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Il Futuro dei Call Center nelle Filippine: Cosa faranno gli impiegati una volta superati dai Chatbot?


Mentre il mondo discute ancora dell’impatto dell’intelligenza artificiale (AI) sull’occupazione, i lavoratori dei call center nelle Filippine stanno già vivendo le conseguenze di questa trasformazione. Il Paese, noto come “capitale mondiale dei call center”, si trova ora a fronteggiare una nuova minaccia: la sostituzione dei lavoratori umani con robot e algoritmi avanzati.

Le grandi multinazionali, spinte dalla necessità di ridurre i costi e aumentare l’efficienza, stanno progressivamente implementando tecnologie AI nei loro servizi di outsourcing, mettendo a rischio fino a 300.000 posti di lavoro nel settore BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) filippino nei prossimi cinque anni. Tuttavia, questa rivoluzione tecnologica potrebbe anche creare nuove opportunità, con la previsione di 100.000 nuovi impieghi in aree come l’addestramento di algoritmi e la gestione dei dati.

Un esempio significativo di questa transizione è Christopher Bautista, un veterano del settore dei call center, che ha visto il suo lavoro essere gradualmente sostituito da soluzioni AI più economiche ed efficienti. Nonostante ciò, il numero complessivo di dipendenti nel settore continua a crescere, almeno per ora. La sfida, come sottolineato dagli esperti, è preparare adeguatamente i lavoratori per questa nuova era, garantendo che possano adattarsi e prosperare in un contesto lavorativo sempre più dominato dalla tecnologia.

L’intelligenza artificiale sta già dimostrando il suo potenziale nelle Filippine, con aziende come [24]7.ai che utilizzano chatbot avanzati per formare i nuovi dipendenti e ridurre i tempi di addestramento da tre mesi a poche settimane. Allo stesso tempo, multinazionali come Concentrix stanno sperimentando assistenti AI che monitorano e analizzano le conversazioni in tempo reale, evidenziando il crescente ruolo dell’automazione nei processi aziendali.

Il governo filippino ha risposto a queste sfide con iniziative volte a migliorare le competenze degli 1,7 milioni di lavoratori del settore, ma rimane ancora molta strada da fare. La necessità di aggiornare rapidamente le competenze è evidente, con figure di spicco come Arsenio Balisacan, capo dell’Autorità Nazionale per l’Economia e lo Sviluppo, che avvertono: “Se non aggiorni le tue competenze, l’AI ti sostituirà.”

Nonostante le preoccupazioni, il futuro non è del tutto oscuro. Le Filippine potrebbero diventare un esempio di come un Paese può adattarsi e prosperare durante una rivoluzione tecnologica, se saprà cogliere le opportunità offerte dall’intelligenza artificiale.

Conclusione

L’intelligenza artificiale sta rapidamente cambiando il volto del settore dei call center nelle Filippine, con implicazioni significative per il futuro dell’occupazione. Il Paese si trova a un bivio, dove rischi e opportunità coesistono. Prepararsi adeguatamente e adattarsi alla nuova realtà sarà essenziale per garantire che i lavoratori filippini possano continuare a prosperare in un mondo tecnologicamente sempre più avanzato.

L'articolo Il Futuro dei Call Center nelle Filippine: Cosa faranno gli impiegati una volta superati dai Chatbot? proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.



Inside a Portable Satellite Dish


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Like many of us, [Gabe] has things he just can’t stop buying. In his case, it is portable satellite dishes. You’ve seen these. They look like a dome or maybe a hard hat on some kind of motorized base. What’s in them? What can you do with them? Watch the video below and find out.

As [Gabe] points out, you can often find these on the surplus market for very little money. You can sometimes find them on the side of the road for free, too. Although we’ve never been that lucky.

The video shows three generations of Winegard antennas. It shows what’s inside and how to command them. Of course, the obvious use for these is as an antenna. But we also were thinking they’d make a fair motion base for something, too.

Some of the antennas lack any limit switches. On startup, the system spins until it grinds the plastic gears to find its travel limits. We expect that’s not good for the gears, but it does work. [Gabe] mentions it might be a bit of planned obsolescence, but we imagine it is more of a cost-saving measure.

Junkyards are a frequent source for satellite gear, apparently. Dishes have lots of other uses, too.

youtube.com/embed/6kQa6nfUkIs?…


hackaday.com/2024/09/19/inside…



Pixel contro il Cancro! Come le AI migliorano la risposta al trattamento al cancro al polmone


I ricercatori dell’Università di Colonia hanno sviluppato un’innovativa piattaforma che utilizza l’intelligenza artificiale (AI) per analizzare il tessuto polmonare e diagnosticare il cancro. Il progetto è stato guidato dal dottor Yuri Tolkach e dal professor Reinhard Büttner della Facoltà di Medicina e dell’Ospedale Universitario di Colonia.

La piattaforma sviluppata utilizza algoritmi per analizzare automaticamente sezioni di tessuto di pazienti affetti da cancro ai polmoni. Il cancro al polmone è uno dei tipi di cancro più comuni e mortali. Il cancro polmonare non a piccole cellule (NSCLC) rappresenta oltre l’80% di tutti i tumori polmonari ed è considerato il secondo tipo più comune e mortale di cancro epiteliale.
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Il successo del trattamento dipende in gran parte da un accurato esame patologico, in cui i patologi analizzano biopsie e campioni di resezione. L’introduzione dell’intelligenza artificiale può ottimizzare significativamente questo processo. Il dottor Tolkach osserva: “I nuovi strumenti non solo possono migliorare la qualità della diagnosi, ma anche fornire nuovi tipi di informazioni sulla malattia di un paziente, come la sua risposta al trattamento”.

