06.01.23

Tux Machines Closing the Door on Twitter Because Twitter is Dead (for a Lot of People)

Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux at 1:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Tux Machines recently joined millions of others who had already quit Twitter, including passive posting (fully or partly automated)

As noted here some days ago, Tux Machines had officially left Twitter. Now we’re decommissioning what’s left and invite others to quit similarly. Tux Machines actually exited all forms of social control media as they’re volatile and generally a waste of time, never mind many inherent issues, especially for people who actively “engage” there. In fact, “momentum” is never a good excuse for anything, let alone staying in such nefarious sites…

Tux Machines was there for 12 years and now it’s the end.

A last reminder to leave:

Tux Machines exit

Before deletion/deprecation, a local copy:

An archive of Tux Machines

With updates stopping around the middle of May, the impact on visibility can be seen.

Tux Machines stats

Nothing of value lost. █

05.31.23

Links 31/05/2023: Inkscape’s 1.3 Plans and New ARM Cortex-A55-Based Linux Chip

Posted in News Roundup at 8:32 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Gemini Links 31/05/2023: Personality of Software Engineers

Posted in News Roundup at 8:19 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • Gemini* and Gopher

    • Personal

      • Today I Lost an Important Thing in My Life

        A very important thing, which made up large parts of my private life for the last decade, has been taken from me. Nothing life-threatening or dangerous in any way, just leaving a big hole.

        Granted, I was thinking about removing it from my life voluntarily a couple of times, but never took any action. Or, better, not stopping what I was doing.

      • Composing with Constraints: Episodes I-III

        Results from “Composing with Constraints: 100 Practical Exercises in Music Composition” by Jorge Variego, for better or worse.

      • Seriously? Last day ‘o May already?

        Pleasant day. We rehearsed a bit for a show on the 3rd. Hashed out some interpersonal abrasions that had been dogging us. Hit a winery and a couple “dispensaries”. Should be good to go for a couple months. I’m hoping the low grade stuff we acquired solves a specific pain issue for my wife.

        I guess I’m just never going to feel energetic again, post COVID. There’s a weariness that just plain doesn’t go away no matter what chemicals I forego, no matter “how well I eat”, etc.

        I mean, I’m sure age is a non-trivial factor at this point. But just a year ago we were both “killing it” in terms of still holding down jobs and getting gobs of other shit done (e.g. take care of a couple short term rentals). Now it seems I have to stop and rest after every form of even middle-of-the-road exertion.

      • Un-Shittifying Wordle

        Like many others in the smolnet scene I was very nonplussed about the NYT acquisition of Wordle. I think we all knew exactly where that was headed eventually. Luckily so many people telegraphed what would happen that there is a plethora of ways to play wordle on a TON of different platforms without having to involve the NYT at all. This is far from an exhaustive list of Wordle clones. There are far too many to keep track of but these are the ones I play or at least have tried and enjoyed.

    • Politics

      • ‘Up, Simba’: David Foster Wallace on the Presidential campaign trail & UK Citizenship

        I’ve been re-reading some of David Foster Wallace’s essays and journalism in the collection ‘Consider the Lobster and Other Essays’ (2005). Last night, I couldn’t sleep until the small hours – and years of insomnia have taught me that the thing to do is accept it, get up and read (rather than, say: stay laying down in a state of somewhat wakefulness, conscious of the night, of the silence, of the changing cadence of the street outside (this can drag for hours, and almost never leads to sleep)). So I spent a few hours of the night getting absorbed in Wallace’s piece of journalism ‘Up, Simba’, originally written for Rolling Stone magazine; an account of the 2000 Republican nominee campaign trail following John McCain, who at the time was up against his main competitor and now ex-President George Bush Jr.

    • Technical

      • Asus L210MA lid screen issue with XFCE4 on Devuan 5
      • Asus L210MA lid screen issue with XFCE4 on Devuan 5

        I tested several combinations and followed various ancient and modern workarounds, none of those worked out; eventually I found my recipe, perhaps many steps are even unnecessary, however this combination seems to have the highest rate of reliability.

      • The computer is a dream

        I had to think about it for a bit. I certainly used to dream about computers. I used to dream in ASCII, the dream rolling down the insides of my closed eyelids like letters on a flickering CRT. And then I’d wake up, make coffee,and check Usenet on my 386, dialed into either the CS department Sun server, or a community UUCP provider, at 2400 baud. Probably even for a while after that, when I was setting up auto-dial and dynamic DNS on my 486 and 56k modem, and porting Unix software to OS/2 instead of working my dissertation proposal, completely unrelated to computers.

      • Science

        • Neuralink and Autism

          I want you, the reader, for the length of this post, to ignore the “Holy Shit!” implications of “enabling Web browsing and telepathy” as a linked pair and instead let’s just focus on Autism.

          I have always been different. I’ve always known that I was different, too. But it took me much of my lifetime to gain insight into what made me different. At least part of the difference is Autism.

      • Programming

        • The Personality of Software Engineers

          First, non-technical folk vastly over estimate how much computer scientists and software engineers know what they’re doing. We’re all just making it up as we go along and especially when it comes to machine learning we haven’t a clue of how any of it works, nor what’s even with the scope of possibility. We’re figuring all this stuff out with the rest of society.

          Another thing is the level of understanding of software technologies in the general population. Most people have a general baseline of understanding of cancer; they understand that cancers can be life threatening, and that treatments are difficult and fraught with complications. When it comes to software, the average persons knows nothing: they think that programmers wear hoodies, sitting in basements, with falling green text projected onto their faces. We see this in the ludicrous questions that elected officials ask of executives, and in turn the almost as ludicrous answers that those executives give in response.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

Links 31/05/2023: Armbian 23.05 Release and Illegal UPC

Posted in News Roundup at 1:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

Gemini Protocol About to Turn 4 and It’s Still Growing

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Protocol at 12:28 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Notice the sharp bump in the graph on the right:

There are 3249 capsules. We successfully connected recently to 2415 of them.

Summary: In the month of May we had zero downtime (no updates to the system or outages in the network), which means Lupa did not detect any errors such as timeouts and we’re on top of the list (the page was fixed a day or so after we wrote about it); Gemini continues to grow (chart by Botond) as we’re approaching the 4th anniversary of the protocol

The Gemini project was started in June 2019 by Solderpunk.

