Category: Uncategorized

• Peter Flynn caused the first 404

  Now that's a great bit of web trivia :) "[UCC's] first webmaster was the first person to ever break a link on the web, when he moved the location of a webpage on UCC's servers without telling TimBL. Such a change resulted in the need to error-handle such an occurrence, and the 404 was born"

  (tags: 404 history http web peter-flynn ucc irish-web trivia)

• Credit reference agency Equifax fined for security breach

  The ICO fines Equifax £500K, the maximum amount possible under the old Data Protection Act (via Privacy Kit)

  (tags: via:privacy-kit ico equifax privacy data-protection uk penalties law)

• Muting some magic keywords fixes the Twitter timeline

  Apparently, turning off some of the shittier recent features:

  Muting suggest_recycled_tweet_inline and suggest_activity_tweet actually has fixed my timeline. It's all chronological and there are barely any "x and y liked" tweets.

  (tags: twitter feature-creep muting hacks)

• Kebab-Case

  TIL! In other words spelling identifiers-like-this, Lisp style

  (tags: kebab-case case lisp identifiers coding terminology)

• Cindy Sridharan on Twitter: NanoLog by Ousterhout et al.

  - just formatting a log typically takes on the order of 1µs! - nanolog achieves high throughput by shifting work out of runtime hot path into compilation + post-execution phases

  Basically records symbolic form of logs, and uses a post-processor after the fact to generate readable text.

  (tags: logging ops coding performance)

• Surprisingly Little Evidence for the Accepted Wisdom About Teeth - The New York Times

  Turns out there is little evidence for many dental practices:

  A systematic review in 2011 concluded that, in adults, toothbrushing with flossing versus toothbrushing alone most likely reduced gingivitis, or inflammation of the gums. But there was really weak evidence that it reduced plaque in the short term. There was no evidence that it reduced cavities. That’s pretty much what we learned recently.

  (tags: teeth dentistry dental health medicine statistics science)

• Google spent $60 million on building Content ID

  That's how much it costs to build a not-particularly-accurate UGC copyright filter:

  Google’s new report takes aim at this claim. It asserts that Content ID is a highly effective solution, with over 98 percent of copyright management on YouTube happening through Content ID, and just 2 percent coming from humans filing copyright removal notices. Google also says the music industry opts to monetize more than 95 percent of its copyright claims, meaning they leave the videos up on the service. It claims a whopping half of the music industry's YouTube revenue comes from fan content — covers, remixes, dance versions, etc. — claimed via Content ID. The report also puts a hard figure on how much Google has spent so far on Content ID: $60 million.

  (tags: filtering copyright eu article-13 copyfight content-id google web ugc)

• A definitive blood test for post-infectious irritable bowel syndrome?: Expert Review of Gastroenterology & Hepatology: Vol 10, No 11

  Very interesting! This paper and the one at https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0126438 discuss the increasing evidence that some kinds of IBS may be caused by post-infection autoimmune activity triggered by a gastroenteritis infection -- this matches the thing which put me on a restricted diet a few years ago.

  (tags: digestion ibs medicine health diet fodmap gastroenteritis papers)

• Notes on some artefacts

  Five or six years ago, around the time most people seemed to be spending almost all of their time on the internet, I began to notice a particular kind of online phenomenon, one that I did not have a terminology for. I started to call these moments “artefacts”, borrowing a term from photography that describes the machine-created distortions and ghosts that corrupt digital imagery. “An unintended alteration in data” is one definition, but this new kind of “artefact” was expanding beyond sporadic instances and becoming a persistent sub-theme in discourse at large. The result was a type of semiotic collapse, one that first found its fullest expression in the absurdity of the 2016 presidential campaign, when news stories fabricated in Macedonia found a wider reach than The Washington Post. Countermeasures to interference in the coming 2018 congressional election look ineffectual, perhaps deliberately so.

  (tags: artefacts fake-news bots weird 2018 trump politics)

• The British Airways Breach: How Magecart Claimed 380,000 Victims

  very detailed and pretty fiendish

  (tags: analysis security attacks magecart british-airways web javascript)

• UIDAI’s Aadhaar Software Hacked, ID Database Compromised, Experts Confirm

  The authenticity of the data stored in India's controversial Aadhaar identity database, which contains the biometrics and personal information of over 1 billion Indians, has been compromised by a software patch that disables critical security features of the software used to enrol new Aadhaar users, a three month-long investigation by HuffPost India reveals. The patch—freely available for as little as Rs 2,500 (around $35)— allows unauthorised persons, based anywhere in the world, to generate Aadhaar numbers at will, and is still in widespread use. This has significant implications for national security at a time when the Indian government has sought to make Aadhaar numbers the gold standard for citizen identification, and mandatory for everything from using a mobile phone to accessing a bank account.

  (tags: security aadhaar identity india privacy databases data-privacy)

• Troy Hunt: The Effectiveness of Publicly Shaming Bad Security

  Now I don't know how much of this change was due to my public shaming of their security posture, maybe they were going to get their act together afterward anyway. Who knows. However, what I do know for sure is that I got this DM from someone not long after that post got media attention (reproduced with their permission): Hi Troy, I just want to say thanks for your blog post on the Natwest HTTPS issue you found that the BBC picked up on. I head up the SEO team at a Media agency for a different bank and was hitting my head against a wall trying to communicate this exact thing to them after they too had a non secure public site separate from their online banking. The quote the BBC must have asked from them prompted the change to happen overnight, something their WebDev team assured me would cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and at least a year to implement! I was hitting my head against the desk for 6 months before that so a virtual handshake of thanks from my behalf! Thanks!

  (tags: business internet security social-media shame troy-hunt bad-press spin shaming)

• Software as Craft: software delivery and open source in a Cloud & Enterprise world

  Niall Murphy sends this on:

  Microsoft is very pleased to welcome Maggie Pint and Dr. Nicole Forsgren to our new campus, to talk about open source and the deep connections between how software is written, and how successful it is. For those of you who are not aware, Maggie Pint is a software engineering lead in Azure’s Production Infrastructure Engineering (PIE) organization. Maggie’s team works on improving the engineering systems experience for Microsoft’s web-focused developers. She co-ordinates open source and inner source education and execution through Azure PIE. Outside of her day job, Maggie maintains the popular Moment.js JavaScript library, and is the JS Foundation’s delegate to TC39, the standards committee for JavaScript. She is passionate about dogs, coffee, the JavaScript language, and helping others live open source values in their day-to-day work. Dr. Nicole Forsgren is the co-founder and Chief Scientist of the DevOps Research and Assessment joint venture with Jez Humble and Gene Kim, also well-known leaders in the DevOps community. She is best known as a co-author of Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps and lead investigator for the largest-scale DevOps studies undertaken to date. She is also member of the ACM Queue editorial board, a research affiliate for a number of universities, and earned her PhD in Management Information Systems from the University of Arizona. This event comprises two public technical talks, with an intended audience of a few hundred software and systems professionals, including technical managers and SREs.

  (tags: software coding open-source microsoft maggie-pint nicole-forsgren azure)

• gRPC On HTTP/2: Engineering A Robust, High Performance Protocol

  Decent writeup on how gRPC uses HTTP/2 efficiently

  (tags: http2 grpc rpc networking http tcp protocols)

• 'The Internet of Garbage' by Sarah Jeong

  Sarah Jeong's 2015 book is now free: 'I think The Internet of Garbage still provides a useful framework to begin to talk about our new dystopia, and it continues to be surprisingly relevant in many ways. But I wrote the book with a tone of optimism I did not feel even at the time, hoping that by reaching the well-meaning policy teams across Silicon Valley, I might be able to spark change for the better. Not only did that change never quite solidify, but the coordinated, orchestrated harassment campaigns of Gamergate that I very briefly touch on in Chapter Two have since overtaken our national political and cultural conversations. These twisted knots of lies, deflection, and rage are not just some weird and terrible online garbage. They shadow executive orders, court rulings, even the newly appointed judiciary. They will haunt us for years to come. We are all victims of fraud in the marketplace of ideas. I hope that in the very near future, I will be putting out a second edition of The Internet of Garbage. In that future edition, I hope to grapple with advertising incentives, engagement traps, international propaganda wars, the American crisis in free speech coinciding with the rise of platform power, and search engine optimization as the new paradigm of speech. In the meantime, I am putting out The Internet of Garbage 1.5 as an interim edition. I wish it were more helpful in our present reality. But as imperfect a tool as it is, I figure we all need as much help as we can get. '

  (tags: dystopia fake-news internet spam harrassment abuse twitter gamergate politics books free to-read)

• Science Europe – cOAlition S

  cOAlition S signals the commitment to implement, by 1 January 2020, the necessary measures to fulfil its main principle: “By 2020 scientific publications that result from research funded by public grants provided by participating national and European research councils and funding bodies, must be published in compliant Open Access Journals or on compliant Open Access Platforms.” The 11 national research funding organisations that form cOAlition S have agreed to implement the 10 principles of Plan S in a coordinated way, together with the European Commission including the ERC. Other research funders from across the world, both public and private, are invited to join cOAlition S.