Gli scienziati hanno addestrato l’intelligenza artificiale sul più grande set di dati di alta qualità disponibile, consentendo alla tecnologia di analizzare rapidamente campioni bioptici, segmentando accuratamente 11 tipi di tumore e tessuto benigno a livello di pixel.

Lo studio, pubblicato sulla rivista Cell Reports Medicine, dimostra due applicazioni chiave per lo strumento:

  1. Creazione di un modello accurato per identificare i tipi di NSCLC, testato e convalidato con i dati dei pazienti provenienti da più ospedali.
  2. Identificazione di quattro marcatori misurabili in campioni di tessuto che aiutano a prevedere la progressione del cancro e la sopravvivenza del paziente.

Inoltre, i ricercatori hanno pubblicato tre set di dati per supportare la ricerca globale sul cancro al polmone e lo sviluppo di algoritmi. Il team prevede di continuare gli studi di validazione in collaborazione con cinque istituti di patologia in Germania, Austria e Giappone.

L'articolo Pixel contro il Cancro! Come le AI migliorano la risposta al trattamento al cancro al polmone proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.



2024 SAO Contest: The Jolly Tagger Is a Golden Way to Share Info


A golden Jolly Wrencher SAO that works as an NFC tag for sharing contact info.

For this contest, we’re asking you to come up with the best SAO you can think of that does something cool. What could be cooler than sharing your contact information all over Supercon and beyond with a tap of a Jolly Wrencher? It’s way better than just some sticker, and with the extra solder pad on the back, you can turn it into a pin once the con is over. Contact data can be uploaded over I²C.
An antenna coil PCB trace as generated by a KiCad plugin.The KiCad-generated coil.
Here, [Phil Weasel] seeks to answer the question of whether one can make a working NFC tag with the M24LR04E IC, using a PCB trace as a coil. If there is an issue, it’s probably going to be that copper plane inside the antenna.

Designing the antenna itself proved fairly easy after checking the datasheet for the internal tuning capacitance (~27.5 pF), verifying the frequency of NFC (~13.56 MHz), and doing the math to find the inductance needed. After confirming everything in LTSpice, [Phil] used a PCB coil calculator and let the KiCad coil generator draw it out.

Did we mention the Jolly Wrencher is backlit by four side-mounted LEDs? Because what’s an SAO without a few blinkenlights?

2024 Hackaday Supercon SAO Contest


hackaday.com/2024/09/19/2024-s…



Is That A Coaster? No, It’s An LED Matrix!


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I’m sure you all love to see some colorful blinkenlights every now and then, and we are of course no exception. While these might look like coasters at a distance, do not be deceived! They’re actually [bitluni]’s latest project!

[bitluni]’s high-fidelity LED matrix started life as some 8×8 LED matrices lying on the shelf for 10 years taunting him – admit it, we’re all guilty of this – before he finally decided to make something with them. That idea took the form of a tileable display with the help of some magnets and pogo pins, which is certainly a very satisfying way to connect these oddly futuristic blinky coasters together.

It all starts with some schematics and a PCB. Because the CH32V208 has an annoying package to solder, [bitluni] opted to have the PCB fab do placement for him. Unfortunately, though, and like any good prototype, it needed a bodge! [bitluni] had accidentally mirrored a chip in the schematic, meaning he had to solder one of the SMD chips on upside-down, “dead bug mode”. Fortunately, the rest was seemingly more successful, because with a little 3D-printed case and some fancy programming, the tiny tiles came to life in all of their rainbow-barfing glory. Sure, the pogo pins were less reliable than desired, but [bitluni] has some ideas for a future version we’re very much looking forward to.

Video after the break.

youtube.com/embed/8wMKw4m6-Rc?…

Has your hunger for blinkenlights not been satiated? More posts about [bitluni] perhaps? How about the time [bitluni] made a very blinkenlight-y “super”computer?


hackaday.com/2024/09/19/is-tha…



Reverse Engineering A Keyboard Driver Uncovers A Self-Destruct Code


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Should you be able to brick a keyboard just by writing a driver to flash the lights on it? We don’t think so either. [TheNotary] got quite the shock when embarking on a seemingly straightforward project to learn C++ on the x86-64 architecture with Windows and sent it straight to Silicon Heaven with only a few seemingly innocent USB packets.

The project was a custom driver for the XVX S-K80 mechanical keyboard, aiming to flash LED patterns across the key LEDs and perhaps send custom images to the integrated LCD. When doing this sort of work, the first thing you need is the documentation of the communications protocols. Obviously, this was not an option with a closed-source project, so the next best thing is to spy on the existing Windows drivers and see how they worked. Using Wireshark to monitor the USB traffic whilst twiddling with the colour settings, it was clear that communications were purely over HID messages, simplifying subsequent analysis. Next, they used x32dbg (now x64dbg, but whatever) to attach to the existing driver process and trap a few interesting Windows system calls. After reading around the Windows API, a few candidate functions were identified and trapped. This gave them enough information to begin writing code to reproduce this behaviour. Then things got a bit odd.

There apparently was a lot of extra protocol baggage when performing simple tasks such as lighting an LED. They shortened the sequence to reduce the overhead and noticed an additional byte that they theorized must encode the number of packets to expect in case only a subset of the LEDs were being programmed. Setting this to 0x01 and sending LED code for single keys appeared to work and was much faster but seemed unreliable. After a short experiment with this mystery value, [TheNotary] reverted the code to send all the packets for the full LED set as before, forgetting to correct this mystery value from the 0xFF it was programmed to during the experiment. They were surprised that all the LEDs and LCD were switched off. They were then horrified when the keyboard never powered up again. This value appeared to have triggered an obscure firmware bug and bricked it—a sad end to what would have been a fun little learning project.

Keyboard hacks are so plentiful it’s hard to decide where to start. How about upgrading the keyboard of your trusty ZX81? Here’s a lovely, minimal mechanical keyboard powered by a Pi Pico, and finally while we’re thinking about drivers bricking your stuff, who can forget FTDI gate? We may never forgive that one.