Links 31/05/2023: Librem Server v2, curl 8.1.2, and Kali Linux 2023.2 Release

Posted in News Roundup at 5:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • GNU/Linux

  • Distributions and Operating Systems

  • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Using WordPress for a self-hosted blog

      While I long since moved off WordPress for my own blog, I’ve mentioned that I still maintain various installs for others. This has prompted a few of you to ask if it’s worth it for a personal blog.

      I’d say so. If you’re not tempted by static site generators, or prefer running server-side software (as I keep being tempted back to), it works fine. There are so many benefits to hosting your own material if you can, regardless of what you use. In the words of my late mum: stop worrying about the chisel, and get carving!

    • Web Browsers/Web Servers

      • Daniel Stenberg ☛ The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

        There is again a pull-request submitted to the curl project to bring support for the Gemini protocol. It seems like a worthwhile effort that I support, even if it is also a lot of work involved and it might take some time before it reaches the state in which it can be merged. A previous attempt at doing this was abandoned a while ago.

        This renewed interest made me take a fresh tour through the current Gemini protocol spec and I decided to write down some observations for you. So here I am. These are comments based on my reading of the 0.16.1 version of the protocol spec. I have implemented Internet application protocols client side for some thirty years. I have not actually implemented the Gemini protocol.

      • Jim Nielsen ☛ Browser Defaults We Throw Away

        I think there are a few browser-related features that, collectively, we simply ignore. They’re built-in to the browser for our use, and yet it has become an almost knee-jerk reaction to immediately override them.

      • Daniel Stenberg ☛ curl 8.1.2 ate one too

        This is the second follow-up patch release in the 8.1.x series due to regressions and bugs that are too annoying to leave lingering around.

    • Programming/Development

      • [Old] [Repeat] Jason W Comeau ☛ Clever Code Considered Harmful

        This is important to keep in mind if you’re building an open-source tool, but it’s even more important if you’re working in a production codebase with other humans. Especially ones that have less experience than you.

  • Leftovers

    • Scheerpost ☛ Quitting Time
    • Hackaday ☛ Simple Cubes Show Off AI-Driven Runtime Changes In VR

      AR and VR developer [Skarredghost] got pretty excited about a virtual blue cube, and for a very good reason. It marked a successful prototype of an augmented reality experience in which the logic underlying the cube as a virtual object was changed by AI in response to verbal direction by the user. Saying “make it blue” did indeed turn the cube blue! (After a little thinking time, of course.)

    • Anders Borch ☛ Combine.social as an Org

      I have some ambitions about where I want to take combine.social over time. It starts with taking the old toottail repository and moving it into a Github organization.

      I want to make it easier to adopt combine.social into your workflow, to trust that the code does what it says it does and nothing else. I already created a privacy policy specifically to mitigate any privacy concerns.

    • Ruben Schade ☛ Spreadsheets as a knowledge base and mental map

      Back in February I talked about how I mentally map things, and admitted I was using spreadsheets more. A few of you asked if I could provide some examples, so that’s what I’m (finally!) getting to here. I use LibreOffice, but other graphical spreadsheets have equivalent functionality.

      In summary, I tend to think of things in terms of matrices. Turns out, a spreadsheet is a giant, beautiful, flexible canvas upon which to build them! I can can fill out, sort, filter, and search for things using this glorified database, and change things easily.

    • The Nation ☛ The First Street Baptist Church in America: Jesus Had 2 Dads
    • The Nation ☛ Better Than Reality

      Ever since I read media scholar Julie Turnock’s The Empire of Effects: Industrial Light & Magic and the Rendering of Realism, I haven’t been able to watch a movie or TV show that contains special effects without focusing on the wrong things. Instead of dragons or landscapes from the past, I see particles everywhere: fog and dust and mist and dirt and shrapnel and rain. These digital details are meant to provide the texture of reality, but now I see them as a constant blanket of static coating the action. Sometimes ignorance is bliss, so if you enjoy admiring the realism of elven villages, don’t read this book.

    • Education

      • Rachel ☛ Feedback: I try to answer “how to become a systems engineer”

        I got some anonymous feedback a while back asking if I could do an article on how to become a systems engineer. I’m not entirely sure that I can, and part of that is the ambiguity in the request. To me, a “systems engineer” is a Real Engineer with actual certification and responsibilities to generally not be a clown. That’s so far from the industry I work in that it’s not even funny any more.

      • CER ☛ The information won’t just sink in: Helping teachers provide technology-assisted data literacy instruction in social studies

        Last year, Tammy Shreiner and I published an article in the British Journal of Educational Technology, “The information won’t just sink in: Helping teachers provide technology-assisted data literacy instruction in social studies.” (I haven’t been able to blog much the last year while starting up PCAS, so please excuse my tardiness in sharing this story.) The journal version of the paper is here, and our final submitted version (not paywalled) is available here.

      • Stacey on IoT ☛ My five big takeaways from this week’s big smart home event

        I’m currently in Dallas for the Parks Associates Connections conference, where it’s clear that the smart home industry is laser-focused on five big topics. And while the mood here is fairly grim with regards to the short term, it is optimistic when it comes to the long term.

        The five big topics of conversation both onstage and offstage have been smart energy, senior living, the Matter smart home interoperability standard, generative AI, and privacy. Smart energy and senior living offer the greatest hope for service revenue while Matter and generative AI have provoked both confusion and disappointment. The vibe around privacy, meanwhile, has been one of begrudging acceptance. Yes, this is something the industry needs to care about.

      • Jon Udell ☛ Ed Iacobucci on DayJet, from IT Conversations

        There’s much more to say about Descript, which by the way deployed a significant upgrade in the middle of my project, but for now I’ll just say: Thank you! It’s a brilliant piece of software that enabled me to revisit one of my most treasured conversations and bring it to life in a way that people can now search for and read, as well as hear, with maximum fidelity. DayJet folded in 2008; it was a remarkable tale of innovation; here’s hoping Ed’s dream will come true.

      • Telex (Hungary) ☛ Opposition MEP to request that EC make education reform in Hungary condition for EU funds

        - Anna Donáth, Momentum MEP said at the party’s campaign launching press conference in front of the cordons at the Prime Minister’s office.

    • Hardware

      • Devever ☛ Modern CPUs have a backstage cast

        If you take someone with intermediate knowledge of computing in the right areas, and ask them how an x86 machine boots, they’ll probably start telling you about how the CPU first comes up in real mode and starts executing code from the 8086 reset vector of FFFF:FFF0. This understanding of how an x86 machine boots has remained remarkably persistent, as far as I can tell because this basic narrative about the boot process has been handed down from website to website, generation to generation, largely unchanged.

