Testing and Test Control Notation version 3: TTCN-3 language extensions: Behaviour types

Testing and Test Control Notation version 3: TTCN-3 language extensions: Behaviour types

Functional requirements and framework of green data centre energy-saving management system

GoToMeetings, Cavoon, AdobeConnect and Audio bridges during the SG17 meeting (17 - 26 April 2013)
Source: TSB
Study Questions: QALL/17

GoToMeetings, Cavoon, AdobeConnect and Audio bridges during the SG17 meeting (26 August - 4 September 2013)
Source: TSB
Study Questions: QALL/17

Practical facilities available for the conduct of the work of SG17
Source: TSB
Study Questions: QALL/17

GoToMeetings, Cavoon, AdobeConnect and Audio bridges during the SG17 meeting (17 - 26 September 2014)
Source: TSB
Study Questions: Q8/17

Information technology - ASN.1 encoding rules: Specification of JavaScript Object Notation Encoding Rules (JER)

Timing characteristics of an enhanced synchronous equipment slave clock

With over 4.8 billion users currently on the internet across the globe, the digital world as we once knew it continues to adapt to accommodate modern forms of interaction and communication across the social sphere. As e-commerce booms and social platforms multiply, it’s clear that a digitally native world is only around the corner. With […]

The post From Users To Players: The Future Of UX Design In The Metaverse appeared first on Usability Geek

Influencers have played a big role in this election cycle. Hundreds of typically nonpolitical content creators have been using their platforms to endorse candidates on both sides of the political spectrum. Funnily enough, those who said nothing on election day actually ended up being the loudest. 

“Speaking as an influencer, a lot of your favorite influencers are fucking embarrassing,” said TikToker Kate Glavan. “To be a woman in America with a huge fucking platform and a huge audience and post nothing yesterday, just business as usual, ‘I’m going to my Pilates and I’m going to my brunch . . . ’ No one gives a fuck about your Amazon storefront or your fucking makeup routine.” 

The comment section of her video is filled with people calling out the names of influencers who have been notably silent throughout the election. “Me finding out which influencers voted [Republican] cause they are the ones who are strangely silent and acting like its a regular day,” posted another TikTok user last week. 

For influencers, posting who they voted for is a lose-lose situation. Pick a side and they risk alienating a large section of their audience. Stay silent and they risk alienating a large section of their audience. While it makes sense that followers want to know who their favorite influencer voted for, should we expect—or even want—political activism from people whose job involves posting their Sephora hauls and workout routines?

With apologies to Voltaire, with great virality comes great responsibility. Unlike media outlets, which are subject to regulation, there is little oversight of social media, meaning influencer posts can reach millions and have huge sway over their followings. During the 2024 election cycle we have seen influencers and internet personalities being paid on behalf of groups backing both Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump to court their followers’ votes, cashing in on thousands—sometimes millions—for a single post. 

Social media influencers have more influence than they are often given credit for, according to research published in the journal Management Information Systems Quarterly. In fact, research by Pew shows that more than half of U.S. adults (54%) turn to social media for news at least some of the time, putting influencers in direct competition with traditional news outlets for audience attention. To stand out in this crowded space, influencers are incentivized to exaggerate their messages, often leading to polarized followers. If their audience ends up blindly following what they say instead of examining the candidate’s or party’s policies for themselves, it can result in diminished critical thinking in voters. 

Influencers are human and will have a political opinion whether they choose to share it or not. Being pressured into posting about politics can sometimes end up causing more harm than good. At the same time, choosing not to post anything at all during such a divisive election is a choice. So is following an account.

After a tumultuous year filled with anxiety and a legal battle about its future in the U.S., TikTok may have just been thrown a lifeline by the man who was once its biggest foe: Donald Trump.

The president-elect, who tried to ban the social media platform the last time he was in the White House, has repeatedly pledged during his most recent campaign to oppose a ban on the short-form video app, which could happen as soon as mid-January if the company loses a court case that’s currently underway in Washington.

For months, TikTok and its China-based parent company ByteDance have been embroiled in a legal battle with the U.S. over a federal law that forces them to cut ties for national security reasons or stop operating in one of their biggest markets in the world. The measure, signed by President Joe Biden in April, gives ByteDance nine months to divest its stakes, with a possible three-month extension if a sale is in progress. If that happens, the deadline could be extended into the first 100 days of Trump’s presidency.

The companies have claimed that divestiture is not possible, and the law, if upheld, would force them to shut down by January 19, just a day before Trump’s second inauguration. Attorneys for both sides have asked a federal appeals court reviewing the case to issue a ruling by December 6. The losing side is expected to appeal to the Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority and could decide to take up the case, potentially dragging out the process even longer.

When reached for comment, the Trump transition team did not offer details on how Trump plans to carry out his pledge to “save TikTok,” as he said on a Truth Social post in September while encouraging people who care about the platform to vote for him. But Karoline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for the transition team, indicated in a statement that he plans to see it through.

“The American people reelected President Trump by a resounding margin, giving him a mandate to implement the promises he made on the campaign trail,” Leavitt said. “He will deliver.”

During a March interview with CNBC, Trump said he still believed TikTok posed a national security risk but opposed banning it because doing so would help its rival, Facebook, which he has continued to lambast over his 2020 election loss. He also denied changing his mind on the issue because of Republican megadonor Jeff Yass, a ByteDance investor who Trump, at the time, said he had only met “very briefly.” He said Yass “never mentioned TikTok” during their meeting.