Header image: Martin Vorel, CC BY-SA 4.0.


hackaday.com/2024/09/19/revers…

razzospaziale reshared this.



Hello everyone @Friendica Support !
I filed this issue on github and it has been pretty ignored. Of course I don't expect it to be taken into consideration, but I would like to know if I'm the only one who perceives this feature as a problem. I would also be curious to know if in your opinion the issue is easily solvable, or if it requires an unjustifiable effort?


For those who do not have a GitHub account, I report the text of the Issue here:


Good evening everyone.

Introduction

Like most software in the Fediverse, Friendica accounts can also be "followed" through their RSS feed.

In this way, it is possible to use the string https://INSTANCENAME/feed/USERNAME/

For example, the account of the Friendica group "School" is
poliverso.org/feed/scuola/

Is the feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

Unfortunately, however, the feed of the Fediverse accounts publishes only the contents of that account and not, for example, those reshared.

This choice, although understandable for normal accounts, is much less understandable for Groups (the former Forums), since these groups do not publish (if not rarely) their own contents.

Describe the feature you'd like

The developers Lemmy have brilliantly solved the problem with their "Communities" (the Lemmy version of Activitypub groups) and today it is possible to follow the feed of the Lemmy communities through the string
https://ISTANZA/feeds/c/NOMEUTENTE.xml?sort=New

And in fact the feed of the "Fediverso" community is perfectly queryable by a feed reader
feddit.it/feeds/c/fediverso.xm…

Even Lemmy displays a feed that presents all the posts published in the local communities (https://ISTANZA/feeds/local.xml?sort=New) and even all those of the federated "timeline" (ISTANZA/feeds/all.xml?sort=New).

I therefore wonder if it is not possible to make it so that at least the "Group" type accounts can display a feed that also includes shared content.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I can't think of any valid alternatives.
I tried in vain to follow a Friendica Group with a Lemmy account (basically I signed up to the "group" which obviously in Lemmy is seen as a "Community"): basically I wanted to use Lemmy to make him export the RSS feed...
Unfortunately, however, there are still problems that do not allow the contents of Friendica to be correctly synchronized in the community view of Lemmy.



Iran, Masih Alinejad: “I Paesi democratici smettano di stringere le mani ai nostri assassini”

@Politica interna, europea e internazionale

“Servono decisioni concrete, tagliate i legami con i nostri assassini. I leader dei Paesi democratici devono smettere stringere la mano agli assassini delle donne iraniane”. Lo ha detto Masih Alinejad, attivista per i



Lathe Outfitted with Electronic Gearbox


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Running a metal lathe is not for the faint of heart. Without proper knowledge and preparation, these machines can quickly cause injury or destroy expensive stock, tools, or parts. The other major problem even for those with knowledge and preparedness is that some of their more niche capabilities, like cutting threads with a lead screw, can be tedious and complicated thanks to the change gear system found on some lathes. While these are useful tools for getting things done, [Not An Engineer] decided that there was a better way and got to work building an electronic gearbox to automate the task of the traditional mechanical change gear setup in this video.

What makes change gears so tricky is that they usually come as a set of many gears of different ratios, forcing the lathe operator to figure out the exact combination of gears needed to couple the spindle of the lathe to the feed screw at the precise ratio needed for cutting a specific thread pattern. It is possible to do this task but can be quite a headache. [Not An Engineer] first turned to an Arduino Nano to receive input from a rotary encoder connected to the shaft of the lathe and then instruct a motor to turn the feed screw at a set ratio.

The first major problem was that the Arduino was not nearly fast enough to catch every signal from the encoder, leading to a considerable amount of drift in the output of the motor. That was solved by upgrading to a Teensy 4.1 with a 600 MHz clock speed. There was still one other major hurdle to cross; the problem of controlling the motor smoothly when an odd ratio is selected. [Not An Engineer] used this algorithm to inspire some code, and with that and some custom hardware to attach everything to the lathe he has a working set of electronic change gears that never need to be changed again. And, if you don’t have a lathe at all but are looking to get started with one, you can always build your own from easily-sourced parts.

youtube.com/watch?v=iSDNKmk5B2…


hackaday.com/2024/09/19/lathe-…



Design and the Golden Rule


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You often learn the golden rule or some variation of it as early as kindergarten. There are several ways to phrase it, but you most often hear: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” While that’s catchy, it is really an aphorism that encourages us to consider the viewpoints of others. As people who design things, this can be tricky. Sometimes, what you want isn’t necessarily what most people want, and — conversely — you might not appreciate what most people want or need.

EDIT/1000


20430553HP/1000 CC-BY-SA-3.0 by [Autopilot]I learned this lesson many years ago when I used to babysit a few HP/1000 minicomputers. Minicomputer sounds grand, but, honestly, a Raspberry Pi of any sort would put the old HP to shame. Like a lot of computers in those days, it had a text editor that was arcane even by the standards of vi or emacs. EDIT/1000 couldn’t be sure you weren’t using a printing terminal, and the commands reflect that.

For example, printing a few lines around the current line requires the command: “/-2,L,5” which isn’t that hard, I suppose. To delete all lines that contain a percent sign, “1$ D/%/A/” assuming you don’t want to be asked about each deletion.

Sure, sure. As a Hackaday reader, you don’t find this hard to puzzle out or remember. But back in the 1980s, a bunch of physicists and chemical engineers had little patience for stuff like that. However, the editor had a trick up its sleeve.

Old Terminal Basics


Old HP terminals didn’t work like you think of a terminal today. The computer would send a whole screen to the terminal along with some instructions. This was common on several brands of computers, even though it is rare today. For example, the computer might send a form with some data. The user can then use the terminal to modify the data or add new data. Then, with a single keystroke, the entire screen goes back to the computer for processing.