  I am extremely happy to see SFI on this list! (Via Cathal Garvey)

  (tags: sfi ireland funding science open-access open papers journals via:cathalgarvey)

• Mastodon and the challenges of abuse in a federated system

  Similar to this thread by CJ Silverio, I’m not thinking about this in terms of whether Wil Wheaton or his detractors were right or wrong. Rather, I’m thinking about how this incident demonstrates that a large-scale harassment attack by motivated actors is not only possible in the fediverse, but is arguably easier than in a centralized system like Twitter or Facebook, where automated tools can help moderators to catch dogpiling as it happens. As someone who both administrates and moderates Mastodon instances, and who believes in Mastodon’s mission to make social media a more pleasant and human-centric place, this post is my attempt to define the attack vector and propose strategies to prevent it in the future.

  (tags: mastodon abuse twitter wilw harassment moderation)

• Biohackers Encoded Malware in a Strand of DNA

  a group of researchers from the University of Washington has shown for the first time that it’s possible to encode malicious software into physical strands of DNA, so that when a gene sequencer analyzes it the resulting data becomes a program that corrupts gene-sequencing software and takes control of the underlying computer.

  (tags: hacking malware security sequencing genome biohacking dna)

• Unsupervised machine translation: A novel approach to provide fast, accurate translations for more languages – Facebook Code

  Training an MT model without access to any translation resources at training time (known as unsupervised translation) was the necessary next step. Research we are presenting at EMNLP 2018 outlines our recent accomplishments with that task. Our new approach provides a dramatic improvement over previous state-of-the-art unsupervised approaches and is equivalent to supervised approaches trained with nearly 100,000 reference translations. To give some idea of the level of advancement, an improvement of 1 BLEU point (a common metric for judging the accuracy of MT) is considered a remarkable achievement in this field; our methods showed an improvement of more than 10 BLEU points. This is an important finding for MT in general and especially for the majority of the 6,500 languages in the world for which the pool of available translation training resources is either nonexistent or so small that it cannot be used with existing systems. For low-resource languages, there is now a way to learn to translate between, say, Urdu and English by having access only to text in English and completely unrelated text in Urdu – without having any of the respective translations.

  (tags: unsupervised-learning ml machine-learning ai translation facebook)

• Linocuts by Gail Brodholt

  scenes from London transit infrastructure. There's a fantastic 1960s vibe off these

  (tags: london tube public-transport prints art gail-brodholt via:mltshp)

• This Music Theory Professor Just Showed How Stupid and Broken Copyright Filters Are - Motherboard

  Kaiser then decided to test Google’s system more fully. He opened a new YouTube account named Labeltest, and began sharing additional examples of copyright-free music. “I quickly received Content ID notifications for copyright-free music by Bartok, Schubert, Puccini, and Wagner,” Kaiser said. “Again and again, YouTube told me that I was violating the copyright of these long-dead composers, despite all of my uploads existing in the public domain.” Google’s Content ID is the result of more than $100 million in investment funds and countless development hours. Yet Kaiser found the system was largely incapable of differentiating between copyrighted music and content in the public domain. And the appeals process that Google has erected to tackle these false claims wasn’t any better.

  (tags: content-id copyright copyright-filtering youtube fail google public-domain ip music filtering bartok schubert wagner puccini)

• Google Online Security Blog: Introducing the Tink cryptographic software library

  Tink aims to provide cryptographic APIs that are secure, easy to use correctly, and hard(er) to misuse. Tink is built on top of existing libraries such as BoringSSL and Java Cryptography Architecture, but includes countermeasures to many weaknesses in these libraries, which were discovered by Project Wycheproof, another project from our team. With Tink, many common cryptographic operations such as data encryption, digital signatures, etc. can be done with only a few lines of code.

  (tags: tink google java c++ boringssl ssl jca crypto)

• Yahoo! are scanning your email contents and selling data to advertisers

  For example: Amazon will no longer mail full receipt text as advertisers were believed to be extracting it

  (tags: yahoo privacy email mail amazon)

• How network clients need to participate in fault tolerance

  Top tips on best practices here:

  Colm's thread on shuffle sharding reminded me of how important it is that clients participate in fault tolerance, and how frustrated I get when a client library *doesn't* do this by default in my application. Let's talk about some best practices!

  Bottom line: use Hystrix :)

  (tags: retries fault-tolerance networking tcp http exponential-backoff ip)

• Surgical team collaborates with McLaren F1 to improve processes

  On the screen was a motor racing grand prix and, as they watched, the two men became aware of the similarities between the handover disciplines from theatre to intensive care and what they were seeing in the pit of a Formula One racing team. From that moment began a collaboration between the leaders of Great Ormond Street's surgical and intensive care units, first with the McLaren F1 racing team and then with Ferrari's team chief Jan Todt, technical guru Ross Brawn and, in particular, race technical director Nigel Stepney. They worked together at their home base in Modena, Italy, in the pits of the British Grand Prix and in the Great Ormond Street theatre and intensive care ward. The major restructuring of the patient handover procedure, resulting directly from the input of the F1 pit technicians, will soon be described in two scientific publications. "It is not too early to say that, when we look at the number of critical instances we encounter, they have reduced markedly since we introduced the modified training protocol developed from what we have learned from Formula 1," said Prof Elliott. The single A4 sheet of paper, which contained the flow diagram of Ferrari's pit procedure, became several pages of twice that size when Mr Stepney and his colleagues at Ferrari were confronted with the critical transfer from operating theatre to recovery room at Great Ormond Street.

  (tags: collaboration cross-discipline surgery formula-1 mclaren pitstops cardiac)

• Fixing Slow Macbook WIFI Reconnect after sleep – airbag moments

  A command line hack to fix the common Macbook wifi problem where wifi won't reconnect after opening the lid without a manual reconnect

  (tags: wifi macbooks mbp hardware apple hacks cli sleep)

• Why Love Generative Art?

  Or as jwz put it, a brief history of generative art

  (tags: art generative-art computer-art algorithms graphics via:jwz)

• Russian Trolls Used Vaccine Debate to Sow Discord, Study Finds - The New York Times

  But instead of picking a side, researchers said, the trolls and bots they programmed hurled insults at both pro- and anti-vaccine advocates. Their only intent, the study concluded, seemed to be to raise the level of hostility. “You see this pattern,” said David A. Broniatowski, a computer engineer at George Washington University and lead author of the study, which was published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health. “On guns, or race, these accounts take opposite sides in lots of debates. They’re about sowing discord.”

  So the Russian strategy is basically more of a "Hail Eris" than a "Hail Mary"?

  (tags: russia trolls discord vaccination health internet)

• spotify/dockerfile-maven: A set of Maven tools for dealing with Dockerfiles

  'a Maven plugin and extension which help to seamlessly integrate Docker with Maven. The design goals are: Don't try to do anything fancy. Dockerfiles are how you build Docker projects; that's what this plugin uses. They are mandatory. Make the Docker build process integrate with the Maven build process. If you bind the default phases, when you type mvn package, you get a Docker image. When you type mvn deploy, your image gets pushed. Make the goals remember what you are doing. You can type mvn dockerfile:build and later mvn dockerfile:tag and later mvn dockerfile:push without problems. This also eliminates the need for something like mvn dockerfile:build -DalsoPush; instead you can just say mvn dockerfile:build dockerfile:push. Integrate with the Maven build reactor. You can depend on the Docker image of one project in another project, and Maven will build the projects in the correct order. This is useful when you want to run integration tests involving multiple services.' Looks very nice and well-run -- shame it's Maven instead of Gradle...

  (tags: java docker maven build coding packaging)

• One in five genetics papers contains errors thanks to Microsoft Excel | Science | AAAS

  'Autoformatting in Microsoft Excel has caused many a headache — but now, a new study shows that one in five genetics papers in top scientific journals contains errors from the program, The Washington Post reports. The errors often arose when gene names in a spreadsheet were automatically changed to calendar dates or numerical values.'

  (tags: science microsoft excel spreadsheets autoformatting clippy fail papers genetics)

• Filter before you parse: faster analytics on raw data with Sparser

  Super fast JSON parsing. Has some interesting similarities to some code I wrote in SpamAssassin, as it turns out!

