Starting next year, Google plans to require all apps installed on certified Android devices, including sideloading, to come from developers it has verified. Many Android developers see the move as a power grab and have started a movement to "Keep Android Open." //
On Tuesday, via the F-Droid blog, he renewed his challenge to Google's assertions about its verification program, specifically the company's claim that "Sideloading is fundamental to Android and it is not going away."
"This statement is untrue," he wrote in his post. "The developer verification decree effectively ends the ability for individuals to choose what software they run on the devices they own.
"It bears reminding that 'sideload' is a made-up term. Putting software on your computer is simply called 'installing,' regardless of whether that computer is in your pocket or on your desk."
Both Google and Apple [PDF] use the term "sideloading" as a pejorative, possibly because they have a commercial interest in running app store toll booths.
Prud'hommeaux proposes the term "direct installing," in case you need to make a distinction between obtaining software the old-fashioned way versus going through a rent-seeking intermediary marketplace like the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store.
Pointing to The Register's recent report about 77 malicious apps on Google Play that amassed more than 19 million downloads, Prud'hommeaux questions both Google's ability to catch malicious apps and its lack of evidence to support the claim that it "found over 50 times more malware from internet-sideloaded sources than on apps available through Google Play."
To get this new Start menu, you must be running build 26100.7019 or 26200.7019 or newer versions of Windows 11. Make sure you have all the latest updates installed by going to Settings->Windows Update and clicking the Check for updates button. You can check your Windows build number by hitting Windows+R to open the run prompt and running winver. //
If you have the right build number, it’s possible that the new Start menu will appear on its own. But, if not, you can use the ViveTool, a utility that enables hidden Windows features, to turn it on.
First, download the ViveTool and unzip it to C:\vive. Then open a command prompt as an administrator and change into that directory.
cd c:\viveFinally, issue the following command:
vivetool /enable /id:57048231,47205210,56328729,48433719
Can Britain be saved from itself? The latest example of submission to Muslims took place in London, where a British lawyer wearing a Star of David necklace near a pro-Palestinian protest outside the Israeli Embassy was arrested for his provocative behavior. After all, the mere sight of that necklace could cause the mob to become angry, even violent, and instead of protecting the lawyer from possible violence by the mob, the Metropolitan Police arrested him. More on this absurdity can be found here: “London police detain Jew for wearing Star of David, ‘antagonizing’ pro-Palestine protesters,” Jerusalem Post, October 19, 2025: //
He was there not to provoke — after all, he could have been in real trouble from a maddened mob — but to record that mob’s behavior and what he believed were its violations of the law, including laws against hate crimes. Instead the police chose to arrest him, handcuff him, and hold him for ten hours, as they tried to figure out they could charge him with, but came up empty and had to let him go.
A mob’s yelling and screaming against Israel and Jews is apparently okay, according to the British police. A single man, wearing a Star of David neckless and silently recording that mob’s behavior, deserves to be arrested.
Are GPTs the way to AGI, probably not
In an opinion piece for the NY Times Gary Marcus indicates why he has reservations on the future of LLM GPT AI systems.
Silicon Valley Is Investing in the Wrong A.I.
“Buoyed by the initial progress of chatbots, many thought that A.G.I. was imminent.
But these systems have always been prone to hallucinations and errors. Those obstacles may be one reason generative A.I. hasn’t led to the skyrocketing profits and productivity that many in the tech industry predicted. A recent study run by M.I.T.’s NANDA initiative found that 95 percent of companies that did A.I. pilot studies found little or no return on their investment. A recent financial analysis projects an estimated shortfall of $800 billion in revenue for A.I. companies by the end of 2030.
If the strengths of A.I. are truly to be harnessed, the tech industry should stop focusing so heavily on these one-size-fits-all tools and instead concentrate on narrow, specialized A.I. tools engineered for particular problems. Because, frankly, they’re often more effective.”
Points I’ve also been making here several times over the past few months, along with others about the perilous state of the current US economy and how the “Current AI Hype Bubble” could be a disaster for it.