In the case of EDIT/1000, you could invoke screen mode, which would load a page of text into your terminal. Then you could use the arrow keys, insert, delete and the experience wasn’t too far from using a text editor today. Until you wanted to change pages, that is.

You’d use /S to start the screen mode from the current location in a file. But to move forward you needed to use Control+F. Well, that’s if you wanted to send your changes to the computer. You could also move forward and discard your changes by pressing Control+F twice. There were a handful of other commands you could use in screen mode. To do things like search and replace, you still needed the oddball commands along with the Control+X incantation to execute a command while in screen mode.

Complaint Department


We heard no end of complaints about EDIT/1000 and spent a lot of time helping people fix their mistakes made while editing. Training didn’t really seem to help. There didn’t seem to be any other reasonable options as far as buying a different editor.

The problem is, we were split into two camps. People who knew how to use EDIT/1000 well and people who needed to use it, but didn’t really know anything about it.

One More Puzzle Piece


HP terminals of the day all had an interesting feature. The keyboards had nine keys along the top row — what you’d think of as function keys today. The monitors always had eight little spots at the bottom that had labels for what the keys did. The ninth key let you page through a couple of sets of function keys. You can see that in the HP terminal teardown video below.

youtube.com/embed/Rhz4QqS4two?…

So F1 might have “Help” on the screen above it, unless you set the next page where it might say “Clear” or something. The effect was best on the terminals where the keyboard and screen were one piece so the labels lined up.

Then One Day…


I was thinking, probably uncharitably, about how stupid people were that couldn’t learn how to use the editor. I happened to be setting up custom function keys at the time. I wrote a quick program to put a few editor-specific keys on the terminal like “next page” and “previous page” and mapped them to the correct commands.

That worked fine, and then I wrote a short program to launch the editor on a file and put it into screen mode. I grabbed someone passing by and had them try it. By the end of the day, everyone was using “my” editor.

No Genius


I can’t overstate how simple this was. I later reduced it to just a batch file that copied a text file to the terminal to set the function keys, and then launched the editor. And everyone loved it. The people who knew how to use the editor didn’t need all this, of course. And they knew how easy it was. But they loved that it saved people asking dumb questions or messing up their files. The other users just loved it because it made the editor easy.

This predates easy access to the Internet, and a common thing in those days was to trade tapes with other sites. You’d get a magnetic tape in the mail, mount it, look at what was on it, copying anything you found interesting. Then you’d add anything you had to the end, and send it to the next place. In a year or so, the tape would make its way back around to you and the process would repeat. I put my editor on the outbound tape.

Within a year or so, people were literally finding me — hard to do in those days — and sending me real letters thanking me for my editor solution.

The Moral


The script to do this was extremely trivial. It probably took 10 minutes to write and once you knew how to do it, maybe less. But the point was, the people who knew how to write the script didn’t need it. The people who needed it were those who had no more idea how to program function keys than I know how to perform open heart surgery.

It doesn’t matter if it is hardware or software. Getting into the heads of users can really pay off.


hackaday.com/2024/09/19/design…



L’ex ministro della Cultura Gennaro Sangiuliano ha denunciato l’imprenditrice Maria Rosaria Boccia


@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
L’avvocato Silverio Sica, legale dell’ex ministro della Cultura Gennaro Sangiuliano, ha presentato alla Procura di Roma una denuncia a carico dell’imprenditrice Maria Rosaria Boccia. L’esposto, secondo quanto riporta l’agenzia di




Renzi, Calenda, Tajani e gli altri: le regionali in Liguria spaccano (ancora di più) il centro


@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
Al circo della politica italiana gli acrobati eseguono il numero più spettacolare, applaudito più dei pagliacci. Tra sussulti, retromarce, intoppi e piroette senza rete, prosegue il tentativo dei centristi di intrufolarsi nel campo largo ligure del centrosinistra,



Embossing Graphics By 3D Printing On Wood


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Embossing (making raised shapes) and debossing (making sunken shapes) on 3D-printed surfaces is not a new idea; we do it all the time. [Cory] from Vancouver Hack Space was playing around with the 3D printing wood, and came up with the idea of creating raised tactile surfaces using a simple transfer process.

We don’t often try to print directly onto a wooden surface for various reasons, but [Cory] wanted to give it a go. They hoped to get some grain patterns to transfer to the surface, but as they say in the blog entry, the beauty of wood patterns is in the colouration, which doesn’t transfer. Next, they laser etched a logo into the wood surface to see how well that would transfer. It did create a discernable raised impression, but they forgot to mirror the image (oops!) and relevel the bed, so the results are less impressive than they could be. Still, it’s another useful technique to consider.

Embossing is the process by which braille sheets. This DIY braille encoder is pretty sweet. Of course the process can be simply decorative. Here’s how to use a laser cutter to create your own embossing seals. The traditional way to emboss paper for a fancy effect was to use embossing powder to selectively change the properties of drying paper. But how can you make the stuff for cheap?


hackaday.com/2024/09/19/emboss…



Stella Alpina 24. Così l’Esercito si prepara alle operazioni multi-dominio

@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo

[quote]La conclusione dell’esercitazione Stella Alpina 24, che ha coinvolto oltre seicento unità provenienti da corpi diversi dell’Esercito ed è durata due settimane, costituisce un importante momento di confronto con le esigenze tattiche e operative dei nuovi scenari di



In seguito all’emergenza maltempo in #EmiliaRomagna, con evacuazioni in numerosi comuni a causa di piogge intense e allagamenti, il #MIM, in collaborazione con la Protezione Civile e le autorità locali, ha messo a disposizione alcune strutture scolas…


Il TPI Fest 2024 torna domani, venerdì 20 settembre, in solidarietà con la popolazione dell’Emilia-Romagna colpita dalle alluvioni


