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Basil Farraj, an assistant professor at Birzeit University, talks about the conditions and treatment of Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners in Israeli detention centres.

KSR = Kalka Shimla Railway. ZDM = Z stands for Narrow Gauge in Indian Railway terminology, D for diesel haulage and M means the loco was meant both for freight and passenger trains [though freight don't run on this section].

The section was built in 1902 and designated a UNESCO heritage site in 2008

Photographer @kirk781@discuss.tchncs.de

Microsoft hasn't been having a great time in courts around the world. Recently, we saw Microsoft get sued by an Australian group after the latter claimed that the former was hiding cheaper Microsoft 365 renewal prices from the people.

However, as that fight was beginning, another one was beginning to wrap up, and it isn't good news for Microsoft. A UK court has ruled that the company can no longer prevent people from reselling license keys for its products, after Microsoft claimed that doing so "infringed copyright."

Original YT Video: https://youtu.be/6NHbDGW31ZM

An incredibly ambitious hardware modder with a penchant for both sublime and ridiculous GPU tinkering has boosted an RTX 5050 to nearly 3.5GHz with a camping freezer. The result is clocks boosted to nearly 3.5GHz, a 23% uplift, and a handful of broken world records. This test was performed as part of what Trashbench calls "the dumbest competition on YouTube" in a video about his battle against fellow overclocking YouTuber Clock Bench to see who can push the GeForce RTX 5050 harder.

Determined to win, Trashbench shunt-modded his Gigabyte RTX 5050 card to unlock the card's power limits and crank it as hard as possible. He ended up with a sustained clock rate of 3468 MHz, some 23% increased over the stock 2820 MHz. This pushed the little GB207 GPU to the top of the 3DMark benchmark charts, and indeed, it is probably the fastest GB207 on the planet—for what dubious merit that honor awards. #1 is #1, though, no matter the context.

Over the past several decades, researchers have been making rapid progress in harnessing light to enable all sorts of scientific and industrial applications. From creating stupendously accurate clocks to processing the petabytes of information zipping through data centers, the demand for turnkey technologies that can reliably generate and manipulate light has become a global market worth hundreds of billions of dollars.

One challenge that has stymied scientists is the creation of a compact source of light that fits onto a chip, which makes it much easier to integrate with existing hardware. In particular, researchers have long sought to design chips that can convert one color of laser light into a rainbow of additional colors—a necessary ingredient for building certain kinds of quantum computers and making precision measurements of frequency or time.

Original YT Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSMQ3U1Thzw

Over on YouTube, [Ben Eater] pursues that classic 8-bit sound. In this video, [Ben] integrates the MOS Technology 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) with his homegrown 6502. The 6581 SID was famously used in the Commodore line of computers, perhaps most notably in the Commodore 64.

The 6581 SID supports three independent voices, each consisting of a tone oscillator/waveform generator, an envelope generator, and an amplitude modulator. These voices are combined into an output filter along with a volume control. [Ben] goes into detail concerning how to configure each of these voices using the available facilities on the available pins, referencing the datasheet for the details.

Original YT Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oZlt9Dl43I

The 3Dfx Voodoo 2 and the Nvidia Riva TNT were the pinnacles of the early era of 3D graphics. Both were released in 1998, and while I owned the latter, the Voodoo 2 was the faster of the two, despite the inconvenience of requiring an existing 2D graphics card. The Voodoo 2 is naturally memorable, and it's a regular presence in retro PC builds. As the YouTube channel Bits und Bolts (Bits) found out, the cards' capacitors can and will fail in time due to the rarely discussed pyroelectric effect.

In a lengthy video, Bits diagnoses why one of his Voodoo 2 cards is intermittently failing with graphical corruption, with no apparent pattern other than the issues appearing after a short time of use. After much digging, he figures out that the problem seems related to the card's power-delivery circuitry by inspecting how resistance changed at the component that converts 5 V to 3.3 V.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Lawmakers seeking to force the release of files related to the sex trafficking investigation into Jeffrey Epstein are predicting a big win in the House this week with a “deluge of Republicans” voting for their bill and bucking the GOP leadership and President Donald Trump, who for months have disparaged their effort.

The bill would force the Justice Department to release all files and communications related to Epstein, as well as any information about the investigation into his death in federal prison. Information about Epstein’s victims or ongoing federal investigations would be allowed to be redacted.

“There could be 100 or more” votes from Republicans, said Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., among the lawmakers discussing the legislation on Sunday news show appearances. “I’m hoping to get a veto-proof majority on this legislation when it comes up for a vote.”