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🔗 Human rights 🔗 Russia 🔗 Crime 🔗 Religion 🔗 Islam 🔗 LGBT studies 🔗 Sociology 🔗 Chechnya 🔗 Discrimination 🔗 Correction and Detention Facilities 🔗 Sexology and sexuality

Anti-gay purges in the Chechen Republic, a part of the Russian Federation, have included forced disappearances — secret abductions, imprisonment, torture — and extrajudicial killing by authorities targeting persons based on their perceived sexual orientation. An unknown number of people, who authorities detained on suspicion of being gay or bisexual, have reportedly died after being held in what human rights groups and eyewitnesses have called concentration camps.

Allegations were initially reported on 1 April 2017 in Novaya Gazeta, a Russian-language opposition newspaper, which reported that since February 2017 over 100 men had allegedly been detained and tortured and at least three had died in an extrajudicial killing. The paper, citing its sources in the Chechen special services, called the wave of detentions a "prophylactic sweep". The journalist who first reported on the subject went into hiding. There have been calls for reprisals against journalists who report on the situation.

As news spread of Chechen authorities' actions, which have been described as part of a systematic anti-LGBT purge, Russian and international activists scrambled to evacuate survivors of the camps and other vulnerable Chechens but were met with difficulty obtaining visas to conduct them safely beyond Russia.

The reports of the persecution were met with a variety of reactions worldwide. The Head of the Chechen Republic Ramzan Kadyrov denied not only the occurrence of any persecution but also the existence of gay men in Chechnya, adding that such people would be killed by their own families. Officials in Moscow were skeptical, although in late May the Russian government reportedly agreed to send an investigative team to Chechnya. Numerous national leaders and other public figures in the West condemned Chechnya's actions, and protests were held in Russia and elsewhere. A report released in December 2018 by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) confirmed claims that persecution of LGBT persons had taken place and was ignored by authorities.

On 11 January 2019, it was reported that another 'gay purge' had begun in the country in December 2018, with several gay men and women being detained. The Russian LGBT Network believes that around 40 persons were detained and two killed.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computing/Networking

The Secure Remote Password protocol (SRP) is an augmented password-authenticated key agreement (PAKE) protocol, specifically designed to work around existing patents.

Like all PAKE protocols, an eavesdropper or man in the middle cannot obtain enough information to be able to brute force guess a password without further interactions with the parties for each guess. Furthermore, being an augmented PAKE protocol, the server does not store password-equivalent data. This means that an attacker who steals the server data cannot masquerade as the client unless they first perform a brute force search for the password.

In layman's terms, during SRP (or any other PAKE protocol) authentication, one party (the "client" or "user") demonstrates to another party (the "server") that they know the password, without sending the password itself nor any other information from which the password can be derived. The password never leaves the client and is unknown to the server.

Furthermore, the server also needs to know about the password (but not the password itself) in order to instigate the secure connection. This means that the server also authenticates itself to the client, without reliance on the user parsing complex URLs. This prevents Phishing.

🔗 Biography 🔗 Oregon 🔗 Perl

Randal L. Schwartz (born November 22, 1961), also known as merlyn, is an American author, system administrator and programming consultant.

He is known for his expertise in the Perl programming language, his promotional role within the Perl community, as a co-host of FLOSS Weekly, and for a controversial felony conviction resulting from State of Oregon vs. Randal Schwartz, later officially expunged.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Computer science 🔗 Lists 🔗 History of Science 🔗 Bibliographies 🔗 Bibliographies/Science

This is a list of important publications in computer science, organized by field.

Some reasons why a particular publication might be regarded as important:

• Topic creator – A publication that created a new topic
• Breakthrough – A publication that changed scientific knowledge significantly
• Influence – A publication which has significantly influenced the world or has had a massive impact on the teaching of computer science.

🔗 Computing 🔗 Systems 🔗 Computing/Software 🔗 Systems/Systems engineering

Greenspun's tenth rule of programming is an aphorism in computer programming and especially programming language circles that states:

Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

🔗 Philosophy 🔗 Philosophy/Logic

Abductive logic programming (ALP) is a high-level knowledge-representation framework that can be used to solve problems declaratively based on abductive reasoning. It extends normal logic programming by allowing some predicates to be incompletely defined, declared as abducible predicates. Problem solving is effected by deriving hypotheses on these abducible predicates (abductive hypotheses) as solutions of problems to be solved. These problems can be either observations that need to be explained (as in classical abduction) or goals to be achieved (as in normal logic programming). It can be used to solve problems in diagnosis, planning, natural language and machine learning. It has also been used to interpret negation as failure as a form of abductive reasoning.

