When Non-Jews Wield Anti-Semitism as Political Shield | GQ
a spate of ultra-Christian would-be spokespeople have demonstrated outrage against congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for daring to use the term “concentration camps” to describe the camps in which thousands of migrants are concentrated in squalor, and have died, on the Southern border. Wyoming representative Liz Cheney and Meghan McCain have volunteered, unasked-for, as blonde Christian Loraxes, prepared at all times to speak for the Jews. In late June, Cheney demanded Ocasio-Cortez apologize for utilizing the term, stating that “6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this.” But Jews are not trees, not animals, not mute props to use as cudgels in a war of escalating rhetoric. We do not need to be spoken for, we who have been here since before this country was a country, and want to remain, and know no other home; we are not waiting for your apocalypse. As if to prove a counterpoint, on Tuesday, July 15, one thousand “Jews and allies” led by a group called #NeverAgainAction and the immigrant justice group Movimiento Cosecha enacted a protest in Washington, D.C., blockading the entrances and exits to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s headquarters and the approaching street. Their chief slogan defied those who would use Jews’ bloody history to deny present atrocities; those who would utilize Jews as weapons to silence anti-racists; those who want us to wait, meekly, to be cozened by Christ in the end of days. What they chanted, holding hands, were four simple words: “Never Again is Now.”
(tags: antisemitism us-politics politics smearing aoc rhetoric)
Category: Uncategorized
The Codeless Code: Case 234 Ozymandias
Love this:
I chanced upon an ancient cache of code: a stack of printouts, tall as any man, that in decaying boxes had been stowed. Ten thousand crumbling pages long it ran. Abandoned in the blackness to erode, what steered a ship through blackness to the moon. The language is unused in this late year. The target hardware, likewise, lies in ruin. Entombed within one lone procedure’s scope, a line of code and then these words appear: # TEMPORARY, I HOPE HOPE HOPE The code beside persisting to the last— as permanent as aught upon this sphere— while overhead, a vacant moon flies past.
(tags: moon apollo coding history hacks comments funny poetry poems ozymandias)
Modeling the Mythical Man-Month using the Universal Scalability Law
turns out the USL can apply
(tags: usl scalability scaling brooks teams mythical-man-month estimation)
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posts GitHub pull requests that are ready to be reviewed into Slack. How does it know when a pull request is ready? We have a special label in our repositories, aptly named READY TO REVIEW (all caps so it’s easier to spot). When a pull request is ready for review, the author adds this label to their PR to mark it as finished. Meanwhile, all pull requests without this label are seen as works in progress and shouldn’t be reviewed. Next, an engineer can pick from the READY TO REVIEW pull requests and start reviewing — all code changes at PSPDFKit get reviewed by at least one other person. After the review is done, the pull request author incorporates the feedback and merges the PR.
(tags: github reviews code-review slack integration team)
Details of the Cloudflare outage on July 2, 2019
Great writeup from jgc. Worth noting some important lessons: * config changes should be rolled out carefully and gradually, just like code; * particularly regexps, which are effectively code anyway; * emergency-use rollback systems need to work, of course!; * having emergency-only systems is a risk, too, since infrequently-used code paths are likely to atrophy and break without anyone noticing (as nsheridan said); * /.*/ in a regexp is pretty much always bad news, and would have been worth a linter to catch before commit.
(tags: cloudflare outages regex postmortems regexps deployment rollback via:jgc)
The Configuration Complexity Clock
This, so much this…..
Frustratingly there are still some business requirements that can’t be configured using the new [post-config-file] rules engine. Some logical conditions simply aren’t configurable using its GUI, and so the application has to be re-coded and re-deployed for some scenarios. Help is at hand, someone on the team reads Ayende’s DSLs book. Yes, a DSL will allow us to write arbitrarily complex rules and solve all our problems. The team stops work for several months to implement the DSL. It’s a considerable technical accomplishment when it’s completed and everyone takes a well earned break. Surely this will mean the end of arbitrary hard-coded business logic? It’s now 9am on the clock. Amazingly it works. Several months go by without any changes being needed in the core application. The team spend most of their time writing code in the new DSL. After some embarrassing episodes, they now go through a complete release cycle before deploying any new DSL code. The DSL text files are version controlled and each release goes through regression testing before being deployed. Debugging the DSL code is difficult, there’s little tooling support, they simply don’t have the resources to build an IDE or a ReSharper for their new little language. As the DSL code gets more complex they also start to miss being able to write object-oriented software. Some of the team have started to work on a unit testing framework in their spare time. In the pub after work someone quips, “we’re back where we started four years ago, hard coding everything, except now in a much crappier language.”
(via Oisin)(tags: configuration scripting dsls script config rules-engines rules via:oisin dsl coding hard-coding)
Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops
The Palantir user guide shows that police can start with almost no information about a person of interest and instantly know extremely intimate details about their lives. The capabilities are staggering, according to the guide: If police have a name that’s associated with a license plate, they can use automatic license plate reader data to find out where they’ve been, and when they’ve been there. This can give a complete account of where someone has driven over any time period. With a name, police can also find a person’s email address, phone numbers, current and previous addresses, bank accounts, social security number(s), business relationships, family relationships, and license information like height, weight, and eye color, as long as it’s in the agency’s database. The software can map out a person’s family members and business associates of a suspect, and theoretically, find the above information about them, too. All of this information is aggregated and synthesized in a way that gives law enforcement nearly omniscient knowledge over any suspect they decide to surveil.
(tags: police surveillance palantir creepy grim data-privacy privacy)
Ireland putting profit before people with genomic medicine strategy
From David McConnell and Orla Hardiman at TCD:
Much of the medical information sought by GMI [Genomics Medicine Ireland] has been collected from patients in public hospitals funded by the exchequer at great expense […]. Clinicians are being contracted and asked to obtain consent from their patients to transfer clinical information to GMI, along with a tissue sample for WGS [Whole Genome Sequencing]. We understand GMI will pay for the additional hospital clinical costs required for the project. It will obtain the full genetic code for each patient (WGS), and it will analyse all the data. For the most part …. there is minimal tangible benefit to the patient who participates in this programme. It is important to realise that GMI will own all the clinical and WGS data that they have acquired from the health service, which is of considerable commercial value. GMI will also have complete control over the research and any outcomes. Participating patients do not appear to have access to their data held by GMI – and there does not seem to be a “right to be forgotten”, despite the commercial nature of the enterprise. Moreover, the genomic and clinical data may also be transmitted outside of the European Union, and thus will not be protected by the stringent data-protection laws within the EU.[….] The Government has made a very big investment in GMI. There may be a view that it is not necessary to provide any additional public investments in genomic medicine in Ireland. However, to those of us who care about the longer-term development of genomic medicine in Ireland, this would be a seriously short-sighted approach. One person in 20 will develop a genetic disorder in their lifetime and half of the Irish population will experience a form of cancer. These and many other patients should be able to benefit from a publicly-available genomics project that can drive new medical care in Ireland. Genomic medicine is here to stay. We urgently need a properly governed genomics programme in Ireland that will ensure that Irish genomics remains within the public (non-commercial) domain, and that data obtained from Irish citizens will be used to benefit the entire Irish population.
