1.78 million plus $10,000 per day. Last week, Pornhub's parent company Aylo blocked anyone accessing its network of sites from a Texas IP address, and replaced its network of sites -- which include Pornhub, Brazzers, YouPorn and many more -- with a message about its rejection of age verification legislation that requires adults to show government-issued ID to access porn. [...] As of writing, xHamster and Chaturbate are still accessible in Texas and don't have requirements to verify users' ages with a government ID.

An anonymous reader writes: Reddit priced its stock on Wednesday at $34 a share, the top of the anticipated range, a signal that investors are excited about the company's IPO on Thursday. The social media giant raised nearly $500 million in the offering. Excluding employee stock options, the 19-year old company's valuation will start at $5.4 billion, a far cry from its last private market value of $10 billion, set in August 2021, the top of the last tech markets boom. The stock, which is the most anticipated offering of the year so far, will debut on New York Stock Exchange on Thursday with the ticker symbol "RDDT."

Neuralink, the brain-chip startup founded by Elon Musk, showed its first patient using his mind to play online chess. Reuters reports: Noland Arbaugh, the 29-year-old patient who was paralyzed below the shoulder after a diving accident, played chess on his laptop and moved the cursor using the Neuralink device. The implant seeks to enable people to control a computer cursor or keyboard using only their thoughts. Arbaugh had received an implant from the company in January and could control a computer mouse using his thoughts, Musk said last month.

"The surgery was super easy," Arbaugh said in the video streamed on Musk's social media platform X, referring to the implant procedure. "I literally was released from the hospital a day later. I have no cognitive impairments. I had basically given up playing that game," Arbaugh said, referring to the game Civilization VI, "you all (Neuralink) gave me the ability to do that again and played for 8 hours straight."

Elaborating on his experience with the new technology, Arbaugh said that it is "not perfect" and they "have run into some issues." "I don't want people to think that this is the end of the journey, there's still a lot of work to be done, but it has already changed my life," he added.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: In India, a government-run agency will now monitor and undertake fact-checking for government related matters on social media even as tech giants expressed grave concerns about it last year. The Ministry of Electronics and IT on Wednesday wrote in a gazette notification that it is amending the IT Rules 2021 to cement into law the proposal to make the fact checking unit of Press Information Bureau the dedicated arbiter of truth for New Delhi matters. Tech companies as well as other firms that serve more than 5 million users in India will be required to "make reasonable efforts" to not display, store, transmit or otherwise share information that deceives or misleads users about matters pertaining to the government, the IT ministry said. India's move comes just weeks ahead of the general elections in the country. Relying on a government agency such as the Press Information Bureau as the sole source to fact-check government business without giving it a clear definition or providing clear checks and balances "may lead to misuse during implementation of the law, which will profoundly infringe on press freedom," Asia Internet Coalition, an industry group that represents Meta, Amazon, Google and Apple, cautioned last year.

Meanwhile, comedian Kunal Kamra, with support from the Editors Guild of India, cautioned that the move could create an environment that forces social media firms to welcome "a regime of self-interested censorship."

samleecole writes: Last month, the surveillance company Flock Safety published a study and press release claiming that its automated license plate readers (ALPR) are "instrumental in solving 10 percent of reported crime in the U.S." The study was done by Flock employees, and given legitimacy with the "oversight" of two academic researchers whose names are also on the paper. Now, one of those researchers has told 404 Media that "I personally would have done things much differently" than the Flock researchers did.

The researcher, Johnny Nhan of Texas Christian University, said that he has pivoted future research on Flock because he found "the information that is collected by the police departments are too varied and incomplete for us to do any type of meaningful statistical analysis on them." Flock is one of the largest vendors of ALPR cameras and other surveillance technologies, and is partially responsible for the widespread proliferation of this technology. It markets its cameras to law enforcement, homeowners associations, property managers, schools, and businesses. It regularly publishes in-house case studies and white papers that it says shows Flock is instrumental in solving and reducing crime, then uses those studies to market its products.