        It’s also a pack of lies and hasn’t reflected the true nature of the boot process for some time. It’s true the 8086 reset vector is still used, but only because it’s a standard “ABI” for the CPU to transfer control to the BIOS (whether legacy PC BIOS or UEFI BIOS). In reality an awful lot happens before this reset vector starts executing.1 Aside from people having vaguely heard about the Intel Management Engine, this modern reality of the boot process remains largely unknown. It doesn’t help that neither Intel nor AMD have really gone out of their way to actually document what the modern boot process looks like, and large parts of this process are handled by vendor-supplied mystery firmware blobs, which may as well be boxes with “???” written in them. Mainly we have the substantial assistance of assorted reverse engineers and security researchers to thank for the fact that we even have a decent picture of what the modoern x86 boot process actually looks like for both Intel and AMD. I could write a whole article about that process — but instead, I’d like to focus on something else.

      • Hackaday ☛ Supercon 2022: [Jorvon Moss] Gives His Robots A Soul

        How do you approach your robot designs? Maybe, you do it from a ‘oh, I have these cool parts’ position, or from a ‘I want to make a platform on wheels for my experiments’ perspective. In that case, consider that there’s a different side to robot building – one where you account for your robot’s influence on what other people around feel about them, and can get your creations the attention they deserve. [Jorvon ‘Odd-Jayy’ Moss]’s robots are catchy in a way that many robot designs aren’t, and they routinely go viral online. What are his secrets to success? A combination of an art background, a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration, and a trove of self-taught electronics skills helped him develop a standout approach to robot building.

      • Techdirt ☛ Now That Snail Mail Has Pretty Much Been Rendered Obsolete, Congress Is Finally Getting Serious About Terminating Postal Surveillance

        For as long as the United States Postal Service (USPS) has had scanners, the government has been able to obtain information about senders and recipients. Under the Third Party Doctrine, information shared with third parties (in this case, shared with the government directly) is the government’s to have. No warrant needed.

      • Hackaday ☛ Ultimate Garage Door Control Does The Job Brilliantly

        [Stephen Carey] had previously relied on an Insteon garage door controller, only to have it perform poorly and fail at integrating with Alexa properly. Thus, he did what any good hacker would do, and built his own system instead.

      • Hackaday ☛ Pretty Small Robot Is Capable, Nonetheless

        When science fiction authors imagined robots in the 20th century, many of them were huge imposing steel automatons. [Shane]’s designs for the Pretty Small Robot are quite contrary to that, being tiny in stature and cute in affect.

    • Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

      • Vice Media Group ☛ Eating Disorder Helpline Disables Chatbot for ‘Harmful’ Responses After Firing Human Staff

        After NEDA workers decided to unionize in early May, executives announced that on June 1, it would be ending the helpline after twenty years and instead positioning its wellness chatbot Tessa as the main support system available through NEDA. A helpline worker described the move as union busting, and the union representing the fired workers said that “a chatbot is no substitute for human empathy, and we believe this decision will cause irreparable harm to the eating disorders community.”

      • NBC ☛ Foodborne illness outbreaks at restaurants are often linked to sick workers, CDC finds

        Sick employees are major contributors to the spread of foodborne illnesses at restaurants and other food establishments, according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report released Tuesday.

        From 2017 to 2019, the report found, around 40% of foodborne illness outbreaks with known causes were at least partly associated with food contamination by a sick or infectious worker. In 2017, for instance, Chipotle attributed a norovirus outbreak at its restaurant in Sterling, Virginia, to an employee who came to work while ill.

      • Hackaday ☛ DIY 3D Printed Rain Gauge Connects To Home Assistant

        Measuring local rainfall has real practical uses, especially in agriculture, but most of us will have to admit that it’s at least partly about drawing cool graphs on a screen. Whatever your motivation, you can build this open source electronic rain gauge designed by [Sebastian] of Smart Solutions for Home, and integrate it with Home Assistant.

      • Techdirt ☛ Maryland Cops Can’t Seem To Understand Why Marijuana Legalization Means They Can’t Search Cars Just Because They Smell Marijuana

        Everyone likes an easy day at the office. Cops are no exception. They like easy excuses to disregard the Fourth Amendment. Pretextual stops are how cop business has been done for years. Any missing tail light or (subjectively) too dark window tint is enough to initiate a traffic stop and apply pressure on drivers to submit to a so-called “consensual” search of their car.

      • Hackaday ☛ Hackaday Prize 2023: EyeBREAK Could Be A Breakthrough

        For those with strokes or other debilitating conditions, control over one’s eyelid can be one of the last remaining motor functions. Inspired by [Jeremiah Denton] blinking in Morse code on a televised interview, [MBW] designed an ESP32-based device to decode blinks into words.

      • Techdirt ☛ A Deeper Look At The Surgeon General’s Report On Kids & Social Media: It’s Not What You Heard

        We had just recently written about the American Psychological Association’s very thorough and detailed report going through much of the research about the impact of social media on the mental health of kids. That report was careful, and nuanced, and basically said that there is little evidence that social media is inherently bad for kids. It noted that studies suggested social media actually seems to be beneficial for many kids, and in the cases where it’s harmful, there are often other, extenuating circumstances. It had many recommendations, focused mainly on better educating children about how to use social media appropriately, rather than any sort of moral panic about it (of course, as we noted, the media still misrepresented the study and claimed it “warned of social media’s potential harm to kids.”)

      • Michael West Media ☛ Growers nervous over drier conditions for winter crops

        Australia’s winter crop is on target to exceed last year’s planting but overall production could be significantly lower than last year, a Rabobank report shows.

        In its annual Australian winter crop outlook the agribank forecasts 23.48 million hectares will be planted this year, up 0.3 per cent on last year.

    • Proprietary

      • New York Times ☛ Why an Octopus-like Creature Has Come to Symbolize the State of A.I.

        Comparing an A.I. language model to a Shoggoth, @TetraspaceWest said, wasn’t necessarily implying that it was evil or sentient, just that its true nature might be unknowable.

        “I was also thinking about how Lovecraft’s most powerful entities are dangerous — not because they don’t like humans, but because they’re indifferent and their priorities are totally alien to us and don’t involve humans, which is what I think will be true about possible future powerful A.I.”

