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Previous articles about PostgreSQL 17: 2023-07, 2023-09, 2023-11.

Governments in many countries restrict citizens' access to information and services on the Internet in one way or another. Combating such censorship is an important and difficult task. Usually simple solutions cannot boast about high reliability or long-term efficiency. More complex methods of overcoming blocks have disadvantages in terms of usability, low performance, or they do not allow you to maintain the quality of Internet use at the proper level.

A group of American scientists from the University of Illinois has developed a new method of overcoming blocks, which is based on the use of proxy technology, as well as segmenting users by trust level to effectively identify agents working for censors. We present you with the main theses of this work.

Description of the approach

Scientists have developed the Salmon tool, a system of proxy servers operated by volunteers from countries without restrictions on Internet use. In order to protect these servers from blocking by censors, the system uses a special algorithm for assigning a level of trust to users.

The method involves exposing potential censor agents that pose as ordinary users in order to find out the IP address of the proxy server and block it. In addition, countering Sybil attacks is carried out through the requirements to provide a link to a valid social network account when registering in the system or to receive a recommendation from a user with a high level of trust.

How it works

It is assumed that the censor is a state–controlled body that has the ability to take control of any router within the country. It is also assumed that the task of the censor is to block access to certain resources, and not to identify users for further arrests. The system cannot prevent such a course of events in any way – the state has plenty of opportunities to find out what services citizens use. One of them is the use of honeypot servers to intercept communications.

It is also assumed that the state has significant resources, including human ones. The censor can solve tasks that require hundreds and thousands of full-time employees.

A few more basic theses:

Hello everyone, this is Denis Weber.

Today I’m going to talk about what happens if you combine LEGO and the iconic movie Terminator 2. I’ll show you how I created a real LEGO trailer and what came out of it. I like doing such large-scale projects and if you have any cool ideas, let me know in the comments.

If you prefer the video format, you can watch it here.

Today, I would like to share my personal story. I hope it helps you get to know me better and maybe benefits your own journey.

Wearable Digital Health Technologies for Monitoring in Cardiovascular Medicine

This review article presents a three-part true-life clinical vignette that illustrates how digital health technology can aid providers caring for patients with cardiovascular disease. Specific information that would identify real patients has been removed or altered. Each vignette is followed by a discussion of how these methods were used in the care of the patient.

In this article, I’m going to discuss something really important. If you’re a data analyst or you want to learn data analysis, please watch this video till the end because it’s really important.

Masking an IP address with a use of a proxy is necessary not only to circumvent censorship on the Internet and watch TV series. In recent years, proxies have been increasingly used to solve corporate objectives from application testing under load to competitive intelligence. Habr has a good overview of the various options for using proxies in the business sector.

Today we will talk about what to pay attention to when choosing a proxy network for solving such corporate objectives.

IP address masking may be required for various tasks – from accessing blocked content to bypassing anti-bot systems of search engines and other online resources. We found an interesting post about how this technology can be used to solve corporate objectives.

There are several options of implementing a proxy:

Few days ago, Mira Murati, Chief Technology Officer at OpenAI, introduced the company's latest GPT model - GPT-4o. A new flagship model set to change how people interact with AI.

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Recently I got Asus E200H laptop, which I would like to use as a portable computer to work with a high-precision equipment.

Within the scope of the article we will perform the experiment about the upgrade of the default 32 GB eMMC capacitor to 256 GB and will test it.

Have a nice reading!

According to the Oxford Dictionary, empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another”. In UX, there is a special term “user empathy”. It refers to the ability of UX designers to fully understand what users need from a particular software product. Having user empathy and basing design solutions around users” comfort is one of the most true indicators of a designer”s professionalism. Without that, any product a designer works on has a high chance of turning out to be pointless. Apart from having empathy as a soft skill in general, there are several ways a designer can practice user empathy through different UX methods and techniques. In this article we would like to talk on how a UX designer can treat users with empathy and make the product more accessible for different groups of target audience.

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I always pay attention to assessing the complexity of programming in a particular language. Programming is indeed not an easy task and this is perceived as a fact and usually does not require any confirmation.