Major U.S. broadband internet providers must start displaying information similar to nutrition labels on food products to help consumers shop for services starting on April 10, under new rules from the Federal Communications Commission. From a report: Verizon Communications said it will begin providing the labels on Wednesday. The FCC first moved to mandate the labels in 2022. Smaller providers will be required to provide labels starting in October. The rules require broadband providers to display, at the point of sale, labels that show prices, speeds, fees and data allowances for both wireless and wired products. Verizon Chief Customer Experience Officer Brian Higgins said in an interview the labels will help consumers make "an equal comparison" between product offerings, speeds and fees.

Higgins said standardized labels across the industry "make it easier for customers to do a comparison of which provider is going to be the best fit for their needs." He said customers will still need to research various bundling offers across carriers. The labels were first unveiled as a voluntary program in 2016. Congress ordered the FCC to mandate them under the 2021 infrastructure law. "Consumers will finally get information they can use to comparison shop, avoid junk fees, and make informed choices about which high-speed internet service is the best fit for their needs and budget," FCC Chair Jessica Rosenworcel said.

Christopher Harper reports via Tom's Hardware: Earlier this month, Danluu.com released an exhaustive 23-page analysis/op-ed/manifesto on the current status of unoptimized web pages and web app performance, finding that just loading a web page can even bog down an entry-level device that can run the popular game PUBG at 40 fps. In fact, the Wix webpage requires loading 21MB of data for one page, while the more famous websites Patreon and Threads load 13MB of data for one page. This can result in slow load times that reach up to 33 seconds or, in some cases, result in the page failing to load at all.

As the testing above shows, some of the most brutally intensive websites include the likes of... Quora, and basically every major social media platform. Newer content production platforms like Squarespace and newer Forum platforms like Discourse also have significantly worse performance than their older counterparts, often to the point of unusability on some devices. The Tecno S8C, one of the prominent entry-level phones common in emerging markets, is one particularly compelling test device that stuck. The device is actually quite impressive in some ways, including its ability to run PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds Mobile at 40 FPS -- but the same device can't even run Quora and experiences nigh-unusable lag when scrolling on social media sites.

That example is most likely the best summation of the overall point, which is that modern web and app design is increasingly trending toward an unrealistic assumption of ever-increasing bandwidth and processing. Quora is a website where people answer questions -- there is absolutely no reason any of these websites should be harder to run than a Battle Royale game.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: YouTube has updated its rulebook for the era of deepfakes. Starting today, anyone uploading video to the platform must disclose certain uses of synthetic media, including generative AI, so viewers know what they're seeing isn't real. YouTube says it applies to "realistic" altered media such as "making it appear as if a real building caught fire" or swapping"the face of one individual with another's." The new policy shows YouTube taking steps that could help curb the spread of AI-generated misinformation as the US presidential election approaches. It is also striking for what it permits: AI-generated animations aimed at kids are not subject to the new synthetic content disclosure rules.

YouTube's new policies exclude animated content altogether from the disclosure requirement. This means that the emerging scene of get-rich-quick, AI-generated content hustlers can keep churning out videos aimed at children without having to disclose their methods. Parents concerned about the quality of hastily made nursery-rhyme videos will be left to identify AI-generated cartoons by themselves. YouTube's new policy also says creators don't need to flag use of AI for "minor" edits that are "primarily aesthetic" such as beauty filters or cleaning up video and audio. Use of AI to "generate or improve" a script or captions is also permitted without disclosure. [...]

The exemption for animation in YouTube's new policy could mean that parents cannot easily filter such videos out of search results or keep YouTube's recommendation algorithm from autoplaying AI-generated cartoons after setting up their child to watch popular and thoroughly vetted channels like PBS Kids or Ms. Rachel. Some problematic AI-generated content aimed at kids does require flagging under the new rules. In 2023, the BBC investigated a wave of videos targeting older children that used AI tools to push pseudoscience and conspiracy theories, including climate change denialism. These videos imitated conventional live-action educational videos -- showing, for example, the real pyramids of Giza -- so unsuspecting viewers might mistake them for factually accurate educational content. (The pyramid videos then went on the suggest that the structures can generate electricity.) This new policy would crack down on that type of video. "We require kids content creators to disclose content that is meaningfully altered or synthetically generated when it seems realistic," says YouTube spokesperson Elena Hernandez. "We don't require disclosure of content that is clearly unrealistic and isn't misleading the viewer into thinking it's real."

