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Month: July 2018

Links for 2018-07-17

Published July 17, 2018

Links for 2018-07-16

Published July 16, 2018

Links for 2018-07-13

Published July 13, 2018

  • Facebook's new rules for moderators on dealing with far-right pages are awful

    This is a total shitshow. Facebook needs to sort this out, it is not remotely desirable.

    Facebook: "We allow to call for the creation of white ethno-states." In other words, Facebook is officially ok with people calling for ethnic cleansing and genocide. The time for Facebook to hire/consult with experts re: the far-right was about three or four years ago. That they now *agree* with the rationale of Alt-Reich rebranding in 2018 shows that this company is simply not fit for purpose. [...] t's quite something that Facebook's advice to their moderators literally mirrors Nazi propaganda: "Being interested in and caring for one’s kind is not to disparage foreign peoples and races"- Nazi party pamphlet "Why the Aryan Law?" (1934)

    (tags: facebook awful moderation far-right nazis fascism ethnic-cleansing genocide social-media fail)

  • How my research on DNA ancestry tests became "fake news"

    I was not surprised to see our research twisted by fake news and satire websites. Conspiracy theories are meant to be just as entertaining as they are convincing. They also provide a way out of confronting reality and reckoning with facts that don’t confirm preexisting worldviews. For white nationalists and racists, if test results showed traces of African American or Jewish ancestry, either the tests did not work, or the results were planted by some ideologically motivated scientists, or the tests were part of a global war against whites. With conspiracy theories, debunking is rarely useful because the individual is often searching for an interpretation that confirms their prior beliefs. As such, DNA conspiracy theories allow white supremacists to plan new escape routes for the traps they laid for themselves long ago. With DNA testing, the one-drop rule—a belief made law in the 1900s that one drop of African blood makes one Black—becomes transmuted genealogically into the one-percent rule, according to which to remain racially white, an individual’s results must show no sign of African or Jewish origin. Through the genealogical lens, American white nationalists consider “one hundred percent European” as good results, which in turn substantiates their “birth right” to the United States as a marker of heredity and conquest.

    (tags: racism science fake-news conspiracy genealogy dna dna-testing)

  • Second Wind CPAP

    Second-hand CPAP machines -- decent prices here, recommended by @Searcher on FP

    (tags: cpap second-hand appliances)

Links for 2018-07-12

Published July 12, 2018

Links for 2018-07-11

Published July 11, 2018

Links for 2018-07-10

Published July 10, 2018

  • Basho investor to pay up $20m in damages for campaign that put biz on 'greased slide to failure' • The Register

    This is disappointing. Basho was very promising.

    An investment fund and its manager have been ordered to pay up $20.3m after "misinformation, threats and combative behaviour" helped put NoSQL database biz Basho on a "greased slide to failure". As reported by The Register, the once-promising biz, which developed the Riak distributed database, faded away last year amid severe criticisms of the way its major investor, Georgetown Capital Partners, operated. These centred around the control the investment firm and boss Chester Davenport gained over Basho, and how that power was used to block other funders and push out dissenting voices, with the hope of selling the company off fast.

    (tags: basho distcomp riak vc software silicon-valley)

  • Scarr

    S3 + Cloudfront + ACM + Route53, automated.

    There are a bunch of free/cheap options for hosting static sites (just html/css/js) out there: github pages, netlify, firebase hosting - but when I want to build a bulletproof static site "for real", my go-to toolset is S3 for hosting with Cloudfront caching in front of it. I figured that after a few times doing this, I'd automate it. There are a few pre-existing tools for parts of this, but none I could find that did the whole thing from registration through uploading and Cloudfront invalidation.

    (tags: cli acm aws s3 cloudfront route53 static-sites web html hosting)

  • Hospitality boom: What’s happening with Dublin’s bars and restaurants?

    Good article with an insider look at what's going on with venues, bars and restaurants in Dublin:

    They call it “meanwhile use” in property developer shorthand. It’s the market or cafe that slots itself temporarily into a building earmarked for redevelopment. Rent is low and terms are flexible. Cheap space is hewn out of a lull. Cool creative things happen. You don’t need the backing of a private equity fund or a multinational developer to set up a cafe or restaurant. No one is asking for a six-figure sum just to hand you the keys. [...] That era has gone. Landlords are back in the driving seat. Between the canals the key money, a once-off upfront payment just to get the keys, is mind-boggling. The pace of new openings seems relentless and “not particularly sustainable”, as one industry insider puts it: how many burritos do you have to sell when you’ve paid €500,000 upfront, before the costs of fitting it out, staffing it and paying the rent?

    (tags: dublin hospitality bars restaurants pubs nightlife landlords property boom key-money)

  • Dublin Cargo Bike Rental

    EUR40 per day from the Dutch Bike Shop in Belfield

    (tags: dutch-bikes bakfiets cargo-bikes cycling bikes rental dublin)

  • Google Cloud Platform Blog: Introducing Jib

    'build Java Docker images better':

    Jib takes advantage of layering in Docker images and integrates with your build system to optimize Java container image builds in the following ways: Simple - Jib is implemented in Java and runs as part of your Maven or Gradle build. You do not need to maintain a Dockerfile, run a Docker daemon, or even worry about creating a fat JAR with all its dependencies. Since Jib tightly integrates with your Java build, it has access to all the necessary information to package your application. Any variations in your Java build are automatically picked up during subsequent container builds. Fast - Jib takes advantage of image layering and registry caching to achieve fast, incremental builds. It reads your build config, organizes your application into distinct layers (dependencies, resources, classes) and only rebuilds and pushes the layers that have changed. When iterating quickly on a project, Jib can save valuable time on each build by only pushing your changed layers to the registry instead of your whole application. Reproducible - Jib supports building container images declaratively from your Maven and Gradle build metadata, and as such can be configured to create reproducible build images as long as your inputs remain the same.