But the concept of “complexity” is akin to the term “heap”. For some, five coconuts is not so much, but for someone who ate one and “didn’t want any more,” this means that even one coconut will be too much for him.

The same goes for the complexity of programs. It seems that the constant increase in the complexity of programs is obvious to everyone and is observed in all areas of application of IT technologies, and programming languages themselves become more and more complex as they develop, but assessing “complexity” using numerical metrics is a problem. obviously a thankless task, but also “You can’t manage what you can’t measure...”

Typically, talk of “complexity” only implies value judgments without any numerical evaluation. And since I am personally interested in the issue of the complexity of programming languages, I decided to calculate the complexity of implementing the gcc compiler on some conditional “parrots”. What if we could see some patterns of difficulty changing over time?

Practically all programming languages are built either on the principle of similarity (to make like this one, only with its own blackjack) or to realize some new concept (modularity, purity of functional calculations, etc.). Or both at the same time.

But in any case, the creator of a new programming language doesn't take his ideas randomly out of thin air. They are still based on his previous experience, obsession with the new concept and other initial settings and constraints.

Is there a minimal set of lexemes, operators, or syntactic constructs that can be used to construct an arbitrary grammar for a modern general-purpose programming language?

The director Denis Villeneuve and cinematographer Greig Fraser in their Dune: Part Two movie made a curious decision to film the scenes on the surface of the Giedi Prime planet in the infrared spectrum. It turned out to have interesting aesthetics and there are some interesting related physics to discuss and speculate about how realistic the look of it is.

S.B. Pshenichnikov

The article outlines a new mathematical apparatus for verbal calculations in NLP (natural language processing). Words are embedded not in a real vector space, but in an algebra of extremely sparse matrix units. Calculations become evidence-based and transparent. The example shows forks in calculations that go unnoticed when using traditional approaches, and the result may be unexpected.

The use of IT in Natural Language Processing (NLP) requires standardization of texts, for example, tokenization or lemmatization.

After this, you can try to use mathematics, since it is the highest form of standardization and turns the objects under study into ideal ones, for example, data tables into matrices of elements. Only in the language of matrices can one search for general patterns in data (numbers and texts).

If text is turned into numbers, then in NLP these are first natural numbers for numbering words, which are then embedded into real vectors is irreversible ed in a real vector space.

Perhaps we should not rush to do this but come up with a new type of numbers that is more suitable for NLP than numbers for studying physical phenomena. These are matrix hyperbinary numbers. Hyperbinary numbers are one of the types of hypercomplex numbers.

Hyperbinary numbers have their  own  arithmetic,  and  if  you get used to  it,  it  will  seem  more  familiar  and  simpler  than  Pythagorean arithmetic.

In Decision Support Systems (DSS), the texts are value judgments and a numbered verbal rating scale. Next (as in NLP), the numbers are turned into vectors of real numbers and used as sets of weighted arithmetic average coefficients.

Internet censorship is becoming an increasingly important issue worldwide. This leads to increasing of the "race of armaments" – in different countries government agencies and private corporations try to block various content and fight against the ways of circumventing of such restrictions. At the same time developers and researchers strive to create effective tools to combat censorship.

Scientists from Carnegie Mellon University, Stanford University, and SRI International conducted an experiment in which they developed a special service for masking the use of Tor – one of the most popular tools for bypassing blocking. Here is the story about the work done by the researchers.

一组印度科学家发表了以其本国为例政府机构采用的现代互联网屏蔽方法概述。他们研究了互联网服务提供商限制访问被禁信息的机制，评估了这些机制的准确性以及绕过这些屏蔽的能力。2captcha常驻代理团队整理了这项研究，并提请大家关注这项工作成果的主要论点。

A group of Indian scientists has published an overview of modern methods of Internet blocking introduced by government agencies, using the example of their own country. They studied the mechanisms used by Internet service providers restricting access to prohibited information, assessed their accuracy, and the ability to bypass such blocks. We would like to bring to your attention the main theses of this work.