        The Shoggoth image caught on, as A.I. chatbots grew popular and users began to notice that some of them seemed to be doing strange, inexplicable things their creators hadn’t intended. In February, when Bing’s chatbot became unhinged and tried to break up my marriage, an A.I. researcher I know congratulated me on “glimpsing the Shoggoth.” A fellow A.I. journalist joked that when it came to fine-tuning Bing, Microsoft had forgotten to put on its smiley-face mask.

      • NVISO Labs ☛ Transforming search sentences to query Elastic SIEM with OpenAI API

        The primary task of a security analyst or threat hunter is to ask the right questions and then translate them into SIEM query languages, like SPL for Splunk, KQL for Sentinel, and DSL for Elastic. These questions are designed to provide answers about what actually happened. For example: “Identify failed login attempts, Search for a specific user’s login activities, Identify suspicious process creation, Monitor changes to registry keys, Detect user account lockouts, etc.”

        The answers to these questions will likely lead to even more questions. Analysts will keep interrogating the SIEM until they get a clear answer. This allows them to piece together a timeline of all the activities and explain whether it is a false positive or an actual incident. To do this, the analysts need to know a bunch of things. First, they need to be familiar with several types of attacks. Next, they need to understand the infrastructure (cloud systems, on-premises, applications, etc.). And on top of all that, they must learn how to use these SIEM tools effectively.

      • Techdirt ☛ Perhaps GPT Is Not Ready For The Supreme Court

        Over the last few months, we’ve written a bunch about DoNotPay, the company run by Joshua Browder, claiming that it is the “world’s first robot lawyer” — that is until people take him to court for various things, at which point he says the term is just meant to be for marketing, and not to be taken seriously.

      • Windows TCO

        • Security Week ☛ Personal Information of 9 Million Individuals Stolen in MCNA Ransomware Attack

          The data breach, which occurred between February 26 and March 7, impacted both current and former members of certain state Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Programs, the company says in the notification letter, a copy of which was submitted to the Maine Attorney General’s Office.

          During the incident, an unauthorized party accessed multiple systems within MCNA’s network, infected them with malware, and stole personal information stored on them.

        • ABC ☛ Worst cyberattack in Greece disrupts high school exams, causes political spat

          It said the distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks aimed at overwhelming the platform occurred for a second consecutive day Tuesday. The attack involved computers from 114 countries, causing outages and delays in high school exams but failing to incapacitate the system, the ministry said.

    • Security

      • Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

        • Bruce Schneier ☛ Brute-Forcing a Fingerprint Reader

          Depending on the model, the attack takes between 40 minutes and 14 hours.

        • EFF ☛ EU’s Proposed Cyber Resilience Act Raises Concerns for Open Source and Cybersecurity

          EFF welcomes the intention of the legislation, but the proposed law will penalize open source developers who receive any amount of monetary compensation for their work. It will also require manufacturers to report actively exploited, unpatched vulnerabilities to regulators. This requirement risks exposing the knowledge and exploitation of those vulnerabilities to a larger audience, furthering the harms this legislation is intended to mitigate.

          Open source software serves as the backbone of the modern internet. Contributions from developers working on open source projects such as Linux and Apache, to name just two, are freely used and incorporated into products distributed to billions of people worldwide. This is only possible through revenue streams which reward developers for their work, including individual donations, foundation grants, and sponsorships. This ecosystem of development and funding is an integral part of the functioning and securing of today’s software-driven world.

          The CRA imposes liabilities for commercial activity which bring vulnerable products to market. Though recital 10 of the proposed law exempts not-for-profit open source contributors from what is considered “commercial activity” and thus liability, the exemption defines commercial activity much too broadly. Any open source developer soliciting donations or charging for support services for their software is not exempted and thus liable for damages if their product inadvertently contains a vulnerability which is then incorporated into a product, even if they themselves did not produce that product. Typically, open source contributors and developers write software and make it available as an act of good-will and gratitude to others who have done the same. This would pose a risk to such developers if they receive even a tip for their work. Smaller organizations which produce open source code to the public benefit may have their entire operation legally challenged simply for lacking funds to cover their risks. This will push developers and organizations to abandon these projects altogether, damaging open source as a whole.

        • Krebs On Security ☛ Discord Admins Hacked by Malicious Bookmarks

          A number of Discord communities focused on cryptocurrency have been hacked this past month after their administrators were tricked into running malicious Javascript code disguised as a Web browser bookmark.

      • Privacy/Surveillance

        • Video ☛ Tesla Had a Massive Data Leak
        • Patrick Breyer ☛ Data Retention: Red Line Against Storage of Citizens’ IP Addresses

          On 15 and 16 May the judges of the Court of Justice of the European Union heard the French government, several French NGOs, the European Data Protection Supervisor and the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity in a case whose outcome will significantly strengthen or weaken, respectively the privacy of more than 447 million EU citizen’s activities on the Internet. (See case C‑470/21)

        • Scoop News Group ☛ Section 702 data led to State Department warnings about North Korean IT scams, official says

          The revelation about the 2022 scheme comes as the State Department joins the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and the White House in pushing for Congress to renew Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act before its sunset at the end of this year.

          While other officials have focused primarily on the surveillance tool’s importance in combatting nation-state threats, Brett Holmgren, the State Department’s assistant secretary for its Bureau of Intelligence and Research, emphasized how crucial the tool is to diplomatic efforts.

        • The Register UK ☛ The FBI as advanced persistent threat – and what to do about it

          Consider a repeat offender: the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Last week, the FBI was caught using its power to hoover up communications without a warrant, ostensibly to monitor foreign threats, to plunder the privacy of many thousands of US citizens whose revulsion at a brutal killing of a Black man by white cops marked them as activists.

          This is nothing new. Search for “FBI abuse of powers” – replacing FBI with other state agencies to taste – and you’ll be scrolling for a year. It’s actually quite cheering that democracies still have safeguards to bring this stuff to light, and yet it keeps happening. If you live in a part of the world where such protection is diluted or absent, you won’t need telling how bad it can get.

        • Techdirt ☛ FTC Gives Fertility App $200k Wrist Slap For Sharing Sensitive Medical Info

          We’ve mentioned for years how there’s now an absolute ocean of telecoms, services, apps, and other companies that are busy collecting all manner of sensitive location, health, mental health, browsing, and sexual preference data, then selling access to it to a massive array of dodgy and poorly regulated data brokers. Despite this, we consistently refuse to pass any sort of competent internet privacy law or competently regulate said brokers.