(via Aoife McLysaght)(tags: gmi wgs genome open-data data-privacy gdpr privacy health medicine ireland genomics)
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Rossa McMahon with a twitter thread on the legality of GMI’s genomic data collection program in Ireland:
GMI is a big, expensive company. It announced planned investment injection of $400m last year. It is engaged in a hot industry – hot because of investor interest and hot because of regulatory/ethics concerns. GDPR is not new. It has been known since 2016. Data protection law is not new. It has been known since 1988. The impact of these laws on genetic data collection & use is not a surprise. So if you have a $400m+ business and this is a key business issue, you have taken advice. And you have, no doubt, been in a position to take that advice from some of the best and/or most expensive advisors available. Assumptions are dangerous, but I think it is fair to assume this has happened. So read the story again. Would you be looking for repeated meetings with [Department of Health], answers to questions on regulatory matters and assurances from the State, if you had legal advice of your own to the effect that you are operating or can operate as your currently are?
(tags: gmi genomics genetics data-privacy privacy gdpr ireland)
Terrifying thread of Google Maps fails
‘This takes you over Hayden Pass Rd. “It’s a real challenging road and a true test of your vehicle and your stamina because the road abounds in twists and turns with wheels sometimes hanging above the precipice.” “There is a very narrow section of shelf road before you get to the top that is very dangerous if icy. There are no rocks to stop you from sliding off the side. This section should not be attempted if there is any ice at all.” I’m a little surprised that Google gave this route to me with no warning. It’s also comical to say you can get the drive done in 30 minutes.’ [….] ‘A couple of years ago I did a drive from Port Headland (Northwest Western Australia) to Perth. When we got onto Nanutarra road (Near Paraburdoo), the maps decided we should take a road that was actually the Lyons River – if we were foreign tourists it would have led us into a spot where we could easily have died. Unfortunately in outback WA, many tourists have experienced this and succumbed to it.’
(tags: driving safety google-maps google mapping routing fail via:danluu)
excellent Twitter thread about Brexiteer attitudes to Ireland
as one commenter notes: ‘Ireland as Britain’s Taiwan, not a real country but a renegade province that must be brought to heel and reclaimed for the Motherland’
Moving From Apache Thrift to gRPC: A Perspective From Alluxio
Good advice here:
Thrift served well as a fast and reliable RPC framework powering the metadata operations in Alluxio 1.x. Its limitation in handling streamed data has led us to a journey in search of better alternatives. gRPC provides some nice features that help us in building a simpler, more unified API layer. In this post, we discussed some lessons learned to move from Thrift to gRPC, including performance tuning tips that helped us achieve comparable performance for both one-off RPC calls as well as data streams. We hope this helps if you are looking at gRPC as an option for building high-performance services. Check out our blog for more articles on how we build Alluxio.
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‘Homes for Sale and Rent (in Ireland), Mapped’ — neat dataviz site by Robert Lawson
Guidance for Drivers on use of “Dash Cams”
guidance note from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on GDPR implications of dashcams.
Chernobyl True Story: What The HBO Miniseries Gets Right (& Changes)
A much more reasonable writeup of what the HBO series changed from what really happened — notably the show trial in the final episode was largely concocted. This is much more accurate than the cinemablend.com article.
(tags: chernobyl fact fiction hbo tv fictionalisation ussr history)
Open Source Could Be a Casualty of the Trade War
ideologically, a core tenant of open source is non-discriminatory empowerment. When I was introduced to open source in the 90’s, the chief “bad guy” was Microsoft – people wanted to defend against “embrace, extend, extinguish” corporate practices, and by homesteading on the technological frontier with GNU/Linux we were ensuring that our livelihoods, independence, and security would never be beholden to a hostile corporate power. Now, the world has changed. Our open source code may end up being labeled as enabling a “foreign adversary”. I never suspected that I could end up on the “wrong side” of politics by being a staunch advocate of open source, but here I am. My open source mission is to empower people to be technologically independent; to know that technology is not magic, so that nobody will ever be a slave to technology. This is true even if that means resisting my own government. The erosion of freedom starts with restricting access to “foreign adversaries”, and ends with the government arbitrarily picking politically convenient winners and losers to participate in the open source ecosystem. Freedom means freedom, and I will stand to defend it. Now that the US is carpet-bombing Huawei’s supply chain, I fear there is no turning back. The language already written into EO13873 sets the stage to threaten open source as a whole by drawing geopolitical and national security borders over otherwise non-discriminatory development efforts. While I still hold hope that the trade war could de-escalate, the proliferation and stockpiling of powerful anti-trade weapons like EO13873 is worrisome. Now is the time to raise awareness of the threat this poses to the open source world, so that we can prepare and come together to protect the freedoms we cherish the most. I hope, in all earnestness, that open source shall not be a casualty of this trade war.
(tags: open-source business china economics huawei us-politics trade-war oss gnu linux)
jCenter is the new default repository used with Android’s gradle plugin, I haven… | Hacker News
I am a developer Advocate with JFrog, the company behind Bintray. So, jcenter is a Java repository in Bintray (https://bintray.com/bintray/jcenter), which is the largest repo in the world for Java and Android OSS libraries, packages and components. All the content is served over a CDN, with a secure https connection. JCenter is the default repository in Groovy Grape (http://groovy.codehaus.org/Grape), built-in in Gradle (the jcenter() repository) and very easy to configure in every other build tool (maybe except Maven) and will become even easer very soon. Bintray has a different approach to package identification than the legacy Maven Central. We don’t rely on self-issued key-pairs (which can be generated to represent anyone, actually and never verified in Maven Central). Instead, similar to GitHub, Bintray gives a strong personal identity to any contributed library. If you really need to get your package to Maven Central (for supporting legacy tools) you can do it from Bintray as well, in a click of a button or even automatically.
(tags: jars maven gradle java bintray via:lemire packaging distribution)
Russians used fake Foster email for disinformation – researchers
Facebook believes this is the first time fake information about Northern Ireland and topics concerning Anglo-Irish relations has been disseminated by Russian operators acting in concert. The Atlantic Council’s research centre found the campaign was “persistent, sophisticated and well-resourced” and said that “the likelihood is that this operation was run by a Russian intelligence agency”. The operation “appeared designed to stoke racial, religious or political hatred, especially in Northern Ireland”, the researchers said, disclosing their findings in an online article published on the Medium self-publishing online platform over the weekend.
