Category: Uncategorized

• Computer says no: the people trapped in universal credit's 'black hole'

  This is some horrifically dystopian shit from the UK:

  Tears filled the eyes of Danny Brice, 47, in London when he showed the Guardian how difficult he has found negotiating the UC programme with learning disabilities and dyslexia. “I call it the black hole,” he said. “I feel shaky. I get stressed about it. This is the worst system in my lifetime. They assess you as a number not a person. Talking is the way forward, not a bloody computer. I feel like the computer is controlling me instead of a person. It’s terrifying.” Nine million people in the UK are functionally illiterate and 5 million adults have either never used the internet or last used it more than three months ago. And yet many of these people rely on a “digital by default” welfare system.

  (tags: poverty ai algorithms uk politics universal-credit dystopia bureaucracy dwp benefits grim-meathook-future)

• Unpopular opinions on solar power

  from Jenny "@solar_chase" Chase. Lots of interesting solar-power factoids, like: 12. A lot of current household PV systems are designed suboptimally and may not make economic sense or even perform well. Also, most countries will move to paying a pittance for solar exports, so self-consumption rate is becoming the most important financial parameter. 13. To financially assess a proposed rooftop solar system, you will need at least a year’s data on hourly electricity consumption to estimate selfconsumption. Also, get it built when you have scaffolding up for something else, scaffolding is expensive.

  (tags: solar solar-power power electricity generation renewables future factoids twitter)

• thoughts on rms and gnu -- wingolog

  I can hear you saying it. RMS started GNU so RMS decides what it is and what it can be. But I don't accept that. GNU is about practical software freedom, not about RMS. GNU has long outgrown any individual contributor. I don't think RMS has the legitimacy to tell this group of largely volunteers what we should build or how we should organize ourselves. Or rather, he can say what he thinks, but he has no dominion over GNU; he does not have majority sweat equity in the project. If RMS actually wants the project to outlive him -- something that by his actions is not clear -- the best thing that he could do for GNU is to stop pretending to run things, to instead declare victory and retire to an emeritus role. Note, however, that my personal perspective here is not a consensus position of the GNU project. There are many (most?) GNU developers that still consider RMS to be GNU's rightful leader. I think they are mistaken, but I do not repudiate them for this reason; we can work together while differing on this and other matters. I simply state that I, personally, do not serve RMS.

  (tags: rms gnu leadership open-source foss free-software organisations emeritus)

• UK launched passport photo checker it knew would fail with dark skin | New Scientist

  “User research was carried out with a wide range of ethnic groups and did identify that people with very light or very dark skin found it difficult to provide an acceptable passport photograph,” the department wrote in a document released in response to a freedom of information (FOI) request. “However; the overall performance was judged sufficient to deploy.” Samir Jeraj at the Race Equality Foundation says: “It’s outrageous. It clearly shows it wasn’t a priority for them that it would work for people with black skin.” Jeraj called on the government to be clearer and more robust about what improvements it will make, and by when. In the meantime, he adds it would not cost the passport office anything to put a note on its website acknowledging the issue.

  And it took a fecking FOI to discover this! Terrible.

  (tags: passports racism uk photos biometrics data-quality home-office equality)

• Origins of the Party Parrot

  ... just this week, I got an email from a Florida man claiming to be the person I had been looking for. What's more, he says he made the original emoji in December 2009 and uploaded it to Something Awful, a website popular in the 2000s for its comedic blog posts and forums. He had no idea his work had turned into a meme until he read my story on Tuesday. 

  (tags: something-awful memes history party-parrot emoticons internet)

• libeatmydata

  'a small LD_PRELOAD library designed to (transparently) disable fsync (and friends, like open(O_SYNC)). This has two side-effects: making software that writes data safely to disk a lot quicker and making this software no longer crash safe.' Good for tests....

  (tags: fsync linux performance mysql testing)

• THE HISTORY OF GAMING MAGAZINES: A GALLERY - DIGITISER

  this is incredible

  (tags: gaming magazines funny retrogaming arcade-games games parody digitiser)

• Gen A

  Most of those under the age of around forty will live lives defined by the anthropocene: by the immense challenges contained in mounting climate chaos and ecological collapse. As these twin calamities evolve, there will be no meaningful way to distinguish between those young generations delineated by marketing agencies: Gen Z and Millennials, the two big generations still under forty. Instead, they will likely become a single transition generation overseeing our move from the old world to a new one. Their shared experiences will be grafted together by the wildfires they’ll weather together, their shared values moulded and alloyed by the acts of violence that have always trailed ecological collapse. The existential crisis inherent to this transition is so dire and so unique that our usual way of demarcating generational cohorts needs revamping, and the generation experiencing it needs a new designation. Welcome Generation Anthropocene, or Gen A, to the social scene.

  (tags: gen-a generations future youth anthropocene climate-change)

• 150 successful machine learning models: 6 lessons learned at Booking.com

  Good tips for real-world production ML/classification adoption.

  One tactic Booking.com have successfully deployed in these situations with respect to binary classifiers is to look at the distribution of responses generated by the model. “Smooth bimodal distributions with one clear stable point are signs of a model that successfully distinguishes two classes.” Other shapes (see figure below) can be indicative of a model that is struggling.

  Also very interesting to note that people found an over-accurate prediction engine to be "creepy" and an example of the "uncanny valley" effect.

  (tags: learning ml ai machine-learning production booking.com)

• A quarter of UK mammals and nearly half of birds are at risk of extinction

  A quarter of UK mammals and nearly half of the birds assessed are at risk of extinction, according to the report, which was produced by a coalition of more than 70 wildlife organisations and government conservation agencies. When plants, insects and fungi are added, one in seven of the 8,400 UK species assessed are at risk of being completely lost, with 133 already gone since 1500.

  (tags: xr news horrifying extinction uk wildlife future climate-change)

• Revealed: the 20 firms behind a third of all carbon emissions

  The top 20 companies on the list have contributed to 35% of all energy-related carbon dioxide and methane worldwide, totalling 480bn tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e) since 1965. Those identified range from investor-owned firms – household names such as Chevron, Exxon, BP and Shell – to state-owned companies including Saudi Aramco and Gazprom. Chevron topped the list of the eight investor-owned corporations, followed closely by Exxon, BP and Shell. Together these four global businesses are behind more than 10% of the world’s carbon emissions since 1965.

  (tags: coal emissions business gas oil fossil-fuels climate-change co2 carbon chevron exxon bp shell)

• The big polluters’ masterstroke was to blame the climate crisis on you and me | George Monbiot | Opinion | The Guardian

  the biggest and most successful lie it tells is this: that the first great extermination is a matter of consumer choice. In response to the Guardian’s questions, some of the oil companies argued that they are not responsible for our decisions to use their products. But we are embedded in a system of their creation – a political, economic and physical infrastructure that creates an illusion of choice while, in reality, closing it down. We are guided by an ideology so familiar and pervasive that we do not even recognise it as an ideology. It is called consumerism. It has been crafted with the help of skilful advertisers and marketers, by corporate celebrity culture, and by a media that casts us as the recipients of goods and services rather than the creators of political reality. It is locked in by transport, town planning and energy systems that make good choices all but impossible. It spreads like a stain through political systems, which have been systematically captured by lobbying and campaign finance, until political leaders cease to represent us, and work instead for the pollutocrats who fund them. In such a system, individual choices are lost in the noise. [...] This individuation of responsibility, intrinsic to consumerism, blinds us to the real drivers of destruction.

  (tags: capitalism consumerism fossil-fuels climate-change plastic-straws keep-cups)

• Scylla compression benchmarks

  ScyllaDB tested out LZ4, Snappy, DEFLATE, and ZStandard at several different levels on a decently real-world-ish workload. tl;dr:

  Use compression. Unless you are using a really (but REALLY) fast hard drive, using the default compression settings will be even faster than disabling compression, and the space savings are huge. When running a data warehouse where data is mostly being read and only rarely updated, consider using DEFLATE. It provides very good compression ratios while maintaining high decompression speeds; compression can be slower, but that might be unimportant for your workload. If your workload is write-heavy but you really care about saving disk space, consider using ZStandard on level 1. It provides a good middle-ground between LZ4/Snappy and DEFLATE in terms of compression ratios and keeps compression speeds close to LZ4 and Snappy. Be careful however: if you often want to read cold data (from the SSTables on disk, not currently stored in memory, so for example data that was inserted a long time ago), the slower decompression might become a problem.

  (tags: compression scylladb storage deflate zstd zstandard lz4 snappy gzip benchmarks tests performance)

• Financial supports to growing forests on farmland in Ireland

  Rather than focusing on the production of a commercial conifer (or broadleaf) timber crop, you can also choose to establish a new native woodland. Not only will an ecologically rich, biodiverse woodland be created, but it also presents opportunities for planting in various environmentally sensitive areas such as Special Areas of Conservation (SACs) and Special Protection Areas (SPAs). Establishing a native woodland will provide you with higher annual payments of €665-€680/ha/yr for 15 years.

  (tags: farming forestry trees growing rewilding ireland funds)

• electricityMap

  This is fascinating! 'a live visualization of where your electricity comes from and how much CO2 was emitted to produce it.' (via ClimateAction.tech)

  (tags: electricity statistics graphs data energy climate renewables carbon co2)

• Project Drawdown

  'The objective of the solutions list is to be inclusive, presenting an extensive array of impactful measures already in existence. The list is comprised primarily of “no regrets” solutions—actions that make sense to take regardless of their climate impact since they have intrinsic benefits to communities and economies. These initiatives improve lives, create jobs, restore the environment, enhance security, generate resilience, and advance human health.' A little over-optimistic IMO, but a good resource nonetheless

  (tags: climate-change society environment climate drawdown future)

• "See bike, say bike"

  This is useful advice, on how to avoid the SMIDSY, or "Sorry mate, I didn't see you", accident type.

  When we looked at what predicts whether you do remember the motorbike, it's not whether you looked at it, or how long you looked at it for, it's what you do afterwards. So the more things you look at after the motorbike, the more likely you are to forget it. Now that looks like forgetting, not a failure to attend to it in the first place. [...] it looks as though this error is a limitation in short term memory. Now what we do know about short term memory, and we've known since the 1960s, is that you've got two types of short term memory that are essentially independent systems. You've got visuospatial working memory, for the things you look at and you've got phonological short term memory. That's a verbal form of store for things you say. The two are separate. So I've suggested that if you're at a junction and you see a motorbike or a pedal cycle coming, you just say aloud or under your breath, “bike”, that will automatically encode it in phonological working memory. That gives you extra capacity, essentially doubling the amount of stuff you can remember. See bike, say bike could be a simple intervention that might make a big difference.