        • EFF ☛ To Save the News, We Must Ban Surveillance Advertising

          The ad-tech industry is incredibly profitable, raking in hundreds of billions of dollars every year by spying on us. These companies have tendrils that reach into our apps, our televisions, and our cars, as well as most websites. Their hunger for our data is insatiable. Worse still, a whole secondary industry of “brokers” has cropped up that offers to buy our purchase records, our location data, our purchase histories, even our medical and court records. This data is continuously ingested by the ad-tech industry to ensure that the nonconsensual dossiers of private, sensitive, potentially compromising data that these companies compile on us are as up-to-date as possible. 

          Commercial surveillance is a three-step process:

          This data-gathering and processing is the source of innumerable societal harms: it fuels employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and is a pipeline for predatory scams. The data also finds its way into others’ hands, including the military, law enforcement, and hostile foreign powers. Insiders at large companies exploit data for their own benefit. It’s this data that lets scam artists find vulnerable targets and lets stalkers track their victims. 

        • EFF ☛ Federal Judge Makes History in Holding That Border Searches of Cell Phones Require a Warrant

          EFF is thrilled about this decision, given that we have been advocating for a warrant for border searches of electronic devices in the courts and Congress for nearly a decade. If the case is appealed to the Second Circuit, we urge the appellate court to affirm this landmark decision.

          U.S. Customs & Border Protection (CBP) asserts broad authority to conduct warrantless, and often suspicionless, device searches at the border, which includes ports of entry at the land borders, international airports, and seaports.

          For a century, the Supreme Court has recognized a border search exception to the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement, allowing not only warrantless but also often suspicionless searches of luggage and other items crossing the border.

        • Techdirt ☛ The FBI’s Constant Abuse Of Section 702 Surveillance May Finally Take This Tool Away From The NSA

          The FBI has fucked around and now it’s on a collision course with Finding Out. The NSA likes its Section 702 collection — an upstream collection authorized to gather communications in bulk from foreigners as well as US persons communicating with foreigners.

        • Hackaday ☛ Secret Bookshelf Door Uses Hidden Fingerprint Scanner

          What is it that compels us about a secret door? It’s almost as if the door itself and the promise of mystery is more exciting than whatever could lay beyond. In any case, [Scott Monaghan] is a lover of the form, and built his own secret door hidden in a bookshelf, as all good secret doors should be.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Transparency/Investigative Reporting

      • The Dissenter ☛ Film Review: Reproducing FBI’s Interrogation Of Whistleblower Reality Winner
      • Salon ☛ Pentagon leaker Jack Teixeira is nothing like Edward Snowden: He’s more like Donald Trump

        Another glaring, but overlooked, difference between Teixeira’s leaks and Snowden’s is the question of how each man viewed his actions. Teixeira bragged about breaking the rules, the sensitivity of what he had access to, and the “f**k ton of information” he possessed about U.S. intelligence on countries considered among America’s greatest enemies, such as Syria, Iran and China.

        Snowden, in contrast, was concerned about the U.S. breaking its own rules through mass domestic surveillance and bulk collection of Americans’ phone records — a concern later vindicated by an appeals court. Snowden did not boast about his disclosures or seek credit for them. That’s why he initially blew the whistle anonymously under the pseudonym “Citizenfour.”

        The most significant differences, however, are that Snowden made his disclosure to independent journalists who could vet the information, not to gamer buddies he was trying to impress, and that Snowden’s revelations were clearly in the public interest.

      • The Telegraph UK ☛ Cover-up row over ministers’ WhatsApps

        “It now appears that vital evidence has gone missing,” said Angela Rayner, Labour’s deputy leader.

    • Environment

      • International Business Times ☛ Research reveals New York City could sink under its own weight in the near future

        A recent research article published in the Earth’s Science edition of Advancing Earth & Space Science suggested that New York City could sink under its own weight in the near future. The article published earlier this month shows how the island burdened by skyscrapers is subsiding by 2mm per year.

        The scientists have termed this research the most difficult task because the rate of this subsidence is comparatively new when measured against the urban load of buildings and people, which has been happening for a bigger period. Despite that, they have done thorough research comparing the surface geology of the place from different satellite image sources including GPS or the Global Positioning System and Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar.

      • Energy/Transportation

        • Pro Publica ☛ Help ProPublica Report on Railroad Worker Safety

          To do this right, we need to hear from as many people who work in the system as possible. This means railroaders in all positions, managers and people familiar with the Federal Railroad Administration.

        • Michael West Media ☛ Fossil-fuel sponsors for sports and arts shown red card

          Fossil-fuel companies are being shown the red card on their sponsorships of sporting and arts events as industry bosses face pressure to ditch the lucrative deals under a voluntary code. 

          Leading environmental advocacy group the Climate Council will launch the code for sports clubs and arts institutions in response to pressure from athletes, artists, fans and punters for action to protect the planet.

        • Michael West Media ☛ Push for Indigenous inclusion in new energy economy

          The First Nations Chamber of Commerce and Industry (FNCCI) is plugging into the booming renewable energy industry.

          Attracting delegates from industry and business, the organisation’s inaugural summit kicked off in Gladstone on Wednesday with a focus on Indigenous jobs and economic development.

      • Wildlife/Nature

    • Finance

      • Gizmodo ☛ Fidelity: Twitter is Now Only Worth a Third of What Elon Musk Paid for It
      • Scheerpost ☛ The Death Penalty for Homelessness

        You can measure the depth of a civilization by how it treats its poor, very young, elderly and mentally ill. By any such metric, ours here in the Exceptional Empire is barbaric. Take New York City mayor Eric Adams and his pronouncements on the homeless destitute.

      • Scheerpost ☛ Ralph Nader: Inverted Corporate Capitalism—Blocking Their Owner-Shareholders

        It is the season of annual shareholder meetings for giant corporations when CEOs go through the motions of elections for their Board of Directors and approval of other resolutions. People who own stock in General Motors (GM) receive the “GM Meeting Information” in an envelope emblazoned with this disingenuous message: […]

      • The Nation ☛ The Debt Deal Is a Tragedy

        Two men emerged from the Oval Office. One of them, President Joe Biden, said of the deal they’d just reached that it “reduces spending while protecting critical programs for working people and growing the economy for everyone.”