(tags: ireland russia disinformation fake-news facebook dfrlab ira politics)
Why the BAI is not the body to regulate the internet
Simon McGarr makes a good argument, and I agree
(tags: bai ireland regulation internet web messaging crypto privacy)
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Three related flaws were found in the Linux kernel’s handling of TCP networking. The most severe vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to trigger a kernel panic in systems running the affected software and, as a result, impact the system’s availability. The issues have been assigned multiple CVEs: CVE-2019-11477 is considered an Important severity, whereas CVE-2019-11478 and CVE-2019-11479 are considered a Moderate severity. The first two are related to the Selective Acknowledgement (SACK) packets combined with Maximum Segment Size (MSS), the third solely with the Maximum Segment Size (MSS). These issues are corrected either through applying mitigations or kernel patches. Mitigation details and links to RHSA advsories can be found on the RESOLVE tab of this article.
Climate change: I work in the environmental movement. I don’t care if you recycle. – Vox
While we’re busy testing each other’s purity, we let the government and industries — the authors of said devastation — off the hook completely. This overemphasis on individual action shames people for their everyday activities, things they can barely avoid doing because of the fossil fuel-dependent system they were born into. In fact, fossil fuels supply more than 75 percent of the US energy system. If we want to function in society, we have no choice but to participate in that system. To blame us for that is to shame us for our very existence. […] But that doesn’t mean we do nothing. Climate change is a vast and complicated problem, and that means the answer is complicated too. We need to let go of the idea that it’s all of our individual faults, then take on the collective responsibility of holding the true culprits accountable. In other words, we need to become many Davids against one big, bad Goliath.
(tags: activism climate environment green climate-change future fossil-fuels society)
A free Argo Tunnel for your next project
Argo Tunnel lets you expose a server to the Internet without opening any ports. The service runs a lightweight process on your server that creates outbound tunnels to the Cloudflare network. Instead of managing DNS, network, and firewall complexity, Argo Tunnel helps administrators serve traffic from their origin through Cloudflare with a single command. [….] Starting today, any user, even those without a Cloudflare account, can try this new method of connecting their server to the Internet. Argo Tunnel can now be used in a free model that will create a new URL, known only to you, that will proxy traffic to your server. We’re excited to make connecting a server to the Internet more accessible for everyone.
(tags: cloudflare internet tunnel servers ports tunnelling ops free)
Download Starburst Distribution of Presto
Starburst’s free distro of Presto; there are additional enterprise features which require a license key but the basic distro is OSS. Docs at https://docs.starburstdata.com/latest/index.html
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“Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything” — Advanced Nuclear Power
(tags: nukes nuclear-power power future soonish smbc tech reactors)
Show HN: Enviro+ for Raspberry Pi – Environmental sensors
HN thread and linked Pimoroni gadget. UKP45 for a nice environmental sensor board
(tags: electronics iot projects sensors environment raspberry-pi gadgets)
The Surprising Reason that There Are So Many Thai Restaurants in America – VICE
Turns out the Thai government has taken a leaf from Guinness’ book:
The Ministry of Commerce’s Department of Export Promotion [..] drew up prototypes for three different “master restaurants,” which investors could choose as a sort of prefabricated restaurant plan, from aesthetic to menu offerings. Elephant Jump would be the fast casual option, at $5 to $15 per person; Cool Basil would be the mid-priced option at $15 to $25 a head; and the Golden Leaf prototype would cost diners $25 to $30, with décor featuring “authentic Thai fabrics and objets d’art.” (Does your favorite Thai spot have objets d’art? The restaurant may have been built from a government prototype.)
(Guinness do exactly the same thing for Irish pubs worldwide.)(tags: cuisine culture food government marketing thai thailand guinness restaurants franchising)
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aren’t these lovely
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Undocumented Amazon S3 APIs and third-party extensions: GET object by multipart number; AWS Java SDK partNumber; Multipart Upload ETag. (via Last Week in AWS)
Why women leave academia and why universities should be worried
I couldn’t agree more with this, having seen it happen first-hand:
The participants in the study identify many characteristics of academic careers that they find unappealing: the constant hunt for funding for research projects is a significant impediment for both men and women. But women in greater numbers than men see academic careers as all-consuming, solitary and as unnecessarily competitive. Both men and women PhD candidates come to realise that a string of post-docs is part of a career path, and they see that this can require frequent moves and a lack of security about future employment. Women are more negatively affected than men by the competitiveness in this stage of an academic career and their concerns about competitiveness are fuelled, they say, by a relative lack of self-confidence. Women more than men see great sacrifice as a prerequisite for success in academia. This comes in part from their perception of women who have succeeded, from the nature of the available role models. Successful female professors are perceived by female PhD candidates as displaying masculine characteristics, such as aggression and competitiveness, and they were often childless. As if all this were not enough, women PhD candidates had one experience that men never have. They were told that they would encounter problems along the way simply because they are women. They are told, in other words, that their gender will work against them. […] Universities will not survive as research institutions unless university leadership realises that the working conditions they offer dramatically reduce the size of the pool from which they recruit. We will not survive because we have no reason to believe we are attracting the best and the brightest. When industry is the more attractive employer, our credibility as the home of long-term, cutting edge, high-risk, profoundly creative research, is diminished.
(via Aoife McLysaght)(tags: women life university third-level careers research via:aoifemcl)
The New Wilderness (Idle Words)
Our discourse around privacy needs to expand to address foundational questions about the role of automation: To what extent is living in a surveillance-saturated world compatible with pluralism and democracy? What are the consequences of raising a generation of children whose every action feeds into a corporate database? What does it mean to be manipulated from an early age by machine learning algorithms that adaptively learn to shape our behavior?
(tags: facebook google privacy future dystopia surveillance society)
Jigsaw Bought a Russian Twitter Troll Campaign as an Experiment
“Let’s say I want to wage a disinformation campaign to attack a political opponent or a company, but I don’t have the infrastructure to create my own Internet Research Agency,” Gully told WIRED in an interview, speaking publicly about Jigsaw’s year-old disinformation experiment for the first time. “We wanted to see if we could engage with someone who was willing to provide this kind of assistance to a political actor … to buy services that directly discredit their political opponent for very low cost and with no tooling or resources required. For us, it’s a pretty clear demonstration these capabilities exist, and there are actors comfortable doing this on the internet.”
it cost just $250.(tags: disinformation fakes disinfo fake-news russia trolls jigsaw social-media)
New Spam Campaign Controlled by Attackers via DNS TXT Records
Ah, Google, what were you thinking?
When decoded, this string is an URL to Google’s public DNS resolve for a particular domain. For example, the above string decodes to https://dns.google.com/resolve?name=fetch.vxpapub.[omitted].net&type=TXT. The attachment’s script will use this URL to retrieve the associated domain’s TXT record. A TXT record is a DNS entry that can be used to store textual data. This field is typically used for SPF or DMARC records, but could be used to host any type of textual content. The nice part about using the Google’s DNS resolver is that the information will be returned as JSON, which makes it easy for the malicious script to extract the data it needs.