But the question of what is “Artificial General Intelligence”(AGI) is something that has at best had an elusive answer akin to “Shoulder shrug handwaving” and impossible “What ever you want it to be” type statements. It’s something that a group of 33 specialists from 28 institutions have got together to try and address more reasonably,
They come up with,
Definition : AGI is an AI that can match or exceed the cognitive versatility and proficiency of a well-educated adult.”
Which although it sounds profound is actually not that useful.
Because the use of,
“match … Well-educated adult.”
Is not actually a useful measure.
It’s been pointed out that the “use of aids” “dumbs us down” in that it causes us to “loose skills”. I first heard this when I was in school. With first electronic calculators and whilst still in school computers.
Whilst many would argue that it’s not important or even irrelevant, it is true that certain skills are not developed because of the use of aids.
What most do not realise is that those traditional skills that are seen as nolonger worth teaching due to the ubiquitous use of aids, are actually important. Not for what they directly teach, but indirectly teach. That is they give new viewpoints that are force-multiplier tools that enable us to reason in either new ways or to levels we otherwise might not.
At the end of the day the two things that have moved humans forwards over many thousands of years are,
- Stored Knowledge.
- Use knowledge to reason.
They were and still should be the foundations of becoming “Well-educated”.
Sadly as gets often observed these days, producing “Well-educated adults” appears to be nolonger a goal of the education system in a number of Western Nations.
RSAT tools can be installed using the built-in Windows DISM tool. As an example, run the following command in an elevated command prompt to install the RSAT Group Policy Management Tools, RSAT Active Directory Domain Services and Lightweight Directory Services Tools and RSAT DNS Server Tools.
dism /online /add-capability /CapabilityName:Rsat.GroupPolicy.Management.Tools~~~~0.0.1.0 /CapabilityName:Rsat.Dns.Tools~~~~0.0.1.0 /CapabilityName:Rsat.ActiveDirectory.DS-LDS.Tools~~~~0.0.1.0 To administer Active Directory (AD) from Windows, use the Microsoft Remote Server Administration Tools (RSAT). The tools are available for all platforms, Microsoft actively supports.
admin-tools is available as an AppImage which means "one app = one file", which you can download and run on your Linux system while you don't need a package manager and nothing gets changed in your system. Awesome!
AppImages are single-file applications that run on most Linux distributions. Download an application, make it executable, and run! No need to install. No system libraries or system preferences are altered. Most AppImages run on recent versions of Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and other common desktop distributions.
Maxwell Meyer
@mualphaxi
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Bill Gates has jumped ship on climate alarmism.
He says it’s not the end of the world, that temp isn’t the most important metric, and that money is being spent poorly (wow, really??)
This is a white flag from someone who fought hard for an insane set of ideas, and lost.
9:27 AM · Oct 28, 2025 //
Bill Gates has been a key enabler of the climate grift, although hardly the most powerful proponent of it. Despite his reputation as an innovator, he is and always has been more inclined to ride a wave than create one. If he is calling off the climate catastrophe talk, you can be sure that he is merely voicing what many people in his orbit are thinking.
There’s a doomsday view of climate change that goes like this:
In a few decades, cataclysmic climate change will decimate civilization. The evidence is all around us—just look at all the heat waves and storms caused by rising global temperatures. Nothing matters more than limiting the rise in temperature.
Fortunately for all of us, this view is wrong. Although climate change will have serious consequences—particularly for people in the poorest countries—it will not lead to humanity’s demise. People will be able to live and thrive in most places on Earth for the foreseeable future. Emissions projections have gone down, and with the right policies and investments, innovation will allow us to drive emissions down much further.
Unfortunately, the doomsday outlook is causing much of the climate community to focus too much on near-term emissions goals, and it’s diverting resources from the most effective things we should be doing to improve life in a warming world.
It’s not too late to adopt a different view and adjust our strategies for dealing with climate change. Next month’s global climate summit in Brazil, known as COP30, is an excellent place to begin, especially because the summit’s Brazilian leadership is putting climate adaptation and human development high on the agenda.
The idiocy of climate alarmists has been obvious to anybody who paid attention for years, and it is infuriating that people like us have to fight against disastrous policies for years or decades before we are proven right. We don't even get thanks or credit for being right, and the idiots don't get punished for being perpetually wrong. As with COVID, it's forgive and forget for the elites.