      • Michael West Media ☛ Asia stocks slump to monthly loss on weak China data

        Asia’s stockmarkets slid toward a second month of losses in a row on Wednesday as weak Chinese factory activity fed growing doubts about the post-pandemic recovery in the world’s second biggest economy.

        MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan fell one per cent in early trade and is down 2.4 per cent in a month where hopes for robust Chinese rebound have run dry.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Interest rate buffer intact despite ‘mortgage prison’

        The banking regulator is alert to mortgage stress as interest rates rise and borrowers face a looming deadline on cheap fixed-rate home loans, but won’t ease the rules.

        Refinancing a mortgage has hit the highest level in 20 years, Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) chair John Lonsdale said on Wednesday.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Slow productivity growth risks inflation outlook: RBA

        The head of the Reserve Bank has issued a warning about weak productivity growth as it continues its fight against high inflation with interest rate hikes.

        Philip Lowe told a parliamentary committee that wages growth, in isolation, was not the problem.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Philip Lowe urges diversity on Reserve Bank board

        Populating the new monetary policy board solely with economists would be a backward step, Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe says.

        The governor favours a diverse board that includes business people and labour market experts.

      • Michael West Media ☛ The PwC scandal, the Big Four, and the real elephant in the room. What’s next?

        While PwC is struggling to contain what might be its very own Enron moment, the ATO, Treasury and the Senate are trying to figure out why nobody did anything about what everybody seemed to know. It’s now a scandal too big to go away, Kim Wingerei reports on what might be next.

        Fresh out of business school in Norway in 1980, this writer joined the illustrious Arthur Anderson, one of the then “Big 8” audit and consulting firms. At an internal meeting discussing proposed legislative changes to the tax benefits of limited partnerships, the local firm’s tax consulting partner was asked how it would affect some of our big clients. His answer was as succinct as it was cynical:

      • Michael West Media ☛ ACCC wary of market power in supermarket sector

        A lack of competition in the supermarket sector is making it easier for major players to charge shoppers more.

        The consumer watchdog has a close eye on the big supermarkets to make sure they aren’t using their market position to charge much higher prices for groceries.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Thousands of documents on PwC tax leak not released

        A key body involved in investigating the PwC tax advice scandal says there are thousands of documents relating to the matter that are yet to be released.

        Tax Practitioners Board chief executive Michael O’Neill told a Senate estimates hearing there might be thousands of documents relating to the confidentiality breach case that went beyond already publicly released emails.

      • Michael West Media ☛ RBA governor ‘appalled’ by PwC leak revelations

        The Reserve Bank governor has labelled the confidentiality breach scandal embroiling PwC a disgrace and says the central bank will not sign new contracts with the firm until appropriate action has been taken.

        Philip Lowe also confirmed the bank has contracted the troubled consultancy giant to assist it in correcting staff underpayments.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • NYPost ☛ Biden sexual assault accuser Tara Reade feels ‘safe’ in Russia after fleeing over safety concerns

        “I felt safe and I felt heard and I felt respected,” Reade said of getting off the plane in Russia.

      • New York Times ☛ Tara Reade, Who Accused Biden of Assault, Says She Has Moved to Russia

        Years after accusing President Biden of sexual assault, Ms. Reade told a Russian outlet that she had moved in order to feel safe.

      • Michael Geist ☛ Extend the Deadline: My Submission to the CRTC on its Deeply Flawed Bill C-11 Consultations

        The CRTC’s Bill C-11 consultations are off to a rocky start with mounting concern over short deadlines that may limit public participation and reduce the quality of the submissions. A dozen groups have asked the Commission to extend the deadlines with more groups joining in the call. The deadline for comment on the extension ended yesterday and I navigated an exceptionally difficult consultation process (more on that shortly) to submit the comments posted below. I support the extension but argue that a better approach would be to wait until the government’s policy direction process is final and there is certainty on support for public interest group participation.

      • Vice Media Group ☛ AI CEOs Say AI Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Are Trying to Find the Guy Who Did This

        “I see this as a way for companies like Open AI to control the narrative and move public attention away from things like data consent, the legality of their systems, and the false and misleading information that they produce (and how all of these can impact our livelihoods). Essentially, it is a misdirection of public attention away from what matters towards that which suits their narrative and business model,” Luccioni added.

        “The whole thing looks to me like a media stunt, to try to grab the attention of the media, the public, and policymakers and focus everyone on the distraction of scifi scenarios,” Emily M. Bender a Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington, told Motherboard. “This would seem to serve two purposes: it paints their tech as way more powerful and effective than it is and it takes the focus away from the actual harms being done, now, in the name of this technology. These include the pollution of the information ecosystem, the reinforcement and replication of biases at scale, exploitative labor practices and further gigification of the economy, enabling oppressive surveillance such as the ‘digital border wall’ and theft of data and creative work.”

      • MIT Technology Review ☛ How to talk about AI (even if you don’t know much about AI)

        Everyone is talking about AI, it seems. But if you feel overwhelmed or uncertain about what the hell people are talking about, don’t worry. I’ve got you.

        I asked some of the best AI journalists in the business to share their top tips on how to talk about AI with confidence. My colleagues and I spend our days obsessing over the tech, listening to AI folks and then translating what they say into clear, relatable language with important context. I’d say we know a thing or two about what we’re talking about.

      • The Nation ☛ The Other Race

        Among the gamblers there’s excitement: Just who will face the next indictment? Will it be Trump, will it be Rudy Who finds himself in deeper doody?

      • The Nation ☛ Ron DeSantis Is Flaunting His Résumé—Does Anyone Care?

        Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who was planning to launch his presidential campaign as this issue of The Nation went to press, is accruing leadership credentials in a party that no longer exists. DeSantis has used his super­majority in the Florida Legislature to launch a head-spinning array of salvos in the right-wing culture wars—from an anti-trans surveillance regime in public schools and rolling book bans to an improbable assault on Disney as the avatar of all things woke.

      • The Nation ☛ Is It Sexist to Demand That Feinstein Resign?

        The drumbeat for Senator Dianne Feinstein to resign has reached a kind of dull fever pitch. Aside from the open secret of her cognitive decline, the California Democrat was “working from home” for three months straight due to shingles, holding up President Biden’s judicial nominees in Washington, D.C., at a time when women are dying like it’s 1973 all over again. Now Feinstein is back in the Senate, looking and sounding completely decrepit. There’s absolutely nothing feminist about defending her nonexistent “right” to remain in office, no matter what Kirsten Gillibrand tries to argue on CNN. Yet there is a double standard at work here, and leftist men in particular would do well to check themselves.1

      • The Nation ☛ Soul-Crushing Misogyny Made Succession the Perfect Show for Our Time

        So Succession reached its finale, with both a bang and a whimper.