  (tags: memory cycling safety roads driving smidsy accidents attention brain)

• Operating Apache Kafka Clusters 24/7 Without A Global Ops Team

  Lyft built an autoremediation system and apparently it works :) Good to get a detailed writeup on such an elusive beast

  (tags: autoremediation failures ops kafka scalability automation)

• The Shitkansen

  this may be the best Aussie neologism. "Shitkansen" refers to the shitty Newcastle-Sydney suburban rail line, as opposed to the gleaming, zoomy japanese "shinkansen" bullet trains

  (tags: trains via:johnb78 shitkansen australia sydney funny neologisms nicknames shinkansen bullet-trains rail-travel)

• Updating and Backing Up Docker Containers With Version Control

  Version controlling Docker-based service upgrades; assuming all the service state is in a /config or /data app-data directory, this is a nice approach. Linuxserver.IO are impressive in how well they have thought out the use of Docker containers as a server deployment system for small-scale, home use

  (tags: docker home ops services upgrades docker-compose version-control)

• JSON originally had comments. They were removed

  Oh christ. This is some terrible logic from Douglas Crockford:

  Comments in JSON (Apr 30, 2012) I removed comments from JSON because I saw people were using them to hold parsing directives, a practice which would have destroyed interoperability. I know that the lack of comments makes some people sad, but it shouldn't. Suppose you are using JSON to keep configuration files, which you would like to annotate. Go ahead and insert all the comments you like. Then pipe it through JSMin before handing it to your JSON parser.

  I've never even _heard_ of JSMin. Meanwhile various tools which chose to use JSON as a configuration file format work around this crappy decision with messy hacks.

  (tags: hacks json bad-decisions design apis configuration file-formats javascript douglas-crockford fail jsmin parsing comments)

• How To Use The Bridgefy Offline Messaging App

  Decent offline messaging system for smartphones -- uses Bluetooth to connect p2p, without requiring working internet

  (tags: apps mobile offline networking bluetooth chat emergency)

• The Loudest Sound Ever Heard

  The Krakatoa explosion registered 172 decibels at 100 miles from the source. This is so astonishingly loud, that it’s inching up against the limits of what we mean by “sound.” When you hum a note or speak a word, you’re wiggling air molecules back and forth dozens or hundreds of times per second, causing the air pressure to be low in some places and high in other places. The louder the sound, the more intense these wiggles, and the larger the fluctuations in air pressure. But there’s a limit to how loud a sound can get. At some point, the fluctuations in air pressure are so large that the low pressure regions hit zero pressure—a vacuum—and you can’t get any lower than that. This limit happens to be about 194 decibels for a sound in Earth’s atmosphere. Any louder, and the sound is no longer just passing through the air, it’s actually pushing the air along with it, creating a pressurized burst of moving air known as a shock wave.[...] Amazingly, for as many as 5 days after the explosion, weather stations in 50 cities around the globe observed this unprecedented spike in pressure re-occuring like clockwork, approximately every 34 hours. That is roughly how long it takes sound to travel around the entire planet.

  (tags: sound shockwaves earth krakatoa disasters volcanos eruptions noise decibels)

• Implementing graceful-close in Haskell network library

  One of the nice bits about HTTP 1.0 and 1.1 was the strong connection direction semantics, avoiding the classic TCP deadlock scenarios seen in bidirectional protocols. But now HTTP/2 supports bidirectionality, so HTTP/2 servers need to be more careful about how they close connections, as this blog post describes -- tl;dr: shutdown(SHUT_WR) .

  (tags: http networking protocols http2 bidirectional-protocols tcp ip)

• Scott Aaronson on Google's quantum supremacy leaked paper

  It seems a paper between Google and NASA accidentally leaked a couple of days ago, saying that a group at Google has now achieved quantum computational supremacy with a 53-qubit superconducting device. According to Scott Aaronson, a noted quantum-computation expert, this is a Big Deal and a significant moment in scientific progress:

  It’s like, have a little respect for the immensity of what we’re talking about here, and for the terrifying engineering that’s needed to make it reality. Before quantum supremacy, by definition, the QC skeptics can all laugh to each other that, for all the billions of dollars spent over 20+ years, still no quantum computer has even once been used to solve any problem faster than your laptop could solve it, or at least not in any way that depended on its being a quantum computer. In a post-quantum-supremacy world, that’s no longer the case. A superposition involving 250 or 260 complex numbers has been computationally harnessed, using time and space resources that are minuscule compared to 250 or 260. I keep bringing up the Wright Flyer only because the chasm between what we’re talking about, and the dismissiveness I’m seeing in some corners of the Internet, is kind of breathtaking to me. It’s like, if you believed that useful air travel was fundamentally impossible, then seeing a dinky wooden propeller plane keep itself aloft wouldn’t refute your belief … but it sure as hell shouldn’t reassure you either.

  (tags: google programming quantum-computing qubits future science qc history research)

• Isolating workloads with Systemd slices

  Systemd supports docker-like cgroups isolation, it seems, and ScyllaDB can take advantage of that

  (tags: systemd cgroups process-isolation linux containerisation scylladb ops)

• GNOME Foundation facing lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging

  Software patents are a cancer. 'The GNOME Foundation has been made aware of a lawsuit from Rothschild Patent Imaging, LLC over patent 9,936,086. Rothschild allege that Shotwell, a free and open source personal photo manager infringes this patent. Neil McGovern, Executive Director for the GNOME Foundation says “We have retained legal counsel and intend to vigorously defend against this baseless suit.”'

  (tags: software-patents swpats shotwell gnome linux open-source patents)

• IPCC Report: Oceans Face 'Unprecedented Conditions'

  The IPCC report on the ocean is full of utterly disastrous science. One example:

  The dangerous changes to the ocean don’t even begin to address the impacts of rising seas. Under all climate change scenarios, coastal areas will see what the report euphemistically calls “extreme sea level events”—that would be floods to you and me—that were once once-in-a-century will become annual occurrences by century’s end. But devastating effects will impact unnumbered people far sooner. “Many low-lying megacities and small islands (including SIDS) are projected to experience historical centennial events at least annually by 2050,” the report authors wrote.

  Bottom line: 'The world has shown little appetite to take a collaborative approach to these types of adaptation projects let alone drawing down emissions to-date, but the tide will have to turn if humanity is to have any chance of staying above water.'

  (tags: climate-change climate oceans sea-level disasters future 2050)

• Green New Deal critics are missing the bigger picture

  This Vox article absolutely nails what we are facing, and why there's no longer any room to _not_ implement a Green New Deal world wide.

  New EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler recently dismissed the latest IPCC report as being based on a “worst-case scenario,” which is darkly ironic, since the report is all about the dangers that lie between 1.5 and 2 degrees of warming. But 2 degrees is not the worst-case scenario. It is among the best-case scenarios. The UN thinks we’re headed for somewhere around 4 degrees by 2100. Believing that we can limit temperature rise to 2 degrees — a level of warming scientists view as catastrophic — now counts as wild-haired optimism. [...] Two degrees would be terrible, but it’s better than three, at which point Southern Europe would be in permanent drought, African droughts would last five years on average, and the areas burned annually by wildfires in the United States could quadruple, or worse, from last year’s million-plus acres. And three degrees is much better than four, at which point six natural disasters could strike a single community simultaneously; the number of climate refugees, already in the millions, could grow tenfold, or 20-fold, or more; and, globally, damages from warming could reach $600?trillion — about double all the wealth that exists in the world today. The worst-case scenario, which, contra Wheeler, is virtually never discussed in polite political circles in the US, is, as Wallace-Wells quotes famed naturalist David Attenborough saying, “the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world.” That is alarming and, if you must, “alarmist,” but as Wallace-Wells says, “being alarmed is not a sign of being hysterical; when it comes to climate change, being alarmed is what the facts demand.” [...] Choosing to continue down our present path is madness. Nihilism. It is not “moderation.”

  (tags: activism climate-change climate green-new-deal green future ipcc david-attenborough nihilism politics)

• Neurosexism: the myth that men and women have different brains

  The history of sex-difference research is rife with innumeracy, misinterpretation, publication bias, weak statistical power, inadequate controls and worse. Rippon, a leading voice against the bad neuroscience of sex differences, uncovers so many examples in this ambitious book that she uses a whack-a-mole metaphor to evoke the eternal cycle. A brain study purports to discover a difference between men and women; it is publicized as, ‘At last, the truth!’, taunting political correctness; other researchers expose some hyped extrapolation or fatal design flaw; and, with luck, the faulty claim fades away — until the next post hoc analysis produces another ‘Aha!’ moment and the cycle repeats. As Rippon shows, this hunt for brain differences “has been vigorously pursued down the ages with all the techniques that science could muster”. And it has exploded in the past three decades, since MRI research joined the fray. Yet, as 'The Gendered Brain' reveals, conclusive findings about sex-linked brain differences have failed to materialize.

  (tags: brain men nature women gender sexism neurology neurosexism myths debunking)

• AIB makes a mess of security upgrade, locking out thousands of customers

  Ireland's largest bank, and they've really made a mess of this. Lots of false positives on the "rooted device" detection code it seems. It seems detecting "rooted" devices is a part of the PSD2 spec, and you have to wonder why...

  (tags: aib security fail rooting devices mobile paranoia)

• A deconstruction of the BBC's "windmills actually increase global warming" article about SF6 from last week

  'This is a neat example of how eminently resolvable challenges around the clean power transition are framed by deniers and ideologues as incurable curses, while actual scientists and engineers just get on with fixing them.' As Aoife McLysaght notes: 'This is a great, informative thread. Yes SF6 is has a warming effect, but it’s released v little, is a feature of all switches (not only wind turbines as implied), and alternatives are in the works. Wind turbines aren’t zero emissions but they are v low.'