  (tags: json parsing performance coding algorithms)

I came across this cocktail in Pals, in Catalonia, in 30 degree heat, a few weeks back -- I saw it on the menu at the cafe in the square of the old town, and had to give it a go. It's incredible. Basically, it's lager mixed with a lemon granita -- like a beer slushy. Nothing is better at thirst quenching on a hot day, and best of all it's quite low in alcohol so no worries about lorrying into it during the daytime :)

This year at Groovefest, our yearly get together/mini-festival, I got to serve up a few, with great results -- they were quite popular. So here's the recipe!

First off, a day or two in advance, make a batch of lemon granita. I based mine on this recipe which I'll copy here just in case the original goes away:

Lemon Granita

Serves: about 8

Ingredients:

• 3-4 lemons
• 1L water
• 150g of sugar

Method:

• Zest the lemons and set the zest aside. Juice the lemons until you have 150ml juice (you may not need all of them).

• Add the water and sugar to a large pan and bring to the boil. Reduce to a simmer and cook for 2 minutes, stirring to dissolve the sugar.

• Add the lemon juice and zest, remove from the heat and cover. Set aside to cool for 20 minutes.

• Strain the mixture into 2 containers that will fit in your freezer and leave to cool to room temperature.

• Freeze until the mixture is partially frozen, which should take several hours. (I just left them overnight)

• Remove the granita from the freezer and leave at room temperature until you can break it into chunks with a large spoon or fork.

• Either transfer to a blender or food processor and blitz, or break it up with a fork. It doesn't need to be perfectly smooth and snowy -- a slushy texture is just right for this drink.

• Store in the freezer. Take out 30 minutes before serving and break it up again with a fork.

Clara Con Limón Granizado

To serve: half-fill a half-pint glass with the lemon granita. Pour the beer on top to fill the glass. Stir once or twice to mix. Enjoy!

PS: I think -- not sure as my Catalan is pretty terrible -- it may be a clara granitzada in Catalonia...

• The BARR-C:2018 Embedded C Coding Standard

  'Barr Group's Embedded C Coding Standard was developed to minimize bugs in firmware by focusing on practical rules that keep bugs out--while also improving the maintainability and portability of embedded software. The coding standard details a set of guiding principles as well as specific naming conventions and other rules for the use of data types, functions, preprocessor macros, variables and much more. Individual rules that have been demonstrated to reduce or eliminate certain types of bugs are highlighted. In this latest version, BARR-C:2018, the stylistic coding rules have been fully harmonized with MISRA C: 2012, while helping embedded system designers reduce defects in firmware written in C and C++.'

  (tags: embedded c coding standards style-guides misra c++)

• Nosferatu is only viewable today due to piracy

  'In 1922 a German court ordered all prints and negatives of Nosferatu destroyed following a copyright dispute with the widow of Bram Stoker. The film only exists today because of piracy. One copy survived and somehow found it's way to America, where Dracula was already in the public domain. That's it. That's the only reason you've ever seen the granddaddy of all horror movies.'

  (tags: dracula bram-stoker nosferatu piracy licensing movies history)

• Anatomy of a tabloid Fortnite front page story

  Interesting writeup of how the UK tabloids concoct their scare stories, rustling up "victims" and paying them and their agents fees of thousands of pounds

  (tags: fortnite pokemon-go gaming tabloids uk newspapers truth the-sun games)

• Hacker Finds Hidden 'God Mode' on Old VIA C3 x86 CPUs

  Domas discovered the backdoor, which exists on VIA C3 Nehemiah chips made in 2003, by combing through filed patents. He found one — US8341419 — that mentioned jumping from ring 3 to ring 0 and protecting the machine from exploits of model-specific registers (MSRs), manufacturer-created commands that are often limited to certain chipsets. Domas followed the "trail of breadcrumbs," as he put it, from one patent to another and figured out that certain VIA chipsets were covered by the patents. Then he collected many old VIA C3 machines and spent weeks fuzzing code. He even built a testing rig consisting of seven Nehemiah-based thin clients hooked up to a power relay that would power-cycle the machines every couple of minutes, because his fuzzing attempts would usually crash the systems. After three weeks, he had 15 GB of log data — and the instructions to flip on the backdoor in the hidden RISC chip.

  (via Nelson)

  (tags: cpu via x86 fuzzing security nehemiah via:nelson)

• How I gained commit access to Homebrew in 30 minutes

  If I were a malicious actor, I could have made a small, likely unnoticed change to the openssl formulae, placing a backdoor on any machine that installed it. If I can gain access to commit in 30 minutes, what could a nation state with dedicated resources achieve against a team of 17 volunteers? How many private company networks could be accessed? How many of these could be used to escalate to large scale data breaches? What other package management systems have similar weaknesses? This is my growing concern, and it’s been proven time and time again that package managers, and credential leaks, are a weak point in the security of the internet, and that supply chain attacks are a real and persistent threat. This is not a weakness in Homebrew, but rather a systemic problem in the industry, and one where we need more security research.

  (tags: homebrew github security jenkins credentials scary)

• Fonez - Pre-owned Phones

  Galway-based refurb phone retailer, recommended by co-worker Ciaran where he picked up his Pixel

  (tags: phones ireland shopping mobile)

• ncw/rclone

  "rsync for cloud storage" - Google Drive, Amazon Drive, S3, Dropbox, Backblaze B2, One Drive, Swift, Hubic, Cloudfiles, Google Cloud Storage, Yandex Files

  (tags: backup github sync cloud s3 storage rsync rclone google aws dropbox backblaze yandex onedrive)

• People Think This Whole QAnon Conspiracy Theory Is A Prank On Trump Supporters

  This, if true, is the most gloriously Discordian thing ever.

  "Let us take for granted, for a while, that QAnon started as a prank in order to trigger right-wing weirdos and have a laugh at them. There's no doubt it has long become something very different. At a certain level it still sounds like a prank. But who's pulling it on whom?" they [Roberto Bui, Giovanni Cattabriga, and Federico Guglielmi] said.

  (tags: q conspiracy politics trump qanon luther-blissett discordianism wu-ming funny crazy)

• Why JSON isn't a good configuration language

  solid +1s on these points

  (tags: json configuration languages coding formats)

• Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team | Fast, Powerful, and Practical: New Technology for Aerial Imagery in Disaster Response

  Aerial imagery can play an important role in disaster response operations, enabling response teams to identify and prioritize hardest-hit areas, conduct damage assessments, and plan response activities. Existing tools make this relatively easy in connected environments; users can browse high-resolution satellite imagery catalogs and download the relevant imagery, and can process drone imagery using online tools. Current solutions don’t work well in disconnected environments, however. Even offline tools lack the storage space and processing power to be effective for addressing large areas. This blog post shows how rugged, portable Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers can be turned into a kit that’s mega-powerful, deployable, and purpose-built for post-disaster imagery operations. This can help humanitarians and government agencies to more accurately and efficiently conduct damage assessments and identify hardest-hit areas, potentially making a real difference in the aftermath of a natural disaster.

  (tags: snowball aws humanitarian emergency-response osm openstreetmap mapping aid disasters)

• Labour HQ used Facebook ads to deceive Jeremy Corbyn during election campaign | News | The Times

  Campaign chiefs at Labour HQ hoodwinked their own leader because they disapproved of some of Corbyn’s left-wing messages. They convinced him they were following his campaign plans by spending just £5,000 on adverts solely designed to be seen by Corbyn, his aides and their favourite journalists, while pouring far more money into adverts with a different message for ordinary voters.

  (tags: advertising politics crazy facebook jeremy-corbyn microtargeting ads uk labour-party)

• 15 Key Takeaways from the Serverless Talk at AWS Startup Day

  Best current practices for AWS Lambda usage. (still pretty messy/hacky/Rube-Goldberg-y from the looks of it tbh)

  (tags: aws lambda serverless ops hacks amazon)

• "Haskell is very simple"

  niftierideology on twitter:

  Haskell is very simple. Everything is composed of Functads which are themselves a Tormund of Gurmoids, usually defined over the Devons. All you have to do is stick one Devon inside a Tormund and it yields Reverse Functads (Actually Functoids) you use to generate Unbound Gurmoids.

  (tags: haskell functors functads tormund-of-gurmoids jargon funny satire coding languages)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Second Wind CPAP

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

  (tags: cpap second-hand appliances)

• Using Kindle Fire's Parental Controls

  time to set this up I think

  (tags: kindle fire parental-controls devices kids)

• The problems with DynamoDB Auto Scaling and how it might be improved

  'Based on these observations, we hypothesize that you can make two modifications to the system to improve its effectiveness: trigger scaling up after 1 threshold breach instead of 5, which is in-line with the mantra of “scale up early, scale down slowly”; trigger scaling activity based on actual request count instead of consumed capacity units, and calculate the new provisioned capacity units using actual request count as well. As part of this experiment, we also prototyped these changes (by hijacking the CloudWatch alarms) to demonstrate their improvement.'

