On Friday, Pennsylvania became the first state to deploy an automated system to seal criminal records for all qualifying formerly incarcerated or arrested people in the state. Though judges in Pennsylvania grant expungement in the manual petition system around 90% of the time, less than 10% of the people who are eligible to have their records sealed actually do. Rebecca Vallas, a senior fellow at the left-leaning Center for American Progress and a co-designer of Pennsylvania’s law, stressed that Clean Slate is just one of several remedies states can pursue.

In his system, each symbol represents a syllable rather than a single phoneme; the 85 (originally 86) characters provide a suitable method to write Cherokee. Some Cherokee words pose a problem for transliteration software because they contain adjacent pairs of single letter symbols that (without special provisions) would be combined when doing the back-conversion from Latin script to Cherokee. [19]

In 1828, the order of the characters in a chart and the shapes of the characters were modified by Cherokee author and editor Elias Boudinot to adapt the syllabary to printing presses.

But with the new Mac Pro unveiled this month being made in China, Apple is “shifting abroad production of what had been its only major device assembled in the US as trade tensions escalate between the Trump administration and Beijing,” The Wall Street Journal reported today. Apple told the Journal that it designs and engineers the new Mac Pro in the US and that the computer includes some US-made components. These pictures from the event (taken by Senior Reviews Editor Samuel Axon) show what the new hardware looks like upon final assembly:

In May 2013, Apple CEO Tim Cook confirmed plans to make a new Mac computer in Texas and said the company would spend $100 million to bring manufacturing stateside.

A window manager for X that is extensible in Guile Scheme

Xlambda currently ships with the following basic functions:

Returns the x coordinate of the top-leftmost pixel of a window (including borders). As there is currently no mouse support, Xlambda must be used with another window manager in order to be useful. On the other hand, if Xlambda is looking to be a practical window manager, the “most abstract” version of it is something I’ve been thinking about for some time now, which I’ve jokingly called the “Window Manager Calculus”.

Of course Stack Exchange/Overflow needs to make money, but this, a huge ad, with no easy way to dismiss, to go question view by default, no way to escape it that’s intuitive, and only the hamburger menu or footer menu, is very bad design. I’ve been a member of Stack Overflow for years, but these are the kind of steps that kind of turn you off and make you consider making your own Q & A site that doesn’t pull these kind of shenanigans without consulting the community. But that’s okay, all companies do that eventually, giving rise to the competition that appeals to the alienated user base.

Combing through the relatively few experts who used the websites just before Conficker C appeared, investigators found the IP address of smartsystem.com.ua — the address of a Ukrainian company that was the recipient of millions swindled by TrafficConverter.biz . Computers at their residences revealed direct links to smartsystem.com.ua, to TrafficConverter.biz and to the coding work and planning behind Conficker. Because fewer victims know how to use such payment methods, the criminals try to make up the gap by raising the ransom fees tenfold from the old credit card days.

End-to-end encrypted messaging is a major issue for law enforcement—as the world shifts from easy to crack (for governments) cellular SMS messaging to various flavors of IP messaging, such as WhatsApp, iMessage, Signal and Wickr, governments are exploring their options. The challenge for governments, the U.S. included, is that the privacy of messaging has become a central theme in the ongoing debate around privacy, data security and information integrity. Earlier this month, a coalition of technology companies, privacy experts and human rights groups published an open response to a discussion document from U.K. spy agency GCHQ that suggested the idea of a ghost protocol to enable “an extra end” in end-to-end encrypted messaging, allowing governments (when required) to listen in.

Enough people have tried to find efficient factoring algorithms that we can be confident the problem isn’t easy, but there’s no reason to think it’s impossible. These functions interpolate between L (n) = nc and L (n) = (log n)c.

Until the 1970’s, the best algorithms known for factoring all had running times of the form L (n) for some constant c. Some people suspected that this was the true complexity of factoring, but in the late 1980’s the number field sieve reduced the running time to L (n).

The “digital economy,” of which the iPhone and its kin have become an integral part, uses about 10 percent of the planet’s total electricity. Year after year, America is now generally using less total steel, copper, gold, fertilizer, water, cropland, timber, paper, and other physical building blocks of an economy. The “gizmo type” items that had vanished into the iPhone Cichon kept in his pocket included a calculator, camcorder, clock radio, mobile telephone, and tape recorder.

Building a community-owned and -operated internet network for all New Yorkers

New York, NY, June 13—Today, NYC Mesh announced the beginning of a massive expansion of its wireless broadband network in Brooklyn, allowing for greater network capacity and opening the door to potential coverage in the neighborhoods of Sunset Park, South Slope, Park Slope, Gowanus, Red Hook, and beyond. This expansion results from the completion of a major new antenna on the NYC Mesh network at Industry City, where NYC Mesh partnered with Pilot Fiber, Inc. About NYC Mesh: NYC Mesh is a community-owned and -operated wireless internet network in New York City with continuous operation since 2013.