Daily Archives: August 16, 2021

Debian 11 “bullseye” released

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After 2 years, 1 month, and 9 days of development, the Debian project is proud to present its new stable version 11 (code name bullseye), which will be supported for the next 5 years thanks to the combined work of the Debian Security team and the Debian Long Term Support team.

Debian 11 bullseye ships with several desktop applications and environments. Amongst others it now includes the desktop environments:

  • Gnome 3.38,
  • KDE Plasma 5.20,
  • LXDE 11,
  • LXQt 0.16,
  • MATE 1.24,
  • Xfce 4.16.

This release contains over 11,294 new packages for a total count of 59,551 packages, along with a significant reduction of over 9,519 packages which were marked as obsolete and removed. 42,821 packages were updated and 5,434 packages remained unchanged.

bullseye becomes our first release to provide a Linux kernel with support for the exFAT filesystem and defaults to using it for mount exFAT filesystems. Consequently it is no longer required to use the filesystem-in-userspace implementation provided via the exfat-fuse package. Tools for creating and checking an exFAT filesystem are provided in the exfatprogs package.

Most modern printers are able to use driverless printing and scanning without the need for vendor specific (often non-free) drivers. bullseye brings forward a new package, ipp-usb, which uses the vendor neutral IPP-over-USB protocol supported by many modern printers. This allows a USB device to be treated as a network device. The official SANE driverless backend is provided by sane-escl in libsane1, which uses the eSCL protocol.

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Source: Debian — News — Debian 11 “bullseye” released

Apple’s iPhone computer vision has the potential to preserve privacy but also break it completely

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an AI on your phone will scan all those you have sent and will send to iPhotos. It will generate fingerprints that purportedly identify pictures, even if highly modified, that will be checked against fingerprints of known CSAM material. Too many of these – there’s a threshold – and Apple’s systems will let Apple staff investigate. They won’t get the pictures, but rather a voucher containing a version of the picture. But that’s not the picture, OK? If it all looks too dodgy, Apple will inform the authorities

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In a blog post “Recognizing People in Photos Through Private On-Device Machine Learning” last month, Apple plumped itself up and strutted its funky stuff on how good its new person recognition process is. Obscured, oddly lit, accessorised, madly angled and other bizarrely presented faces are no problemo, squire.

By dint of extreme cleverness and lots of on-chip AI, Apple says it can efficiently recognise everyone in a gallery of photos. It even has a Hawkings-grade equation, just to show how serious it is, as proof that “finally, we rescale the obtained features by ss and use it as logit to compute the softmax cross-entropy loss based on the equation below.” Go, look. It’s awfully science-y.

The post is 3,500 words long, complex, and a very detailed paper on computer vision, one of the two tags Apple has given it. The other tag, Privacy, can be entirely summarised in six words: it’s on-device, therefore it’s private. No equation.

That would be more comforting if Apple hadn’t said days later how on-device analysis is going to be a key component in informing law enforcement agencies about things they disapprove of. Put the two together, and there’s a whole new and much darker angle to the fact, sold as a major consumer benefit, that Apple has been cramming in as much AI as it can so it can look at pictures as you take and after you’ve stored them.

We’ve all been worried about how mobile phones are stuffed with sensors that can watch what we watch, hear what we hear, track where we go and note what we do. The evolving world of personal data privacy is based around these not being stored in the vast vaults of big data, keeping them from being grist to the mill of manipulating our digital personas.

But what happens if the phone itself grinds that corn? It may never share a single photograph without your permission, but what if it can look at that photograph and generate precise metadata about what, who, how, when, and where it depicts?

This is an aspect of edge computing that is ahead of the regulators, even those of the EU who want to heavily control things like facial recognition. By the time any such regulation is produced, countless millions of devices will be using it to ostensibly provide safe, private, friendly on-device services that make taking and keeping photographs so much more convenient and fun.

It’s going to be very hard to turn that off, and very easy to argue for exemptions that weaken the regs to the point of pointlessness. Especially if the police and security services lobby hard as well, which they will as soon as they realise that this defeats end-to-end encryption without even touching end-to-end encryption.

