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schwit1 shares a report from the New York Times: Pete Kayll, a musclebound veteran of Britain's Royal Marines, had an unusual instruction for the Bitcoin investors gathered in Switzerland in late October. "Just bite your way out," he told them. It was the final day of a weekend-long cryptocurrency convention on the shore of Lake Lugano, near the Italian border. A small group of investors had lined up in a conference room to have their hands bound with plastic zipties. Now they were learning how to get them off. "Your teeth will get through anything," Mr. Kayll advised. "But it will bloody well hurt." Most people don't go to an international crypto conference expecting to learn how to gnaw through plastic. But after hours of panels devoted to topics like Bitcoin-collateralized loans, these investors were looking for something more practical. They wanted to know what to do if they were grabbed on the street and thrown into the back of a van. Already paranoid about scams, hacks and market turmoil, wealthy crypto investors have lately become terrified about a much graver threat: torture and kidnapping. These threats are known as "wrench attacks," which is a reference to a popular XKCD cartoon where a thief skips the hacking and just uses a wrench to force out the password. According to the NYT, the best way to stay protected is staying low-profile, minimizing visible signs of wealth, using basic physical security tools, and preparing for self-defense. The report specifically recommends avoiding flashy displays of wealth like luxury watches and cars, watching for honey-traps, using hotel door stoppers, practicing escape techniques such as breaking zip-ties, hiring discreet bodyguards, and relying on panic-button apps like Glok to summon help quickly.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox 145: A Major Release with 32-Bit Linux Support Dropped  Linux Journal

How to View and Monitor Log Files in Linux  TechRepublic

Warren Buffett will step down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of 2025, which also means he will no longer write the Annual Shareholder Letter and take questions at the Annual Shareholder’s Meeting which have become so famous. Instead, he is transitioning to an annual “Thanksgiving Letter”, of which the first one just came out. I am happy that he has found another way to communicate with Berkshire Shareholders.

As always, I recommend reading it directly as his writing style is unique and also (relatively) concise. Mostly, the highlights below are a personal exercise to process and help internalize the wisdom shared.

In the first part of the letter, he reminisces about his long life and shows gratitude for the many lucky events that broke his way, starting with an emergency appendectomy as a child.

As he has reminded us in past letters, nearly everyone reading his writing has had multiple lucky breaks already. Buffett notes that he was “born in 1930 healthy, reasonably intelligent, white, male and in America.” Think about each of those individually. We have no control over them. Imagine being born with an incurable genetic disease or in a struggling country constantly ravaged by war.

In the second part, he talks about accelerating his charitable giving plans so that his children can put it to good use. I always find it interesting how Buffett hasn’t been more active at directing his enormous donations towards specific purposes, even though it’s also a way of “investing” his money. I wonder if it is because it’s so hard to measure the true impact of giving. There is no clear, numerical scorecard like share price or annualized return.

In the third part, he addresses the future of Berkshire Hathaway. From what I can see, Buffett has done a careful and thorough job of making sure his life’s “painting” is in good hands. Greg Abel looks to have all the right talents and skills to be the new boss. Ajit Jain and the rest look to be good fits and not in search of fame or power.

As a company, Berkshire remains designed to provide a very high chance of solid returns, a low chance of amazingly-high returns, and the lowest-possible chance of disaster (if BRK falls, nothing else is standing either). I plan to hold my Berkshire shares through this transition, and I hope the culture remains.

Finally, he concludes with some timeless life advice: don’t dwell on your mistakes, keep trying to improve yourself, be kind to others.

