The BDS National Committee (BNC) has decided to make Microsoft a “priority target” to pressure the company to end its support for Israel’s war effort, after revelations that its AI and cloud services have been heavily used in the genocidal assault, organizers told Drop Site News. Two Microsoft employees fired for their activism, Abdo Mohamed and Hossam Nasr, played key roles in driving the BNC’s decision. The pair organized a vigil outside the company’s headquarters in 2024. The committee is asking all those who have taken its pledge to take three concrete steps 1. Cancel your Xbox Game Pass subscription 2. Boycott Candy Crush, Minecraft, and Call of Duty—flagship videogame franchises owned by Microsoft 3. Boycott all Microsoft Gaming products, including Xbox-branded consoles, headsets, accessories, and all games published by Microsoft-owned publishing labels (such as Xbox Game Studios, Activision, Bethesda and Blizzard)

In mid-March, Google announced that it was paying the staggering sum of $32 billion for the acquisition of the Israeli cloud-computing security company Wiz. The acquisition, pending regulatory approval, will be the largest ever of an Israeli firm. “Organizations of all sizes—from start-ups and large enterprises to governments and public sector organizations—can use Wiz to protect everything they build and run in the cloud,” Google said in a statement announcing the acquisition. The statement added that Wiz would join Google Cloud, but that the Tel Aviv-based company’s security services would still be available across other cloud platforms used by major firms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud. What was left unsaid in Google’s announcement, however, were the personal backgrounds of its four founders. The co-founders of Wiz—Yinon Costica, Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik—are all veterans of Unit 8200, the signals intelligence division of the Israeli military, which is playing a key role in helping to carry out Israel’s wars in Gaza and Lebanon.

Israel’s use of artificial intelligence (AI) in its ongoing assault on the Gaza Strip – aided by tech giants such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon – is fueling concerns over the normalization of mass civilian casualties and raising serious questions about the complicity of these firms in potential war crimes, according to a leading AI expert. Multiple reports have confirmed that Israel has deployed AI models such as Lavender, Gospel, and Where’s Daddy? to conduct mass surveillance, identify targets, and direct strikes against tens of thousands of individuals in Gaza – often in their own homes – all with minimal human oversight. Rights groups and experts say these systems have played a critical role in Israel’s incessant and apparently indiscriminate attacks, which have laid to waste massive swaths of the besieged enclave and killed more than 50,000 Palestinians, mostly women and children.

Muslim marriage app Salams has come under fire after users highlighted that it was acquired by the Match Group, with many accusing its CEO, Spencer Rascoff, of being ‘pro-Israel’. Dozens of people on social media sites such as X and Reddit have called for Muslims to boycott the app, after a post from Rascoff’s LinkedIn page appeared to show support for Israeli soldiers. Rascoff, who has worked for Match Group since March 2024, wrote a post on LinkedIn stating: "Proud to support Ohana co-founders Jacob Ian Halbert and Ezra Gershanok’s campaign to help cover rent bills for Israeli soldiers fighting overseas."

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/28025426 > The European Chips Act has set ambitious goals and its implementation is a significant pan-european effort. From an academic perspective, last year we published an open letter emphasizing the critical importance of open-source EDA for academia in Europe. We were excited and grateful to see that this initiative triggered the definition of a European roadmap in this area, and a matching Chips JU call for project funding. We believe that the projects funded by this call will have a significant impact. Moreover, we already see rising interest from many EU stakeholders, with increasing investments into open-source chip design, especially in open source IP development (e.g. RISC-V cores), and open source EDA tools. > > One additional critical barrier remains toward the end-goal of building real open-source chips, especially for prototyping and education: namely, streamlining the access to open source chip production facilities (foundries) is essential. Programs like ChipIgnite, Tiny Tapeout and IHP’s open source program have become “guiding stars” that demonstrate that everyone with a computer can build chips. We believe that having low-cost, regular and easy access to chip production is critical to create excitement and build up expertise, widening the pool of chip designers with tape-out experience: a true silicon democratization and a further de-mystification of chip design.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/59956144 > * MediaTek Filogic 880 processor > * 1 x 10 Gigabit SFP port > * 1 x 5 Gigabit Ethernet port > * 4 x 2.5 GbE Ethernet port > * 1 or 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports > * WiFi 7 (tri-band) > > > OpenWrt Two is expected to sell for around $250 when it hits the streets in late 2025

[\#HP](https://misskey.social/tags/HP) [#laptop](https://misskey.social/tags/laptop) won't turn on except for BIOS Update I am having some issues with an HP 250 G8 laptop (4K803EA). The pc, when turned on, has the LED on but stays on a black screen. I opened the computer, and noticed that the fan spins for a few seconds after pressing the power button but then stops. I tried swapping ram with a working one taken from another laptop but nothing happens. The only thing that seems working is the HP Bios Update utility, that I can open turning on the pc while pressing Windows + B keys, as described on HP website. It seems to complete flashing the bios with no errors, but then still no boot. I tried putting the bios files on a USB drive as well. Any clue on how to solve this? Thanks. [\#help](https://misskey.social/tags/help) [#computer](https://misskey.social/tags/computer) [#techhelp](https://misskey.social/tags/techhelp) [@[email protected]](https://lemmy.ml/c/technology)

* https://arxiv.org/html/2502.07640v2 * https://arxiv.org/html/2502.00212v4 * https://arxiv.org/html/2501.18310v1 The benchmarks to follow are * https://paperswithcode.com/sota/automated-theorem-proving-on-minif2f-test * https://trishullab.github.io/PutnamBench/leaderboard.html

https://archive.ph/OFC1I

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/59805188

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/59940139

>There's nothing like retro gaming on the Raspberry Pi but we haven't quite seen a gaming rig like this. Leave it to the Pi community to blow our minds and expectations out of the water. This project, created by maker and developer John Park is using our favorite SBC — the Raspberry Pi 5 — to drive a cool wall arcade featuring RGB LED matrix panels as the main display. >According to Park, this setup doesn't just look the part. You can actually play games on the system like a real arcade using wired USB controllers. That said, you're limited by the display capabilities of the matrix panel display. It can run demos with cool retro-style animations but also play a few homebrew games that are created using the PICO-8 Fantasy console.

