On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
Microsoft announced on Wednesday that it was unveiling a new software aimed at curbing and eliminating child porn. The system which is called PhotoDNA jointly developed by Microsoft and Dartmouth College. How the system works is that it converts existing images into a mathematical pattern which can then be used to remove those images from other networks. It can even find images that match the initial phot even if it has been altered. It is called PhotoDNA because it works by extracting a signature from the picture which can be used to track other photos through their PhotoDNA code. Microsoft has devoted the site microsoftphotodna.com with the title a Childhood for every child. They are also asking people to replace your social profile with their campaign logo to help spread the word. So if you use Twitter, Facebook or Myspace your can add their logo to your site. We have a sample from their site below. An original post by Sociolatte