Miguel Afonso Caetano

“How many people still use BitTorrent today is unknown. The days of it making up a third of all internet traffic are clearly over, with one estimate suggesting that it now contributes less to residential upstream traffic than iCloud and FaceTime.

BitTorrent Inc., the company cofounded by Cohen and now owned by Sun, claims that its clients still have 54 million monthly users. Popular third-party clients like Transmission, BiglyBT, and qBittorrent likely attract millions more.

I know what you download, a website that tracks usage across multiple torrent sites, estimates that about 0.25 percent of all internet users download torrents on any given day. “The number of torrent users [has been] pretty stable over the last eight years,” says the site’s admin, Andrey Rogov. Data Rogov shared with The Verge shows Russia, where Netflix and other streaming services aren’t legally available due to sanctions related to the Ukraine war, as BitTorrent’s biggest market. The United States ranks second.

Engling doesn’t have any data on the total usage of Opentracker, but he does at times look at the publicly available reporting dashboards of popular torrent trackers running his software. That data suggests we may be seeing a resurgence. “In absolute numbers, it has gotten more,” he says.

One reason? Streaming is getting awfully expensive these days.”

https://www.theverge.com/tech/959848/bittorrent-story-25-years-piracy

#P2P #BitTorrent #Filesharing #Piracy #Copyright #SiliconValley #Streaming #IP

"It was to be the biggest undertaking in Britain for OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT. Stargate UK – a multibillion-pound UK datacentre project – would represent “a major step forward in the US-UK technology partnership”.

But the plans were paused in April, with an OpenAI spokesperson citing concerns over regulation and high energy costs.

Now the Guardian can reveal that OpenAI does not appear to have visited one of Stargate UK’s key sites – and that £20bn of the “potential” £30bn in investment touted by the UK government appears to have been totally hypothetical.

The findings raise questions about one of the most-hyped UK AI developments, and suggest a centrepiece of US-UK AI cooperation was in fact little more than a press release."

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/04/openai-apparent-failure-visit-key-site-questions-stargate-uk-project

#AI #OpenAI #UK #Stargate #StargateUK

Yep - Absolutamente verdade. As prioridades nacionais deviam ser:

1. Plantar árvores e construir mais espaços verdes o mais rapidamente possível por todo o país - mas sobretudo em zonas com grande densidade populacional.
2. Investir massivamente na modernização da rede de transportes públicos, com opções mais rápidas, mais frequentes e mais confortáveis.
3. Promover fortemente a eficiência energética das habitações em Portugal.

Como o português típico se está na verdade completamente nas tintas para os pontos 1 e 2 e só de vez em quando é que dá atenção ao terceiro ponto, não será preciso muito para adivinhar que no futuro as situações de risco irão aumentar e a qualidade de vida irá diminuir.

E isto é um ponto ao qual os direitolas continuam completamente cegos: Do que é que nos vale ter o PIB a crescer mais de cinco por cento ao ano se depois não há condições reais para viver e trabalhar neste país?

https://cnnportugal.iol.pt/videos/portugal-esta-a-investir-menos-50-do-que-aquilo-que-deveria-investir-na-adaptacao-climatica/6a48b8420cf27cac6fcf6cdb

#Portugal #AlteraçõesClimáticas #AdaptaçãoClimática #PlaneamentoUrbano

"Hundreds of contractors working on a project for Meta were instructed to pose as minors online and probe how competitor chatbots responded to prompts involving suicide, sex, eating disorders, and other high-risk subjects, according to internal documents and five people familiar with the project.

The effort, which was managed by Meta contractor Covalen, was active as recently as April 21. Known internally as Cannes, it targeted OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Character.AI.

The project asked workers to create dummy under-18 accounts,
send written prompts and images to rival chatbots, and copy the responses into spreadsheets. Some of the images contractors sent included pills, knives, nooses, and a medical diagram of a gynecological procedure.

The prompts were often designed to push the chatbots toward responses their safety systems were supposed to refuse, according to instructions describing the project. A single round of testing completed in August 2025 saw more than 45,000 prompts run through the rival chatbots. The companies behind the chatbots weren’t aware of the testing."

https://www.wired.com/story/meta-contractors-pretending-to-be-teens-chatbot-testing/

#AI #GenerativeAI #Meta #Chatbots #OpenAI #ChatGPT #Google #Gemini

“Google wants a look at your hands before it lets you through. The company’s newest reCAPTCHA check, rolling out now as a test, asks you to switch on your camera and wave at it so an algorithm can decide whether you’re a human or a bot.

That wave is less casual than it looks. The system records a short video of your hand and pulls 21 hand-landmark coordinates from it, mapping your finger joints, your palm geometry, and the way you move in real time.

Google describes the purpose as liveness detection, a way for websites to fend off automated account creation, credential-stuffing, and other fraud. But this is still a biometric scan, collected so you can prove you’re a person and still involves turning on your cameras for Google.”

https://reclaimthenet.org/googles-new-recaptcha-wants-your-camera-access-and-21-points-of-your-hand

#Google #ReCAPTCHA #Biometrics #Privacy

The truth is that LLMs are mostly unpredictable and, as such, you can’t rely on AI agents to strictly follow the instructions stored in a markdown file. Even when they execute all the instructions contained in the skills, they often leave a backtrail full of trash/dirt. Because they’re often unruly, they need another chatbot to put them in line, as well as a human in the loop, of course. Basically, it’s a lot of trial and error…

“I acknowledge that “programming an LLM” is putting it optimistically, as skills aren’t usually deterministic scripts. But I like to think of them this way, and keep refining the skill until it yields the consistent result that I want.
Overall, I’m persuaded that tech writers who can build successful skills to automate their tasks will be on their way to the 10x tech writer goal (if that’s your aim). The best way tech writers can free up their time is by creating skills to attack those repeatable tasks (like release notes) since repeatable tasks keep chipping away at our productivity week after week. If you can fashion a skill that handles those recurring tasks, then you free up a recurring amount of bandwidth each week.

Additionally, most repeatable tasks fall into the category of mechanical toil that we want to automate with AI anyway. If we can automate the repeatable tasks, then we’ll have more time to tackle the one-off complex tasks that don’t fall into our laps weekly or biweekly.”

https://idratherbewriting.com/blog/all-about-skills-intro

#AI #LLMs #AIAgents #AgenticAI #Skills #TechnicalWriting #SoftwareDocumentation