A man has been sentenced for cyber flashing in England for the first time. From a report: Nicholas Hawkes, 39, from Basildon in Essex, was jailed for 66 weeks at Southend Crown Court today after he sent unsolicited photos of his erect penis to a 15-year-old girl and a woman on 9 February. The older victim took screenshots of the offending image on WhatsApp and reported Hawkes to the police the same day.

Cyber flashing became a criminal offence in England with the passage of the Online Safety Act on 31 January. It has been a crime in Scotland since 2010. The offence covers the sending of an unsolicited sexual image to people via social media, dating apps, text message or data-sharing services such as Bluetooth and AirDrop. Victims of cyber flashing get lifelong anonymity from the time they report the offence, as it also falls under the Sexual Offences Act.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Reddit, the social media platform gearing up for an initial public offering this week, said Nokia has accused it of infringing some of their patents. Nokia Technologies, the company's licensing business, sent Reddit a letter on Monday with the claims, and Reddit is evaluating them, according to a filing made Tuesday. Nokia's claims come as Reddit prepares for an initial public offering in an effort to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. The company has been working toward a listing for years, and its public market debut this week is set to become a high-profile addition to the year's roster of newly and soon-to-be public companies. Reddit said in the filing: "On March 18, 2024, Nokia sent us a letter indicating they believed that Reddit infringes certain of their patents. We will evaluate their claims. As we face increasing competition and become increasingly high profile, the possibility of receiving more intellectual property claims against us grows.

In addition, various 'non-practicing entities,' and other intellectual property rights holders have asserted in the past, and may attempt to assert in the future, intellectual property claims against us and have sought, and may attempt to seek in the future, to monetize the intellectual property rights they own to extract value through licensing arrangements or other settlements."

Ethiopia's biggest commercial bank is scrambling to recoup large sums of money withdrawn by customers after a "systems glitch." From a report: The customers discovered early on Saturday that they could take out more cash than they had in their accounts at the Commercial Bank of Ethiopia (CBE). More than $40m was withdrawn or transferred to other banks, local media reported.

It took several hours for the institution to freeze transactions. Much of the money was withdrawn from state-owned CBE by students, bank president Abe Sano told journalists on Monday. News of the glitch spread across universities largely via messaging apps and phone calls. Long lines formed at campus ATMs, with a student in western Ethiopia telling BBC Amharic people were withdrawing money until police officers arrived on campus to stop them.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from InfoWorld: C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup has defended the widely used programming language in response to a Biden administration report that calls on developers to use memory-safe languages and avoid using vulnerable ones such as C++ and C. In a March 15 response to an inquiry from InfoWorld, Stroustrup pointed out strengths of C++, which was designed in 1979. "I find it surprising that the writers of those government documents seem oblivious of the strengths of contemporary C++ and the efforts to provide strong safety guarantees," Stroustrup said. "On the other hand, they seem to have realized that a programming language is just one part of a tool chain, so that improved tools and development processes are essential."

Safety improvement always has been a goal of C++ development efforts, Stroustrup stressed. "Improving safety has been an aim of C++ from day one and throughout its evolution. Just compare the K&R C language with the earliest C++, and the early C++ with contemporary C++. My CppCon 2023 keynote outlines that evolution," he said. "Much quality C++ is written using techniques based on RAII (Resource Acquisition Is Initialization), containers, and resource management pointers rather than conventional C-style pointer messes." Stroustrup cited a number of efforts to improve C++ safety. "There are two problems related to safety. Of the billions of lines of C++, few completely follow modern guidelines, and peoples' notions of which aspects of safety are important differ. I and the C++ standard committee are trying to deal with that," he said. "Profiles is a framework for specifying what guarantees a piece of code requires and enable implementations to verify them. There are documents describing that on the committee's website -- look for WG21 -- and more are coming. However, some of us are not in a mood to wait for the committee's necessarily slow progress."

Profiles, Stroustrup said, "is a framework that allows us to incrementally improve guarantees -- e.g., to eliminate most range errors relatively soon -- and to gradually introduce guarantees into large code bases through local static analysis and minimal run-time checks. My long-term aim for C++ is and has been for C++ to offer type and resource safety when and where needed. Maybe the current push for memory safety -- a subset of the guarantees I want -- will prove helpful to my efforts, which are shared by many in the C++ standards committee." Stroustrup previously defended the safety of C++ against the NSA, which recommended using memory-safe languages instead of C++ and C in a November 2022 bulletin.

Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: Last October, tech-backed nonprofit Code.org publicly called out Indiana in its 2023 State of Computer Science Education report, advising the Hoosier state it needed to heed Code.org's new policy recommendation and "adopt a graduation requirement for all high school students in computer science." Having already joined 49 other Governors who signed a Code.org-organized compact calling for increased K-12 CS education in his state after coming under pressure from hundreds of the nation's tech, business, and nonprofit leaders, Indiana Governor Eric J. Holcomb apparently didn't need much convincing. "We must prepare our students for a digitally driven world by requiring Computer Science to graduate from high school," Holcomb proclaimed in his January State of the State Address. Two months later -- following Microsoft-applauded testimony for legislation to make it so by Code.org partners College Board and Nextech (the Indiana Code.org Regional Partner which is also paid by the Indiana Dept. of Education to prepare educators to teach K-12 CS, including Code.org's curriculum) -- Holcomb on Wednesday signed House Bill 1243 into law, making CS a HS graduation requirement. The IndyStar reports students beginning with the Class of 2029 will be required to take a computer science class that must include instruction in algorithms and programming, computing systems, data and analysis, impacts of computing and networks and the internet.

The new law is not Holcomb's first foray into K-12 CS education. Back in 2017, Holcomb and Indiana struck a deal giving Infosys (a big Code.org donor) the largest state incentive package ever -- $31M to bring 2,000 tech employees to Central Indiana — that also promised to make Indiana kids more CS savvy through the Infosys Foundation USA, headed at the time by Vandana Sikka, a Code.org Board member and wife of Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka. Following the announcement of the now-stalled deal, Holcomb led a delegation to Silicon Valley where he and Indiana University (IU) President Michael McRobbie joined Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi and Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka on a Thought Leader panel at the Infosys Confluence 2017 conference to discuss Preparing America for Tomorrow. At the accompanying Infosys Crossroads 2017 CS education conference, speakers included Sikka's wife Vandana, McRobbie's wife Laurie Burns McRobbie, Nextech President and co-CEO Karen Jung, Code.org execs, and additional IU educators. Later that year, IU 'First Lady' Laurie Burns McRobbie announced that Indiana would offer the IU Bloomington campus as a venue for Infosys Foundation USA's inaugural Pathfinders Summer Institute, a national event for K-12 teacher education in CS that offered professional development from Code.org and Nextech, as well as an unusual circumvent-your-school's-approval-and-name-your-own-stipend funding arrangement for teachers via an Infosys partnership with the NSF and DonorsChoose that was unveiled at the White House.

And that, Schoolhouse Rock Fans, is one more example of how Microsoft's National Talent Strategy is becoming Code.org-celebrated K-12 CS state laws!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Back in 2004, in the pre-Web 2.0 era, research indicated that BitTorrent was responsible for an impressive 35% of all Internet traffic. At the time, file-sharing via peer-to-peer networks was the main traffic driver as no other services consumed large amounts of bandwidth. Fast-forward two decades and these statistics are ancient history. With the growth of video streaming, including services such as YouTube, Netflix, and TikTok, file-sharing traffic is nothing more than a drop in today's data pool. [...]

This week, Canadian broadband management company Sandvine released its latest Global Internet Phenomena Report which makes it clear that BitTorrent no longer leads any charts. The latest data show that video and social media are the leading drivers of downstream traffic, accounting for more than half of all fixed access and mobile data worldwide. Needless to say, BitTorrent is nowhere to be found in the list of 'top apps'. Looking at upstream traffic, BitTorrent still has some relevance on fixed access networks where it accounts for 4% of the bandwidth. However, it's been surpassed by cloud storage apps, FaceTime, Google, and YouTube. On mobile connections, BitTorrent no longer makes it into the top ten. The average of 46 MB upstream traffic per subscriber shouldn't impress any file-sharer. However, since only a small percentage of all subscribers use BitTorrent, the upstream traffic per user is of course much higher.