  (tags: sf6 emissions wind electricity global-warming climate-change bbc bias science)

• Crash Course | The New Republic

  Boeing's MCAS disaster as a parable of late-stage capitalism:

  [Boeing] engineers devised a software fix called MCAS, which pushed the nose down in response to an obscure set of circumstances in conjunction with the “speed trim system,” which Boeing had devised in the 1980s to smooth takeoffs. Once the 737 MAX materialized as a real-life plane about four years later, however, test pilots discovered new realms in which the plane was more stall-prone than its predecessors. So Boeing modified MCAS to turn down the nose of the plane whenever an angle-of-attack (AOA) sensor detected a stall, regardless of the speed. That involved giving the system more power and removing a safeguard, but not, in any formal or genuine way, running its modifications by the FAA, which might have had reservations with two critical traits of the revamped system: Firstly, that there are two AOA sensors on a 737, but only one, fatefully, was programmed to trigger MCAS. The former Boeing engineer Ludtke and an anonymous whistle-blower interviewed by 60 Minutes Australia both have a simple explanation for this: Any program coded to take data from both sensors would have had to account for the possibility the sensors might disagree with each other and devise a contingency for reconciling the mixed signals. Whatever that contingency, it would have involved some kind of cockpit alert, which would in turn have required additional training—probably not level-D training, but no one wanted to risk that. So the system was programmed to turn the nose down at the feedback of a single (and somewhat flimsy) sensor. And, for still unknown and truly mysterious reasons, it was programmed to nosedive again five seconds later, and again five seconds after that, over and over ad literal nauseam.? And then, just for good measure, a Boeing technical pilot emailed the FAA and casually asked that the reference to the software be deleted from the pilot manual.? So no more than a handful of people in the world knew MCAS even existed before it became infamous. Here, a generation after Boeing’s initial lurch into financialization, was the entirely predictable outcome of the byzantine process by which investment capital becomes completely abstracted from basic protocols of production and oversight: a flight-correction system that was essentially jerry-built to crash a plane. “If you’re looking for an example of late stage capitalism or whatever you want to call it,” said longtime aerospace consultant Richard Aboulafia, “it’s a pretty good one.”?

  (tags: boeing business capitalism engineering management fail disasters automation cost-control stock-market fly-by-wire)

Here's a quick tip for people using Huawei or Honor phones.

Huawei recently released EMUI version 9.1.0.326 as an OTA update, which I applied once it was offered as an upgrade option.

Once I installed that OS upgrade, however, I noticed that whenever I listened to music or podcasts using a Bluetooth headset or stereo speakers, there was a new and very noticeable 'echoing' effect on the audio.

It appears this was due to the addition of Huawei Histen, a 3D audio/equaliser feature, which apparently will add 3D audio effects when listening on wired headphones of various varieties -- however this is supposed to be disabled on Bluetooth devices.

I spent several days fruitlessly googling how to disable Histen, but with no luck. Eventually, through trial and error, I discovered a workaround -- simply plug in a pair of wired headphones, go into Settings -> Sounds -> Huawei Histen sound effects, and choose "Natural sound". Hey presto, next time you use Bluetooth headphones, it should no longer have the echo.

• Why hard disks are/were called Winchester

  some ancient history. I'd forgotten about this nomenclature

  (tags: winchester history ibm disks hard-disks hardware)

• Use of an opaque binary class in a public iOS API causes problems

  "Apple changing the behavior of `NSData -description` in iOS 13 could break push notification registration for thousands of apps. Beyond the immediate concern for existing apps, this is an interesting case study in how to handle long-standing, widespread misuse of an API." This is messy. Not a good API design decision from Apple

  (tags: apple ios push-notifications apis api coding interoperability i14y)

• The Problem With Sugar-Daddy Science - The Atlantic

  The pursuit of money from wealthy donors distorts the research process—and yields flashy projects that don’t help and don’t work.

  (tags: science funding millionaires donors research ai mit jeff-epstein media-lab)

• Replacing Eir's FTTH WiFi router with a NetGear Orbi

  Great writeup from Padraig Brady. sounds like solid hardware -- I'd get one if I needed to replace my current setup based on this

  (tags: orbi netgear han lan home networking wifi ops)

• Facing the Great Reckoning Head-On - danah boyd - Medium

  “Move fast and break things” is an abomination if your goal is to create a healthy society. Taking short-cuts may be financially profitable in the short-term, but the cost to society is too great to be justified. In a healthy society, we accommodate differently abled people through accessibility standards, not because it’s financially prudent but because it’s the right thing to do. In a healthy society, we make certain that the vulnerable amongst us are not harassed into silence because that is not the value behind free speech. In a healthy society, we strategically design to increase social cohesion because binaries are machine logic not human logic.

  (tags: medialab mit speech tech society danah-boyd)

• Fairphone 3 Teardown - iFixit

  'We tear down the modular Fairphone 3 with a giant grin on our faces! It's not perfect, but this is just about all we can ask for from a smartphone in 2019.' Quite nice -- modular, reminiscent of the Samsung S5 a little. specs are not stellar, but the ethical construction is a major win IMO. I think this (or the next model if it's out by then) might be my next phone.

  (tags: repair mobile hardware phones fairphone ethics fairtrade)

• Paul Vixie's answer to "was DNS intentionally designed to be insecure?"

  no. nor ip itself, or ncp which preceded it, or tcp, or udp, or icmp, or smtp, ot http. it was insecure because it evolved in a safe, germ free academic bubble. absolutely none of it was designed with billions of people in mind, or the full cross section of humanity which would include criminals and national intelligence services. the world of the internet in 2019 would have been seen as a total freak show by the community who deployed dns in the 1980's. nothing that can be abused won't be. you may or may not believe this; it's considered controversial, and there are arguments being had about it today. but noone considered that now-controversial near-truism at all when the core internet protocols were first designed and implemented. the idea of abuse was considered novel in the 1990's when commercialization and privatization brought abuse into the internet world and burst the academic bubble. a lot of old timers blamed AOL and MSN and even Usenet for the problems, but in actuality, it's what humans _always_ do at scale. putting the full spectrum of human culture atop a technology platform designed for academic and professional culture should have been understood to be a recipe for disaster.

  (tags: ietf computers abuse internet security dns paul-vixie history scale culture)

• Project Alternator · scylladb/scylla Wiki

  an open-source project for an Amazon DynamoDB-compatible API. Alternator runs within Scylla. Enabling it is as simple as editing the yaml configuration. Existing DynamoDB clients would simply be pointed at the Scylla cluster. No other client coding is required.

  (tags: dynamodb aws emulation scylla ops)

• Millennium Challenge 2002 - Wikipedia

  omg I never knew about this. Post 9/11, the Bush administration ran a war game scenario which resulted in a massive fail for the US forces, and had to be re-run to ensure they won: 'At this point, the exercise was suspended, Blue's ships were "re-floated", and the rules of engagement were changed; this was later justified by General Peter Pace as follows: "You kill me in the first day and I sit there for the next 13 days doing nothing, or you put me back to life and you get 13 more days' worth of experiment out of me. Which is a better way to do it?"[1] After the reset, both sides were ordered to follow predetermined plans of action. After the war game was restarted, its participants were forced to follow a script drafted to ensure a Blue Force victory. Among other rules imposed by this script, Red Force was ordered to turn on their anti-aircraft radar in order for them to be destroyed, and was not allowed to shoot down any of the aircraft bringing Blue Force troops ashore.[3] Van Riper also claimed that exercise officials denied him the opportunity to use his own tactics and ideas against Blue Force, and that they also ordered Red Force not to use certain weapons systems against Blue Force and even ordered the location of Red Force units to be revealed.[4]'

  (tags: military funny fail wargames history bush do-overs)

• ericflo/mediasummon: Summon your photos and videos back to you

  Mediasummon is an open source application that fetches a copy of all your photos and videos, and keeps them continuously backed up into one organized directory either on your computer or on a cloud storage provider.

  Currently supports reading from Instagram, Google Photos, and Facebook, and writing to Dropbox, GDrive or S3. Go, MIT Licensed.

  (tags: open-source apps photos sync google-photos facebook instagram backups s3 dropbox)

• EO Mini Smart Home

  UK-based vendor for electric vehicle charger driven off PV solar panels

  (tags: solar-power solar charging evs cars)

• zappi

  The incumbent solar-power-driven EV charger, also UK based

  (tags: zappi solar-power solar charging evs cars)

• The history of Tetris randomizers

  Fantastic writeup of the PRNGs used in various Tetris implementations -- for playability reasons, these are more "pseudo" than most PRNGs

  (tags: tetris algorithms coding games prng random randomness)

• TIL: bananas contain the primary compound in the honeybee's "alarm" pheromone

  Science helps us explain the phenomena. Turns out bananas contain a compound called isoamyl acetate (also known as isopentyl acetate) – the very same as that which is in honeybees’ alarm pheromone. Pure banana oil (used in emollients, perfumes, and to broaden the flavored milk range) is nothing but this colorless liquid ester, occasionally mixed with other chemicals. While bees’ alarm pheromone isn’t just isoamyl acetate – in fact there are over 40 compounds in the cocktail – it is the main active component. Guard bees, who patrol the entrance, and stinger bees, who comprise the militia, are the two castes within the hive most likely to release the pheromone. Both of these are worker bees (i.e. female) around 2-3 weeks old – the time it takes for their endocrine system to reach its prime. The scent – excreted from the Koschevnikov gland and other glands around the sting shaft – is released either when the bee pops out its stinger (like a cat retracting its claws), or goes full kamikaze and harpoons the mouse, robber bee or luckless human, rear-end first (inevitably dying in the assault). Having volatile properties, the ester evaporates and disperses rapidly from the origin point of the bee’s butt, making it suitable as a swift communication carrier. Once registered, it alerts the colony to the presence of an intruder or threat, lifting their aggro, and effectively coordinating an en masse defensive response. Any stray, lingering waft of a banana about you, then, will trigger a similar reaction (if slightly less intense). Don’t put too much faith in your smoker to avail you either.

  (tags: bees honeybees science pheromones fruit bananas factoids)

• The history of the Ampersand

  via the Tironian notes, a Roman shorthand syntax which originated the 'Tironian et' (?), Pompeii, and the Book of Kells (via Code Points)

  (tags: ampersand characters via:codepoints history writing shorthand tironian-notes ciphers)

• Google release an open-source differential-privacy lib

  Differentially-private data analysis is a principled approach that enables organizations to learn from the majority of their data while simultaneously ensuring that those results do not allow any individual's data to be distinguished or re-identified. This type of analysis can be implemented in a wide variety of ways and for many different purposes. For example, if you are a health researcher, you may want to compare the average amount of time patients remain admitted across various hospitals in order to determine if there are differences in care. Differential privacy is a high-assurance, analytic means of ensuring that use cases like this are addressed in a privacy-preserving manner. Currently, we provide algorithms to compute the following: Count Sum Mean Variance Standard deviation Order statistics (including min, max, and median)

  (tags: analytics google ml privacy differential-privacy aggregation statistics obfuscation approximation algorithms)

• Google Code Review Practices

  how Google do code reviews. pretty basic stuff but it's good to have it written down from an authoritative source

  (tags: google code-review prs pull-requests best-practices coding collaboration)

• TERFs: the rise of “trans-exclusionary radical feminists,” explained - Vox

  Good long-read on TERFism, its history, and its ties to conservatism

  (tags: terfs transgender politics identity gender uk feminism)

• Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) in cardiac bypass patients: A multicenter randomized trial of uncertainty and certainty of receiving intercessory prayer - ScienceDirect

  hee hee:

  Intercessory prayer itself had no effect on complication-free recovery from [coronary artery bypass graft surgery], but certainty of receiving intercessory prayer was associated with a higher incidence of complications.