  (tags: dynamodb autoscaling ops scalability aws scaling capacity)

• Summer Fruit Shrub Recipe - NYT Cooking

  as recommended by Nelson -- I've been meaning to make one

  (tags: shrubs drinks vinegar recipes to-make fruit)

• Evolution of Application Data Caching : From RAM to SSD

  Memcached provides an external storage shim called extstore, that supports storing of data on SSD (I2) and NVMe (I3). extstore is efficient in terms of cost & storage device utilization without compromising the speed and throughput. All the metadata (key & other metadata) is stored in RAM whereas the actual data is stored on flash.

  (tags: memcached netflix services storage memory ssd nvme extstore caching)

• Goodbye Microservices: From 100s of problem children to 1 superstar · Segment Blog

  Super-happy we resisted many of the microservices gospels and dodged this bullet

  (tags: architecture microservices monolith git monorepo)

• Centrifuge: a reliable system for delivering billions of events per day

  Nice scale-up service to solve the multi-tenant, multi-target queueing problem with good customer isolation from Segment

  (tags: queueing architecture dead-letter-queue kafka segment multi-tenant isolation)

• Flight Rights

  'This website has been designed to help you, the passenger, understand your rights and entitlements in the event that your air travel plans are disrupted.' from the Commission for Aviation Regulation. See also thread from Sinead Ryan at https://twitter.com/sinead_ryan/status/1016628694427885568

  (tags: consumer aviation flights ryanair aer-lingus ireland rights flying)

• open source ham radio hardware in the Thai cave rescue

  the Heyphone, a voice radio designed by UK radio ham, John Hey

  (tags: ham-radio heyphone voice radios cave rescue thailand)

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

  This is disappointing. Basho was very promising.

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

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

• Scarr

  S3 + Cloudfront + ACM + Route53, automated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Dublin Cargo Bike Rental

  EUR40 per day from the Dutch Bike Shop in Belfield

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

• Google Cloud Platform Blog: Introducing Jib

  'build Java Docker images better':

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

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

• Saving a non-profit six figures a year using Squarespace, Airtable and Glitch.com

  Airtable in particular sounds like a lovely tool for small-scale users

  (tags: serverless airtable google squarespace glitch tools web ops)

• Wifi Design Tips

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Large breweries ‘pay publicans not to stock smaller companies’ beer, cider’

  Good on Alan Kelly TD for raising the issue -- it is clearly happening and is clearly anti-competitive market manipulation by the big brewers.

  He said a pub in Cork he was in recently had 21 taps of which 19 were from one brewing company and that smaller breweries tried to get some of that business. Mr Kelly claimed similar practices were occurring in pubs across all counties and that the statutory body that deals with anti-competitive practices, the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC), had received a number of complaints but did not have the resources to deal with the issue. However, Minister of State Pat Breen said “after a robust examination” the CCPC found it did not have grounds to suspect a breach of the law. Mr Kelly said that “the dogs in the street know what is happening here” and that the Minister’s response was insulting to the industry. He said the CCPC would need large resources to investigate the issue and “large amounts of cash and resources are being used, and these practices are happening in large pubs in all cities and towns in Ireland”.

  (tags: ireland brewing beer pubs ccpc anti-competitive business alan-kelly dail)

• React Native: A retrospective from the mobile-engineering team at Udacity

  I think it's safe to say they didn't like it

  (tags: react react-native udacity coding javascript android ios)

• airlift/jvmkill

  a simple JVMTI agent that forcibly terminates the JVM when it is unable to allocate memory or create a thread. This is important for reliability purposes: an OutOfMemoryError will often leave the JVM in an inconsistent state. Terminating the JVM will allow it to be restarted by an external process manager.

  This is apparently still useful despite the existence of '-XX:ExitOnOutOfMemoryError' as of java 8, since that may somehow still fail occasionally.

  (tags: oom java reliability uptime memory ops)

• "Stylish" browser extension steals all your internet history | Robert Heaton

  'Stylish, the popular CSS userstyle browser extension [collects] complete browser history, including sites scraped from Google results. Instant uninstall.' (via Andy Baio)

  (tags: privacy browser extensions stylish css history data-protection)

• Dublin Cycling Campaign traffic survey finds twice as many cyclists as car passengers during rush hour

  There are twice as many people cycling as there are people in cars on the quays in Dublin at the morning rush hour, a video survey by the Dublin Cycling Campaign has found.

  This doesn't surprise me at all -- I would be in that number too, except I now avoid the quays as they are too dangerous to cycle on due to the heavy traffic! A segregated cycle route is greatly needed.

  (tags: cycling dublin safety cars driving dublin-cycling-campaign liffey-cycle-route)

• Sundial Generator

  Glowforge laser-cut a sundial, customised for your very own corner of planet Earth

  (tags: sundial sun laser-cutting cool making makers time)

• Nginx tuning tips: TLS/SSL HTTPS – Improved TTFB/latency

  Must do these soon on jmason.org / taint.org et al.

  (tags: nginx http https http2 ops tls security linux)

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Cory Doctorow: Zuck’s Empire of Oily Rags

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

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

• Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams to Augment Human Creativity — MIT Media Lab

  Using Dormio you fall asleep as you normally would, but the transition into stage 2 sleep is tracked and interrupted. This suspends you in a semi-lucid state where microdreams are inceptable, allowing direction of your dreams. 

  (tags: dreaming dreams science neuroscience brain sleep lucid-dreaming via:fp dormio)

• Facial recognition software is not ready for use by law enforcement | TechCrunch

  This is a pretty amazing op-ed from the CEO of a facial recognition software development company:

  Facial recognition technologies, used in the identification of suspects, negatively affects people of color. To deny this fact would be a lie. And clearly, facial recognition-powered government surveillance is an extraordinary invasion of the privacy of all citizens — and a slippery slope to losing control of our identities altogether. There’s really no “nice” way to acknowledge these things. I’ve been pretty clear about the potential dangers associated with current racial biases in face recognition, and open in my opposition to the use of the technology in law enforcement. As the black chief executive of a software company developing facial recognition services, I have a personal connection to the technology, both culturally and socially. Having the privilege of a comprehensive understanding of how the software works gives me a unique perspective that has shaped my positions about its uses. As a result, I (and my company) have come to believe that the use of commercial facial recognition in law enforcement or in government surveillance of any kind is wrong — and that it opens the door for gross misconduct by the morally corrupt.

  (tags: techcrunch facial-recognition computer-vision machine-learning racism algorithms america)

• Yelp, The Red Hen, And How All Tech Platforms Are Now Pawns In The Culture War

  Though the brigading of review sites and doxxing behavior isn’t exactly new, the speed and coordination is; one consequence of a never-ending information war is that everyone is already well versed in their specific roles. And across the internet, it appears that technology platforms, both big and small, must grapple with the reality that they are now powerful instruments in an increasingly toxic political and cultural battle. After years attempting to dodge notions of bias at all costs, Silicon Valley’s tech platforms are up against a painful reality: They need to expect and prepare for the armies of the culture war and all the uncomfortable policing that inevitably follows. Policing and intervening isn’t just politically tricky for the platforms, it’s also a tacit admission that Big Tech’s utopian ideologies are deeply flawed in practice. Connecting everyone and everything in an instantly accessible way can have terrible consequences that the tech industry still doesn’t seem to be on top of. Silicon Valley frequently demos a future of seamless integration. It’s a future where cross-referencing your calendar with Yelp, Waze, and Uber creates a service that’s greater than the sum of its parts. It’s an appealing vision, but it is increasingly co-opted by its darker counterpart, in which major technology platforms are daisy-chained together to manipulate, abuse, and harass.

  (tags: culture-war technology silicon-valley yelp reviews red-hen dystopia spam doxxing brigading politics)

• AWS Developer Forums: m5.xlarge in us-east-1 has intermittent DNS resolution failures

  likewise for C5 instance types -- reportedly still an issue

  (tags: c5 m5 instances ec2 aws amazon ops dns)

• ICE's Risk Classification Assessment turned into a digital rubber stamp

  If this report is correct, this "statistics-based" risk classification tool is just a cruel joke:

  To conform to Trump’s policies, Reuters has learned, ICE modified a tool officers have been using since 2013 when deciding whether an immigrant should be detained or released on bond. The computer-based Risk Classification Assessment uses statistics to determine an immigrant’s flight risk and danger to society. Previously, the tool automatically recommended either “detain” or “release.” Last year, ICE spokesman Bourke said, the agency removed the “release” recommendation

  (tags: immigration statistics machine-learning rubber-stamping fake-algorithms whitewashing ice us-politics)

• Visa admits 5m payments failed over a broken switch

  “We operate two redundant data centres in the UK, meaning that either one can independently handle 100% of the transactions for Visa in Europe. In normal circumstances, the systems are synchronised and either centre can take over from the other immediately … in this instance, a component with a switch in our primary data centre suffered a very rare partial failure which prevented the backup switch from activating.”

