©1998 *Educational CyberPlayGround®
https://edu-cyberpg.com
Sign Up NetHappenings Blog News Headlines Email List
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) sign up ©ECP NetHappenings Blog https://cyberplayground.org
Follow Twitter @CyberPlayGround
©1993 https://k12playground.com
© https://RichAsHell.com
#INTERNET
Twitter Whistleblower Complaint: The TL;DR Version
Lightning Network Graph Visualization
Rogue WHOIS server gives researcher superpowers no one should ever have
A bit of ARPANET history in this piece as well.
https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/rogue-whois-server-gives-researcher-superpowers-no-one-should-ever-have/
I’ve been on the net since 1991 when it became legal for civilians to use it. ~ KE — The Educational CyberPlayGround Inc. ®
PRIVACY POLICY
www.edu-cyberpg.com [with or without the dash] launched 7/9/1998 and ranked #No. 343,304 in the world out of 234,000,000 websites at that time!
.edu = education | cyber = internet | pg = playground for adults.
You can trust the curated information presented in this website.
Over 1500 pages of information, reporting, research, and analysis from 1987 to the present!
45 Years Ago CompuServe Connected the World Before the World Wide Web
Tony Isaac shares a report from WOSU Public Media:Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today. A listener submitted a question to WOSU’s Curious Cbus series wanting to know more about the legacy of CompuServe and what it meant to go online before the Internet. That legacy was recently commemorated by the Ohio History Connection when they installed a historical marker in Upper Arlington — near the corner of Arlington Center and Henderson roads — where the company located its computer center and corporate building in 1973. The plaque explains that CompuServe was “the first major online information service provider,” and that its subscribers were among the first to have access to email, online newspapers and magazines and the ability to share and download files.CompuServe, founded in 1969 in Ohio as a subsidiary of Golden United Life Insurance, began as a computer time-sharing service for businesses. In 1979, it launched an online service for consumers, partnering with RadioShack since they “were key in reaching early computer users.”
FINALLY California law requires schools to limit or prohibit the use of phones by students
Huddle01, Blockchain Video Conferencing Project That Seeks to Outdo Zoom, Targets $37M Node Sale
Purchasers of the nodes could earning rewards for contributing excess internet bandwidth to the network, which aims to reduce latency while providing “censorship-resistant real-time connectivity.”
MrBeast is YouTube’s biggest star – now he faces 54-page lawsuit
#POLITICS
Kamala Harris tells WPR she supports eliminating the filibuster to restore abortion right
State Republican party chairs endorse Kamala Harris for president: ‘Be a patriot’
UK tells Putin: You’re a slave-owning mafia boss
British foreign secretary invokes legacy of slavery as he attacks “imperialism” of Russian leader.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Has a New Plan to Paralyze the Vote Count in a Critical Swing State
“We want the judge to issue arrest warrants”: Haitian group sues over Trump-Vance smear campaign
Huge news. 13 days later, Harper’s has miraculously replied to my half-baked request for comment on their baffling cover. Their email to me: “The Atlantic, owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, is now, in effect, a subsidiary of Apple and a tool of OpenAI…” (Laurene Powell Jobs is the daughter.)
The FTC — yes, the FTC!–is becoming an increasingly important regulator of out of control housing prices.
Imagine a second term Khan under President Harris, with Bedoya and Slaughter, taking all that they’ve done in three +years and building on it–there are so many cheats.
FTC takes action against Invitation Homes for deceiving renters, charging junk fees, withholding security deposits, and employing unfair eviction practices:
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/09/ftc-takes-action-against-invitation-homes-deceiving-renters-charging-junk-fees-withholding-security
How Roy Cohn Helped Rupert Murdoch
https://consortiumnews.com/2016/06/19/how-roy-cohn-helped-rupert-murdoch-2/
In 1 996, Maria Farmer reported Epstein, Maxwell & Wexner to the FBI, yet that report was suppressed, allowing 1 OOS more children to be abused, trafficked, raped & exploited by this pedophile ring for a further 25 years. The FBI is 100% culpable.
Young women now make more money than their male counterparts in several US metro areas including NYC and Washington DC.