  (tags: prayer religion funny papers science research health medicine surgery)

• Minecraft now publishing deobfuscation maps

  About time too.

  In an effort to help make modding the game easier, we have decided to publish our game obfuscation maps with all future releases of the game, starting today. This means that anyone who is interested may deobfuscate the game and find their way around the code without needing to spend a few months figuring out what’s what. It is our hope that mod authors and mod framework authors use these files to augment their updating processes that they have today. These mappings will always be available, instantly and immediately as part of every newly released version. This does not, however, change the existing restrictions on what you may or may not do with our game code or assets. The links to the obfuscation mappings are included as part of the version manifest json, and may be automatically pulled for any given version.

  (tags: minecraft obfuscation microsoft mods modding community coding games)

• Vox Hiberionacum explains the Loch Ness Monster's apocryphal origins

  The clue is the origin story, fuckos... And it's just that. A hagiographical motif in a story. In the original Life of Columba, by Adomnán, which is a string of stories drowning in Christian metaphor, it's refered to as Aquatilis Bestiae, a 'water beast'. But its not the point of the story. If you read [the] actual episode, point is that blue arsed pagan pictish feckers who witness Columba scaring the bejaysis out of the waterbeast (away from a devout follower, bravely swimming in river, full of faith, despite the danger) are impressed. In other words. It's some class of a metaphor. Now hold that thought, and go look up Leviathan motif in Hebrew Bible, or Beast from the Sea in Revelation, and/or other water beast appearances in medieval hagiography... Revelation 13:1-10 (ESV) The First Beast - And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems on its horns and blasphemous names on its heads. [....] In other words: Modern day Nessie Bolloxology, Tourist Trap Tat and Snake Oil 'Scientists' looking for funding, are all entirely based on actual seventh century insular Irish imagination and religious metaphor. The end.

  (tags: loch-ness sea-monsters picts history columba columbanus metaphor myth legends)

• cable internet is IP over MPEG

  DOCSIS sends downstream data in MPEG frames because that's what the cable networks are optimized for and what all the switching equipment understood when cable broadband took off.

  :facepalm: (via:jwz)

  (tags: history hysterical-raisins docsis protocols bizarre mpeg via:jwz)

• It's later than you think

  This is one heartbreaking blog post:

  Eight years ago, during the same month, I had twin boys and co-founded Cloudability. About three months ago Cloudability was acquired. About three weeks ago we lost one of our boys.

  (tags: death kids horror probabilities epilepsy health life chance)

• Trees on the Land

  a cross-border initiative working to establish young native trees across the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. We run an annual tree planting event where landowners across the 32 counties turn out to plant their trees on a selected Saturday in February.  Our next planting day is Saturday 15th February 2020. We provide simple schemes for landowners to access quality native tree mixes each season.  We work with farmers, smallholders, community groups, councils, schools, colleges and many other landowners to coordinate sites to accommodate trees. Our vision is to establish tree cover and woodland in rural and urban areas that will grow for many years and provide valuable resources, beneficial ecosystem services and a lasting legacy for future generations.

  (tags: trees nature ireland woods green climate-change regreening rewilding)

• Shape the future: 3D Printing a Sustainable World

  our planet needs bright ideas and new ways of thinking, consuming and living. Pitch your idea and I-Form, the SFI Research Centre for Advanced Manufacturing, will turn the winning idea for sustainability into 3D printed reality.

  (tags: 3d-printing future sustainability design ireland sfi)

• AWS Post-Event Summaries

  'A list of post-event summaries from major service events that impacted AWS service availability'

  (tags: postmortems post-mortems aws ops outages availability)

• The Plan to Use Fitbit Data to Stop Mass Shootings Is One of the Scariest Proposals Yet

  “The proposed data collection goes beyond absurdity when they mention the desire to collect FitBit data,” Annas told Gizmodo. “I am unaware of any study linking walking too much and committing mass murder. As for the other technologies, what are these people expecting? ‘Alexa, tell me the best way to kill a lot of people really quickly’? Really?” [....] Fridel said that “literally any risk factor identified for mass shooters will result in millions of false positives,” adding that the most reliable risk factor is gender, and that most mass murderers are male. “Should we create a list of all men in the United States and keep tabs on them?” she said. “Although it would be absurd and highly unethical, doing so would be more effective than keeping a list of persons with mental illness.”

  (tags: dystopia technology grim-meathook-future data-protection data-privacy fitbit harpa)

• The Irish Native Woodland Trust are fundraising

  "We're raising funds to help to plant trees on our reserves [in Ireland] and to create more woodland nature reserves like the 11 we already manage, from Donegal to Waterford"

  (tags: trees wildlife nature carbon climate-change rewilding ireland)

• The Secret History of Dune - Los Angeles Review of Books

  The Sabres of Paradise (1960) served as one of those sources, a half-forgotten masterpiece of narrative history recounting a mid-19th century Islamic holy war against Russian imperialism in the Caucasus. [...] Anyone who has obsessed over the mythology of Dune will immediately recognize the language Herbert borrowed from Blanch’s work. Chakobsa, a Caucasian hunting language, becomes the language of a galactic diaspora in Herbert’s universe. Kanly, from a word for blood feud among the Islamic tribes of the Caucasus, signifies a vendetta between Dune’s great spacefaring dynasties. Kindjal, the personal weapon of the region’s Islamic warriors, becomes a knife favored by Herbert’s techno-aristocrats. As Blanch writes, “No Caucasian man was properly dressed without his kindjal.”

  (tags: books dune frank-herbert lesley-blanch caucasus scifi)

• Does Kafka really guarantee the order of messages? - SoftwareMill Tech Blog

  tl;dr: nope --

  It is worth to know that default configuration can lead to producing messages in the wrong order when a failure happens, and if message order is important for your application you can have a lot of trouble because someone told you about the guarantees that as you can see are not always true.

  (tags: messaging kafka streaming ordering exactly-once distcomp events)

• Solid advice on what to do in case the government shuts down the internet

  ....as is feared will happen right now in Hong Kong.

  Dear Hong Kong friends: as people are worried about an internet shutdown, do not be afraid to make plans now. Find a VPN that you like and test it out. If Telegram is unusable, use Signal or WhatsApp (both are safe). If LIHGK is not usable, use Reddit or Facebook groups. Above all, please remember that one of the biggest enemies you face are rumors. These will get worse if Internet access is curtailed; be careful about unverified news. As a general rule, you are best served by using a very big site (like Facebook or Google) than something small. The very big sites are harder to shut down and to attack. They also have security teams that make it harder for people to interfere with them. Whatever backup plan you have, test it while things are still working, so you don't have to learn it when under lots of stress. Twitter is another good choice for sharing information quickly. Google is also a safe option for chat/messages. All of these companies have experience fighting Chinese interference and will fight for you in case there is an effort to limit internet access in Hong Kong. My biggest piece of advice: do not forget to look at cat pictures once in a while to reduce anxiety and stress!

  VPN recommendations, via Zeynep Tufekci: 'the three I heard most about were: @getcloak (now encrypt.me), @theTunnelBear (PAID) and @FreedomeVPN. Don't use free ones.'

  (tags: security privacy internet shutdown via:pinboard via:zeynep hong-kong)

• Well Networked Self-Driving Cars Become A Surveillance Nightmare?

  It's time to establish precedents that the fleets of advanced cars on the road do not become a giant surveillance apparatus. That it should be illegal for police to request that car fleets perform surveillance for them. That companies operating fleets resist such requests when they come, in the courts if they have to.

  (tags: cars driving future surveillance cctv anpr alpr police privacy)

• How googly eyes solved one of today’s trickiest UX problems

  'A little robot at a library in Helsinki went from reviled to beloved, all because it got a new pair of plastic eyes.' AWWWW

  (tags: googly-eyes robots ux design cute funny)

• Irish firm’s device to detect IBS triggers praised by researchers

  The FoodMarble device is quite cool:

  Aire uses breath analysis to enable users to measure how well they absorb different types of foods, so they can identify what foods they can eat without discomfort. Researchers from the University of Auckland found that FoodMarble’s device successfully detected malabsorption of lactose and milk when put to the test against gold-standard clinical machines. The research was published in peer-reviewed journal, Nutrients.

  (tags: foodmarble aire food fodmaps ireland ibs lactose-intolerance nutrition)

• Roadside Picnic: Artifacts left by Visitors in the Zones

  Rattling napkins, so-sos, empties and Dick The Tramp

  (tags: roadside-picnic sf strugatsky-brothers the-zones stalker fiction)

• Daring Fireball: Siri, Privacy, and Trust

  My reading of this is that until last week, if you used Siri in any way, your recordings might be used in this “grading” process. If I graded Apple on the privacy and trust implications of this, I’d give them an F.

  (tags: siri grading privacy data voice ml training fail apple)

• Common ground: Holly Herndon in conversation with James Bridle

  long read, but I am looking forward to it

  (tags: cognition intelligence ai art holly-herndon james-bridle future)

• Dystopias Now

  Kim Stanley Robinson calling for fully automated luxury communism

  (tags: ksr kim-stanley-robinson future dystopia writing utopia scifi)

• 'Bees, not refugees': the environmentalist roots of anti-immigrant bigotry | Environment | The Guardian

  proclamations of looming dystopia in the form of a mass climate-caused global refugee crisis put well-intentioned environmentalists on some shared ground with fear-mongering nativists, even as they’re attempting to convey a useful urgency about the future of the planet and the disproportionate impacts of climate crisis on the developing world. “Not to say there won’t be climate-related migration, but I think that portrayal of migrants as climate change refugees, especially these mass movements of people, feeds into the anti-immigrant environmental worldview,” said Hartmann. “Alarmist hyperbole and stereotypes around climate conflict and even climate mass refugee dislocation is based on kind of old, racially and colonially charged stereotypes of poor people of color being more prone to violence in times of scarcity.” A worsening climate crisis could easily become a cudgel for anti-immigration activists looking to use ecological preservation as an excuse to close borders, a means of gesturing toward doing something about climate crisis that aligns with the right’s other political goals. “As it becomes more difficult for Republicans to deny that climate change is a thing, this is a really likely next move for the right in climate politics,” said Hultgren.