Still, ByteDance—and groups connected to Yass—have been attempting to exert their influence. Lobbying disclosure reports show that this year, ByteDance paid veteran lobbyist and former Trump campaign aide David Urban $150,000 to lobby lawmakers in Washington in favor of TikTok. The company has also spent more than $8 million on in-house lobbyists and another $1.4 million on other lobbying firms, according to the nonprofit OpenSecrets.

Meanwhile, in March, Politico reported that Kellyanne Conway, a former senior Trump aide, was being paid by the Yass-funded conservative group Club for Growth to advocate for TikTok in Congress. A spokesperson for the organization said Conway was hired as a consultant to conduct polling. Conway and Urban did not respond to requests for comment. TikTok, which has long denied it’s a national security risk, declined to comment.

If the courts uphold the law, it would fall on Trump’s Justice Department to enforce it and punish any potential violations with fines. The fines would apply to app stores that would be prohibited from offering TikTok, and internet hosting services who would be barred from supporting it. Leah Plunkett, a lecturer at Harvard Law School, said from her reading of the statute, the attorney general has to investigate violations but can decide whether or not to drag such companies to court and force them to comply.

Trump could do other things to prevent TikTok from disappearing.

He could issue an executive order to nullify the ban—which Plunkett believes would not be lawful—or urge Congress to repeal the law. That would require support from Congressional Republicans who have aligned themselves with Trump but have also supported the prospects of getting TikTok out of the hands of a Chinese company.

In a statement sent to the AP after the election, Republican Representative John Moolenaar of Michigan, chairman of the House Select Committee on China, said Trump’s “long-standing concerns” about TikTok align with the law’s requirement for divestment.

“The Trump Administration will have a unique opportunity to broker an American takeover of the platform,” he said.

ByteDance, though, has previously said it has no intention of selling the platform despite interest from some investors, including Trump’s former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Analysts say the company is even less likely to sell the proprietary algorithm that fuels what users see on the app. That means even if TikTok is sold to a qualified buyer, it is likely to be a shell of its current self and would need to be rebuilt with new technology.

Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute, said it’s also possible that Trump could take the issue back to the drawing board and direct his administration to negotiate a new deal with TikTok.

TikTok said in 2022 that it presented the Biden administration with a draft agreement that would bolster protections for users and provide it more oversight over the company’s U.S. operations. But the administration has argued in court documents in recent months that it would be challenging to enforce the agreement due to the size and the technical complexity of the platform.

Trump hasn’t been privy to new intelligence material on the matter for a few years and it’s possible he could change his mind—and abandon his campaign promise—once he does, Kreps said.

Plunkett, the Harvard Law lecturer and author of Sharenthood: Why We Should Think Before We Talk About Our Kids Online, said if she were counseling TikTok, she would advise it to come up with a divesture plan that is compliant with the law and as favorable to the company as possible, noting, “There is too much uncertainty about what a Trump administration is likely to do.”

—By Haleluya Hadero, Associated Press


”Understand me…I do not have time for things that have no soul.” – Charles Bukowski

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JavaScript continues to grow and evolve. While new libraries are important, there’s much more happening. The language itself is improving, there’s a lot going on in the community, and the tools are rapidly advancing. Let’s take a look at what’s new in JavaScript. Vue.js Creator’s New Company Raises $4.6M to Build Better JavaScript Tools Evan…

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Anton Shilov reports via Tom's Hardware: FFmpeg is an open-source video decoding project developed by volunteers who contribute to its codebase, fix bugs, and add new features. The project is led by a small group of core developers and maintainers who oversee its direction and ensure that contributions meet certain standards. They coordinate the project's development and release cycles, merging contributions from other developers. This group of developers tried to implement a handwritten AVX512 assembly code path, something that has rarely been done before, at least not in the video industry. The developers have created an optimized code path using the AVX-512 instruction set to accelerate specific functions within the FFmpeg multimedia processing library. By leveraging AVX-512, they were able to achieve significant performance improvements -- from three to 94 times faster -- compared to standard implementations. AVX-512 enables processing large chunks of data in parallel using 512-bit registers, which can handle up to 16 single-precision FLOPS or 8 double-precision FLOPS in one operation. This optimization is ideal for compute-heavy tasks in general, but in the case of video and image processing in particular. The benchmarking results show that the new handwritten AVX-512 code path performs considerably faster than other implementations, including baseline C code and lower SIMD instruction sets like AVX2 and SSSE3. In some cases, the revamped AVX-512 codepath achieves a speedup of nearly 94 times over the baseline, highlighting the efficiency of hand-optimized assembly code for AVX-512.

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According to a partial teardown video of Apple's new Mac mini, the new machine features modular storage that can be removed. "As we saw with the Mac Studio, however, replacing the modular storage is complicated," notes MacRumors. The teardown also reveals two 128GB storage chips in the 256GB model, enabling faster SSD speeds comparable to higher-capacity versions. From the report: The criticism surrounding Apple's decision to use a single 256GB chip in some base-model Macs a few years ago primarily came from a vocal contingent of tech enthusiasts, and the average customer is unlikely to even notice the slower speeds in common day-to-day tasks. Nevertheless, it appears that customers who do want the fastest SSD speeds do not need to worry about which storage capacity they choose when ordering the new Mac mini.

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