BREAKING: In a stunning new leaked video, Project 2025’s Director, Paul Dans, just admitted that if Donald Trump is elected, Trump’s agenda on day 1 will mirror Project 2025’s. This is a huge revelation.
Project 2025 mastermind allegedly told colleagues he killed a [barking] dog with a shovel
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/sep/24/project-2025-kevin-roberts-killed-dog
VP Harris suggested watching Trump’s rallies to see just how weird it can get. We see the wannabe dictator & his supporters calling for legal Haitian immigrants’ deportation. This is repugnant and straight out of the Third Reich. Americans deserve better.
The path to the regaining the House majority might run through these competitive seats/districts in CA. Please volunteer and/or donate.
@RudySalasCA CA-22 https://rudysalas.com
@gtwhitesides CA-27 https://georgewhitesides.com
@WillRollinsCA CA-41 https://secure.actblue.com/donate/willrollins_social_2024io
“Which pipeline companies will benefit from overthrowing Assad.”
a former CIA director, who was on an Advisory Board of a company that wanted to drill in Syria, would call for killing people just to help his own financial interests, right? Right??
Former CIA Director James Woolsey, who signed his name to a letter addressed to President Clinton in 1998 arguing for the Iraq war, appeared on Fox to make the case against Syria. “l think we ought to execute some air
strikes against Syria,” adding, “The last thing we ought to do now is to start talking about cease-fires and the rest.” Watch it.
Genie wanted to drill for oil…in Syria. Black gold under the Golan
Geologists in Israel think they have found oil—in very tricky territory
Genie Energy is an interesting company. Check out their 2015 Theranos-like Advisory Board $GNE: Lawrence Summers, Governor Bill Richardson, Senator Mary Landrieu, R. James Woolsey, Dick Cheney, Lord Jacob Rothschild, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Steinhardt
Montana Voting System Shut Down After Kamala Harris Left Off Ballot
Jan. 6 investigator says he has ‘receipts’ on Clarence and Ginni Thomas
Swazi king picks young new wife
King Mswati of Swaziland has chosen a teenager to be his 13th wife.
#BITCOIN
Nobody alive today has ever seen what we are about to go through in global markets. Nobody.
EDUCATING THE PUBLIC ONLINE FOR OVER 30 YEARS
!!! PSA !!! — YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BUY AN WHOLE BITCOIN.
YOU DO REALIZE YOU CAN BUY A SMALL AMOUNT RIGHT?
THINK ABOUT MAYBE 5.00 A WEEK FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE.
THERE ARE 100 MILLION SATOSHIS = 1 WHOLE BITCOIN
LIKE 100 PENNIES = 1 DOLLAR
TRY TO OWN 0.01 this week.
YOU CAN ALWAYS BUY A BIT JUST A SMALL AMOUNT OF BITCOIN 
WHY WE BITCOIN
How Africans Are Using Bitcoin Without Internet Access
Carrefour Express now accepts Bitcoin payments!
Bitcoin adoption is reaching a new milestone in France. The Carrefour Express in Rouen has just announced that it now accepts Bitcoin payments via the Lightning network. This initiative marks a turning point in the integration of cryptocurrencies by major French retailers.
Congress believes banks should be able to custody. – Michael Saylor
If banks can custody bitcoin, then they will start offering and recommending it to their wealth management clients. If it is offered and recommended as part of a managed portfolio then more people will adopt and hold it. The more people that adopt and hold it, the higher the demand for it. The higher the demand for it the higher the price for those of us holding it. This does not affect our ability to self-custody bitcoin, but would absolutely affect the price in a significant way. While most of those who understand the purpose of bitcoin are going to prefer self-custody, you have to understand that the majority of the population, particularly the older generations, still place a lot of trust in banks/institutions. There are also a lot of people who do not trust themselves with a bitcoin wallet nor their ability to remember a password, especially those who are not chronically online like younger generations are. These are the needed next steps within the consumer adoption chain. Allowing the banks self-custody is also the next step on the institutional adoption chain (changing accounting rules would be even bigger on this chain). The holy grail of the institutional and national adoption chains would be if bitcoin is adopted as a tier 1 reserve asset under the Basel Accords that guide international finance.