Google employees and human rights groups have raised concerns about the tech giant’s purchase of an Israeli start-up in an unprecedented $32bn deal. Google on Tuesday announced the all-cash acquisition of Wiz, an Israeli cloud security firm which was founded by former members of Unit 8200, an elite Israeli army cyber-espionage and surveillance unit. The deal comes with the Google already facing internal and external pressure over its controversial Project Nimbus contract, through which along with Amazon it provides cloud computing and AI services to the Israeli government and military. A spokesperson for No Tech for Apartheid, a coalition of Google and Amazon workers campaigning against the companies' involvement with Israel, said Google was "playing with fire" by buying Wiz.

Humanity was up to some pretty dumb stuff in the 20th century. There’s comfort in one fact: Overall, society appears to be slowly getting smarter. Through the decades and across most of the world, people’s scores on IQ tests were slowly improving. Scientists dubbed this the Flynn effect, the phenomenon of the substantial and consistent rise in average IQ scores. Unfortunately, it appears to be reversing. Not only does the century-long long climb in IQ scores seem to be over, but new evidence also suggests society is actually getting dumber. And many experts suspect phones are to blame. The end of the Flynn effect. To be clear, worries about the end of the Flynn effect predate the widespread use of smartphones. One huge data set, involving IQ tests given to basically every man in Norway over decades, shows intelligence starting to decline there from the 1970s, so much so that each generation appeared to lose around seven IQ points. This drop even occured within single families, suggesting it didn’t have anything to do with shifting demographics. Something in the environment appeared to be the culprit, though no one could agree on what. Diet, lack of exercise, pollution, and outsourcing your memory to Google have all been suggested as possible culprits. Some argued the phenomenon was unique to Norway and reflected the country’s successful project, largely completed by the ’70s, to get everyone a quality education. While demographers and psychologists debated the numbers out of Norway, history and research rolled on. Now, a whole new set of evidence for declining brain power has emerged. This time it’s global and shows an inflection point just about the same time everyone got their hands on a smartphone. There’s evidence your phone is making you dumber. John Burn-Murdoch, a columnist and the chief data reporter for the Financial Times, gathered the latest batch of evidence that says humanity is getting dumber and phones are to blame. The data was shared in a Twitter (aka X) thread and a fascinating (though paywalled) Financial Times article. The first worrying data he cites comes from Programme for International Student Assessment, a worldwide study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. The set of tests studied 15-year-old teenagers around the world to benchmark their performance in reading, mathematics, and science. You will likely have heard that teenagers’ academic abilities fell sharply after Covid-related school closures. But Burn-Murdoch notes that scores on the test actually peaked in 2012, which is right around when smartphone use became widespread. They’ve been falling steeply since. Say goodbye to long-form reading and your concentration. How about teens’ concentration and focus? That’s not looking great either. The long-running Monitoring the Future survey of 18-year-olds “finds a steep rise in the percent of people struggling to concentrate or learn new things,” Burn-Murdoch tweets. Teens’ reading habits reflect their shortened attention spans too. The number of U.S. teens who report reading books for leisure has tanked since the early 2010s. Today, nearly half of teens say they “hardly ever” read books in their leisure time. Fifteen years ago the number was more like 35 percent. (Here’s a deeper dive into what giving up long-form reason does to your brain.) Are adults doing much better? Burn-Murdoch points to another survey of mathematical reasoning showing the number of adults in a variety of high-income countries who can’t use basic math skills to assess simple statements has climbed 25 percent over the past several decades. All in all, it’s a pretty gloomy picture of the ability to retain and synthesize complex information (aka, one crucial form of intelligence). Burn-Murdoch is pretty clear about where he lays the blame. It’s not the phones themselves that are making people dumber, he writes, but the way people use them. “We have moved from finite web pages to infinite, constantly refreshed feeds and a constant barrage of notifications. We no longer spend as much time actively browsing the web and interacting with people we know. Instead, we are presented with a torrent of content,” he writes in the Financial Times. This firehose of short, disjointed, context-less information is undermining the ability to focus and think. As a result, people are effectively dumber. It’s possible to build a world that doesn’t make you dumber. On the one hand, That’s alarming if you’re a phone-owning entrepreneur hoping to keep your brain sharp for the sake of your business and your life. But on the other hand, there is at least a sliver of optimism here. No one thinks human brains have fundamentally changed in a couple of decades. Evolution doesn’t work that fast. What’s causing these observed declines in intelligence isn’t the machinery in your heads, but the world humanity has built. If humanity has built it this way, it certainly has the capacity to tear down the bad parts and build something better. Entrepreneurs are in the business of building new, better worlds. So even if the fact that phones are making the world dumber is depressing, it’s important to face it. Acknowledging just how much scrolling habits affect thinking might encourage society to build tech products and personal lifestyles that get the best out of your brain instead of making you dumber.