So yes, Apple’s anti-CSAM model is capable of being used without impacting the privacy of the innocent, if it is run exactly as version 1.0 is described. It is also capable of working with the advances elsewhere in technology to break that privacy utterly, without setting off the tripwires of personal protection we’re putting in place right now.

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Source: Apple’s iPhone computer vision has the potential to preserve privacy but also break it completely • The Register

Etherium gets rid of miners and electricity costs in 2022 update

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Ethereum is making big changes. Perhaps the most important is the jettisoning of the “miners” who track and validate transactions on the world’s most-used blockchain network. Miners are the heart of a system known as proof of work. It was pioneered by Bitcoin and adopted by Ethereum, and has come under increasing criticism for its environmental impact: Bitcoin miners now use as much electricity as some small nations. Along with being greener and faster, proponents say the switch, now planned to be phased in by early 2022, will illustrate another difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin: A willingness to change, and to see the network as a product of community as much as code.

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the system’s electricity usage is now enormous: Researchers at Cambridge University say that the Bitcoin network’s annual electric bill often exceeds that of countries such as Chile and Bangladesh. This has led to calls from environmentally conscious investors, including cryptocurrency booster Elon Musk and others, to shun Bitcoin and Ethereum and any coins that use proof of work. It’s also led to a growing dominance by huge, centralized mining farms that’s antithetical to a system that was designed to be decentralized, since a blockchain could in theory be rewritten by a party that controlled a majority of mining power.

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The idea behind proof of stake is that the blockchain can be secured more simply if you give a group of people carrot-and-stick incentives to collaborate in checking and crosschecking transactions. It works like this:

* Anyone who puts up, or stakes, 32 Ether can take part. (Ether, the coin used to operate the Ethereum system, reached values of over $4,000 in May.)

* People in that pool are chosen at random to be “validators” of a batch of transactions, a role that requires them to order the transactions and propose the resulting block to the network.

* Validators share that new chunk of blockchain with a group of members of the pool who are chosen to be “attestors.” A minimum of 128 attestors are required for any given block procedure.

* The attestors review the validator’s work and either accept it or reject it. If it’s accepted, both the validators and the attestors are given free Ether.

5. What are the system’s advantages?

It’s thought that switching to proof of stake would cuts Ethereum’s energy use, estimated at 45,000 gigawatt hours by 99.9%. Like any other venture depending on cloud computing, its carbon footprint would then be only be that of its servers. It also is expected to increase the network speed. That’s important for Ethereum, which has ambitions of becoming a platform for a vast range of financial and commercial transactions. Currently, Ethereum handles about 30 transactions per second. With sharding, Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum, thinks that could go to 100,000 per second.

6. What are its downsides?

In a proof of stake system, it would be harder than in a proof of work system for a group to gain control of the process, but it would still be possible: The more Ether a person or group stakes, the better the chance of being chosen as a validator or attestor. Economic disincentives have been put in place to dissuade behavior that is bad for the network. A validator that tries to manipulate the process could lose part of the 32 Ether they have staked, for example. Wilson Withiam, a senior research analyst at Messari, a crypto research firm, who specializes in blockchain protocols, said the problem lies at the heart of the challenge of decentralized systems. “This is one of the most important questions going forward,” he said. “How do you help democratize the staking system?”

7. How else is Ethereum changing?

The most recent change was called the London hard fork, which went into effect in early August. The biggest change to the Ethereum blockchain since 2015, the London hard fork included a fee reduction feature called EIP 1559. The fee cut reduces the supply of Ether as part of every transaction, creating the possibility that Ethereum could become deflationary. As of mid-August, 3.2 ether per minute were being destroyed because of EIP 1559, according to tracking website ultrasound.money. That could put upward pressure on the price of Ether going forward. Another change in the works is called sharding, which will divide the Ethereum network into 64 geographic regions. Transactions within a shard would be processed separately, and the results would then be reconciled with a main network linked to all the other shards, making the overall network much faster.

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Source: Bye-Bye, Miners! How Ethereum’s Big Change Will Work – Bloomberg