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pCloud online backup review: A lifetime of secure files at a bargain price

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Though the initial cost might throw off some users, pCloud's yearly and lifetime plans are affordable in the long run and the service offers several ways to store and sync data via its versatile client software. That said, it's also a bit easier to get up to speed with than those others. I even like its lifetime pricing, as opposed to the usual monthly rate. Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best online backup for comparison.


This free tool keeps my bookmarks synced across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge - here's how

ZDNet

I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen I wore the world's first HDR10 smart glasses TCL's new E Ink tablet beats the Remarkable and Kindle Anker's new charger is one of the most unique I've ever seen This free tool keeps my bookmarks synced across Chrome, Firefox, and Edge - here's how I use multiple browsers every day, and this free utility fixed one of my biggest annoyances. I use Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and other browsers on my desktops and laptops, both personally and professionally. As I want access to the same bookmarks, I need a way to sync them. Each browser has its own syncing method, but it works only within the system, not with other browsers. That's why I use a free and inclusive syncing tool called Floccus.





Characterising Global Platforms: Centralised, Decentralised, Federated, and Grassroots

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Global digital platforms are software systems designed to serve entire populations, with some already serving billions of people. We propose atomic transactions-based multiagent transition systems and protocols as a formal framework to study them; introduce essential agents -- minimal sets of agents the removal of which makes communication impossible; and show that the cardinality of essential agents partitions all global platforms into four classes: 1. Centralised -- one (the server) 2. Decentralised -- finite $>1$ (bootstrap nodes) 3. Federated -- infinite but not universal (all servers) 4. Grassroots -- universal (all agents) Our illustrative formal example is a global social network, for which we provide centralised, decentralised, federated, and grassroots specifications via multiagent atomic transactions, and prove they all satisfy the same basic correctness properties. We discuss informally additional global platforms -- currencies, ``sharing economy'' apps, AI, and more. While this may be the first characterisation of centralised, decentralised, and federated global platforms, grassroots platforms have been formally defined previously, but using different notions. Here, we prove that their original definition implies that all agents are essential, placing grassroots platforms in a distinct class within the broader formal context that includes all global platforms. This work provides the first mathematical framework for classifying any global platform -- existing or imagined -- by providing a multiagent atomic-transactions specification of it and determining the cardinality of the minimal set of essential agents in the ensuing multiagent protocol. It thus provides a unifying mathematical approach for the study of global digital platforms, perhaps the most important class of computer systems today.





SynC: Synthetic Image Caption Dataset Refinement with One-to-many Mapping for Zero-shot Image Captioning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Zero-shot Image Captioning (ZIC) increasingly utilizes synthetic datasets generated by text-to-image (T2I) models to mitigate the need for costly manual annotation. However, these T2I models often produce images that exhibit semantic misalignments with their corresponding input captions (e.g., missing objects, incorrect attributes), resulting in noisy synthetic image-caption pairs that can hinder model training. Existing dataset pruning techniques are largely designed for removing noisy text in web-crawled data. However, these methods are ill-suited for the distinct challenges of synthetic data, where captions are typically well-formed, but images may be inaccurate representations. To address this gap, we introduce SynC, a novel framework specifically designed to refine synthetic image-caption datasets for ZIC. Instead of conventional filtering or regeneration, SynC focuses on reassigning captions to the most semantically aligned images already present within the synthetic image pool. Our approach employs a one-to-many mapping strategy by initially retrieving multiple relevant candidate images for each caption. We then apply a cycle-consistency-inspired alignment scorer that selects the best image by verifying its ability to retrieve the original caption via image-to-text retrieval. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that SynC consistently and significantly improves performance across various ZIC models on standard benchmarks (MS-COCO, Flickr30k, NoCaps), achieving state-of-the-art results in several scenarios. SynC offers an effective strategy for curating refined synthetic data to enhance ZIC.