    (tags: build google java docker maven gradle coding builds jars fat-jars packaging)

Links for 2018-07-06

Published July 6, 2018

  • Wifi Design Tips

    PDF with a few good tips on wifi layout, AP placement etc. Also recommended: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Adep0SeOjAE&feature=youtu.be&t=17m22s (via irldexter)

    (tags: via:irldexter wifi 802.11 wireless ops networking)

  • What I’ve learned from nearly three years of enterprise Wi-Fi at home

    I am happy to note that I've grown out of this kind of pain (I think)....

    Do you just want better Wi-Fi in every room? Consider buying a Plume or Amplifi or other similar plug-n-go mesh system. On the other hand, are you a technically proficient network kind of person who wants to build an enterprise-lite configuration at home? Do you dream of VLANs and port profiles and lovingly tweaked firewall rules? Does the idea of crawling around in your attic to ceiling-mount some access points sound like a fun way to kill a weekend? Is your office just too quiet for your liking? Buy some Ubiquiti Unifi gear and enter network nerd nirvana.

    (tags: networking wifi wireless ubiquiti sdn vlans home ops)

Links for 2018-07-05

Published July 5, 2018

Links for 2018-07-03

Published July 3, 2018

  • ‘Nothing to worry about. The water is fine’: how Flint poisoned its people | News | The Guardian

    The anxiety reverberated all the way to the state capital, Lansing, where Governor Rick Snyder was weeks away from winning reelection. His chief legal counsel, Michael Gadola, wrote in an email: “To anyone who grew up in Flint as I did, the notion that I would be getting my drinking water from the Flint River is downright scary. Too bad the [emergency manager] didn’t ask me what I thought, though I’m sure he heard it from plenty of others. My mom is a city resident. Nice to know she’s drinking water with elevated chlorine levels and fecal coliform … They should try to get back on the Detroit system as a stopgap ASAP before this thing gets too far out of control.”

    (tags: flint michigan bureaucracy water poisoning corrosion poison us-politics environment taxes)

  • The iconic _Fountain_ (1917) was not created by Marcel Duchamp

    In 1982 a letter written by Duchamp came to light. Dated 11 April 1917, it was written just a few days after that fateful exhibit. It contains one sentence that should have sent shockwaves through the world of modern art: it reveals the true creator behind Fountain – but it was not Duchamp. Instead he wrote that a female friend using a male alias had sent it in for the New York exhibition. Suddenly a few other things began to make sense. Over time Duchamp had told two different stories of how he had created Fountain, but both turned out to be untrue. An art historian who knew Duchamp admitted that he had never asked him about Fountain, he had published a standard-work on Fountain nevertheless. The place from where Fountain was sent raised more questions. That place was Philadelphia, but Duchamp had been living in New York. Who was living in Philadelphia? Who was this ‘female friend’ that had sent the urinal using a pseudonym that Duchamp mentions? That woman was, as Duchamp wrote, the future. Art history knows her as Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She was a brilliant pioneering New York dada artist, and Duchamp knew her well. This glaring truth has been known for some time in the art world, but each time it has to be acknowledged, it is met with indifference and silence. This article addresses the true authorship of Fountain from the perspective of the latest evidence, collected by several experts. The opinions they voice offer their latest insights.  Their accumulation of evidence strengthens the case to its final conclusion. To attribute Fountain to a woman and not a man has obvious, far-reaching consequences: the history of modern art has to be rewritten. Modern art did not start with a patriarch, but with a matriarch. What power structure in the world of modern art prohibits this truth to become more widely known and generally accepted? Ultimately this is one of the larger questions looming behind the authorship of Fountain. It sheds light on the place and role of the female artist in the world of modern art.

    (tags: elsa-von-freytag-loringhoven marcel-duchamp modern-art history art-history scandals credit art fountain women)

  • Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags

    the sophisticated targeting systems available through Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Big Tech ad platforms made it easy to find the racist, xenophobic, fearful, angry people who wanted to believe that foreigners were destroying their country while being bankrolled by George Soros. Remember that elections are generally knife-edge affairs, even for politicians who’ve held their seats for decades with slim margins: 60% of the vote is an excellent win. Remember, too, that the winner in most races is “none of the above,” with huge numbers of voters sitting out the election. If even a small number of these non-voters can be motivated to show up at the polls, safe seats can be made contestable. In a tight race, having a cheap way to reach all the latent Klansmen in a district and quietly inform them that Donald J. Trump is their man is a game-changer. Cambridge Analytica are like stage mentalists: they’re doing something labor-intensive and pretending that it’s something supernatural. A stage mentalist will train for years to learn to quickly memorize a deck of cards and then claim that they can name your card thanks to their psychic powers. You never see the unglamorous, unimpressive memorization practice. Cambridge Analytica uses Facebook to find racist jerks and tell them to vote for Trump and then they claim that they’ve discovered a mystical way to get otherwise sensible people to vote for maniacs.

    (tags: facebook politics surveillance cory-doctorow google twitter advertising elections cambridge-analytica racism nazis)