  (tags: visa outages post-mortems fail europe dcs)

• 10-hour Microsoft Azure outage in Europe

  Service availability issue in North Europe Summary of impact: From 17:44 on 19 Jun 2018 to 04:30 UTC on 20 Jun 2018 customers using Azure services in North Europe may have experienced connection failures when attempting to access resources hosted in the region. Customers leveraging a subset of Azure services may have experienced residual impact for a sustained period post-mitigation of the underlying issue. We are communicating with these customers directly in their Management Portal. Preliminary root cause: Engineers identified that an underlying temperature issue in one of the datacenters in the region triggered an infrastructure alert, which in turn caused a structured shutdown of a subset of Storage and Network devices in this location to ensure hardware and data integrity. Mitigation: Engineers addressed the temperature issue, and performed a structured recovery of the affected devices and the affected downstream services.

  The specific services were: 'Virtual Machines, Storage, SQL Database, Key Vault, App Service, Site Recovery, Automation, Service Bus, Event Hubs, Data Factory, Backup, API management, Log Analytics, Application Insight, Azure Batch Azure Search, Redis Cache, Media Services, IoT Hub, Stream Analytics, Power BI, Azure Monitor, Azure Cosmo DB or Logic Apps in North Europe'. Holy cow

  (tags: microsoft outages fail azure post-mortems cooling-systems datacenters)

• Here’s a list of organizations that are mobilizing to help separated immigrant children | The Texas Tribune

  We’ve compiled a list of organizations that are mobilizing to try and help children that have been separated from their parents at the Texas-Mexico border.

  (tags: texas children immigration family-separations us-politics usa charity)

• Save on your AWS bill with Kubernetes Ingress

  decent into to Kubernetes Ingress and the Ambassador microservices API gateway built on Envoy Proxy

  (tags: envoy proxying kubernetes aws elb load-balancing ingress ambassador ops)

• Is America Ready for a Global Pandemic? - The Atlantic

  The egg-based [vaccine manufacture] system depends on chickens, which are themselves vulnerable to flu. And since viruses can mutate within the eggs, the resulting vaccines don’t always match the strains that are circulating. But vaccine makers have few incentives to use anything else. Switching to a different process would cost billions, and why bother? Flu vaccines are low-margin products, which only about 45 percent of Americans get in a normal year. So when demand soars during a pandemic, the supply is not set to cope. American hospitals, which often operate unnervingly close to full capacity, likewise struggled with the surge of patients. Pediatric units were hit especially hard by H1N1, and staff became exhausted from continuously caring for sick children. Hospitals almost ran out of the life-support units that sustain people whose lungs and hearts start to fail. The health-care system didn’t break, but it came too close for comfort—especially for what turned out to be a training-wheels pandemic. The 2009 H1N1 strain killed merely 0.03 percent of those it infected; by contrast, the 1918 strain had killed 1 to 3 percent, and the H7N9 strain currently circulating in China has a fatality rate of 40 percent. That the U.S. could be so ill-prepared for flu, of all things, should be deeply concerning. The country has a dedicated surveillance web, antiviral drugs, and an infrastructure for making and deploying flu vaccines. None of that exists for the majority of other emerging infectious diseases.

  (tags: vaccines health diseases h1n1 flu pandemics future scary)

• Here's how you can fight family separation at the border

  Slate's list of organisations fighting this horrible policy

  (tags: family-separation law immigration us-politics america)

• In America, Naturalized Citizens No Longer Have an Assumption of Permanence | The New Yorker

  Michael Bars, the U.S.C.I.S. spokesman, told the Washington Examiner that the agency is hiring dozens of lawyers for the new task force. The mandate, according to both Cissna and Bars, is to find people who deliberately lied on their citizenship applications, not those who made innocent mistakes. The distinction is fuzzier than one might assume. Back in 1989, I had to make a decision about whether to lie on my citizenship application. At the time, immigration law banned “aliens afflicted with sexual deviation,” among others suffering from “psychopathic personality,” from entry to the United States. I had come to this country as a fourteen-year-old, in 1981, but I had been aware of my “sexual deviation” at the time, and this technically meant that I should not have entered the country. [....] Over the years, the applications for both citizenship and permanent residence have grown ever longer, filling with questions that seem to be designed to be used against the applicant. Question 26 on the green-card application, for example, reads, “Have you EVER committed a crime of any kind (even if you were not arrested, cited, charged with, or tried for that crime)?” ... The question does not specify whether it refers to a crime under current U.S. law or the laws of the country in which the crime might have been committed. In the Soviet Union of my youth, it was illegal to possess foreign currency or to spend the night anywhere where you were not registered to live. In more than seventy countries, same-sex sexual activity is still illegal. On closer inspection, just about every naturalized citizen might look like an outlaw, or a liar.

  (tags: law immigration us-politics america citizenship naturalization history)

• A few observations on the bikesharing systems in China

  Mindblowing Twitter thread. The variety of systems, most of which are barely impinging on our systems over here in Ireland!

  (tags: china bikesharing cycling bikes transit public-transit commuting)

• Fibonacci Hashing: The Optimization that the World Forgot (or: a Better Alternative to Integer Modulo)

  Turns out I was wrong. This is a big one. And everyone should be using it. Hash tables should not be prime number sized and they should not use an integer modulo to map hashes into slots. Fibonacci hashing is just better. Yet somehow nobody is using it and lots of big hash tables (including all the big implementations of std::unordered_map) are much slower than they should be because they don’t use Fibonacci Hashing.

  Apparently this is binary multiplicative hashing, and Google's brotli, webp, and Snappy libs all use a constant derived heuristically from a compression test corpus along the same lines (see comments). (Via Michael Fogleman)

  (tags: algorithms hashing hash fibonacci golden-ratio coding hacks brotli webp snappy hash-tables hashmaps load-distribution)

• Halton sequence

  In statistics, Halton sequences are sequences used to generate points in space for numerical methods such as Monte Carlo simulations. Although these sequences are deterministic, they are of low discrepancy, that is, appear to be random for many purposes. They were first introduced in 1960 and are an example of a quasi-random number sequence.

  (tags: algorithms graphics random randomness coding monte-carlo-simulation number-sequences)

• The best Mario Kart character according to data science

  Unless you’re going all-in on acceleration, it looks like a heavy character is the way to go; the two heaviest character classes (Wario and Donkey Kong) account for 11/15 of the Pareto-optimal configurations.

  Wario/Sports Bike/Slick or Wario/Gold Standard/Slick get the top billing!

  (tags: wario nintendo mario-kart games wii switch)

• Taming the Beast: How Scylla Leverages Control Theory to Keep Compactions Under Control - ScyllaDB

  This is a really nice illustration of the use of control theory to set tunable thresholds automatically in a complex storage system. Nice work Scylla:

  At any given moment, a database like ScyllaDB has to juggle the admission of foreground requests with background processes like compactions, making sure that the incoming workload is not severely disrupted by compactions, nor that the compaction backlog is so big that reads are later penalized. In this article, we showed that isolation among incoming writes and compactions can be achieved by the Schedulers, yet the database is still left with the task of determining the amount of shares of the resources incoming writes and compactions will use. Scylla steers away from user-defined tunables in this task, as they shift the burden of operation to the user, complicating operations and being fragile against changing workloads. By borrowing from the strong theoretical background of industrial controllers, we can provide an Autonomous Database that adapts to changing workloads without operator intervention.

  (tags: scylladb storage settings compaction automation thresholds control-theory ops cassandra feedback)

• Val on Programming: Making a Datomic system GDPR-compliant

  Proposed solution: complementing Datomic with an erasure-aware key/value store. In cases where Excision is not a viable solution, the solution I've come up with is store to privacy-sensitive values in a complementary, mutable KV store, and referencing the corresponding keys from Datomic.

  This seems to be turning into a common pattern for GDPR compliant storage.

  (tags: gdpr privacy clojure datomic data-protection storage architecture)

• Twitter thread regarding GDPR-compliance for append-only logs/event sourcing systems

  Martin Kleppmann: "What’s current best practice for GDPR compliance (in particular, right to deletion) in systems with append-only logs/event sourcing/blockchains, which are supposed to keep history forever?" Ben Kehoe: "Crypto delete. The immutable store keeps an encrypted copy, and the key is stored elsewhere. Forget me = throw away the key". That seems to be the most practical suggestion in general in this thread.

  (tags: twitter threads gdpr compliance law eu append-only logs blockchain event-sourcing architecture storage kafka kinesis)

• Trans kids & the people who hate them

  Research (Mental Health of Transgender Children Who Are Supported in Their Identities, Olson et al. 2016) has shown that children whose preferred gender identity is accepted by family and friends have no worse mental health outcomes than other children. But those who are not accepted are much more likely to have mental health issues, self harm or take their own lives. We can take from this that acceptance causes no harm, but non-acceptance causes harm?—?so why are so many people angry with parents for accepting their trans kids?