Imagine if we had built a hundred more nuclear power plants, or two hundred, since the 1980s. But no, the fearmongers stopped us, and the result is that we have spent decades trying to restart an industry that we killed for no reason other than alarmism.
It's not until the damage is done, is obvious, and the bill is outrageously high that people move on. Germany, soon enough, will do an about-face on energy or simply wither away, but if and when they do, they will have to rebuild the nuclear plants they destroyed and work mightily to lure back any industries that might take the risk.
The damage was completely avoidable. We told them so. We jumped up and down. Showed the evidence. Took apart the models. Put things in context. Held conferences. Endured ridicule and censorship. //
So yes, we are winning this battle. But we will have to fight the dead-enders for years and rebuild what they have destroyed.
In my USAF C-141 flying years, I often flew NASA support missions to Ascension Island. It’s a joint RAF/USAF base deep in the South Atlantic. It’s a spit of an island whose landscape looks like the Moon — pockmarked volcanic rock and beaches, an undulating runway often populated with sheep or cattle, a mountain peak reaching into the clouds named “Green Mountain” — with some locals and some military/NASA personnel. It’s a beautiful little island with some amazing history. We’d typically fly from Charleston AFB, SC, to Patrick AFB, FL, then on to Antigua for gas (and a cheeseburger), and then the long flight south to the remote island. We called it “the world’s longest straight in.” After takeoff, you flew the same course all the way to the runway. Often late at night.
It’s still legal to pick locks, even when you swing your legs.
“Opening locks” might not sound like scintillating social media content, but Trevor McNally has turned lock-busting into online gold. A former US Marine Staff Sergeant, McNally today has more than 7 million followers and has amassed more than 2 billion views just by showing how easy it is to open many common locks by slapping, picking, or shimming them.
This does not always endear him to the companies that make the locks. //
Wheels Of Confusion Ars Legatus Legionis
16y
73,932
Subscriptor
The company claimed to have this case locked up from the start, but it was picked apart embarrassingly quickly.
By any measure, Melissa is an extraordinary and catastrophic storm.
By strengthening overnight and then maintaining its incredible intensity of 185 mph, Melissa has tied the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935 as the most powerful hurricane to strike a landmass in the Atlantic Basin, which includes the United States, Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands.
Melissa also tied the Labor Day storm, which struck the Florida Keys, as the most intense storm at landfall, measured by central pressure at 892 millibars.
Overall, Melissa is tied for the second strongest hurricane, measured by winds, ever observed in the Atlantic basin, behind only Hurricane Allen and its 190 mph winds in 1980. Only Hurricane Wilma (882 millibars) and Gilbert (888 millibars) have recorded lower pressures at sea. //
Robin-3 Ars Scholae Palatinae
3y
953
Subscriptor
Hurricane Melissa made landfall in southwestern Jamaica, near New Hope, on Tuesday at 1 pm ET with staggeringly powerful sustained winds of 185 mph. [...] The only mitigating factor is that the storm’s strongest winds are blowing across a relatively confined area, about 20 miles across.
Sustained winds of 185 mph (or nearly) in a 20-mile-wide swath.
For comparison, that's the speed you'd see in a mid-level EF-4 ("devastating") tornado... across a 20-mile-wide path. (I imagine the sustained winds will decrease after landfall, but that's a high enough starting point that a significant reduction can still leave them incredibly high.)
Christopher Rollston examines the Qeiyafa Ostracon, Gezer Calendar and other candidates for the oldest known Hebrew inscription
Using letter order in the ancient Hebrew alphabet for clues
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When a single RIF (Radiation Induced Foci) is faced with multiple DSB's (Double Strand Break in DNA), it can end up rejoining the wrong ends, creating a possibly viable misrepair. A few of the viable mutations will escape our immune system, and a few of those could become cancerous.
