Month: July 2024
I renewed my US passport in a single week with the government’s speedy online beta
Perhaps you’ve heard you can now renew your US passport online. As long as you meet certain requirements, there’s a beta website for that. The State Department tells me it’s not necessarily faster — but anecdotally, my family just had two of the speediest, most painless experiences we’ve ever had…
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Meta ordered to stop training its AI on Brazilian personal data
Brazil’s data protection authority (ANPD) has banned Meta from training its artificial intelligence models on Brazilian personal data, citing the “risks of serious damage and difficulty to users.” The decision follows an update to Meta’s privacy policy in May in which the social media giant granted itself permission to use…
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Proton just launched a privacy-focused alternative to Google Docs
Proton Docs looks a lot like Google Docs: white pages, formatting toolbar at the top, live indicators showing who’s in the doc with their name attached to a cursor, the whole deal. That’s not especially surprising, for a couple of reasons. First, Google Docs is hugely popular, and there are…
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Impatient for Nvidia’s RTX 5090 to arrive? This ‘frankenGPU’ that’s basically an RTX 4090 Super will whet your appetite nicely
A team of intrepid modders at Teclab have created an RTX 4090 Super, or the equivalent, concocting a kind of ‘frankenGPU’ which is a considerable chunk faster than the stock Lovelace flagship graphics card. You might recall there were rumors flying around for a long while about an RTX 4090…
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How proxies differ from VPNs
On the surface, a proxy server and VPN (virtual private network) seem incredibly similar. Both act as a go-between when establishing connections. Primarily, a proxy and VPN accomplish the same things, and that’s to route internet traffic through a remote server and assign a new IP address, one that’s virtually…
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DJI further diversifies from drones with the Avinox e-bike drive system
With a US ban of its hyper-popular drones more likely than not, DJI has been diversifying into products that won't be affected by the Countering CCP Drones Act, like backup batteries. Now the company is entering the e-bike arena with the Avinox Drive System that will go up against the…
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