(via Paul Vixie)(tags: txt dns google resolvers spam fail security via:paulvixie)
An Orbit Map of the Solar System
This week’s map shows the orbits of more than 18000 asteroids in the solar system. This includes everything we know of that’s over 10km in diameter – about 10000 asteroids – as well as 8000 randomized objects of unknown size. This map shows each asteroid at its exact position on New Years’ Eve 1999. All of the data for this map is shared by NASA and open to the public.
Really lovely stuff!(tags: astronomy dataviz map space visualization asteroids planets posters moons solar-system)
Fans Are Better Than Tech at Organizing Information Online
Fans tag the content, but then — volunteers consolidate and aggregate those tags:
On AO3, users can put in whatever tags they want. (Autocomplete is there to help, but they don’t have to use it.) Then behind the scenes, human volunteers look up any new tags that no one else has used before and match them with any applicable existing tags, a process known as tag wrangling. Wrangling means that you don’t need to know whether the most popular tag for your new fanfic featuring Sherlock Holmes and John Watson is Johnlock or Sherwatson or John/Sherlock or Sherlock/John or Holmes/Watson or anything else. And you definitely don’t need to tag your fic with all of them just in case. Instead, you pick whichever one you like, the tag wranglers do their work behind the scenes, and readers looking for any of these synonyms will still be able to find you.
(tags: folksonomy tagging tags taxonomy fans fandom archival archives fanfic)
Irish National Open Research Forum national framework published
“All Irish scholarly publications resulting from publicly-funded research will be openly available by default from 2020 onwards and will be accessible on an ongoing basis.” (via Don Marti)
(tags: via:donmarti open open-access science public ireland funding research)
Internet-Scale analysis of AWS Cognito Security
Just published the white-paper for my latest research: Internet-Scale analysis of AWS Cognito Security. The white-paper contains the methodology and results of an internet-scale security analysis of AWS Cognito configurations. The research identified 2500 identity pools, which were used to gain access to more than 13000 S3 buckets (which are not publicly exposed), 1200 DynamoDB tables and 1500 Lambda functions.
(via Ben Bridts)(tags: aws cognito security s3 dynamodb scanning whitepapers)
Multi-Sensor IoT Environmental Sensor Box With CircuitPython
Just add a power outlet and a WiFi network and stream time and location stamped environmental readings to AdafruitIO.
(tags: adafruit sensors iot maker hacks air-quality temperature environment metrics)
The Making of a YouTube Radical – The New York Times
Near the end of our interview, I told Mr. Cain that I found it odd that he had successfully climbed out of a right-wing YouTube rabbit hole, only to jump into a left-wing YouTube rabbit hole. I asked if he had considered cutting back on his video intake altogether, and rebuild some of his offline relationships. He hesitated, and looked slightly confused. For all of its problems, he said, YouTube is still where political battles are fought and won. Leaving the platform would essentially mean abandoning the debate. He conceded, though, that he needed to think critically about the videos he watched. “YouTube is the place to put out a message,” he said. “But I’ve learned now that you can’t go to YouTube and think that you’re getting some kind of education, because you’re not.”
two-thirds of cyclists with disabilities find cycling easier than walking
and other facts about disabled cyclists. This is very thought-provoking stuff.
According to a recent study by Wheels for Well-being, a British organization of disabled cyclists, 15 percent of people with disabilities cycle, compared with 18 percent of the general population. Moreover, two-thirds of cyclists with disabilities find cycling easier than walking, the group says. Clearly, bikes are not just a mode of transit, but function as mobility devices for many disabled people. I find it ableist, or prejudiced against the disabled, when we consider e-bikes and other adaptive-cycling methods as “inferior.” Many of us can ride a traditional two-wheeled bicycle, but others simply can’t.
(tags: cycling disability accessibility cities design cycles disabled)
Carnival Cruise Line to pay a $20M fine over pollution
Carnival’s pollution problem is so bad that across its fleet, the large boats pollute 10 times more than all 260 million of Europe’s cars. That tidbit comes courtesy of a study by the European think tank Transport & Environment, which looked at 203 cruise ships sailing European waters in 2017. The report also found that besides over-tourism and crashing into ports, there’s a good reason for European cities to dislike cruise ships: they are emitting sulfur dioxide all over the place. If you can’t keep your pollutants straight, sulfur dioxide causes both acid rain and lung cancer. Cruise lines, it turns out, have been dropping the gas all over Europe; the report says Barcelona, Palma Mallorca, and Venice were the cities worst affected by sulfur dioxide emissions. Per the FT, “sulfur dioxide emissions from cars was 3.2m kt versus 62m kt from cruise ships, with Carnival accounting for half that, the study found.”
(tags: carnival cruises cruise-ships pollution europe eu driving environment climate-change)
The Existential Crisis Plaguing Online Extremism Researchers
Oh god. This, so much:
Many researchers in the field cut their teeth as techno-optimists, studying the positive aspects of the internet—like bringing people together to enhance creativity or further democratic protest, á la the Arab Spring—says Marwick. But it didn’t last. The past decade has been an exercise in dystopian comeuppance to the utopian discourse of the ’90s and ‘00s. Consider Gamergate, the Internet Research Agency, fake news, the internet-fueled rise of the so-called alt-right, Pizzagate, QAnon, Elsagate and the ongoing horrors of kids YouTube, Facebook’s role in fanning the flames of genocide, Cambridge Analytica, and so much more. “In many ways, I think it [the malaise] is a bit about us being let down by something that many of us really truly believed in,” says Marwick. Even those who were more realistic about tech—and foresaw its misuse—are stunned by the extent of the problem, she says. “You have to come to terms with the fact that not only were you wrong, but even the bad consequences that many of us did foretell were nowhere near as bad as the actual consequences that either happened or are going to happen.” […..] “It’s not that one of our systems is broken; it’s not even that all of our systems are broken,” says Phillips. “It’s that all of our systems are working … toward the spread of polluted information and the undermining of democratic participation.”
(via Paul Moloney)(tags: future grim dystopia tech optimism web internet gamergate wired via:oceanclub)
France Bans Judge Analytics, 5 Years In Prison For Rule Breakers
‘The identity data of magistrates and members of the judiciary cannot be reused with the purpose or effect of evaluating, analysing, comparing or predicting their actual or alleged professional practices.’ As far as Artificial Lawyer understands, this is the very first example of such a ban anywhere in the world. Insiders in France told Artificial Lawyer that the new law is a direct result of an earlier effort to make all case law easily accessible to the general public, which was seen at the time as improving access to justice and a big step forward for transparency in the justice sector. However, judges in France had not reckoned on NLP and machine learning companies taking the public data and using it to model how certain judges behave in relation to particular types of legal matter or argument, or how they compare to other judges. In short, they didn’t like how the pattern of their decisions – now relatively easy to model – were potentially open for all to see.