  (tags: trans children kids parenting society gender identity)

• The Language of the Trump Administration Is the Language of Domestic Violence | The New Yorker

  God this is so awful.

  Gaslighting, it needs not be said, is Trump’s preferred mode of communication, and it is encoded in the family-separation policy itself: once their parents have been taken into custody, the children are reclassified as “unaccompanied minors,” their parents effectively disappeared. On Friday, NPR reported on three Guatemalan mothers who were on trial in Alpine, Texas, after D.H.S. flew their children—ages eight, eight, and nine—more than two thousand miles away, to a shelter in Manhattan. “There is no mention in the Border Patrol narrative,” an immigration lawyer told NPR, “that these women had children with them when they entered the United States.” Can you prove this child is yours? Do you even have children? Well, then, where are they?

  (tags: children donald-trump new-yorker dhs asylum-seekers)

• Woman's Tongue Gets Inseminated By Squid After Eating Undercooked Seafood | IFLScience

  As documented in a 2012 edition of the Journal of Parasitology, the foreign bodies were identified as squid spermatophores (sperm-containing capsules) belonging to a Japanese flying squid (Todarodes pacificus). Rather foolishly, the woman had not removed the internal organs of the squid and proceeded to only parboil it for a few seconds before eating it, meaning its spermatophores were still alive and well. “As soon as she put a piece into her mouth, she felt like many 'bugs' were biting her oral mucosa,” the study reads. “She experienced severe sharp pain and spat out the entire portion without swallowing. Despite that, she could feel many small squirming white bug-like organisms penetrating her oral mucosa.”

  NOOOOOPE

  (tags: nope argh disgusting gross squid sperm parasitology spermatophores korea tongue)

• Amazon EKS is now GA - Official Discussion Thread and Ask the Experts

  r/aws discussion thread on EKS now that it's GA

  (tags: eks ga aws kubernetes ops architecture clustering docker)

• NTSB: Autopilot steered Tesla car toward traffic barrier before deadly crash

  This is the Tesla self-crashing car in action. Remember how it works. It visually recognizes rear ends of cars using a BW camera and Mobileye (at least in early models) vision software. It also recognizes lane lines and tries to center between them. It has a low resolution radar system which ranges moving metallic objects like cars but ignores stationary obstacles. And there are some side-mounted sonars for detecting vehicles a few meters away on the side, which are not relevant here. The system performed as designed. The white lines of the gore (the painted wedge) leading to this very shallow off ramp become far enough apart that they look like a lane.[1] If the vehicle ever got into the gore area, it would track as if in a lane, right into the crash barrier. It won't stop for the crash barrier, because it doesn't detect stationary obstacles. Here, it sped up, because there was no longer a car ahead. Then it lane-followed right into the crash barrier. That's the fundamental problem here. These vehicles will run into stationary obstacles at full speed with no warning or emergency braking at all. That is by design. This is not an implementation bug or sensor failure. It follows directly from the decision to ship "Autopilot" with that sensor suite and set of capabilities.

  (tags: tesla fail safety self-driving autopilot cars driving sonar radar sensors ai)

• 8thref.ie

  An archive of 489,506 Irish abortion tweets from the period around the 8th referendum in Ireland

  (tags: ireland history analytics archives archival repealthe8th)

• Software Development and GDPR

  You could think, as a developer, that the lawyers worry about this kind of fine-grained issue. They don’t. This is one of those situations where they say, well, here’s the risk, you have to make a decision, document it, and be ready to back that up in front of a judge should the soup hit the fan. In this particular case it’s straightforward enough. Are you in control of the presence of data in your database? Yes. It’s up to you to delete it when requested. Are you in control of the data on your harddrive? Yes. It’s up to you to delete it when requested. Are you in control of the operating system implementation or database implementation of deletion? No. Could you get the data back if you wanted to? Yes – but that’s not part of your usual run of business, so why would you explicitly do that? What if some bad dude steals your harddrive and then rummages through it? Ok we are getting a little far-fetched here for most businesses that are not keeping special category data, but if this does happen, then you have failed in your security controls. I guess my overall point here is that GDPR Compliance is a continuum, not a tickbox. You want to be doing the best you can with it and document why you can go so far and not further. The companies that will be getting the big legislative fines are the guys that are willy-nilly exporting special category data out of the EEA en masse without the knowledge of the people associated with that data. The rest of us just need to muddle along as best we can.

  (tags: gdpr privacy dev tech coding data-protection law eu storage)

• What to Do When a Loved One Is Severely Depressed - The New York Times

  This is good advice (or seems to be, at least)

  (tags: depression health friends sympathy nytimes medicine advice)

• AWS Region Table

  what products are available where

  (tags: amazon aws regions azs services architecture ops)

• How to change JVM arguments at runtime to avoid application restart

  This is a super nifty feature of the JVM: turn on and off heap class histogram dumps at runtime, for instance.

  java -XX:+PrintFlagsFinal -version|grep manageable

  (tags: jvm ops switches cli java heap-dumps memory debugging memory-leaks)

• How Ireland’s Abortion Referendum Became a Test Case for Democracy in the Social Media Age

  Exploring the "fake news" merchants attempting to subvert the Irish abortion referendum.

  On 4chan, a number of users who identified as Irish attempted to infiltrate the online conversation and tarnish the pro-repeal campaign. Operation Zyklon encouraged users to spread awareness of a connection between Amnesty International Ireland and the philanthropist George Soros, who donated €137,000 to Amnesty’s My Body My Rights campaign in 2016. Operation Trojan Horse saw users sharing templates of fake pro-repeal posters with extreme captions such as, “There should be no limit on abortion up to birth”. Users were encouraged to print and spread these posters around college campuses and share them across social media. A particularly curious operation called Operation Drunken Monkey aimed to stifle student voter turnout by organizing club nights on May 24 in the hope that students would be too hungover to vote the following day.

  (tags: 4chan repealthe8th abortion referenda politics fake-news amnesty)

• How Ireland Beat Dark Ads – Foreign Policy

  In practice, while these recognizable attempts to disrupt the democratic debate with microtargeted ads, bot activity, and misinformation were active, they appear to have been relatively ineffective and may even have turned voters away from those employing them. Given the battleground online discourse has become in democracies across the world, this small country’s resistance to it may offer some cause for hope. The resilience offered by the small size and close-knit nature of the Irish electorate may be difficult to reproduce in larger democracies. But the active measures taken by media, volunteer groups, and campaigners against potentially corrosive techniques can be a powerful inspiration.

  +1 -- it's heartening that we were able to defeat these 21st century dirty tricks after the damage they did with Trump and Brexit.

  (tags: brexit elections trump fake-news propaganda bots dark-ads facebook social-media repealthe8th referenda abortion ireland repeal-shield twitter)

• ‘Abroad For Yes' Helped Irish Voters Get Home for Abortion Referendum

  This was one of the most amazing things I saw during the referendum campaign, alright! I had the pleasure of helping to fund several journeys home to vote:

  Rebecca Wilson, one of the Abroad for Yes co-founders, said she and two other women, her sister Lauren Wilson and Hannah McNulty Madden, decided to launch the group when the referendum date was announced in late March. Wilson was visiting Helsinki, where Lauren and McNulty Madden are students. After realizing Lauren and McNulty Madden weren’t eligible for a postal vote, they looked up the cost of flights and panicked. On Twitter, however, McNulty Madden noticed that people were expressing interest in helping people who wanted to go home to Ireland but couldn’t afford it. The women decided to set up the Abroad for Yes Facebook group as a community for supporters of repealing the eighth amendment to gather and find one another. Wilson thought they’d help fund travel for maybe 10 people total, but in the first day of the group’s existence funded 5 trips, including for Lauren and McNulty Madden. After traveling back to Dublin, Wilson and the group continued to help others, enlisting three other group administrators. Wilson said they don’t have an exact figure, but she believes they’ve helped raise at least 30,000 euros.