  (tags: environment racism politics climate-change future dystopia refugees immigration)

• "Trees in early Ireland" - Augustine Henry Memorial Lecture, Royal Dublin Society

  'In this article an attempt is made to identify all the twenty-eight trees and shrubs which are listed in Old Irish law-text of about the eight century AD. There is also an account of trees which are mentioned in early Irish poetry and proverbs, as well as brief description of woods and woodland management in pre-Norman Ireland. The article concludes with a discussion of tree-references in early English, Scottish and Welsh sources.' Particularly noteworthy are the 7 "lords of the wood" (airig fedo): 1. Dair 'oak' (Quercus robur, Quercus petraea) 2. Coil 'hazel' (Corylus avellana) 3. Cuilenn 'holly' (Ilex aquifolium) 4. Ibar 'yew' (Taxus baccata) 5. Uinnius 'ash' (Fraxinus excelsior) 6. Ochtach 'Scots pine' (Pinus sylvestris) 7. Aball 'wild apple-tree' (Malus pumila) (via Valen)

  (tags: lords-of-the-wood woods forestry forest history ireland trees shrubs woodland rewilding via:valen)

• Irish State told to delete ‘unlawful’ data on 3.2m citizens

  This is amazing:

  The State has been told it must delete data held on 3.2 million citizens, which was gathered as part of the roll-out of the Public Services Card, as there is no lawful basis for retaining it. In a highly critical report on its investigation into the card, the Data Protection Commission found there was no legal reason to make individuals obtain the card in order to access State services such as renewing a driving licence or applying for a college grant. [...] Helen Dixon, the Data Protection Commissioner, told The Irish Times that forcing people to obtain such a card for services other than those provided by the department was “unlawful from a data-processing point of view”.

  (tags: psc ireland politics data-privacy privacy data-collection dpo dpc)

• Climeworks Shop

  direct-to-consumer sales for carbon-sequestration tech -- effectively crowdfunding CCS with a monthly subscription

  (tags: co2 climate carbon-sequestration ccs crowdfunding)

• What the Heck Is Crab Rangoon Anyway? - Gastro Obscura

  this is great. Crab Rangoon (which I've never heard of on this side of the pond!) is a wholly concocted "preposterous dish":

  Crab rangoon is a pure distillation of tiki fusion weirdness. There was a strange, circular movement between tiki food and American Chinese food. Trader Vic’s created tiki food by making American Chinese food seem more tropical; American Chinese restaurants took his dishes right back and made them more American Chinese. The American Chinese version tends toward cheaper imitation crab, which is made, usually, of pollock blended with starch and other binders, crab flavoring, and red food coloring. Imitation crab simply wasn’t available to Trader Vic—it started being produced in 1975—and it’s also neither Polynesian nor Chinese, but Japanese. American Chinese crab rangoon is a 1940s crab-and-cream-cheese dip stuffed into a wonton and deep-fried—a pure distillation of tiki fusion weirdness. Crab rangoon is, after all, a preposterous dish. Many of the responses I got in my survey were sheepish, or seemed overly proud, as if to mask the problem of loving a dish that is utterly uncool, wildly outdated, and not even in the same ballpark as authenticity.

  (tags: tiki kitsch food gastro crab crab-rangoon trader-vics usa history)

• How YouTube Radicalized Brazil

  YouTube’s search and recommendation system appears to have systematically diverted users to far-right and conspiracy channels in Brazil. A New York Times investigation in Brazil found that, time and again, videos promoted by the site have upended central elements of daily life. Teachers describe classrooms made unruly by students who quote from YouTube conspiracy videos or who, encouraged by right-wing YouTube stars, secretly record their instructors. Some parents look to “Dr. YouTube” for health advice but get dangerous misinformation instead, hampering the nation’s efforts to fight diseases like Zika. Viral videos have incited death threats against public health advocates. And in politics, a wave of right-wing YouTube stars ran for office alongside Mr. Bolsonaro, some winning by historic margins. Most still use the platform, governing the world’s fourth-largest democracy through internet-honed trolling and provocation. YouTube’s recommendation system is engineered to maximize watchtime, among other factors, the company says, but not to favor any political ideology. The system suggests what to watch next, often playing the videos automatically, in a never-ending quest to keep us glued to our screens.

  (tags: youtube politics brazil future grim engagement machine-learning google zika)

• security-bulletins/2019-002.md at master · Netflix/security-bulletins

  A variety of DOS attacks against HTTP/2 server-side implementations

  (tags: http2 dos security attacks netflix)

• IBM’s photo-scraping scandal shows what a weird bubble AI researchers live in - MIT Technology Review

  scraping data from publicly available sources is so much of an industry standard that it’s taught as a foundational skill (sans ethics) in most data science and machine-learning training. [...] this story highlights the need for the tech industry to adapt its cultural norms and standard practices to keep pace with the rapid evolution of the technology itself, as well as the public’s awareness of how their data is used.

  (tags: scraping privacy data ai big-data data-privacy flickr photos machine-learning)

• Panel: The Promises and Perils of Eschewing Distributed Coordination

  good panel chat

  (tags: distcomp coordination distributed-systems distributed coding algorithms)

• Adversarial Fashion

  The patterns on the goods in this shop are designed to trigger Automated License Plate Readers, injecting junk data in to the systems used by the State and its contractors to monitor and track civilians and their locations.

  (tags: anpr alpr adversarial-classification privacy)

• Google Employee Alleges Discrimination Against Pregnant Women in Viral Memo - VICE

  “During one conversation with my new manager in which I reiterated an early leave and upcoming bedrest, she told me that she had just listened to an NPR segment that debunked the benefits of bedrest,” she wrote. “She also shared that her doctor had ordered her to take bedrest, but that she ignored the order and worked up until the day before she delivered her son via cesarean section. My manager then emphasized in this same meeting that a management role was no longer guaranteed upon my return from maternity leave, and that she supported my interviewing for other roles at Google.”

  (tags: pregnancy life hr work google peopleops leaks bedrest maternity-leave career)

• Baseline EBS performance

  for AWS I/O optimized instance types. This is vital info to understand how I/O performance on AWS will degrade and what it'll drop down to, for production workloads

  (tags: aws ebs performance planning ops baselines)

• Why Won’t Twitter Treat White Supremacy Like ISIS? Because It Would Mean Banning Some Republican Politicians Too. - VICE

  “Cracking down on white nationalists will therefore involve removing a lot of people who identify to a greater or lesser extent as Trump supporters, and some people in Trump circles and pro-Trump media will certainly seize on this to complain they are being persecuted,” Berger said. “There's going to be controversy here that we didn't see with ISIS, because there are more white nationalists than there are ISIS supporters, and white nationalists are closer to the levers of political power in the US and Europe than ISIS ever was.”

  (tags: gop corruption twitter politics filtering ai fascism republicans)

• The White House is reportedly drafting an order to stop social media ‘bias’ - The Verge

  One shooting was apparently an act of far-right terrorism, based on an anti-immigrant screed posted online. There was a fine line between its rhetoric and the views of major conservative figures like Tucker Carlson or Trump himself. Preemptively flagging the shooter — or one of several far-right killers before him — could have looked like egregious anti-conservative bias. And since predictive AI has sky-high error rates, it would probably catch a lot of non-violent conservative accounts (alongside those of non-conservatives) purely by accident. That’s already a recipe for a PR disaster, and it gets even dicier if Trump adds new legal punishments.

  (via JK)

  (tags: filtering ai terrorism far-right fascism nazis trump twitter social-media)

• Thread of bike camera reviews

  (via ITC)

  (tags: bike-cameras cameras safety cycling)

• Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer - Last Week in AWS

  Amazon have filed a non-compete case against one of their sales execs who left and moved to Google. ouch

  (tags: aws amazing noncompetes jobs work legal non-competes)

• We Already Have the World’s Most Efficient Carbon Capture Technology

  it's the empress tree, which can absorb 10x to 100x the quantity of CO2-per-acre vs other tree species

  (tags: carbon climate trees co2 empress-trees ccs)

• David Jeske's answer to Why do some developers at strong companies like Google consider Agile development to be nonsense? - Quora

  Wow, this is a great answer. As he notes, the Scrum-style process is flawed for big backend projects: "This style of short-term planning, direct customer contact, and continuous iteration is well suited to software with a simple core and lots of customer visible features that are incrementally useful. It is not so well suited to software which has a very simple interface and tons of hidden internal complexity, software which isn’t useful until it’s fairly complete, or leapfrog solutions the customer can’t imagine." And he goes on to come up with something which works better for Google-style projects:

  Our highest priority is to increase customer (and programmer) productivity and access to information. Work on the biggest, most frequently used problems you can find, and create the largest net impact. Don’t give the customer what they ask for; understand them, and revolutionize their world. Developers should create a Google Design Document (a fairly minimal, but structured design doc), explaining the project, what goals it hopes to achieve, and explains why it can’t be done in other ways. This document should be circulated with stakeholders, to get early feedback before the project gets underway. The written record is essential, as it assures there is a clear and agreed understanding of when the project is a success and how it aims to get there. At all phases of the project, critical design elements for larger components should be concisely explained and captured in a design document. Innovate in leapfrogs. It’s more important to finish and deploy a leapfrog than to attempt perfection. There is no perfection. Instead be flexible, and plan to constantly reinvent at every level of the stack. Deliver working software as soon as is reasonably possible, and no sooner. “Dogfood” projects internally before they are shipped externally. Make sure products meet high quality standards before shipping. The quality of the product is more important than the time it takes to achieve it.

  (tags: agile architecture google scrum development coding projects project-management design)

• CarbonKit

  CarbonKit provides all the data and models necessary for calculating various greenhouse gas emissions in categories such as car, train and air transport, types of fuel or country-specific grid electricity, electrical appliances, agricultural and industrial processes and building materials.

  (tags: carbon co2 emissions data ghgs)

• Vectorized Emulation: Hardware accelerated taint tracking at 2 trillion instructions per second | Gamozo Labs Blog

  The goal is to take standard applications and JIT them to their AVX-512 equivalent such that we can fuzz 16 VMs at a time per thread. The net result of this work allows for high performance fuzzing (approx 40 billion to 120 billion instructions per second [the 2 trillion clickbait number is theoretical maximum]) depending on the target, while gathering differential coverage on code, register, and memory state. By gathering more than just code coverage we are able to track state of code deeper than just code coverage itself, allowing us to fuzz through things like memcmp() without any hooks or static analysis of the target at all. Further since we’re running emulated code we are able to run a soft MMU implementation which has byte-level permissions. This gives us stronger-than-ASAN memory protections, making bugs fail faster and cleaner.