(tags: censorship france analytics judgements legal judges statistics)
Changing my Mind about AI, Universal Basic Income, and the Value of Data
In this piece I’ll be talking about two particular bits of rhetoric that have found an apparently unlikely partnership in the past five years. The impending obsolescence of humanity locked eyes across the room with a utopian vision of all-powerful AI that sees to all our needs. They started a forbidden romance that has since enthralled even the most serious tech industry leaders. I myself was enthralled with the story at first, but more recently I’ve come to believe it may end in tragedy.
(tags: ai philosophy ubi future tech)
An update on Sunday’s service disruption | Google Cloud Blog
Google posting the most inappropriately upbeat post-mortem I’ve ever read…
In essence, the root cause of Sunday’s disruption was a configuration change that was intended for a small number of servers in a single region. The configuration was incorrectly applied to a larger number of servers across several neighboring regions, and it caused those regions to stop using more than half of their available network capacity. The network traffic to/from those regions then tried to fit into the remaining network capacity, but it did not. The network became congested, and our networking systems correctly triaged the traffic overload and dropped larger, less latency-sensitive traffic in order to preserve smaller latency-sensitive traffic flows, much as urgent packages may be couriered by bicycle through even the worst traffic jam. Google’s engineering teams detected the issue within seconds, but diagnosis and correction took far longer than our target of a few minutes. Once alerted, engineering teams quickly identified the cause of the network congestion, but the same network congestion which was creating service degradation also slowed the engineering teams’ ability to restore the correct configurations, prolonging the outage. The Google teams were keenly aware that every minute which passed represented another minute of user impact, and brought on additional help to parallelize restoration efforts.
(tags: gcp google odd outages post-mortems networking)
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RepliCade Insert Coin keychains are constructed from a traditional blend of diecast metal and plastic. Push the coin return button to activate LED illumination for 30 seconds. This 1:1 scale arcade-accurate replica metal coin return key chain stands 2″ tall and weighs in at a whopping 3.2 ozs.
The war on trees: insurance involvement denied by Cork County Council
Cork people have documented on social media examples of trees being removed from public spaces and have been critical of the practice. Last week, The Phoenix magazine claimed the insurance industry “has been identified as the dark force behind the slaughtering of thousands of healthy trees across Ireland”.t “It transpires insurance companies have offered lower premiums to county councils, if they remove any tree that poses even a remote threat to passing humans,” the magazine reported. This was put to Cork City Council, which denied the claim. “I refer to your query and can confirm that no contact has been made with Cork City Council by insurance companies, in relation to trees,” the spokesperson said.
Skerries protesters attempt to stop felling of mature trees
The War On Trees comes to Skerries, with people organising day-long rotas and chaining vehicles to trees to stop Fingal County Council from cutting them down
Yes, you can feed bread to swans
“There has been a great deal of press coverage in recent months regarding the ‘Ban the Bread’ campaign which is confusing many members of the public who like to feed swans. Supporters of the campaign claim that bread should not be fed to swans on the grounds that it is bad for them. This is not correct. [….] There is no good reason not to feed bread to swans, provided it is not mouldy. Most households have surplus bread and children have always enjoyed feeding swans with their parents. The ‘Ban the Bread’ campaign is already having a deleterious impact upon the swan population; I am receiving reports of underweight cygnets and adult birds, and a number of swans from large flocks have begun to wander into roads in search of food. This poses the further risk of swans being hit by vehicles. Malnutrition also increases their vulnerability to fatal diseases like avian-flu which has caused the deaths of many mute swans and other waterfowl in the past.”
What I Learned Trying To Secure Congressional Campaigns (Idle Words)
‘on August 22, the DNC had a phishing scare, where they mistook a vulnerability assessment for an actual attack. The next day, DCCC Executive Director Dan Sena sent an email to all campaigns with the subject line “Reminder About Cybersecurity”. That email included three attachments, including a file evocatively titled “2-20170712-Falcon.docx”.’
(tags: politics security dnc democrats funny yubikeys gmail google auth phishing hacking congress)
British Far Right Extremism Manipulating Ireland
digging into the “Irexit” campaign and their extensive links to Nigel Farage and the British far right — 100% astroturf
(tags: astroturf ireland irexit nigel-farage ukip brexit politics dirty-tricks)
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an entertaining dive down a low-level performance-optimization rabbit hole, diving into radix sort on an array of integers in particular
(tags: sorting sort performance optimization radix-sort qsort algorithms)
A Twitter thread about where P99s came from
“If you’re wondering what “P-four-nines” means, it’s the latency at the 99.99th percentile, meaning only one in 10,000 requests has a worse latency. Why do we measure latency in percentiles? A thread about how how it came to be at Amazon…” This is a great thread from Andrew Certain, who managed the Performance Engineering team at Amazon in 2001. Percentiles, particularly for latency and performance measurement, were one of the big ideas which hit me like a ton of bricks when I joined Amazon, as they had been adopted whole-heartedly across the company by that stage.
(tags: p99 percentiles quantiles history performance analysis measurement metrics amazon aws pmet)
The Fairy King’s advice on Trees. A poem from Early Ireland
This medieval Irish poem about trees is taken from a text known as Aidedh Ferghusa meic Léide (the Death of Fergus). In the poem, Iubhdán, the king of the fairies, advises the ruler of Ulster, Fergus mac Léide, on the special qualities of trees and which ones can be burned in the household fire.
The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet
The internet of today is a battleground. The idealism of the ’90s web is gone. The web 2.0 utopia?—?where we all lived in rounded filter bubbles of happiness?—?ended with the 2016 Presidential election when we learned that the tools we thought were only life-giving could be weaponized too. The public and semi-public spaces we created to develop our identities, cultivate communities, and gain knowledge were overtaken by forces using them to gain power of various kinds (market, political, social, and so on). […] The dark forests grow because they provide psychological and reputational cover. They allow us to be ourselves because we know who else is there. Compared to the free market communication style of the mass channels?—?with their high risks, high rewards, and limited moderation?—?dark forest spaces are more Scandinavian in their values and the social and emotional security they provide. They cap the downsides of looking bad and the upsides of our best jokes by virtue of a contained audience.
(tags: culture internet dark-forests future web privacy abuse community)
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Nixery provides the ability to pull ad-hoc container images from a Docker-compatible registry server. The image names specify the contents the image should contain, which are then retrieved and built by the Nix package manager. Nix is also responsible for the creation of the container images themselves.
e.g. “docker run -ti nixery.appspot.com/shell/htop bash”(tags: docker containers nix nixpkgs packaging deployment ops)
5G is the new antivax/chemtrails conspiracy theory
And Russia is pushing it. Expect to see a lot of this about soon
(tags: 5g conspiracies loons crazy russia propaganda disinformation wireless youtube)
The definitive guide to running EC2 Spot Instances as Kubernetes worker nodes
it really is quite definitive, good writeup
(tags: ec2 spot-instances cost-saving kubernetes clusters asg aws)
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Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness is reportedly involved, according to this
(tags: mairead-mcguinness religion secular democracy eu meps europe lobbying)
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‘a new national platform for accessing authoritative geospatial information which provides free, web-based access to authoritative Irish spatial data from multiple providers, including Ordnance Survey Ireland (OSi) and many more.’