@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
Il TPI Fest 2024 torna domani, venerdì 20 settembre, in solidarietà con la popolazione dell’Emilia-Romagna colpita dalle alluvioni In solidarietà e rispetto nei confronti della popolazione dell’Emilia-Romagna colpita dalle alluvioni, è



L’alluvione in Emilia-Romagna diventa un caso politico: scontro tra Governo e Regione


@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
Alluvione Emilia-Romagna: polemica tra Governo e Regione L’alluvione che sta colpendo la parte orientale dell’Emilia-Romagna diventa terreno di scontro politico tra il Governo di centrodestra e la Regione guidata dal centrosinistra. Il ministro per la



La Marina Usa si prepara al confronto con la Cina. Più navi entro il 2027

@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo

[quote]Diversamente da come accade in Europa, dove le discussioni intorno alla Difesa hanno iniziato solo recentemente a registrare il profondo mutamento dei contesti securitari odierni, negli Stati Uniti ci si interroga costantemente su cosa dovesse accadere in caso di conflitto, specialmente con la Cina. Dopo





Switching Regulators: Mistake Fixing For Dummies


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Some time ago, while designing the PCB for the Sony Vaio replacement motherboard, I went on a quest to find a perfect 5 V boost regulator. Requirements are simple – output 5 V at about 2A , with input ranging from 3 V to 5 V, and when the input is 5 V, go into “100% duty” (“pass-through”/”bypass”) mode where the output is directly powered from the input, saving me from any conversion inefficiencies for USB port power when a charger is connected. Plus, a single EN pin, no digital configuration, small footprint, no BGA, no unsolicited services or offers – what more could one ask for.

As usual, I go to an online shop, set the parameters: single channel, all topologies that say “boost” in the name, output range, sort by price, download datasheets one by one and see what kind of nice chips I can find. Eventually, I found the holy grail chip for me, the MIC2876, originally from Micrel, now made by Microchip.

MIC2876 is a 5 V regulator with the exact features I describe above – to a T! It also comes with cool features, like a PG “Power good” output, bidirectional load disconnect (voltage applied to output won’t leak into input), EMI reduction and efficiency modes, and it’s decently cheap. I put it on the Sony Vaio board among five other regulators, ordered the board, assembled it, powered it up, and applied a positive logic level onto the regulator’s EN pin.

Immediately, I saw the regulator producing 3 V output accompanied by loud buzzing noise – as opposed to producing 5 V output without any audible noise. Here’s how the regulator ended up failing, how exactly I screwed up the design, and how I’m creating a mod board to fix it – so that the boards I meticulously assembled, don’t go to waste.

Some Background… Noise

This regulator is one angry chip – with a 2 MHz switching speed, it’s relatively high as far as regulators go. More common is to see 1 MHz and below. Higher switching speed means it can use a smaller inductor, which is great for routability. It also might not handle some layout or component mistakes that a lower-frequency regulator might do.

Still, I made a number of good choices. With boost regulators, remember – you have to pick an inductor according to the input current, not output current; recalculate accordingly, and check the efficiency graphs. That, I achieved – while I was limited by the size of the inductor I could fit onto the board, I did find a 3.8 A inductor that let me achieve a little under 2 A output. Iin theory – good enough. All places where 5 V could go on the board are current-limited, and there are just two USB ports I need to power, so even 1.5 A of 5 V output is plenty. I also picked proper footprints for both inductors and capacitors – it can be tricky to find 22 uF 10 V capacitors in 0603, but it’s a breeze if you pick 0805. A regulator can fail if you don’t provide it with the kind of capacitance that the datasheet asks for, but I put two footprints on both input and output, and it let me experiment with output caps.
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On the other hand, you might have already noticed at least one problem if you’ve read the layout article thoroughly. For one, see that feedback divider? It’s supposed to be connected after the capacitors, measuring the output – not directly between the inductor and the capacitors, which is a point where a lot of current flows back and forth. I’m not sure how I didn’t catch myself doing this, given that I thoroughly described in an article in the same timeframe that I was routing this board; it’s the kind of mistake you can’t help but write off to general human fallibility. There are a good few problems, though – I should have reconsidered this layout severely before ordering.

Example Layout As Checklist Item

20413511This example layout is elegant, and it’s a far cry from my first take
A contributing factor, I’m sure, is that the datasheet doesn’t have a layout example – you only have the evaluation board documentation to go off of, and I didn’t get that far. It’s not always that the datasheet recommendation will be reasonable, or look reasonable. For instance, in the last article, where I reviewed switching regulator layouts, I’ve shown the TI’s puzzling proposed layout for a buck regulator chip of theirs – with intentions hard to decypher both for me and for fellow hackers in the comment section.

However, it helps way more often than it might puzzle you, and if you never even see the layout example because you have to hunt down extra documents for it, you might not notice fundamental differences, just like I did not notice them. The bottom line is I should have noticed the missing layout example and hunted down the evaluation board datasheet.

Comparing mine with the example layout, you might notice another problem. My ground routing differs a fair bit, and it sure seems that my routing is inferior – my ground is more isolated islands, with a fair bit of ground return current forced to go through vias, and the example layout has a fairly straightforward ground path, no underside layers strictly required. What’s more – you might notice ground return current flowing between output capacitors and the regulator center pad, which will go by the pin 4 – AGND. AGND is specifically a pin supposed to stay away from the switching loop pins, and I do remember noticing this at some point, thinking I should revisit the layout and see if I have fulfilled this obligation. It stayed as a low-level mental TODO in my brain, one that I never actually revisited.