If double DSB's are the real problem, then dose rate and repair time becomes all important. The probability that a hit will cause a DDSB is proportional to the inventory of still unrepaired DSB's at the time of the hit.3 To over-simplify, if the repair processes can keep up with the damage, and keep that inventory low, we are OK. If the damage rate is higher than the repair rate, the inventory of unrepaired DSB's will build up, and the probability of a DDSB and a misrepair will grow rapidly. //
If we conservatively assume 10 metabolic DSB's per cell-day, and 0.04 DSB's per millisievert then it would take 250 mSv per day to equal the number of DSB's produced by our metabolism. 250 mSv is about 25,000 times normal background radiation. If normal metabolic damage is equivalent to 250 mSv/d, then any damage associated with 2 mSv/d would almost certainly not be detectable. At the same time, it is not surprising that we start to detect harm at 20 or so mSv/d. At that point, the cell is forced to deal with a substantially higher than normal number of DSB's. ///
Nature has equipped us with a remarkably effective DNA repair system. She had to do this because our O2 based metabolism damages our DNA at a rate that is more than 25,000 times the damage rate from average background radiation.
We begin our Christian life by believing what we are told to believe, then we have to go on to so assimilate our beliefs that they work out in a way that redounds to the glory of God. The danger is in multiplying the acceptation of beliefs we do not make our own.
Conformed to His Image, 381 L
Jesus Christ did not say — “Go and save souls” (the salvation of souls is the supernatural work of God), but — “Go and teach,” i.e., disciple, “all nations,” and you cannot make disciples unless you are a disciple yourself. When the disciples came back from their first mission, they were filled with joy because the devils were subject to them, and Jesus said — “Don’t rejoice in successful service; the great secret of joy is that you are rightly related to Me.” The great essential of the missionary is that he remains true to the call of God, and realises that his one purpose is to disciple men and women to Jesus.
It’s always DNS
Amazon said the root cause of the outage was a software bug in software running the DynamoDB DNS management system. The system monitors the stability of load balancers by, among other things, periodically creating new DNS configurations for endpoints within the AWS network. A race condition is an error that makes a process dependent on the timing or sequence events that are variable and outside the developers’ control. The result can be unexpected behavior and potentially harmful failures.
In this case, the race condition resided in the DNS Enactor, a DynamoDB component that constantly updates domain lookup tables in individual AWS endpoints to optimize load balancing as conditions change. As the enactor operated, it “experienced unusually high delays needing to retry its update on several of the DNS endpoints.” While the enactor was playing catch-up, a second DynamoDB component, the DNS Planner, continued to generate new plans. Then, a separate DNS Enactor began to implement them.
The timing of these two enactors triggered the race condition, which ended up taking out the entire DynamoDB.
The man’s family told doctors that, up until a few months prior, he had been taking three different types of herbal supplements that claim to treat joint pain. The man had taken the supplements for four years, and sometimes as often as four times a day, but he had stopped using them in the lead-up to his illness.
Deadly doses
The supplements were: Artri King, Nhan Sam Tuyet Lien, and Linsen Double Caulis Plus. All are known to contain unlisted glucocorticoids, according to the Food and Drug Administration. And testing of two of the man’s supplements by the hospital confirmed the presence of the steroids.
Doctors determined that the man had essentially overdosed on the glucocorticoids—he had taken doses that exceeded the normal levels of glucocorticoids in the body. The steroids likely suppressed immune responses, leading to his infections and GI ulcers. But, more significantly, the excess steroid levels also caused his HPA axis to essentially shut down. While it’s possible to get the HPA axis back up and running after withdrawal from excessive steroid use, the amount of time that takes can vary. Further, if a person stops taking large doses of glucocorticoids abruptly, rather than gradually—as in the man’s case—and particularly after chronic use—also as in the man’s case—it can lead to an adrenal crisis. In retrospect, the man had all the signs of a crisis.
If we ID the DNA for a great antibody, anyone can now make it. //
knowing what antibodies we’d like to see people making while having no way of ensuring that they do.
One of the options we’ve developed is to just mass-produce broadly neutralizing antibodies and inject them into people. This has been approved for use against Ebola and provided an early treatment during the COVID pandemic. This approach has some practical limitations, though. For starters, the antibodies have a finite life span in the bloodstream, so injections may need to be repeated. In addition, making and purifying enough antibodies in bulk isn’t the easiest thing in the world, and they generally need to be kept refrigerated during the distribution, limiting the areas where they can be used.
So, a number of companies have been looking at an alternative: getting people to make their own. This could potentially lead to longer-lived protection, even ensuring the antibodies are present to block future infections if the DNA survives long enough.