      • Michael West Media ☛ NSW to ditch ‘one of most undemocratic’ voting schemes

        Controversial powers criticised for being one of the most undemocratic election systems in Australia are set to be ditched, the NSW government says.

        Businesses in the City of Sydney have had twice the voting power of ordinary residents in council elections since 2014.

      • Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

        • Terence Eden ☛ M*A*S*H – War Is Heaven

          So now on to M*A*S*H. It’s hailed as a masterpiece of comedy. But, really, it’s an exercise in military propaganda.

          The first season is genuinely hilarious and, at times, moving. But there’s no disguising just how fun it makes war look.

        • Silicon Angle ☛ Twitter to expand crowdsourced fact-checking tool after Pentagon explosion deepfake video

          The whole debacle was a testament to how realistic AI can create phony events and how such events can, in some way, even if just for a short time, rock the world. There has been a lot of talk in the last few years about the danger of deepfake technology in the age of information warfare. Recently, an image of the Pope dressed like a rap star went viral. Though harmless, it was so well done that one can only imagine the chaos this technology will cause now and in the near future.

        • The Hill ☛ Ocasio-Cortez says fake Twitter account impersonating her

          “FYI there’s a fake account on here impersonating me and going viral. The Twitter CEO has engaged it, boosting visibility,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote on her official account Tuesday, referring to Twitter owner Elon Musk. “It is releasing false policy statements and gaining spread. I am assessing with my team how to move forward. In the meantime, be careful of what you see.”

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Michael West Media ☛ Man told by court to stay away from Brittany Higgins

        A man accused of making death threats online has been ordered to stay away from former political staffer Brittany Higgins and her fiance.

        David William Wonnocott, 49, appeared in a northern NSW court on Wednesday for the first time since his April arrest over social media threats of violence. 

    • Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Vice Media Group ☛ Employee Non-Compete Agreements Are Illegal, NLRB Lawyer Says

        The general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board issued a memo on Tuesday stating that overly broad non-compete agreements violate the National Labor Relations Act by barring workers from opportunities to get new jobs. The memo is the latest of multiple governmental actions to address the problem of non-competes, including a proposed ruling by the Federal Trade Commission earlier this year to ban them completely.

      • The Nation ☛ The Takeover of Shasta County

        Mary Rickert opens her iPad, clicks on her hate-mail folder, and shows me some of the screeds she has received over the past three years. One begins: “I’d like to fuck Mary Rickert in the face with a brick.” Another has the subject line “Going, going, gone, dead woman walking.” She closes the folder, shudders, and says, “I have PTSD because of this, just from the insanity of it all. I have nightmares all the time. Watching the county just crumble is absolutely devastating for me… watching it being taken over by a far-right group.”1

      • The Nation ☛ Are the Risk Managers Running Planned Parenthood?

        Jon Wiener: When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, a lot of our friends immediately sent a check to Planned Parenthood—because Planned Parenthood is known to all as the organization that provides abortion services and defends abortion rights. But it turns out some of the affiliates are less willing to provide abortion services than others. And in many places, independent abortion clinics do a lot of the work, and face a lot of the threats from violent anti-abortion activists: for example, in Montana.

      • The Nation ☛ Body and Soul

        Arabesques, the first and only novel by the acclaimed Palestinian writer Anton Shammas, was originally translated into English 35 years ago, in 1988. It was a time of great turmoil and hope, with the Palestinian Intifada entering its second year, and it was also a time when the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian solidarity seemed to show more promise than they had at any other time. As though in confirmation, Shammas’s novel appeared, with its array of Israeli and Palestinian characters reflecting on one another and their relations in a wide range of locales. Perhaps most important, the novel managed to narrate the story of the Nakba in Hebrew to a Jewish Israeli public. When I read it back then, it represented a bold and promising departure suitable to the revolutionary times that Palestine was going through.1

      • The Nation ☛ Republicans Attacked These Queer Students’ Lives. So They Fought Back.

        Kenzie Roller took a deep breath as they approached the stage microphone. It was Wednesday, March 29, and Roller, a high school senior from Louisville, Ky., had traveled to the state capitol in Frankfort so that they could be here, on this stage, to kick off the rally that they had spent the last 19 days planning. The message they had to share was as clear as day: Senate Bill 150—legislation that dramatically limits the rights of queer and trans youth in Kentucky—would harm them, their closest friends, and their entire community.

      • Site36 ☛ Racist killings in German city Hanau: Chaos in the police force
      • Pro Publica ☛ Jefferson Parish Deputies May Have Violated Law in Eric Parsa’s Death, Feds Say

        The Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office in Louisiana may have violated the civil rights of a 16-year-old autistic boy when deputies pinned him to the pavement, handcuffed and shackled, as officers sat on his back for more than nine minutes, according to a “statement of interest” filed this month by the Department of Justice as part of a civil rights lawsuit against JPSO.

        The teen, Eric Parsa, died on the scene in January 2020. The sheriff’s office has also recently faced a number of other lawsuits alleging wrongful death, excessive force and racial discrimination by deputies. The sheriff’s office was the subject of a yearlong investigation by ProPublica and WRKF and WWNO starting in 2021, which disclosed evidence of racial discrimination and violence by deputies; after the first story ran, the American Civil Liberties Union called on federal prosecutors to investigate the department.

      • Michael West Media ☛ Calls for tougher punishment after Iran executions

        Iranian Australians say they are at breaking point and fed up with government inaction as family members are executed, tortured and imprisoned back home.

        Australian-Iranian leaders want the government to step in and go harder against the theocratic and authoritarian regime, which has begun executing protesters.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • uni Stanford ☛ Here’s How the European Commission Proposal to Force Websites to Pay ISPs Violates Net Neutrality

        In a frontal assault on net neutrality, the European Commission wants to force websites and apps to pay fees to broadband companies like Telefonica, Orange and Deutsche Telekom, and it just closed its call for comments on the proposal.

        Network fees like this have never existed in the EU. They violate the EU’s net neutrality law, and, if put in place, would be a radical departure from how the internet has operated and flourished over the last 30 years.