(tags: ireland mapping maps geo ordnance-survey osi geodata)
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nice high-res scan
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The EU’s expert group met last year as a response to the wildfire spread of fake news and disinformation seen in the Brexit referendum and in the US election of President Donald Trump. Their task was to help prevent the spread of disinformation, particularly at pivotal moments such as this week’s hotly contested European parliamentary elections. However some of these experts say that representatives of Facebook and Google undermined the work of the group, which was convened by the European Commission and comprised leading European researchers, media entrepreneurs and activists. In particular, the platforms opposed proposals that would have forced them to be more transparent about their business models. And a number of insiders have raised concerns about how the tech platforms’ funding relationships with experts on the panel may have helped to water down the recommendations. In the wake of numerous reports of massive disinformation campaigns targeting the European elections, many linked to Russia and to far-right groups, EU politicians and transparency campaigners have called these fresh allegations about the tech platforms’ behaviour a “scandal”.
(tags: google facebook disinformation russia eu democracy lobbying)
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‘In this paper, we focus on the problem of searching sorted, in-memory datasets. This is a key data operation, and Binary Search is the de facto algorithm that is used in practice. We consider an alternative, namely Interpolation Search, which can take advantage of hardware trends by using complex calculations to save memory accesses. Historically, Interpolation Search was found to underperform compared to other search algorithms in this setting, despite its superior asymptotic complexity. Also,Interpolation Search is known to perform poorly on non-uniform data. To address these issues, we introduce SIP (Slope reuse Interpolation), an optimized implementation of Interpolation Search, and TIP (Three point Interpolation), a new search algorithm that uses linear fractions to interpolate on non-uniform distributions. We evaluate these two algorithms against a similarly optimized Binary Search method using a variety of real and synthetic datasets. We show that SIP is up to 4 times faster on uniformly distributed data and TIP is 2-3 times faster on non-uniformly distributed data in some cases. We also design a meta-algorithm to switch between these different methods to automate picking the higher performing search algorithm, which depends on factors like data distribution.’
(tags: papers pdf algorithms search interpolation binary-search sorted-data coding optimization performance)
nearly every site running ads has an /ads.txt
Pinboard on Twitter:
‘I just learned that nearly every site running ads has a standardized ads.txt file that helpfully shows you how badly it murders your privacy. The file is a whitelist of all authorized resellers for programmatic advertising. For example, https://www.bostonglobe.com/ads.txt ‘
(tags: ads.txt advertising pinboard privacy data-privacy adtech robots)
The one man behind all those slick, glossy, anti-abortion posters
If you were wondering where all those huge, glossy high-quality posters of foetuses came from during the abortion referendum campaign in Ireland last year: ‘Graphic pictures of aborted fetuses, prayer vigils and protesters. It’s no coincidence that the anti-abortion movement looks the same from London to Dublin to Warsaw. It’s mostly Gregg Cunningham. The California-based activist has been farming out his imagery and strategies to like-minded groups in Europe for more than five years.’ ‘if you see an abortion protester with one of those big, disturbing, graphic images, that says “CHOICE?” Or “ABORTION IS MURDER”, that’s Gregg Cunningham’s work, and that’s not a protest, that’s advertising.’ It’s a business. He sells this worldwide. He’s also a climate change denier, naturally. There’s even a ‘Canadian Centre for Bioethical Reform’, mirroring the Irish operation. So now you know why right-wingers accuse lefties of being ‘paid protesters’ — it’s because that’s what _they_ do. Of course, this tactic backfired dramatically in Ireland — we don’t like being told what to think by paternalistic, patronising, colonialist foreign influences these days….
(tags: gregg-cunningham abortion us-politics posters icbr ccbr)
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Oh dear — not a happy camper….
This is not a bug in the system, but a feature of the system. The app is not automated to the degree that a cancelled bus service can be flagged on the spot. It has to pass through at least two human decision-making processes before it’s removed from the app. In the most simple terms, the system works in such a way that inaccurate information is an inevitable by-product. Similarly, the app struggles to account for buses that are held up in traffic: “When a bus is held in traffic, the predicted arrival time on the RTPI unit will reflect this as it is determined by the bus’ distance between its location and the bus stop and it is not possible to determine the duration of the period of congestion.” So while your bus could be 10 minutes away, on a busy main road full of traffic, the app could tell you that it is two or three minutes away, based purely on its distance.
(tags: buses public-transport dublin rtpi dublin-bus rants apps mobile)
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Google demonstrates their (extremely cool) privacy-preserving machine learning train/test architecture with a comic
(tags: google comics ai ml federated-learning privacy data-protection encryption training)
The many human errors that brought down the Boeing 737 Max – The Verge
Had anyone [at the FAA] checked, they might have flagged MCAS for one of several reasons, including its lack of redundancy, its unacceptably high risk of failure, or its significant increase in power to the point that it was no longer just a “hazardous failure” kind of system. When asked for comment, the agency said, “The FAA’s aircraft certification processes are well established and have consistently produced safe aircraft designs.” Boeing defended the process as well. “The system of authorized representatives — delegated authority — is a robust and effective way for the FAA to execute its oversight of safety,” a spokesperson told The Verge. But that system only works when someone actually reads the paperwork.
(tags: mcas boeing 737max fail safety faa flying regulation)
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Reducing your climate change impact by funding offsetting projects worldwide; usable by individuals
(tags: climate-change climate offsetting donation crowdfunding offset)
Opinion | The Uber I.P.O. Is a Moral Stain on Silicon Valley – The New York Times
Uber — and to a lesser extent, its competitor Lyft — has indeed turned out to be a poster child for Silicon Valley’s messianic vision, but not in a way that should make anyone in this industry proud. Uber’s is likely to be the biggest tech I.P.O. since Facebook’s. It will turn a handful of people into millionaires and billionaires. But the gains for everyone else — for drivers, for the environment, for the world — remain in doubt. There’s a lesson here: If Uber is really the best that Silicon Valley can do, America desperately needs to find a better way to fund groundbreaking new ideas.
(tags: startups uber silicon-valley morality ethics future work tech)
Youth Spies and Curious Elders – Austin Kleon
featuring Eno, John Waters and Stafford Beer:
The revolutions of the future will appear in forms we don’t even recognise—in a language we can’t read. We will be looking out for twists on the old themes but not noticing that there are whole new conversations taking place. Just imagine if all the things about which we now get so heated meant nothing to those who follow us—as mysteriously irrelevant as the nuanced distinctions between anarcho-syndicalism and communist anarchism. At least we can hope for that. As the cybernetician Stafford Beer once said to me: “If we can understand our children, we’re all screwed.” So revel in your mystification and read it as a sign of a healthy future. Whatever happens next, it won’t be what you expected. If it is what you expected, it isn’t what’s happening next.
