“Alternate history, in my opinion, is a more demanding game,” says the author of “Agency” and other science fiction novels, “if only because conventional historical fiction, like history, is itself highly speculative.”

"Regulierte Ausbreitung" versus "konsequente Eindämmung" - diese Strategien stehen sich im Kampf gegen Corona gegenüber. Welcher Weg zerstört mehr von dem, was uns wichtig ist im Leben?

The covid-19 pandemic could leave the world poorer, more divided and less prepared to confront the rapidly rising threat of global warming.

New Jersey, Connecticut, and Kansas are among the states whose unempoyment systems are being overwhelmed with new claims, and the systems run on old computer language that stopped being taught befo…

Want to avoid being seen by person-recognizing camera systems? Wear a shirt printed with a complex, confusing image that looks like a mangled JPG of a crowd scene. The bright adversarial pattern, w…

In time, once this crisis is over, there will be a reckoning. The professions must reflect deeply about their future. In weeks to come, a transformation will continue to take place in the professions that most would have dismissed last year as fanciful. It is hard to believe we will go back to our old ways. For now, though, this should not be our concern. We must do whatever we can to deliver professional services digitally, and quickly, because this will be immeasurably better than the alternative – which is to deliver nothing at all.

In the age of IT automation and self-provisioning, the role of the I&O team comes into question. Principal Analyst Charles Betz provides a detailed outlook on I&O’s future.

Expect an even bigger bloodbath as IT employees at all levels are let go forever.

Im Folgenden erkläre ich, warum Location-Tracking völlig ungeeignet ist, und welche Methoden stattdessen zielführend sein könnten. Wichtig ist immer, Sinn und Ziel einer solchen App nicht aus den Augen zu verlieren:

Wenn bei einer Person zum Zeitpunkt t eine Infektion festgestellt wird, soll sie in der Lage sein, ihre Kontakte der letzen t–14 Tage darüber zu informieren. Nicht mehr, aber auch nicht weniger. Primäres Ziel sollte also sein, die Kontakte reliabel zu erfassen.

I think the effects of COVID-19 will be more drastic than the effects of the terrorist attacks of 9/11: not only with respect to surveillance, but across many aspects of our society. And while many things that would never be acceptable during normal time are reasonable things to do right now, we need to makes sure we can ratchet them back once the current pandemic is over.

Erste Bilanz der Polizei vom Wochenende zeigt: Österreicher waren zu Ostern disziplinierter als eine Woche davor.

Ende März blieben viele Menschen wegen Corona noch brav zu Hause. Doch nun zeigen Handydaten, dass die Bevölkerung von Tag zu Tag mobiler wird - vor allem die ostdeutsche.

Historically, disease outbreaks have happened at a time of social inequality and discord, says science journalist Laura Spinney

Weil sie gegen die Ausgangsbeschränkungen verstoßen hatten, wurden zehn Touristen von der indischen Polizei zum Nachsitzen verdonnert: 500 Mal mussten sie sich schriftlich entschuldigen.

My own dire prophecies failed to adequately predict the future and today I see him as someone far more terrifying

Exclusive: Documents seen by Guardian show tech firms using information to build ‘Covid-19 datastore’

International relations expert warns policy failure could do lasting damage as president insults allies and undermines alliances

A Docker build for Solr, to manage the official Docker hub solr image

Solr is the popular, blazing-fast, open source enterprise search platform built on Apache Lucene™.

A research project I spent time working on during my master’s required me to scrape, index and rerank a largish number of websites. While Google would certainly offer better search results for most of the queries that we were interested in, they no longer offer a cheap and convenient way of creating custom search engines.

This need, along with the desire to own and manage my own data spurred me to set about finding a workflow for retrieving decent results for search queries made against a predefined list of websites. That workflow is described here, providing what I hope shall serve as a useful reference for how to go about setting up a small search engine using free and open-source tools.

Note:
• The instructions here assume that you use some UNIX-like operating system (Linux, MacOS, *BSD).
• Any Python code has only been tested using Python 3.7 (The clock is ticking).
• Any code provided is free to use under the MIT license.