  (tags: fuzzing hardware performance programming virtualization avx-512 avx)

• Coal Ash Is More Radioactive Than Nuclear Waste - Scientific American

  I didn't know this:

  At issue is coal's content of uranium and thorium, both radioactive elements. They occur in such trace amounts in natural, or "whole," coal that they aren't a problem. But when coal is burned into fly ash, uranium and thorium are concentrated at up to 10 times their original levels. Fly ash uranium sometimes leaches into the soil and water surrounding a coal plant, affecting cropland and, in turn, food. People living within a "stack shadow"—the area within a half- to one-mile (0.8- to 1.6-kilometer) radius of a coal plant's smokestacks—might then ingest small amounts of radiation. Fly ash is also disposed of in landfills and abandoned mines and quarries, posing a potential risk to people living around those areas.

  (via Jamie McCarthy)

  (tags: via:jamiemccarthy coal environment nuclear pollution fly-ash coal-ash safety health)

• Fast and flexible observability with canonical log lines

  Interesting -- basically crossing the line between service metrics and logging, with a simple, readable structured logging format, and a well-defined structure

  (tags: stripe logging metrics canonical-logs structured-logs ops operability observability)

• How To Talk To Older People In Your Life About Fake News

  Caulfield said it’s common for older people to unwittingly share things that have extremist messages or iconography. “It's very hard to see people posting stuff that may come from a kind of a dark place that they don't realize is dark,” Caulfield said. “What do you do when your parents go from posting Minions to posting hard-right memes about cement milkshakes?”

  this is where we're at. (Thankfully not with _my_ parents, though)

  (tags: family fake-news propaganda facebook memes alt-right fascism)

• AWS S3 Event Notifications have "probably once" delivery

  you get the following Messages that are delivered once; Messages that are delivered multiple times; Messages that are not delivered This is in fact equivalent to "no guarantees at all" but the phrase "probably once" has a certain appeal to it. In my case I have an application that writes files to S3 at a regular interval. These files are processed by a lambda so they can be loaded into a database. This database is ultimately used in a customer facing application, so any duplicates gets noticed very quickly. Somehow I needed to come up with a way to deal with this pecuilar behavior of S3 Event Notifications.

  Christ, what a mess. Sounds like S3 Event Notifications are best ignored for production use. Disappointing :(

  (tags: aws s3 event-notifications consistency durability reliability ops)

• Loss of Arctic's Reflective Sea Ice Will Advance Global Warming by 25 Years

  “Losing the reflective power of Arctic sea ice will lead to warming equivalent to one trillion tons of CO2 and advance the 2ºC threshold by 25 years. Any rational policy would make preventing this a top climate priority for world leaders,” said Ramanathan, a professor of atmospheric and climate sciences at Scripps. [....] Computer forecast models are actually underestimating the extent of this trend.  “We analyzed 40 climate models from modeling centers around the world,” said Eisenman, a professor of climate, atmospheric science, and physical oceanography at Scripps. “Not a single one of the models simulated as much Arctic sea ice retreat per degree of global warming as has been observed during recent decades.”

  (tags: arctic climate-change climate global-warming fear ice earth)

• Latacora - How (not) to sign a JSON object

  good notes on authentication of API consumers using a HMAC. colmmacc also noted that using a constant-time comparison function of the expected and sent values, is important to avoid timing attacks. "A standard strcmp/memcmp isn't secure and I still see this error in 2019 :("

  (tags: hmac mac authentication crypto security json apis api coding signing)

• twitter thread on how same-sex romance was added to The Sims back in 1998

  Phil Salvador on Twitter: "Sims developer Don Hopkins released a bunch of design documents from The Sims, including this one from August 1998 with his notes about romance: [...] It's incredible to see the internal discussion about romance in The Sims written out so strongly like this."

  (tags: don-hopkins games history the-sims design romance 1990s)

• Data isn't the new oil, it's the new CO2

  great point.

  We should not endlessly be defending arguments along the lines that “people choose to willingly give up their freedom in exchange for free stuff online”. The argument is flawed for two reasons. First the reason that is usually given - people have no choice but to consent in order to access the service, so consent is manufactured.  We are not exercising choice in providing data but rather resigned to the fact that they have no choice in the matter.  The second, less well known but just as powerful, argument is that we are not only bound by other people’s data; we are bound by other people’s consent.  In an era of machine learning-driven group profiling, this effectively renders my denial of consent meaningless. Even if I withhold consent, say I refuse to use Facebook or Twitter or Amazon, the fact that everyone around me has joined means there are just as many data points about me to target and surveil. The issue is systemic, it is not one where a lone individual can make a choice and opt out of the system. We perpetuate this myth by talking about data as our own individual “oil”, ready to sell to the highest bidder. In reality I have little control over this supposed resource which acts more like an atmospheric pollutant, impacting me and others in myriads of indirect ways. There are more relations - direct and indirect - between data related to me, data about me, data inferred about me via others than I can possibly imagine, let alone control with the tools we have at our disposal today. 

  (tags: data ethics data-privacy privacy surveillance surveillance-capitalism co2 future profiling consent gdpr)

• Ikea Symfonisk review: affordable, fun Sonos speakers - The Verge

  looks like they've done a decent job on getting Sonos into IKEA furniture

  (tags: ikea sonos speakers audio home furniture)

• Estimating the success of re-identifications in incomplete datasets using generative models | Nature Communications

  Using our model, we find that 99.98% of Americans would be correctly re-identified in any dataset using 15 demographic attributes. Our results suggest that even heavily sampled anonymized datasets are unlikely to satisfy the modern standards for anonymization set forth by GDPR and seriously challenge the technical and legal adequacy of the de-identification release-and-forget model.

  ouch.

  (tags: deanonymization deidentification anonymization anonymisation gdpr privacy data-privacy papers)

• Aurora Postgres - Disastrous experience : aws

  wow. absolute car crash of a thread regarding Postgres-on-Aurora

  (tags: aws postgresql rds scale aurora ops car-crash)

• "Let's talk about peeing in space."

  Great Twitter thread by @MaryRobinette on the intricacies of bodily functions in zero-G

  (tags: space zero-g gravity peeing bodily-functions funny shit)

• [1907.06902] _Are We Really Making Much Progress? A Worrying Analysis of Recent Neural Recommendation Approaches_

  Deep learning techniques have become the method of choice for researchers working on algorithmic aspects of recommender systems. With the strongly increased interest in machine learning in general, it has, as a result, become difficult to keep track of what represents the state-of-the-art at the moment, e.g., for top-n recommendation tasks. At the same time, several recent publications point out problems in today's research practice in applied machine learning, e.g., in terms of the reproducibility of the results or the choice of the baselines when proposing new models. In this work, we report the results of a systematic analysis of algorithmic proposals for top-n recommendation tasks. Specifically, we considered 18 algorithms that were presented at top-level research conferences in the last years. Only 7 of them could be reproduced with reasonable effort. For these methods, it however turned out that 6 of them can often be outperformed with comparably simple heuristic methods, e.g., based on nearest-neighbor or graph-based techniques. The remaining one clearly outperformed the baselines but did not consistently outperform a well-tuned non-neural linear ranking method. Overall, our work sheds light on a number of potential problems in today's machine learning scholarship and calls for improved scientific practices in this area.

  (via Halvar Flake)

  (tags: via:halvarflake deep-learning machine-learning ml papers algorithms top-n heuristics)

• Bulgarian tax authority hacked, majority of population's tax details leaked

  Well this is pretty much the worst-case scenario for a tax authority:

  A 20-year-old man was arrested in Sofia, Bulgaria, on Tuesday afternoon and charged with an unprecedented hack of the country’s tax authority, ending with the theft of sensitive personal records from nearly every adult in Bulgaria, according to local reports. The suspect, whose name is Kristiyan Boykov, according to Bulgarian media, faces up to eight years in prison. Police say others may have been involved. The country’s officials have spent the week revealing and apologizing for the pillaging of Bulgaria’s National Revenue Agency (NRA) in June, Reuters reported. Personal and financial data for millions of taxpayers was leaked by email to local journalists. The data leak includes names, addresses, income and earnings information, and personal identification numbers, totaling 21 gigabytes and extending back over a decade.

  (tags: bulgaria security tax hacks leaks)

• Margaret Hamilton interviewed by The Guardian

  good interview with the software engineering pioneer

  (tags: margaret-hamilton tech software the-guardian interviews history apollo)

• 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)

• 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)

• Reviewbot

  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)

• Rossa McMahon re GMI

  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'

  (tags: brexit britain uk ireland politics)

• 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.

  (tags: thrift alluxio java grpc protocols coding netty)

• Gaffologist

  'Homes for Sale and Rent (in Ireland), Mapped' -- neat dataviz site by Robert Lawson

  (tags: dataviz mapping ireland homes rent home)

• Guidance for Drivers on use of "Dash Cams"

  guidance note from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner on GDPR implications of dashcams.

  (tags: dpc data-protection privacy dashcams driving gdpr)

• 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)

• TCP SACK PANIC - Kernel vulnerabilities - CVE-2019-11477, CVE-2019-11478 & CVE-2019-11479 - Red Hat Customer Portal

  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.

  (tags: tcp sack ip security vulnerabilities kernel bugs)

• 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

  (tags: starburst presto aws ops software)

• Soonish: The Lost Chapter

  "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)

• Growing a moss garden

  aren't these lovely

  (tags: gardening home plants moss gardens thread twitter)

• gaul/undocumented-s3-apis

  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)

  (tags: via:lwia s3 undocumented hacks aws apis)

• 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.”

  (tags: youtube politics nytimes racism right-wing dystopia)

• 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)

• "Insert Coin" Key Chain

  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.

  (tags: insert-coin arcade keychain keys toys nifty)

• 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.

  (tags: trees greenery wildlife ireland cork insurance)

• 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

  (tags: trees skerries dublin fingal greenery wildlife)

• 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.”

  (tags: swans nature feeding wildlife bread)

• 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)

• Beating up on qsort

  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.

  (tags: fairies trees wood history fire poems poetry)

• 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)

• Nixery

  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)

• Revealed: controversial plan to boost religious lobby in Brussels, as far right pledges to fight for ‘Christian Europe’

  Irish MEP Mairead McGuinness is reportedly involved, according to this

  (tags: mairead-mcguinness religion secular democracy eu meps europe lobbying)

• GeoHive

  '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)

• Dublin Street Map, 1939

  nice high-res scan

  (tags: dublin maps mapping history 1930s 1939)

• Facebook and Google pressured EU experts to soften fake news regulations, say insiders | openDemocracy

  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)

• Teagasc map of commute times across Ireland

  interesting data

  (tags: commutes commuting life ireland transport)

• _Efficiently y Searching In-Memory Sorted Arrays: Revenge of the Interpolation Search?_, Peter Van Sandt, Yannis Chronis, Jignesh M. Patel [pdf]

  '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)

• A deep dive into the problems with the infamous Dublin Bus Real Time app | JOE is the voice of Irish people at home and abroad

  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)

• Federated Learning

  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)

• The Gold Standard

  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)

• The Irish for spam

  'turscar: from the old word for dead seaweed that's been dropped, uninvited, by the tide on the shore.'