One last thing is placing components under the regulator. I can’t quite afford to free up the under-regulator space on the opposite layer of the board – the board is tightly packed by necessity. My defense is that this is a 4-layer board, with two inner layers dedicated to ground, but I’m not sure whether that negates the concerns of the engineers who wrote this recommendation. This is the only thing I’m leaving in when it comes to v2 board design – otherwise, let’s take a look!
20413513hours into debugging the board. this fault’s noise even knocked out cold the SD card!
Out of interest and wanting to finally get to the bringup, I re-wired the FB connection using magnet wire, and even added a more direct GND connection for the output capacitors along the way. The regulator’s behaviour didn’t change one bit, however. Either the GND layout is seriously critical (likely), or the chip got damaged after being booted up with a miswired feedback network; whichever option it is, looks like things won’t be as quick as that. In general, I spent four-five hours on this particular issue, slowly realizing that it’s screwed up beyond fixing.

No matter – let’s just design a mod board that works around all of my mistakes. This helps me bring up the v1 PCB fully – wouldn’t want to have $300 worth of components and days of assembly going to waste. Also, after just a few modifications, we will have a cool switching regulator breakout that we can all use as a building block!

Quick, Simple, Powerful


To make a modification like this, I start by marking an outline of the mod on one of the User layers, then open the file in a text editor, Ctrl-F for the User layer name I used, copy all the lines and circles – and paste them into a footprint .kicad_mod file that’s also open in a text editor. There are a few caveats – first one, the User.Eco2 layer in KiCad UI is called Eco2.User in the actual file. Then, as you copy-paste graphics you’ve drawn, you will also want to replace all “gr_” with “fp_”. Remember to close your kicad_mod while pasting contents into it in the text editor – otherwise, it can be overwritten by accident. Finally, open your .kicad_mod in the footprint viewer, box-select your new lines, and move them so that the (0,0) center point is somewhere near the outline, because it’s going to be a bother to handle this footprint otherwise.
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20413527Then, open a new PCB project, copy-paste the 5 V boost schematic block into the schematic, open the footprint association view and bring over any footprints missing, sync the PCB file, then duplicate the evaluation board layout. Thanks to this workflow, I quickly created a 5 V boost mod board I can solder on top of the board I currently have. This board is about to be ordered, with proper layout, and I’ll soon be soldering it onto the motherboard then testing it – expect an update in the comment section.

There are five (or, four and a half) other switching regulators on the same board, and, as I’m bringing them up and testing them, I’ll write one more article where I will be sharing lessons, whatever they turn out, showing you examples of how to pick parts for a switching regulator, plus, most certainly, demonstrating a couple more more little ways you might get things wrong and how to avoid them. So, till next time!



When a Starship employee talked to the police, the report says, he asked for the employee’s information “so he could contact her and offer their insurance information for her injuries and ‘promo codes.’”#Starship #DeliveryRobots #FOIA


Infostealer malware is often hidden in pirated or cracked software, and hackers then post the harvested credentials and other data online. Criminals have been infected too.#News #Hacking


Ha già lucidato gli stivali, la Benita, per andare a fare passerella nel fango in Romagna?
Chiedo per un amico 🤬
#faenza #alluvioneemiliaromagna


Ora bisognerebbe prendere un negazionista del cambiamento climatico e portarlo a #Faenza, così magari ci può dire se è sempre stato così...(1diot4!)🤬
#alluvioni #negazionisti #noClimateChange


Il Giallo dell’esplosione dei Cercapersone. Handala pubblica i primi 10GB di documenti “Top Secret”


Il gruppo di hacker noto come Handala è emerso lo scorso anno come una nuova e preoccupante minaccia nel panorama della cybercriminalità. Prendendo il nome dal famoso personaggio simbolo della resistenza palestinese, Handala ha acquisito notorietà per aver condotto attacchi mirati e operazioni di cyber intelligence complesse.

Nel loro ultimo attacco, descritto come una combinazione tra operazioni di hackeraggio e sabotaggio fisico, Handala ha rivelato dettagli su come i servizi segreti israeliani, in collaborazione con aziende di facciata come Vidisco, avrebbero alterato i cercapersone usati da Hezbollah, inserendo esplosivi all’interno delle batterie. Questo attacco fa parte di una catena più ampia di sabotaggi contro le infrastrutture di Hezbollah.

Il gruppo ha anche dichiarato di aver hackerato massicciamente le aziende coinvolte, come IIB e Vidisco, estraendo 14TB di dati sensibili, che intendono pubblicare. Questo rivela una capacità impressionante sia sul fronte della cyber intelligence che dell’esfiltrazione di dati.
20406116 Handala ha hackerato Vidisco

Vidisco è un'azienda israeliana che sviluppa e produce sistemi di ispezione digitale a raggi X portatili. Questa azienda è affiliata all'unità 8200 del regime e attualmente l'84% degli aeroporti del mondo utilizza i prodotti di questa azienda nei propri varchi di sicurezza. In pratica, il Mossad passa attraverso i varchi di sicurezza di qualsiasi carico in qualsiasi aeroporto che considera utilizzando la backdoor incorporata nel software di questa azienda.

Molti servizi di sicurezza e militari di diversi Paesi del mondo utilizzano i prodotti di questa azienda. Il mondo è a conoscenza del legame tra questa azienda e il Mossad? Grandi sorprese sono in arrivo nelle prossime ore. 8 TB di dati top-secret di questa azienda, compresi i nomi di tutti gli agenti, i clienti, le e-mail, le fonti delle backdoor, le fonti del software, i documenti finanziari e amministrativi, ecc. sono ora in possesso di Handala e saranno presto divulgati!

Tradotto con DeepL.com (versione gratuita) 20406118
Come abbiamo riportato in precedenza il threat actors Handala ha riportato come l’attacco alla supply chain che ha colpito Hezbollah in Libano sia avvenuto. Handala ha affermato che il Mossad israeliano e l’Unità 8200 sono stati coinvolti nell’operazione, in cui sono stati compromessi dei cercapersone e successivamente radio appartenenti al gruppo libanese.