BNY Identified as First Bank to Receive SEC Exemption From SAB 121
BNY Mellon: The Key to Bitcoin Custody
Irony: How a Cryptocurrency Fortune Crippled a (MELON) Deceased Billionaire’s Estate
https://www.dailydot.com/debug/death-internet-cryptocurrency-matthew-mellon/
SEC Reveals SAB 121 Exemptions for Crypto Custody
Last Monday, SEC Chief Accountant Paul Munter gave a speech in which he surprisingly revealed that the agency had granted some exemptions to SAB 121, mostly finding that the rule did not apply to certain entities if they met certain conditions. Munter said one exemption had been granted to a bank, several brokerage houses, and other entities that use blockchains to track and transfer traditional financial assets, without specifying the names of any of them.
SAB 121 requires that entities who choose to custody crypto list the assets on their balance sheet and create a corresponding liability equal to the worth of the crypto. (Though it is technically guidance, the General Accounting Office determined that it was a rule.) The crypto and banking industries have strongly criticized this measure as overly burdensome to comply with.
In his speech, Munter outlined situations in which the SEC found SAB 121 did not apply for a bank, brokerage house, or other entities that use blockchains. In the case of the bank, he said, the conditions involved the institution working with a state regulator first to ensure that the crypto assets being custodied would return to the customer in the event of a bankruptcy, and that activity with customers would only comprise institutional custody with sufficient controls in place to manage risk.
Leaked U.S. Government Crypto Strategy: What It Means for Bitcoin and a Bold Price Prediction
Why massive capital inflows could propel Bitcoin beyond $100,000
Large-scale investors await favorable conditions before entering the Bitcoin market, with a price surge expected.
AI agents could be policing all crypto txs within 5 years — Chainalysis CEO
When the next megabank blows up from its derivative exposure, you can add the names Jamie Dimon and Patick McHenry to former Republican Congressmen Randy Hultgren and Kevin Yoder as four of the men who greased the skids for another derivatives banking crisis.
A Wall Street Regulator Is Understating Margin Debt by More than $4 Trillion – Because It’s Not Counting Giant Banks Making Margin Loans to Hedge Funds
#AI
FTC Chair Warns AI Could Be Used to Charge You More
https://www.businessinsider.com/ftc-chair-lina-khan-warns-ai-pricing-discrimination-risks-2024-9
Hollywood is coming out in force for California’s AI safety bill
The “Big Lie” of self-driving taxis — armies of remote control workers unlocked
Hacker tricks ChatGPT into giving out detailed instructions for making homemade bombs
https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/12/hacker-tricks-chatgpt-into-giving-out-detailed-instructions-for-making-homemade-bombs/
Vaibhav (VB) Srivastav @reach_vb
“We ask annotators to describe images in speech for 60 to 90 seconds rather than asking them to write descriptions. We prompt the annotators to describe everything they see in great detail, including descriptions of spatial positioning and relationships.”
This is gold!
Today’s most advanced multimodal models remain pro-
prietary. The strongest open-weight models rely heavily
on synthetic data from proprietary VLMs to achieve good
performance, effectively distilling these closed models into
open ones. As a result, the community is still missing foun-
dational knowledge about how to build performant VLMs
from scratch. We present Molmo, a new family of VLMs that
are state-of-the-art in their class of openness. Our key inno-
vation is a novel, highly detailed image caption dataset col-
lected entirely from human annotators using speech-based
descriptions. To enable a wide array of user interactions,
we also introduce a diverse dataset mixture for fine-tuning
that includes innovative 2D pointing data. The success of
our approach relies on careful choices for the model ar-
chitecture details, a well-tuned training pipeline, and, most
critically, the quality of our newly collected datasets, all of
which will be released. The best-in-class 72B model within
the Molmo family not only outperforms others in the class
of open weight and data models but also compares favor-
ably against proprietary systems like GPT-40, Claude 3.5,
and Gemini 1.5 on both academic benchmarks and human
evaluation.
▓▓▓—▓▓▓—▓▓▓—▓▓▓—▓▓▓—▓▓▓