  (tags: ireland repealthe8th abortion referenda abroad-for-yes t4y facebook)

• How to revoke all ad permissions from Oath GDPR pages

  in summary:

  document.querySelectorAll('input[type=checkbox]').forEach(val => val.checked = false)

  (via stx)

  (tags: via:stx oath gdpr privacy tracking ads)

• A first draft of history

  For journalists it is always easier to point to the politician with the pearly-white smile and the pithy sound-byte as the harbinger of change – they attract the cameras and the microphones and make us turn our backs on the truth. It’s like we cannot – or will not – believe that change can be brought about by ordinary people doing extraordinary things, no matter how often we see it. It’s like we need the fallacy that our leaders are somehow better than us, somehow in control to sleep safely at night, when in fact much of our insomnia and worry is their creation. My first draft of history is this: “On Friday May 25 2018, the women of Ireland repealed the Eighth Amendment.” And that’s it. It may have taken them 35 years, and in that time they were scorned and laughed at and belittled and abused, right up until Saturday morning and in some cases beyond, and yet they did it. Nothing else is relevant. Through the day I saw women, from teenagers who had just cast their first vote to political veterans who started out on this trail 35 years previously, gradually realising what they had done. One by one, it dawned on them the immense power that they now wield. They banded together, and over the weeks and months and years, they changed a country. And they’re not done yet.

  Amen to that. Resist the rewriting of history -- this was a revolutionary moment for Ireland, and in some ways, the world.

  (tags: ireland history repealthe8th abortion referenda journalism)

• How the #repealshield Twitter Blocklist is legal under GDPR

  a long and gif-heavy Twitter thread from @hazel_ok

  (tags: repealthe8th repealshield twitter blocklists gdpr law ireland eu abuse)

• If only Brexit had been run like Ireland’s referendum | Fintan O’Toole | Opinion | The Guardian

  Good postmortem review on how the abortion referendum evaded Trumpian "fake news" tactics.

  Irish voters were subjected to the same polarising tactics that have worked so well elsewhere: shamelessly fake “facts” (the claim, for example, that abortion was to be legalised up to six months into pregnancy); the contemptuous dismissal of expertise (the leading obstetrician Peter Boylan was told in a TV debate to “go back to school”); deliberately shocking visual imagery (posters of aborted foetuses outside maternity hospitals); and a discourse of liberal elites versus the real people. But Irish democracy had an immune system that proved highly effective in resisting this virus. Its success suggests a democratic playbook with at least four good rules.

  (tags: trump fake-news abortion referendum repealthe8th democracy ireland fintan-o-toole)

• on the etymology of "ramen"

  One day it hit her when she heard her Chinese chef using his call to let her know an order was done: "Hao-ra" (??), meaning "it's ready." She decided to start calling it Ra-men, and the name quickly took off.

  (tags: ramen food japanese noodles words etymology history)

• _Random Slicing: Efficient and Scalable Data Placement for Large-Scale Storage Systems_, ACM Transactions on Storage, July 2014

  'The ever-growing amount of data requires highly scalable storage solutions. The most flexible approach is to use storage pools that can be expanded and scaled down by adding or removing storage devices. To make this approach usable, it is necessary to provide a solution to locate data items in such a dynamic environment. This article presents and evaluates the Random Slicing strategy, which incorporates lessons learned from table-based, rule-based, and pseudo-randomized hashing strategies and is able to provide a simple and efficient strategy that scales up to handle exascale data. Random Slicing keeps a small table with information about previous storage system insert and remove operations, drastically reducing the required amount of randomness while delivering a perfect load distribution.'

  (tags: randomness architecture algorithms storage hashing slicing scaling)

• Archiving the 8th

  'archiving & collecting the 2018 referendum':

  This site was set up as a voluntary effort to answer some of these questions, and to quickly compile information on all known archiving and collecting activities happening nationwide, on both sides of the referendum campaign. It’s still very much a work in progress but the aspirations include: to provide an immediate, temporary resource to consolidate information on who’s archiving the 8th, and offer contact details share resources and suggestions, particularly for people wishing to donate material identify potential gaps or opportunities in collecting support networking of folks around the country engaged in archiving the 8th share models of protocols and examples of other ‘rapid response’ collecting elsewhere

  (tags: repealthe8th history archives archival 2018 referenda)

• I am a computer — docubyte

  absolutely glorious classic microcomputing GIFs

  (tags: micros computing history apple ibm gifs images art)

• antisemitism in the Irish "NO" prolife campaign against repeal of the 8th amendment

  Good twitter thread documenting some specific examples

  (tags: twitter antisemitism george-soros nazis alt-right ireland prolife repealthe8th)

• This is why you're still seeing referendum ads online

  summary: Google can't block ads placed via their own exchanges

  (tags: advertising adtech google ireland ads repealthe8th)

• ACLU to Amazon: Get out of the surveillance business

  This is a fair point from the ACLU:

  Already, Rekognition is in use in Florida and Oregon. Government agencies in California and Arizona have sought information about it, too. And Amazon didn't just sell Rekognition to law enforcement, it's actively partnering with them to ensure that authorities can fully utilize Rekognition's capabilities. Amazon has branded itself as customer-centric, opposed secret government surveillance, and has a CEO who publicly supported First Amendment freedoms and spoke out against the discriminatory Muslim Ban. Yet, Amazon is powering dangerous surveillance that poses a grave threat to customers and communities already unjustly targeted in the current political climate. We must make it clear to Amazon that we won't stand by and let it pad its bottom line by selling out our civil rights.

  (tags: aclu amazon rekognition facial-recognition faces law privacy data-privacy civil-rights)

• schibsted/strongbox: A secret manager for AWS

  Strongbox is a CLI/GUI and SDK to manage, store, and retrieve secrets (access tokens, encryption keys, private certificates, etc). Strongbox is a client-side convenience layer on top of AWS KMS, DynamoDB and IAM. It manages the AWS resources for you and configure them in a secure way. Strongbox has been used in production since mid-2016 and is now used extensively within Schibsted.

  (tags: schibsted strongbox kms aws dynamodb storage secrets credentials passwords ops)

• Tricks, Lies and Videotape: The Dirty Tactics of the Anti Choice Side - HeadStuff

  Hearing so, so many dirty tricks being pulled by the NO side. Please vote yes for repeal if you have a vote on Friday

  (tags: repealthe8th ireland law abortion prochoice dirty-tricks tactics)

• EC2 Instance Update – C5 Instances with Local NVMe Storage (C5d)

  With a 25% to 50% improvement in price-performance over the C4 instances, the C5 instances are designed for applications like batch and log processing, distributed and or real-time analytics, high-performance computing (HPC), ad serving, highly scalable multiplayer gaming, and video encoding. Some of these applications can benefit from access to high-speed, ultra-low latency local storage. For example, video encoding, image manipulation, and other forms of media processing often necessitates large amounts of I/O to temporary storage. While the input and output files are valuable assets and are typically stored as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) objects, the intermediate files are expendable. Similarly, batch and log processing runs in a race-to-idle model, flushing volatile data to disk as fast as possible in order to make full use of compute resources.

  Very nice!

  (tags: ec2 instance-types ops storage hardware aws)

• Thanos: Prometheus at Scale

  interesting

  (tags: devops monitoring tools prometheus ops metrics)

• Canaries As Poisonous Gas Detectors

  n the late 1890s, [John] Haldane began experimenting on small animals like white mice and canaries [to detect carbon monoxide]. Small animals have faster metabolism rate, and hence show the effects of carbon monoxide poisoning much earlier even in the presence of small quantities of the noxious gas. Canaries are especially good at detecting toxins in the air because of their specialized respiratory system.

  (tags: carbon-monoxide gas safety canaries coal mining mines respiration gas-detectors)

• Completely Silent Computer

  This computer makes no noise when it starts up.  It makes no noise when it shuts down.  It makes no noise when it idles.  It makes no noise when it’s under heavy load.  It makes no noise when it’s reading or writing data.  It can’t be heard in a regular room during the day.  It can’t be heard in a completely quiet house in the middle of the night.  It can’t be heard from 1m away.  It can’t be heard from 1cm away.  It can’t be heard — period.  It’s taken nearly 30 years to reach this point, but I’ve finally arrived.  The journey is over and it feels great. If you are after a silent — not just quiet, but silent — daily driver, then I strongly recommend a passively-cooled case, heat pipes and solid state drives.  Eliminate the moving parts (e.g. fans, HDDs) and you eliminate the noise — it’s not that complicated.  It also doesn’t need to be really expensive (my system requirements were not ‘average’ so please don’t infer from this post that all DB4-based systems are as expensive).  Silence (and a perfectly respectable computer) can easily be had for half the price.

  (tags: diy hardware pc silence quiet-hardware cooling fanless amd)

• Docker is the dangerous gamble which we will regret : devops

  The article this Reddit thread links to is garbage clickbait, but the responses are insightful and much better

  (tags: reddit ops containerization docker contrarians rkt)

• Tracking Firm LocationSmart Leaked Location Data for Customers of All Major U.S. Mobile Carriers Without Consent in Real Time Via Its Web Site

  LocationSmart, a U.S. based company that acts as an aggregator of real-time data about the precise location of mobile phone devices, has been leaking this information to anyone via a buggy component of its Web site — without the need for any password or other form of authentication or authorization — KrebsOnSecurity has learned. The company took the vulnerable service offline early this afternoon after being contacted by KrebsOnSecurity, which verified that it could be used to reveal the location of any AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile or Verizon phone in the United States to an accuracy of within a few hundred yards.