Secondo Handala, le batterie dei dispositivi sono state modificate con esplosivi sensibili al calore dalla compagnia IIB (Israeli Industrial Batteries). Questi dispositivi sono stati trasportati con l’aiuto di una società di facciata chiamata Vidisco, nota per la fornitura di sistemi a raggi X a porti e aeroporti di tutto il mondo, grazie ai quali i sabotatori sono riusciti a eludere i controlli di sicurezza.

Handala ha dichiarato di aver hackerato i sistemi di Vidisco e IIB, raccogliendo 14TB di dati che verranno rilasciati a breve, insieme al codice sorgente del progetto di backdoor utilizzato per compromettere le spedizioni​.
Handala ha hackerato la IIB ( Israeli Industrial Batteries )

IIB è una delle aziende affiliate al Ministero della Difesa del regime, responsabile della progettazione e della produzione di molte infrastrutture vitali per l'immagazzinamento dell'energia per le industrie militari e della difesa del regime sionista, come radar, apparecchiature di telecomunicazione, apparecchiature di spionaggio, ecc. Questa azienda ha anche contaminato con esplosivi le batterie dei dispositivi elettronici di Hezbollah.

6 TB di informazioni sensibili di questa azienda, compresi tutti i messaggi di posta elettronica, i documenti finanziari e amministrativi, i documenti di progettazione e produzione, i clienti, le risorse umane, ecc.

Tradotto con DeepL.com (versione gratuita) 20406122 10 GB di dati riservati sulla cooperazione tra Mossad e Vidisco

Secondo i dati trapelati da Handala, attualmente i servizi di sicurezza e militari di 91 paesi del mondo utilizzano i prodotti Vidisco nei loro varchi di sicurezza. Il Mossad, in collaborazione con Vidisco, ha la possibilità di impedire l'identificazione di spedizioni contaminate in questi Paesi!

Negli ultimi dieci anni, secondo il log estratto dal server di vidisco, il Mossad ha utilizzato la backdoor di questa azienda in 2780 casi in 37 Paesi. Paesi come il Libano, la Siria, l'India, la Turchia, Taiwan, la Tailandia, gli Emirati Arabi Uniti, l'America, la Germania, l'Iraq, ecc. sono in cima alla lista dei Paesi inquinati.

Stiamo rilasciando 10 GB di documenti sensibili di progettazione e sviluppo! Aspettate che la fonte backdoor venga divulgata!
L'articolo Il Giallo dell’esplosione dei Cercapersone. Handala pubblica i primi 10GB di documenti “Top Secret” proviene da il blog della sicurezza informatica.



Adult-content creators call for inclusion in AI policy talks


Adult industry stakeholders are looking to influence artificial intelligence (AI) regulations to protect content creators' rights amid emerging issues like AI-generated pornography, deepfakes, and age verification challenges.


euractiv.com/section/artificia…



EU Commission demands Apple to align interoperability with digital competition rules


The European Commission will formally specify steps that Apple needs to take to comply with the Digital Markets Act (DMA) around its interoperability with other products, the EU executive announced on Thursday (19 September).


euractiv.com/section/competiti…



La Lega propone la castrazione chimica per pedofili e stupratori: il Governo accoglie l’odg


@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
La Lega vuole introdurre la misura della castrazione chimica per i pedofili e gli stupratori. La proposta – vecchio cavallo di battaglia del partito di Matteo Salvini – è stata presentata sotto forma di ordine del giorno durante la discussione sul Ddl



Qui, ora e insieme! Alla festa di TPI discutiamo il futuro del centrosinistra


@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
Può dalle ceneri dei singoli partiti di sinistra, con tutti i loro limiti strutturali e di consenso, oltre che di credibilità, nascere una nuova coalizione di centrosinistra capace di elaborare una valida proposta, di lotta e di governo, alternativa a quella finora messa in campo dalla



Draft Council conclusions aims to strike balance with Letta, Draghi on telecom consolidation


The Hungarian Presidency of the Council of the EU is attempting to bridge the gap between member states' reluctance and Letta and Draghi reports eagerness towards consolidation in the telecom sector, according to draft Council conclusions and seen by Euractiv.


euractiv.com/section/digital/n…



Mothbox Watches Bugs, So You — Or Your Grad Students — Don’t Have To


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To the extent that one has strong feelings about insects, they tend toward the extremes of a spectrum that runs from a complete fascination with their diversity and the specializations they’ve evolved to exploit unique and ultra-narrow ecological niches, and “Eww, ick! Kill it!” It’s pretty clear that [Dr. Andy Quitmeyer] and his team tend toward the former, and while they love their bugs, spending all night watching them is a tough enough gig that they came up with Mothbox, the automated insect monitor.

Insect censuses are valuable tools for assessing the state of an ecosystem, especially insects’ vast numbers, short lifespan, and proximity to the base of the food chain. Mothbox is designed to be deployed in insect-rich environments and automatically recognize and tally the moths it sees. It uses an Arducam and Raspberry Pi for image capture, plus an array of UV and visible LEDs, all in a weatherproof enclosure. The moths are attracted to the light and fly between the camera and a plain white background, where an image is captured. YOLO v8 locates all the moths in the image, crops them out, and sends them to BioCLIP, a vision model for organismal biology that appears similar to something we’ve seen before. The model automatically sorts the moths by taxonomic features and keeps a running tally of which species it sees.

Mothbox is open source and the site has a ton of build information if you’re keen to start bug hunting, plus plenty of pictures of actual deployments, which should serve as nightmare fuel to the insectophobes out there.


hackaday.com/2024/09/19/mothbo…




Informative fantastiche e dove trovarle Non so perchè ma le leggo sempre. Gli amici mi prendono in giro per questo ma non posso farci niente...