(tags: kids learning fashion youth brian-eno john-waters stafford-beer children future music)
Tim Robinson’s townland index for Connemara and the Aran Islands | NUI Galway Digital Collections
Legendary west-of-Ireland mapmaker Tim Robinson has an archive at NUIG — including the maps themselves.
An extensive card catalogue compiled by Tim Robinson throughout the 1980s and 1990s, drawn from his field notes. The series has been arranged by Robinson into civil parishes, and further divided into townlands. For most of the townlands, there are several record cards that give a detailed description of the local landscape. These describe historical, ecclesiastical, geological, and archaeological features. Anecdotes and local lore also feature in these. Robinson adds the names of people who helped him compile his information, usually local people, and often correspondents who sent him information helping him identify the origins of placenames, or certain landmarks and artefacts. The cards also credit several secondary sources, including the OS maps and corresponding Field Name Books, Hardiman’s History of Galway, Alexander Nimmo’s map of the bogs in the West of Ireland, and many more. In all cases in this series, the placename Tim Robinson used as his title appears as the title here. Many are in Irish, and some are in English. The corresponding translation is provided in the description.
(tags: tim-robinson ireland history connemara via:voxhib galway maps mapping culture nuig)
Young Life Out Of Balance: The Impact and Legacy of ‘Koyaanisqatsi’
I found myself thinking about how 10-year-old Mike responded to these overwhelming images. The process of meaning-making for a 10-year-old kid watching a film containing a sophisticated symbolic critique of modern life fascinated me. I decided to watch Koyaanisqatsi in 2019 with a close eye towards the images and sounds that had stuck with me subconsciously in the intervening third of a century, the sequences that offered today’s me a direct connection to my younger self. In childhood I was surrounded by films, cartoons, and other educational programming that transmitted the profundity and complexity of human existence and the universe directly into my growing brain. What did Koyaanisqatsi‘s sensory bombardment, its sometimes overwhelming contrasting of nature and technology mean to me then? And how did that meaning change for me as an adult, now fully conscious of and conversant with the issues Reggio raises?
(tags: koyaanisqatsi godfrey-reggio film art 1980s)
Oh dear. Huawei enterprise router ‘backdoor’ was Telnet, sighs Vodafone
LOL:
Characterising Telnet as a backdoor is a bit like describing your catflap as an access portal with no physical security features that allows multiple species to pass unhindered through a critical home security layer. In other words, massively over-egging the pudding.
(tags: huawei vodafone funny security bloomberg overexcited drama us-politics china)
‘Looping’ Created an Underground Insulin-Pump Market – The Atlantic
By 2014, the hardware components of a DIY artificial pancreas—a small insulin pump that attaches via thin disposable tubing to the body and a continuous sensor for glucose, or sugar, that slips just under the skin—were available, but it was impossible to connect the two. That’s where the security flaw came in. The hackers realized they could use it to override old Medtronic pumps with their own algorithm that automatically calculates insulin doses based on real-time glucose data. It closed the feedback loop. They shared this code online as OpenAPS, and “looping,” as it’s called, began to catch on. Instead of micromanaging their blood sugar, people with diabetes could offload that work to an algorithm. In addition to OpenAPS, another system called Loop is now available. Dozens, then hundreds, and now thousands of people are experimenting with DIY artificial-pancreas systems—none of which the Food and Drug Administration has officially approved. And they’ve had to track down discontinued Medtronic pumps. It can sometimes take months to find one. Obviously, you can’t just call up Medtronic to order a discontinued pump with a security flaw. “It’s eBay, Craigslist, Facebook. It’s like this underground market for these pumps,”
(tags: looping insulin diabetes health hardware open-hardware medtronic glucose medicine fda black-market)
Packets-per-second limits in EC2
By running these experiments, we determined that each EC2 instance type has a packet-per-second budget. Surprisingly, this budget goes toward the total of incoming and outgoing packets. Even more surprisingly, the same budget gets split between multiple network interfaces, with some additional performance penalty. This last result informs against using multiple network interfaces when tuning the system for higher networking performance. The maximum budget for m5.metal and m5.24xlarge is 2.2M packets per second. Given that each HTTP transaction takes at least four packets, we can translate this to a maximum of 550k requests per second on the largest m5 instance with Enhanced Networking enabled.
(tags: aws ec2 networking pps packets tcp ip benchmarking)
Brian Moriarty – “I Sing the Story Electric”
The history of interactive storytelling, including a classification system for branching narrative techniques: The Foldback, Quicktime Events, Sardonic Options, Achtung Options, Checkpoint Saves, and Bait-and-Switch Options, and an example of a computerized interactive narrative from 1955, GENIAC Project 23.
(tags: geniac kinoautomat borges narratives non-linear branching interactive-fiction games gaming ludology history stories storytelling talks)
When License-Plate Surveillance Goes Horribly Wrong – The New York Times
“They built a system to mitigate harm, and yet I ended up with guns pulled on me due to faulty data,” he said. “And it’s more proof that we’ve built this invisible layer behind the scenes that leads to real-world consequences.”
This is the common thread between automated surveillance systems — false positives happen, but the systems are designed to assume this is harmless.(tags: false-positives surveillance anpr license-plates automation)
Ireland Blocks The World on Data Privacy
Last May, Europe imposed new data privacy guidelines that carry the hopes of hundreds of millions of people around the world — including in the United States — to rein in abuses by big tech companies. Almost a year later, it’s apparent that the new rules have a significant loophole: The designated lead regulator — the tiny nation of Ireland — has yet to bring an enforcement action against a big tech firm. That’s not entirely surprising. Despite its vows to beef up its threadbare regulatory apparatus, Ireland has a long history of catering to the very companies it is supposed to oversee, having wooed top Silicon Valley firms to the Emerald Isle with promises of low taxes, open access to top officials, and help securing funds to build glittering new headquarters. Now, data privacy experts and regulators in other countries are questioning Ireland’s commitment to policing imminent privacy concerns like Facebook’s reintroduction of facial recognition software and data-sharing with its recently purchased subsidiary WhatsApp, and Google’s sharing of information across its burgeoning number of platforms.
(tags: ireland fail gdpr privacy data-protection data facebook eu regulation)
Who’s using your face? The ugly truth about facial recognition
In order to feed this hungry system, a plethora of face repositories — such as IJB-C — have sprung up, containing images manually culled and bound together from sources as varied as university campuses, town squares, markets, cafés, mugshots and social-media sites such as Flickr, Instagram and YouTube. To understand what these faces have been helping to build, the FT worked with Adam Harvey, the researcher who first spotted Jillian York’s face in IJB-C. An American based in Berlin, he has spent years amassing more than 300 face datasets and has identified some 5,000 academic papers that cite them. The images, we found, are used to train and benchmark algorithms that serve a variety of biometric-related purposes — recognising faces at passport control, crowd surveillance, automated driving, robotics, even emotion analysis for advertising. They have been cited in papers by commercial companies including Facebook, Microsoft, Baidu, SenseTime and IBM, as well as by academics around the world, from Japan to the United Arab Emirates and Israel. “We’ve seen facial recognition shifting in purpose,” says Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at the EFF, who was shocked to discover that his own colleagues’ faces were in the Iarpa database. “It was originally being used for identification purposes?.?.?.?Now somebody’s face is used as a tracking number to watch them as they move across locations on video, which is a huge shift. [Researchers] don’t have to pay people for consent, they don’t have to find models, no firm has to pay to collect it, everyone gets it for free.”