  (tags: turscar irish gaeilge spam etymology seaweed stinky)

• 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)

• Amazon workers call for zero carbon emissions and cancellation of an AWS fossil-fuel friendly program

  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.

  (tags: amazon business decisions teams documents planning)

• 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)

• At wit’s end with my preschooler : Parenting

  This /r/parenting thread has some good advice on dealing with kids' meltdowns. I wish I had this a few years ago

  (tags: parenting kids tantrums anger reddit advice)

• Spark memory tuning on EMR

  'Best practices for successfully managing memory for Apache Spark applications on Amazon EMR', on the AWS Big Data blog. 'In this blog post, I detailed the possible out-of-memory errors, their causes, and a list of best practices to prevent these errors when submitting a Spark application on Amazon EMR. My colleagues and I formed these best practices after thorough research and understanding of various Spark configuration properties and testing multiple Spark applications. These best practices apply to most of out-of-memory scenarios, though there might be some rare scenarios where they don’t apply. However, we believe that this blog post provides all the details needed so you can tweak parameters and successfully run a Spark application.'

  (tags: spark emr aws tuning memory ooms java)

• Serverless for data scientists

  good write-up of Zappa, a helper lib for running serverless Python web apps on Lambda and API Gateway

  (tags: zappa talks presentations python data-science serverless lambda api-gateway aws)

• Congress Is About to Ban the Government From Offering Free Online Tax Filing. Thank TurboTax. — ProPublica

  Your regular reminder that lobbying by tax-preparation agencies has ensured that US taxation is an overcomplex mess which requires you pay a third party to operate:

  Intuit and H&R Block last year poured a combined $6.6 million into lobbying related to the IRS filing deal and other issues. Neal, who became Ways and Means chair this year after Democrats took control of the House, received $16,000 in contributions from Intuit and H&R Block in the last two election cycles.

  (tags: intuit hr-block taxes us-politics lobbying sleaze irs)

• S3 Throughput Benchmarks

  This is really useful data. As expected the c5ns win, but good to validate that!

  I used this to benchmark S3's performance from all 155 EC2 instance types in existence. I put all the data in an interactive spreadsheet. [...] Below is the max throughput I got from each instance type, but the spreadsheet shows you what object sizes and thread counts you need to get that performance.

  (tags: ec2 instances instance-types hardware cloud s3 performance benchmarks ops)

• ankane/strong_migrations: Catch unsafe Rails migrations at dev time

  Strong Migrations detects potentially dangerous operations in [Rails database] migrations, prevents them from running by default, and provides instructions on safer ways to do what you want.

  (tags: database migrations rails releases ops databases mysql ruby gems)

• Claremont Court, Crescent and Close; Clareville Court and Grove; Claremont Lawns

  A nice bit of local history

  (tags: slutsend west-farm claremont clareville glasnevin history dublin d11)

• ITSCO

  super-cheap ancient Thinkpads etc., ideal for low cost linux laptop usage

  (tags: cheap thinkpads laptops linux via:markdennehy hardware)

• How Gudetama, a lazy egg yolk with a butt, became an unstoppable cultural phenomenon - Vox

  Gudetama isn’t so much about relaxation as about the unbearableness of the world around it. Gudetama, in its golden nakedness, questions the meaning of life. If idleness is true bliss, Gudetama asks, then isn’t anything more than that painful?

  (tags: characters culture japan gudetama eggs odd ass yolks idleness laziness)

• _Screens, Teens, and Psychological Well-Being: Evidence From Three Time-Use-Diary Studies_ - Amy Orben, Andrew K. Przybylski, 2019

  Paper from Amy Orben, Andrew K. Przybylski, of the Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Oxford, and the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford:

  The notion that digital-screen engagement decreases adolescent well-being has become a recurring feature in public, political, and scientific conversation. The current level of psychological evidence, however, is far removed from the certainty voiced by many commentators. There is little clear-cut evidence that screen time decreases adolescent well-being, and most psychological results are based on single-country, exploratory studies that rely on inaccurate but popular self-report measures of digital-screen engagement. In this study, which encompassed three nationally representative large-scale data sets from Ireland, the United States, and the United Kingdom (N = 17,247 after data exclusions) and included time-use-diary measures of digital-screen engagement, we used both exploratory and confirmatory study designs to introduce methodological and analytical improvements to a growing psychological research area. We found little evidence for substantial negative associations between digital-screen engagement — measured throughout the day or particularly before bedtime — and adolescent well-being.

  (tags: screens screen-time teens mental-health psychology papers research)

• Waterford Distillery on Whisky "Finishing"

  Here’s an inexpensive illusion for a whisky brand to acquire more shelf presence. Purchase three barrels of whisky from a generic pool of ex-bourbon matured stocks. Re-rack a couple of these barrels into new barrels – a sherry cask, or maybe you’d like the name of a French chateau to add more gravitas to a label and pull another rabbit out of the hat? Give it a few weeks, then bottle each of them in turn. Instead of one bottle on the shelf, you have three. You’ll more easily catch the eye of the whisky consumer as they walk by, pondering the nature of what ‘finishing’ actually means. These days, the shelves of retailers and at airports are rammed up with all sorts of fancy ‘finishes’ – which is to say a whisky that has been re-racked into another barrel and left to mature for a period of time; perhaps up to a couple of years, but usually just a few brief months.

  Well said. I'm looking forward to their whisky...

  (tags: whiskey whisky waterford-distillery booze finishing distilling barrels)

• Formal GDPR complaint against IAB Europe’s “cookie wall” and GDPR consent guidance

  Fantastic :) A formal complaint has been filed with the Irish Data Protection Commission against IAB Europe, the tracking industry’s primary lobbying organization:

  Tracking and cookie walls: Visitors to IAB Europe’s website, www.iabeurope.eu, are confronted with a “cookie wall” that forces them to accept tracking by Google, Facebook, and others, which may then monitor them. Dr. Ryan has complained to the Irish Data Protection Commission that this is a breach of the GDPR, which protects people in Europe from being forced to accept processing for their data for any purpose other than the provision of the requested service. “One should not be forced to accept web-wide profiling by unknown companies as a condition of access to a website”, said Dr Johnny Ryan of Brave. “This would be like Facebook preventing you from accessing the Newsfeed until you have clicked a button permitting it to share your data with Cambridge Analytica.” Simon McGarr of McGarr Solicitors, who has worked on data protection cases for Digital Rights Ireland, represents Dr Ryan in his complaint. Mr McGarr said “Where companies rely on consent to process people’s data it is critical that this is more than a box ticking exercise. For consent to be valid, it must be freely given, informed, specific and unambiguous. There’s nothing intrinsically good or bad in cookie technology – what matters is ensuring it’s applied in a way which respects individuals’ rights.” Challenging IAB Europe’s industry guidance on the GDPR: The complaint to the Irish Data Protection Commission will also test IAB Europe’s GDPR guidance to the online advertising industry. IAB Europe has put itself forward as a primary designer of the online tracking industry’s data protection notices. It has told major media organizations, tracking companies, and advertising technology companies that they can sidestep the GDPR, and rely instead on the ePrivacy Directive, which IAB Europe has interpreted as more lax in protecting personal data. IAB Europe has widely promoted the notion that access to a website or app can be made conditional on consent for data processing that is not necessary for the requested service to be delivered, despite the clear requirements of the GDPR, and statements from several national data protection authorities, that say otherwise. “This complaint will make it plain that the media and advertising industry should not rely on IAB Europe for GDPR guidance”, said Dr Ryan.

  (tags: dpc ireland brave iab-europe iab cookies tracking gdpr law eu)

• The 9 Categories of Reply Guys

  "#WomeninSTEM get a lot of “Reply Guys” who repeat the same unhelpful comments. @shrewshrew and I (a woman & a man in science) have attempted to catalog those replies, to save us all the trouble of writing new responses every time. presenting THE NINE TYPES OF REPLY GUYS"

  (tags: twitter thread humor mansplaining sexism misogyny reply-guys funny)

• YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Let Toxic Videos Run Rampant - Bloomberg

  As of 2017, YouTube’s policy for how content moderators handle conspiracy theories didn’t exist, according to a former moderator who specialized in foreign-language content.  At the end of the year, fewer than twenty people were on the staff for “trust and safety,” the unit overseeing content policies, according to a former staffer. The team had to “fight tooth and nail” for more resources from the tech giant, this person said. A YouTube spokeswoman said that the division has grown “significantly” since but declined to share exact numbers. In February of 2018, the video calling the Parkland shooting victims “crisis actors” went viral on YouTube’s trending page. Policy staff suggested soon after limiting recommendations on the page to vetted news sources. YouTube management rejected the proposal, according to a person with knowledge of the event. The person didn’t know the reasoning behind the rejection, but noted that YouTube was then intent on accelerating its viewing time for videos related to news. 

  (tags: youtube google alphabet moderation conspiracy-theories news virality engagement)

• April Fool's Day is upon us - What's your best prank given to or received by your kids? : Parenting

  heh heh. revenge next year will be sweet

  (tags: pranks april-fools kids parenting)

• Tesla lane-recognition autopilot fooled by three small stickers

  'Tesla autopilot module’s lane recognition function has a good robustness in an ordinary external environment (no strong light, rain, snow, sand and dust interference), but it still doesn’t handle the situation correctly in our test scenario. This kind of attack is simple to deploy, and the materials are easy to obtain. As we talked in the previous introduction of Tesla’s lane recognition function, Tesla uses a pure computer vision solution for lane recognition, and we found in this attack experiment that the vehicle driving decision is only based on computer vision lane recognition results. Our experiments proved that this architecture has security risks and reverse lane recognition is one of the necessary functions for autonomous driving in non-closed roads. In the scene we build, if the vehicle knows that the fake lane is pointing to the reverse [oncoming traffic] lane, it should ignore this fake lane and then it could avoid a traffic accident.'

  (tags: adversarial-classification cars ml machine-learning tesla driving self-driving-cars)

• We Built A Broken Internet. Now We Need To Burn It To The Ground.