TPI Fest 2024: il racconto della prima serata attraverso le immagini più significative | FOTO


@Politica interna, europea e internazionale
TPI Fest 2024: le immagini della prima serata | FOTO Da Elena Basile ad Alessandro Di Battista: sono solo alcuni degli ospiti che hanno animato la prima serata del TPI Fest 2024, in programma per il terzo anno consecutivo alla “Tettoia Nervi”, in piazza Lucio Dalla, a Bologna.




Così il governo ha posto le basi per l’affermazione della marittimità italiana. Scrive Caffio

@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo

[quote]Il ruolo della blue economy nello sviluppo del Paese, la programmazione di impianti eolici offshore, le istanze dello shipping per una semplificazione amministrativa che favorisca il trasporto via mare, l’attenzione per gli aspetti strategici e produttivi della dimensione



Cos’è Hashomer Yosh, l’ultimo gruppo di coloni colpito dalle sanzioni statunitensi?


@Notizie dall'Italia e dal mondo
L'organizzazione sostenuta dal governo, che porta volontari negli avamposti agricoli israeliani, è uno dei principali motori del furto violento di terra in Cisgiordania
L'articolo Cos’è Hashomer Yosh, l’ultimo gruppo di coloni colpito dalle



Ho già un blog: a cosa potrebbe servirmi Friendica?

@Che succede nel Fediverso?

Friendica è un social molto particolare che consente di scrivere post lunghi, formattati, con immagini in linea e dotati di un vero titolo; inoltre presenta alcune primitive funzionalità di pubblicazione programmata che ricordano quelle delle piattaforme di blogging più utilizzate.

Ecco perché chi usa Friendica è spesso un utente proveniente da Mastodon, un sistema che con le sue limitazioni permette una fruizione passiva del Fediverso piuttosto completa, ma una capacità di pubblicazione attiva decisamente limitata.

Oggi cerchiamo di capire perché Friendica potrebbe essere una soluzione utile anche per chi possiede già un blog e che quindi dispone già di sistemi di pubblicazione avanzati o, addirittura, sta utilizzando piattaforme già federate, come Writefreely o come Wordpress con il fantastico plugin Activitypub for Wordpress.
1) Impostare il proprio account Friendica per fare in modo che ricondivida automaticamente i post pubblicati dal proprio blog

Per attivare questa funzionalità (che funzionerà solo se il blog dispone di un feed RSS o se è federato con il Fediverso), è sufficiente inserire l'indirizzo del blog nella casella di ricerca di Friendica e premere il pulsante "Cerca". A quel punto bisognerà seguire il blog, che comparirà come un qualsiasi altro contatto, e selezionare tra le opzioni del contatto "Duplica come miei messaggi" (per i blog non federati) o "Ricondivisione nativa" (per i blog federati).

2) Sopperire alle mancanze di un blog Writefreely.

Writefreely è infatti la piattaforma di pubblicazione federata più semplice ma, nel suo obiettivo "distrazioni zero", l'utente che pubblica un post su Writefreely, in caso di risposta da parte di un qualsiasi utente del Fediverso, non solo non riceverà alcuna notifica ma addirittura non potrà vedere le risposte a meno che non disponga di un'utenza social. Per questo motivo consigliamo a tutti coloro che abbiano un'utenza social di inserire in fondo al post a mo' di firma il proprio identificativo social nella forma @nomeutente@istanza: in tal modo, chi risponderà al post Writefreely, risponderà anche a quell'indirizzo del fediverso. Purtroppo però l'utente, nella propria risposta, potrebbe anche cancellare il secondo indirizzo, per cui non ci sarebbe più alcuna possibilità di venire allertati su quella risposta! Proprio qui ci viene in aiuto Friendica: infatti, utilizzando il sistema spiegato nel punto 1), ossia la ricondivisione automatica, Friendica ci farà avere anche una notifica ogni volta che qualcuno risponde al post che il sistema ha ricondiviso! Questa limitazione di Writefreely può essere estesa a tutti i blog federati che hanno deliberatamente disattivato le risposte degli utenti: in quei casi, le risposte ci saranno lo stesso e saranno visibili dal Fediverso, solo che non verranno "viste" dal blogger.

3) Creare o usare un gruppo Friendica tematico

Un gruppo Friendica tematico (una sorta a metà tra una lista di distribuzione e un gruppo Facebook) che possa essere "menzionato" da tutti i blog Wordpress federati (il blog dovrà "seguire" il gruppo Friendica, una funzionalità prevista nei plugin di Wordpress). In tal modo, quando un post menziona il gruppo Friendica, il gruppo Friendica ricondividerà il post a favore di tutti coloro che già seguono il gruppo.

PS: approfittiamo per far sapere a tutti i nostri follower che esistono due account dedicati a chi è interessato ai blog federati

1) Il primo è @Il blogverso italiano di Wordpress dedicato a tutti i blog italiani wordpress che si sono federati attraverso il fantastico plugin sviluppato da @Matthias Pfefferle
Chiunque sia interessato a essere aggiunto tra i blog ricondivisi o a segnalare un nuovo blog Wordpress federato, può farci sapere direttamente a questo account

2) Il secondo è @I blog di Writefreely dedicato ai blog italiani basati su Writefreely. L'account al momento non ricondivide i post degli account, ma rispecchia i loro feed RSS. Ah, l'account è anche un gruppo Friendica e quindi se volete segnalare nuovi blog Writefreely, potete farlo menzionando quell'account

in reply to djpanini

@djpanini probabilmente stai sbagliando qualcosa.
Per trovare il tuo contatto, Devi incollare il nickname completo o il link del profilo nella casella di ricerca Friendica.
Poi è fondamentale seguire quel profilo, perché se non lo segui non puoi attivare le funzionalità di repost automatico.
Infine, dovrei andare nella seconda sezione disponibile sulla pagina Friendica del tuo profilo remoto, ossia impostazioni contatto, e selezionare ricondivisione nativa

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