(tags: data privacy face-recognition cameras creative-commons licensing flickr open-data google facebook surveillance instagram ijb-c research iarpa)
Tinder’s move to Kubernetes – Tinder Engineering – Medium
A solid technical writeup of Tinder’s k8s migration. Some problems with Flannel, DNS and (worryingly) ELB, but good +1s for Envoy as a sidecar
(tags: kubernetes k8s flannel networking elb aws envoy ec2 ops tinder)
Interesting thread on how trees should be managed by city councils, vs “topping”
‘Dr Eoin Lettice on Twitter: “At the risk of repeating myself, a serious discussion needs to be had about how @corkcitycouncil and its agents are managing our mature trees in the public realm. This horror show from Ballyphehane today. Topping trees is bad practice for a whole bunch of reasons. [Thread]’
(tags: topping trees ireland maintainance dcc)
James Bridle / New Ways of Seeing
This will be a must-listen, starting this week on BBC Radio 4 and for download: ‘New Ways of Seeing considers the impact of digital technologies on the way we see, understand, and interact with the world. Building on John Berger’s seminal Ways of Seeing from 1972, the show explores network infrastructures, digital images, systemic bias, education and the environment, in conversation with a number of contemporary art practitioners.’
(tags: seeing vision machine-learning james-bridle internet digital future art)
_First M87 Event Horizon Telescope Results. III. Data Processing and Calibration_
‘We present the calibration and reduction of Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) 1.3 mm radio wavelength observations of the supermassive black hole candidate at the center of the radio galaxy M87 and the quasar 3C 279, taken during the 2017 April 5–11 observing campaign. These global very long baseline interferometric observations include for the first time the highly sensitive Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA); reaching an angular resolution of 25 ?as, with characteristic sensitivity limits of ?1 mJy on baselines to ALMA and ?10 mJy on other baselines. The observations present challenges for existing data processing tools, arising from the rapid atmospheric phase fluctuations, wide recording bandwidth, and highly heterogeneous array. In response, we developed three independent pipelines for phase calibration and fringe detection, each tailored to the specific needs of the EHT. The final data products include calibrated total intensity amplitude and phase information. They are validated through a series of quality assurance tests that show consistency across pipelines and set limits on baseline systematic errors of 2% in amplitude and 1° in phase. The M87 data reveal the presence of two nulls in correlated flux density at ?3.4 and ?8.3 G? and temporal evolution in closure quantities, indicating intrinsic variability of compact structure on a timescale of days, or several light-crossing times for a few billion solar-mass black hole. These measurements provide the first opportunity to image horizon-scale structure in M87.’
(tags: papers data big-data telescopes eht black-holes astronomy)
Autonomous Precision Landing of Space Rockets – Lars Blackmore
from ‘Frontiers of Engineering: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering’ from the 2016 Symposium, published by the National Academies Press, regarding the algorithms used by SpaceX for their autonomous landings:
The computation must be done autonomously, in a fraction of a second. Failure to find a feasible solution in time will crash the spacecraft into the ground. Failure to find the optimal solution may use up the available propellant, with the same result. Finally, a hardware failure may require replanning the trajectory multiple times. Page 39 Suggested Citation:”Autonomous Precision Landing of Space Rockets – Lars Blackmore.” National Academy of Engineering. 2017. Frontiers of Engineering: Reports on Leading-Edge Engineering from the 2016 Symposium. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/23659. × Save Cancel A general solution to such problems has existed in one dimension since the 1960s (Meditch 1964), but not in three dimensions. Over the past decade, research has shown how to use modern mathematical optimization techniques to solve this problem for a Mars landing, with guarantees that the best solution can be found in time (Açikme?e and Ploen 2007; Blackmore et al. 2010). Because Earth’s atmosphere is 100 times as dense as that of Mars, aerodynamic forces become the primary concern rather than a disturbance so small that it can be neglected in the trajectory planning phase. As a result, Earth landing is a very different problem, but SpaceX and Blue Origin have shown that this too can be solved. SpaceX uses CVXGEN (Mattingley and Boyd 2012) to generate customized flight code, which enables very high-speed onboard convex optimization.
(tags: spacex blue-origin convex-optimization space landing autonomous-vehicles flight algorithms)
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nice one.
Then the activists saw an article in Gizmodo, a technology news site, that outlined how Amazon’s cloud computing division was building special offerings for oil and gas companies. On its website, Amazon says its customers include BP and Royal Dutch Shell, and its products can “find oil faster,” “recover more oil” and “reduce the cost per barrel.” In a second meeting with Amazon, the workers raised the oil industry connections with the company’s sustainability team; its members did not seem to be aware of the business, according to several employees at the meeting. “That really showed us Amazon is not taking climate change seriously if the highest levels of the sustainability team are not even aware that we have an oil and gas business,” said Ms. Cunningham, who was at the meeting.
(tags: amazon aws fossil-fuels zero-carbon emissions climate-change sustainability)
Using 6 Page and 2 Page Documents To Make Organizational Decisions
Ian Nowland has written up the Amazon 6-pager strategy:
A challenge of organizations is the aggregation of local information to a point where a globally optimal decision can be made in a way all stakeholders have seen their feedback heard and so can “disagree and commit” on the result. This document describes the “6 pager” and “2 pager” document and review meeting process, as a mechanism to address this challenge, as practiced by the document’s author in his time in the EC2 team at Amazon, and then at Two Sigma. […] The major variant I have also seen is 2 pages with 30 minute review; when the decision is smaller in terms of stakeholders, options or impact. That being said, there is nothing magical about 2 pages, i.e., a 3 page document is fine, it just should be expected to take more than 30 minutes to review.
Europol Tells Internet Archive That Much Of Its Site Is ‘Terrorist Content’ | Techdirt
‘The Internet Archive has a few staff members that process takedown notices from law enforcement who operate in the Pacific time zone. Most of the falsely identified URLs mentioned here (including the report from the French government) were sent to us in the middle of the night – between midnight and 3am Pacific – and all of the reports were sent outside of the business hours of the Internet Archive. The one-hour requirement essentially means that we would need to take reported URLs down automatically and do our best to review them after the fact. It would be bad enough if the mistaken URLs in these examples were for a set of relatively obscure items on our site, but the EU IRU’s lists include some of the most visited pages on archive.org and materials that obviously have high scholarly and research value.’
(tags: eu europol policing france archive.org archival web freedom censorship fail)