  The promise of the internet was that it was going to give voice to the voiceless, visibility to the invisible, and power to the powerless. That’s what originally excited me about it. That’s what originally excited a ton of people about it. It was supposed to be an engine of equality. Suddenly, everyone could tell their story. Suddenly, everyone could sing their song. Suddenly, that one weird kid in Helena, Montana, could find another weird kid just like them in Bakersfield, California, and they could talk and know they weren’t alone. Suddenly, we didn’t need anybody’s permission to publish. We put our stories and songs and messages and artwork where the world could find them. For a while it was beautiful, it was messy, and it was punk as fuck. We all rolled up our sleeves and helped to build it. We were the ones who were supposed to guide it there, and we failed. We failed because we were naive enough to believe everyone had the same goals we did. We failed because we underestimated greed. We failed because we didn’t pay attention to history. We failed because our definition of we wasn’t big enough. We designed and built platforms that undermined democracy across the world. We designed and built technology that is used to round up immigrants and refugees and put them in cages. We designed and built platforms that young, stupid, hateful men use to demean and shame women. We designed and built an entire industry that exploits the poor in order to make old rich men even richer.

  (tags: design ethics internet web twitter social-media)

• Announcing Lucet: Fastly’s native WebAssembly compiler and runtime

  Lucet is designed to take WebAssembly beyond the browser, and build a platform for faster, safer execution on Fastly’s edge cloud. WebAssembly is already supported by many languages including Rust, TypeScript, C, and C++, and many more have WebAssembly support in development. We want to enable our customers to go beyond Fastly VCL and move even more logic to the edge, and use any language they choose. Lucet is the engine behind Terrarium, our experimental platform for edge computation using WebAssembly. Soon, we will make it available on Fastly’s edge cloud as well. A major design requirement for Lucet was to be able to execute on every single request that Fastly handles. That means creating a WebAssembly instance for each of the tens of thousands of requests per second in a single process, which requires a dramatically lower runtime footprint than possible with a browser JavaScript engine. Lucet can instantiate WebAssembly modules in under 50 microseconds, with just a few kilobytes of memory overhead. By comparison, Chromium’s V8 engine takes about 5 milliseconds, and tens of megabytes of memory overhead, to instantiate JavaScript or WebAssembly programs. With Lucet, Fastly’s edge cloud can execute tens of thousands of WebAssembly programs simultaneously, in the same process, without compromising security. The Lucet compiler and runtime work together to ensure each WebAssembly program is allowed access to only its own resources. This means that Fastly’s customers will be able to write and run programs in more common, general-purpose languages, without compromising the security and safety we’ve always offered.

  (tags: lucet cdn edge-computing wasm webassembly fastly rust c c++ typescript)

• What is cultural Marxism? The alt-right meme in Suella Braverman's speech in Westminster

  Cultural Marxism is a theory that started in the early 20th century, which was popularised in the aftermath of the socialist revolution (this great piece in the Guardian explains it in depth). The idea was that Marxism should extend beyond class and into cultural equality and that, through major institutions like schools and the media, cultural values could progressively be changed. The theory was later adopted by the philosophers at the Frankfurt School who posited that the only way to destroy capitalism was to destroy it in all walks of life; where, not just classes, but all genders, races, and religions could live in society equally. While this may seem unimportant, the Frankfurt School’s adoption of – and modifications to – cultural Marxism is where the conspiracy theory truly begins. The Frankfurt School’s predominantly Jewish members of the school were forced to flee to America by the Nazis in the 1940s, where many went on to teach, write, and commentate in mainstream institutions. This, conspiracy theorists claim, is when cultural Marxists began to poison the West – and when cultural Marxists began their attempts to undermine its values. Cultural Marxism’s move from political theory to full memeification was fast-tracked when it was used by mass murderer Anders Breivik. Breivik was the sole perpetrator of the 2011 Norway attacks in which 77 people died across several sites. Before committing his attacks, much like the Christchurch shooter, Breivik sent an enormous personal manifesto to a group of friends and family which outlined his anti-multiculturalist, racist, and misogynist ideals. In the manifesto, he spends huge chunks of time crediting the writers who pushed cultural Marxist conspiracy theories into the mainstream. The 1,000-page document references “cultural Marxism” and “cultural Marxists” nearly 650 times.   For the growing audience of anti-Semitic, alt-right white supremacists online, his musings have turned him into an icon – and “cultural Marxism” has become a foundational alt-right belief. It became an easy label for those white supremacists looking for an umbrella term to describe the people at which their anger about diversity, feminism, and religious freedom was directed. Cultural Marxist soon became a signal to mean anyone vaguely left-leaning – in some cases, even if this simply meant those who didn’t agree with white supremacy.

  (tags: antisemitism alt-right suella-braverman marxism nazis fascism history memes dogwhistles)

• Why Is AI Art Copyright So Complicated?

  Claims that AI is creating art on its own and that machines are somehow entitled to copyright for this art are simply naive or overblown, and they cloud real concerns about authorship disputes between humans. The introduction of machine learning as an art tool is ironically increasing human involvement, not decreasing it. Specifically, the number of people who can potentially be credited as coauthors of an artwork has skyrocketed. This is because machine learning tools are typically built on a stack of software solutions, each layer having been designed by individual persons or groups of people, all of whom are potential candidates for authorial credit.

  (tags: ai art machine-learning ml copyright authors gan)

• Pilots had 40 seconds to fix error in tests of Boeing 737 Max flight

  During flight simulations recreating the problems with the doomed Lion Air plane, pilots discovered that they had less than 40 seconds to override an automated system on Boeing’s new jets and avert disaster. The pilots tested a crisis situation similar to what investigators suspect went wrong in the Lion Air crash in Indonesia last fall. In the tests, a single sensor failed, triggering software designed to help prevent a stall. Once that happened, the pilots had just moments to disengage the system and avoid an unrecoverable nose dive of the Boeing 737 Max, according to two people involved in the testing in recent days.

  (tags: boeing 737max mcas fail planes safety disasters)

• lucagrulla/cw: The best way to tail AWS CloudWatch Logs from your terminal

  It even supports "tail -f". Genius

  (tags: tail logs cloudwatch aws ops)

• Article 13 will wreck the internet because Swedish MEPs accidentally pushed the wrong voting button / Boing Boing

  You have got to be joking.

  a group of left-leaning Swedish MEPs have revealed that they pressed the wrong button, and have asked to have the record corrected. They have issued a statement saying they'd intended to open a debate on amendments to the Directive so they could help vote down Articles 11 and 13. We lost on a technicality, and there is no recourse. This is the most significant piece of internet regulation ever undertaken by a democratic government (that is, excluding Russian and Chinese internet regulations). It will do untold damage to the whole internet. And it's because someone pushed the wrong button.

  (tags: sweden meps fail voting evoting censorship article-13 eu europe)

• "Baba Is You" is Turing-complete

  'This video demonstrates my design for a mechanism in #BabaIsYou which implements Cellular Automaton Rule 110, which suffices to prove the game is Turing-Complete!' The write-up is here: http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1sqrh1m

  (tags: baba-is-you games turing-completeness computing)

• Making Logic Gates With Crabs

  Yukio-Pegio Gunji and Yuta Nishiyama from Kobe University, along with Andrew Adamatzky from the aptly named Unconventional Computing Centre at the University of the West of England decided they needed a new way to build logic gates using crabs [....] The colonies of soldier crabs that inhabit the lagoons of Pacific atolls display a unique swarming behavior in their native habitat. When in a swarm of hundreds of individuals, the front of the swarm is driven by random turbulence in the group, while the back end of the swarm simply follows the leaders. Somehow, this is a successful evolutionary strategy, but it can also be exploited to build logic gates using only crabs. The team constructed a Y-shaped maze for a pair of crabs to act as an OR gate. When two soldier crabs are placed at the top of the ‘Y’, they move forward until they meet and exit the maze through the output. This idea can be expanded to a slightly more complex AND gate, functionally identical to the electron-powered AND gate in a 7408 logic chip.

  (tags: logic-gates logic soldier-crabs crabs computing hardware swarming nature animals via:theophite)

• What causes Ruby memory bloat? – Joyful Bikeshedding

  Another likely suspect is the memory allocator. After all, Nate Berkopec and Heroku remarked that fiddling with the memory allocator (either replacing it altogether with jemalloc, or setting the magical environment variable MALLOC_ARENA_MAX=2) drastically lowers [Ruby] memory usage.

  (tags: ruby memory rails linux malloc bloat jemalloc ops)

• Fix glibc's MALLOC_ARENA_MAX variable

  It seems that recent versions of glibc (up to glibc 2.25 at least) have some dysfunctional behaviour around malloc's arenas on multi-CPU systems, massively inflating the number of arenas allocated, which inflate reported VM sizes and (for multi-threaded Ruby services in particular) fragmenting memory badly. See also https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/testing-cedar-14-memory-use Presto issue reported with glibc malloc arena-per-thread behaviour resulting in Presto OOMs: https://github.com/prestodb/presto/issues/8993 Hadoop affected by the inflated VM sizes reported as a side effect: https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/HADOOP-7154 Good detailed writeup from IBM's WebSphere blog: https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/kevgrig/entry/linux_glibc_2_10_rhel_6_malloc_may_show_excessive_virtual_memory_usage

  (tags: ops ruby memory malloc allocation arenas tuning fragmentation)

• The end of open: BBC blocks its podcasts on Google

  Talking to Podnews, a BBC spokesperson said that Google is required to sign a licence to link to their podcasts; and that the Distribution Policy also requires Google to supply user data to the BBC. There has been a “consultation with Google”, and the BBC “has no choice but to stop Google from making podcasts available via Google products.”

  (tags: bbc facepalm fail google licensing podcasts radio)

• ‘A Swiss cheese-like material’ that can solve equations | Penn Today

  This is incredibly cool.

  “For example," Engheta says, "if you were trying to plan the acoustics of a concert hall, you could write an integral equation where the inputs represent the sources of the sound, such as the position of speakers or instruments, as well as how loudly they play. Other parts of the equation would represent the geometry of the room and the material its walls are made of. Solving that equation would give you the volume at different points in the concert hall.”  In the integral equation that describes the relationship between sound sources, room shape and the volume at specific locations, the features of the room — the shape and material properties of its walls — can be represented by the equation’s kernel. This is the part the Penn Engineering researchers are able to represent in a physical way, through the precise arrangement of air holes in their metamaterial Swiss cheese.  “Our system allows you to change the inputs that represent the locations of the sound sources by changing the properties of the wave you send into the system,” Engheta says, “but if you want to change the shape of the room, for example, you will have to make a new kernel.” 

  (tags: computing analog computers hardware papers swiss-cheese equations)

• Cloud Shell - Google Cloud Platform

  I had no idea about this -- every google user has instant in-browser shell access to a Linux VM with 1.7GB of RAM

  (tags: shell servers linux google gcp cloudshell)