        While reporting solid profits and telling their investors everything is going great, European internet service providers (ISPs) have seemingly convinced the European Commission that the normal rise in online traffic is overwhelming and that, without the government requiring online companies to pay them, they’ll be unable to roll out 5G and fiber fast enough to meet EU goals.

    • Monopolies

      • Trademarks

      • Copyrights

        • [Old] USDOJ ☛ 1854. Copyright Infringement — First Sale Doctrine

          The first sale doctrine, codified at 17 U.S.C. § 109, provides that an individual who knowingly purchases a copy of a copyrighted work from the copyright holder receives the right to sell, display or otherwise dispose of that particular copy, notwithstanding the interests of the copyright owner. The right to distribute ends, however, once the owner has sold that particular copy. See 17 U.S.C. § 109(a) & (c). Since the first sale doctrine never protects a defendant who makes unauthorized reproductions of a copyrighted work, the first sale doctrine cannot be a successful defense in cases that allege infringing reproduction.

          Further, the privileges created by the first sale principle do not “extend to any person who has acquired possession of the copy or phonorecord from the copyright owner, by rental, lease, loan, or otherwise, without acquiring ownership of it.” See 17 U.S.C. § 109(d). Most computer software is distributed through the use of licensing agreements. Under this distribution system, the copyright holder remains the “owner” of all distributed copies. For this reason, alleged infringers should not be able to establish that any copies of these works have been the subject of a first sale.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ Flawless IPTV: Men Behind UK’s Largest Pirate Service Jailed For 30+ Years

          Five men behind pirate IPTV service ‘Flawless’ were sentenced to more than 30 years in prison today, after a private prosecution by the Premier League. A FACT test purchase in 2017 led to the involvement of four territorial police forces, three regional Trading Standards units, and the arrest of service kingpin, Mark Gould, in 2018. In less than two years, Flawless served over 50,000 UK households while generating millions in revenue.

        • Torrent Freak ☛ U.S. Govt Launches Consultation on Future Anti-Piracy Strategies

          The U.S. Government’s Patent and Trademark Office will host a public roundtable to discuss future anti-piracy and counterfeiting strategies. The agency notes that piracy causes billions of dollars in losses to the U.S. economy each year. No concrete proposals are mentioned but rightsholders will likely suggest pirate site blocking as an option.

        • Techdirt ☛ Google Nixes ‘Downloader’ App From Store After DMCA Says Its Browser Can Get To Piracy Sites

          As anyone who reads this site regularly will know, DMCA abuse happens all the time. Typically you see this sort of thing resulting from clear attempts to hobble a competitor, or to silence content someone doesn’t want to see, or pure trolling for the purposes of producing mayhem. But we also see this kind of “abuse” stemming from entities, foreign and domestic, that simply don’t know the strictures under which DMCA and copyright law actually operate.

        • Creative Commons ☛ Kirsty von Gogh — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 17

          “Opening up cultural artifacts from African organizations might change how we’re represented in online spaces” says Kirsty von Gogh from Johannesburg. She also shares how increasing production of culturally, linguistically, and contextually aware and relevant content can ensure a more representative digital space for Africans, and how open licensing increases accessibility to this content.

Gemini Links 31/05/2023: Bayes Filter and Programming Wordle

Posted in News Roundup at 4:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  • Personal

    • Cranes and rain 🏗️☔

      In Monaco the marshalls are pretty good at getting crashed cars off the track despite the lack of space. Cranes lift wreckage out of the way to be collected later. This year in practice and qualifying we had some clear views of the underneath of a couple of cars, a part that designers would prefer kept secret. Here’s a web site with a couple of good photos.

    • Actually going places

      Had a shockingly busy weekend as I actually went places where there were people.

      I had to wear my kf94 the whole time: on public transit, in the open air market because it was crowded, inside the theatre, &c. but community transmission is low enough at the moment that wearing the mask the whole time pretty much means that it was safe.

      So what all did we do?

      Well on friday I actually saw coworkers in person, grabbing food while spread out at an outdoor table and kvetching about internal politics of [college we work for]. Since I almost never talk to any of these people outside the context of a structured meeting, it was nice to feel like I’m recognized as being a person outside what I do for them as the coordinator on this project.

  • Technical

    • My online experience would have been so much less without cURL

      Me too, but with emphasis on his having created a tool I couldn’t have lived online nearly so happily without. I’m not at all interested in opinions on Gemini’s technical details.

      [...]

      I’ve found plenty of wonderful writing in Gemini spaces, and rather enjoy that the people writing so often tend to be command line types. I also rather enjoy how aggregation volume such as seen at Antenna these days gives me the sense of something new starting.

    • Bayes Filter

      I’m enjoying just having one class to worry about right now. Gives me more time to focus and digest.

      I just finished a project in which I had to implement a Bayes filter in a virtual robot. I won’t delve into the math here, as exciting as that would be, but the gist is that it’s a way to estimate unknowns using knowns and probability.

      The robot has a map of the world but doesn’t know its location in the world. By following movement commands and detecting walls with its sensors, it can start to get an idea for its location. The fun part is that sometimes it’ll randomly ignore movement commands and go a different direction, and its sensor readings are only correct most of the time.

    • Davinci Resolve

      I’m still doing my YouTube experiment [1], but it’s slightly paused as I spend time learning Davinci Resolve. Davinci Resolve is a completely free video editing tool for Apple Macs. I’ve spent the past week watching videos of Davinci Resolve techniques.

    • Programming

      • Programming Wordle

        Inspired by Ravi’s program (see my last phlog), I decided to give programming Wordle a try. To make it “more fun”, I’m coding in Swift on my Mac. The version I’m writing is just for the command line, but if I get comfortable with Swift, I may just try to implement it as a GUI.

* Gemini (Primer) links can be opened using Gemini software. It’s like the World Wide Web but a lot lighter.

[Meme] Makes No Sense for EPO (Now Connected to the EU) and Staff Pensions to be Tied to the UK After Brexit

Posted in Europe, Finance, Fraud, Patents at 1:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

So my pension money is safe, right? As long as the economy is thriving; What does that mean? Car crash: brexit!

Summary: It seems like EPO staff is starting to have doubts about the safety of EPO pensions after Benoît Battistelli sent money to reckless gambling (EPOTIF) — a plot that’s 100% supported by António Campinos and his enablers in the Council, not to mention the European Union

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