🔗 Computing

Koomey's law describes a trend in the history of computing hardware: for about a half-century, the number of computations per joule of energy dissipated doubled about every 1.57 years. Professor Jonathan Koomey described the trend in a 2010 paper in which he wrote that "at a fixed computing load, the amount of battery you need will fall by a factor of two every year and a half."

This trend had been remarkably stable since the 1950s (R² of over 98%). But in 2011, Koomey re-examined this data and found that after 2000, the doubling slowed to about once every 2.6 years. This is related to the slowing of Moore's Law, the ability to build smaller transistors; and the end around 2005 of Dennard scaling, the ability to build smaller transistors with constant power density.

"The difference between these two growth rates is substantial. A doubling every year and a half results in a 100-fold increase in efficiency every decade. A doubling every two and a half years yields just a 16-fold increase", Koomey wrote.

🔗 Technology 🔗 Aviation 🔗 Computing 🔗 Military history 🔗 Military history/Military aviation 🔗 Military history/North American military history 🔗 Military history/United States military history 🔗 Military history/Military science, technology, and theory 🔗 Aviation/aircraft 🔗 Military history/World War II

The Norden Mk. XV, known as the Norden M series in U.S. Army service, is a bombsight that was used by the United States Army Air Forces (USAAF) and the United States Navy during World War II, and the United States Air Force in the Korean and the Vietnam Wars. It was an early tachometric design that directly measured the aircraft's ground speed and direction, which older bombsights could only estimate with lengthy manual procedures. The Norden improved on older designs by using an analog computer that continuously recalculated the bomb's impact point based on changing flight conditions, and an autopilot that reacted quickly and accurately to changes in the wind or other effects.

Together, these features promised unprecedented accuracy for daytime bombing from high altitudes. During prewar testing the Norden demonstrated a circular error probable (CEP) of 75 feet (23 m), an astonishing performance for that period. This accuracy would enable direct attacks on ships, factories, and other point targets. Both the Navy and the USAAF saw it as a means to conduct successful high-altitude bombing. For example, an invasion fleet could be destroyed long before it could reach U.S. shores. To protect these advantages, the Norden was granted the utmost secrecy well into the war, and was part of a production effort on a similar scale as the Manhattan Project. Carl L. Norden, Inc. ranked 46th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts.

Under combat conditions the Norden did not achieve its expected accuracy, yielding an average CEP in 1943 of 1,200 feet (370 m), similar to other Allied and German results. Both the Navy and Air Forces had to give up using pinpoint attacks. The Navy turned to dive bombing and skip bombing to attack ships, while the Air Forces developed the lead bomber procedure to improve accuracy, and adopted area bombing techniques for ever larger groups of aircraft. Nevertheless, the Norden's reputation as a pin-point device endured, due in no small part to Norden's own advertising of the device after secrecy was reduced late in the war.

The Norden's secrecy had already been compromised by espionage before the United States entered the war. As early as January 1941, the Germans introduced a lightened derivative of the Norden called the Carl Zeiss Lotfernrohr 7 as the primary bombsight for most Luftwaffe level bombers and the first of its bombsights to have gyroscopic stabilization.

The Norden saw reduced use in the post-World War II period after radar-based targeting was introduced, but the need for accurate daytime attacks kept it in service, especially during the Korean War. The last combat use of the Norden was in the U.S. Navy's VO-67 squadron, which used them to drop sensors onto the Ho Chi Minh Trail as late as 1967. The Norden remains one of the best-known bombsights ever invented.

🔗 Biography

Daniel D. McCracken (July 23, 1930 – July 30, 2011) was a computer scientist in the United States. He was a Professor of Computer Sciences at the City College of New York, and the author of over two dozen textbooks on computer programming, with an emphasis on guides to programming in widely used languages such as Fortran and COBOL. His A Guide to Fortran Programming (Wiley, 1961) and its successors were the standard textbooks on that language for over two decades. His books have been translated into fourteen languages.

🔗 Holidays

System Administrator Appreciation Day, also known as Sysadmin Day, SysAdminDay, is an annual event created by system administrator Ted Kekatos. The event exists to show appreciation for the work of sysadmins and other IT workers. It is celebrated on the last Friday in July.