Linux Foundation calls for cryptographic agility ahead of the quantum era  The Asian Banker

Linux Foundation calls for cryptographic agility ahead of the quantum era  The Asian Banker

UC Berkeley researchers working with Project CETI discovered that sperm whales produce vowel-like sounds embedded in their click codas, suggesting a far more complex communication system than previously understood. "It was striking just how structured the system was. I've never seen anything like that before with other animals," Begus, a UC Berkeley linguistics professor and the linguistics lead at Project CETI, told SFGATE. "We're showing the world that there's more than meets the eye in sperm whales and that, if one cares to look closely, they're not as alien. We're much more similar to each other than we used to think." SFGATE reports: With the help of a machine-learning model to identify patterns, Begus and his team combed through recordings collected from social units of sperm whales off the coast of the island of Dominica between 2005 and 2018. When they sped up the audio, removing the silences between clicks, they heard new patterns. They found acoustic properties that share similarities with two vowels -- a and i -- and several vowel combinations. "Before, people were looking just at the timing and the number of clicks exchanged between sperm whales, but now we have to look at the frequencies, too. A whole new set of patterns have appeared," Begus said. "Now, it's one of the most complex non-human communication systems we have observed." [...] Begus said the research only shows how much more we have to learn about whales' style of communicating. He is particularly interested in exploring how the system may differ for whales between regions and how whale babies learn to communicate in this way. Most importantly, he wants to understand the meaning behind the sounds, as a "window into whale thoughts and lives." The research was published in the journal Open Mind.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico. This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into the poorly understood life cycles of hundreds of species of butterflies, bees and other flying insects at a time when many are in steep decline. The breakthrough is the result of a tiny solar-powered radio tag that weighs just 60 milligrams and sells for $200. Researchers have tagged more than 400 monarchs this year and are now following their journeys on a cellphone app created by the New Jersey-based company that makes the tags, Cellular Tracking Technologies. Most monarchs weigh 500 to 600 milligrams, so each tag-bearing migrator making the transcontinental journey is, by weight, equivalent to a half-raisin carrying three uncooked grains of rice. Researchers are tracking more than 400 tagged monarch butterflies as they fly toward winter colonies in central Mexico. The maps [in the article] follow six butterflies. [...] Tracking the world's most famous insect migration may also have a big social impact, with monarch lovers able to follow the progress of individual butterflies on the free app, called Project Monarch Science. Many of the butterflies are flying over cities and suburbs where pollinator gardens are increasingly popular. Some tracks could even lead to the discovery of new winter hideaways. "There's nothing that's not amazing about this," said Cheryl Schultz, a butterfly scientist at Washington State University and the senior author of a recent study documenting a 22 percent drop in butterfly abundance in North America over a recent 20-year period. "Now we will have answers that could help us turn the tide for these bugs."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

Linux-Ready KSTR-IMX93 SBC Debuts With Wi-Fi 6, Cellular IoT, and 802.15.4 Connectivity  linuxgizmos.com

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A new study from researchers in Australia reveals that the people who never forget faces look "smarter, not harder." In other words, they naturally focus on a person's most distinguishing facial features. "Their skill isn't something you can learn like a trick," explains lead author James Dunn, a psychology researcher at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Sydney. "It's an automatic, dynamic way of picking up what makes each face unique." To see what super-recognizers see, Dunn and his colleagues used eye-tracking technology to reconstruct how people surveyed new faces. They did this with 37 super-recognizers and 68 people with ordinary facial recognition skills, noting where and for how long participants looked at pictures of faces displayed on a computer screen. The researchers then fed the data into machine learning algorithms trained to recognize faces. The algorithms, a type known as deep neural networks, were tasked with deciding if two faces belonged to the same person. "These findings suggest that the perceptual foundations of individual differences in face recognition ability may originate at the earliest stages of visual processing -- at the level of retinal encoding," Dunn and colleagues write in their paper. The findings have been published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I found an immutable Linux distro that never breaks and is effortless to use  ZDNET

Valve engineer who keeps decade-old Radeon GPUs alive on Linux, now pushes for AMDGPU to become the default driver  [H]ard|Forum

Valve engineer who keeps decade-old Radeon GPUs alive on Linux, now pushes for AMDGPU to become the default driver  [H]ard|Forum

Valve engineer who keeps decade-old Radeon GPUs alive on Linux, now pushes for AMDGPU to become the default driver  [H]ard|Forum