Technology

Two sibling contractors convicted a decade ago for hacking into US State Department have once again been charged, this time for a comically hamfisted attempt to steal and destroy government records just minutes after being fired from their contractor jobs.

The Department of Justice on Thursday said that Muneeb Akhter and Sohaib Akhter, both 34, of Alexandria, Virginia, deleted databases and documents maintained and belonging to three government agencies. The brothers were federal contractors working for an undisclosed company in Washington, DC, that provides software and services to 45 US agencies. Prosecutors said the men coordinated the crimes and began carrying them out just minutes after being fired.

The internet was made by us, for us, and we can take it back from the noise.

This is Part 1 of a new series I'm starting to help make the internet quieter, break free of doomscrolling, and bring intentionality to how we use our devices. If you enjoyed this piece, please share your feedback or share it! Thank you!

A typical data centre now requires significant, concentrated power—sometimes equivalent to the needs of tens of thousands of homes. As the sector expands, these large, site-specific demands can add pressure to local parts of the grid and create challenges for connecting new developments. These pressures make it harder and more costly to bring forward new homes, with implications for London’s wider economic growth and its ability to meet housing targets.

Found from Bruce Shneier's blog. This model is free, ad-free, privacy respecting, and likely to stay that way. If you or folks you know are heavily using GPT, and likely to be hurt when it starts introducing ads (and otherwise enshittifying) soon, do make sure they know there are alternatives like this.

This particular chat model uses a system prompt chosen by the swiss government, with the intention of providing LLM access as a public utility (like a library). I believe models are intentionally trained on ethical datasets (see the details of Aptertus here), with an effort towards sustainable energy use.

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