  (tags: locationsmart verizon sprint t-mobile att brian-krebs security location-tracking tracking mobile phones location)

• Bitcoin’s energy use got studied, and you libertarian nerds look even worse than usual | Grist

  This is awful. What a waste:

  Bitcoin’s energy footprint has more than doubled since Grist first wrote about it six months ago. It’s expected to double again by the end of the year, according to a new peer-reviewed study out Wednesday. And if that happens, bitcoin would be gobbling up 0.5 percent of the world’s electricity, about as much as the Netherlands. That’s a troubling trajectory, especially for a world that should be working overtime to root out energy waste and fight climate change. By late next year, bitcoin could be consuming more electricity than all the world’s solar panels currently produce — about 1.8 percent of global electricity, according to a simple extrapolation of the study’s predictions. That would effectively erase decades of progress on renewable energy.

  (tags: energy bitcoin blockchain cryptocurrencies money climate-change planet green)

• Face recognition police tools 'staggeringly inaccurate' - BBC News

  "In figures given to Big Brother Watch, South Wales Police said its facial recognition technology had made 2,685 "matches" between May 2017 and March 2018 - but 2,451 were false alarms." This is going to be a disaster.

  (tags: surveillance bbc wales facial-recognition privacy false-positives ml)

• Crank magnetism

  Crank magnetism also denotes the tendency — even for otherwise "lone issue" cranks — to accumulate more crank beliefs over time. You know that old saying about not being so open-minded that your brain falls out? People with crank magnetism didn't pay attention to that. Crank magnetism is an important stepping stone on the path towards being wrong all of the time. Its opposite is the stopped clock (which is when otherwise overly credulous people actually find some crankery that they won't believe in, and may even actively denounce it).

  (tags: cranks psychoceramics crazy crank-magnetism antivaxxers climate-change-denial)

• GDPR will pop the adtech bubble

  Without adtech, the EU’s GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) would never have happened. But the GDPR did happen, and as a result websites all over the world are suddenly posting notices about their changed privacy policies, use of cookies, and opt-in choices for “relevant” or “interest-based” (translation: tracking-based) advertising. Email lists are doing the same kinds of things. “Sunrise day” for the GDPR is 25 May. That’s when the EU can start smacking fines on violators. Simply put, your site or service is a violator if it extracts or processes personal data without personal permission. Real permission, that is. You know, where you specifically say “Hell yeah, I wanna be tracked everywhere.” Of course what I just said greatly simplifies what the GDPR actually utters, in bureaucratic legalese. The GDPR is also full of loopholes only snakes can thread; but the spirit of the law is clear, and the snakes will be easy to shame, even if they don’t get fined. (And legitimate interest—an actual loophole in the GDPR, may prove hard to claim.) Toward the aftermath, the main question is What will be left of advertising—and what it supports—after the adtech bubble pops?

  (tags: advertising europe law privacy gdpr tracking data-privacy)

• Attacks against GPG signed APT repositories - Packagecloud Blog

  It is a common misconception that simply signing your packages and repository metadata with GPG is enough to create a secure APT repository. This is false. Many of the attacks outlined in the paper and this blog post are effective against GPG-signed APT repositories. GPG signing Debian packages themselves does nothing, as explained below. The easiest way to prevent the attacks covered below is to always serve your APT repository over TLS; no exceptions.

  This is excellent research. My faith in GPG sigs on packages is well shaken.

  (tags: apt security debian packaging gpg pgp packages dpkg apt-get ops)

• "Mudslinging" campaigns drive down voting rates, particularly among the unsure

  Does negative campaigning influence the likelihood of voting in elections? Our study of U.S. Senate campaigns indicates the answer is “yes.” We find that people distinguish between useful negative information presented in an appropriate manner and irrelevant and harsh mudslinging. As the proportion of legitimate criticisms increases in campaigns, citizens become more likely to cast ballots. When campaigns degenerate into unsubstantiated and shrill attacks, voters tend to stay home. Finally, we find that individuals vary in their sensitivity to the tenor of campaigns. In particular, the tone is more consequential for independents, for those with less interest in politics, and for those with less knowledge about politics.

  (via Mark Dennehy)

  (tags: politics strategy ireland referenda via:markdennehy dirty-tricks)

• Abortion - the street demonstrations in pictures

  There's me, marching after the X Case in 1992; bookmarking for posterity and my own scrapbook! Repeal the 8th! '1992: A demonstration against the High Court injunction forbidding a 14-year-old alleged rape victim from obtaining an abortion in Britain. Photograph: The Irish Times'

  (tags: 1992 1990s history ireland x-case abortion repealthe8th law)

• Dickens invented "gammon" as a slur in 1838, in 'Nicholas Nickleby'

  This is thoroughly brexiteering stuff:

  The time had been, when this burst of enthusiasm would have been cheered to the very echo; but now, the deputation received it with chilling coldness. The general impression seemed to be, that as an explanation of Mr Gregsbury’s political conduct, it did not enter quite enough into detail; and one gentleman in the rear did not scruple to remark aloud, that, for his purpose, it savoured rather too much of a ‘gammon’ tendency. ‘The meaning of that term — gammon,’ said Mr Gregsbury, ‘is unknown to me. If it means that I grow a little too fervid, or perhaps even hyperbolical, in extolling my native land, I admit the full justice of the remark. I AM proud of this free and happy country. My form dilates, my eye glistens, my breast heaves, my heart swells, my bosom burns, when I call to mind her greatness and her glory.’

  (tags: brexit funny gammon charles-dickens history gb politics uk-politics uk)

• The Tidelift Subscription

  The core idea of the Tidelift Subscription is to pay for “promises about the future” of your software components.   When you incorporate an open source library into your application, you need to know not just that you can use it as-is today, but that it will be kept secure, properly licensed, and well maintained in the future. The Tidelift Subscription creates a direct financial incentive for the individual maintainers of the software stacks you use to follow through on those commitments. Aligning everyone’s interests—professional development teams and maintainers alike. Critically, the Tidelift Subscriptions for React, Angular, and Vue.js cover not just the core libraries, but the vast set of dependencies and libraries typically used in these stacks. For example, a basic React web application pulls in over 1,000 distinct npm packages as dependencies. The Tidelift Subscription covers that full depth of packages which originate from all parts of the open source community, beyond the handful of core packages published by the React engineering team itself.

  (tags: tidelift open-source libraries dependencies coding)

• DNA databases: biology stripped bare

  Unlike other biometrics, [DNA] also provides revealing [data regarding] thousands of other related individuals; even to an entire ethnic group. Such markers may reveal a genetic predisposition towards cancer, or early onset dementia. Mining that data and linking it to family trees and thus, individuals, might interest insurance companies, or state health bodies, or – as ever – advertisers. Or? Who knows? And the ability of a third-party potentially to reveal such information about me, about you, without us having any say, by providing their DNA profile for some personal purpose? Consider how furious so many have been on the basis of their Facebook profile data going to Cambridge Analytica via some Facebook friend deciding to do a quiz. Facebook profile data is revealing enough. But DNA is you, fully, irrevocably, exposed. And whatever it displays about you right now, is trivial compared to what we will be able to read into it in the future. That’s why this case isn’t just about a solitary law enforcement outcome, but about all of us doing an unintended, genetic full monty.

  (tags: dna-matching dna data-privacy privacy future health cancer insurance karlin-lillington)

• Thread by @shockproofbeats: "Got my days wrong and ended up alone in a room with my boss and the President of Ireland while I was on ketamine. Right, this was when I was […]"

  omg this thread easily wins the internet for the month

  (tags: ketamine funny drugs mary-mcaleese vips work jobs fail twitter)

• An Algorithmic Investigation of the Highfalutin 'Poet Voice' - Atlas Obscura

  'It’s easy to make fun of Poet Voice. But its proliferation across the space of academic poetry may have more serious implications as well. In a 2014 essay, “Poet Voice and Flock Mentality,” the poet Lisa Marie Basile connects it to an overall lack of diversity in the field, and a fear of breaking the mold. The consistent use of it, she writes, “delivers two messages: I am educated, I am taught, I am part-of a group … I am afraid to tell my own story in my own voice.”'

  (tags: poet-voice talking speech voices intonation droning poetry)

• Twitter thread: "People still talk about charging speed like it's a long-term obstacle for electric cars. It's not, for several reasons"

  great thread on EV futures. Range anxiety is rapidly dwindling and they are the way of the future for sure

  (tags: evs cars driving batteries bevs)

• I Am the One Woman Who Has It All | The New Yorker

  I have two kids and the unspoken pressure to act like they don’t exist when I’m on a conference call. I have no problem lying about “being in a meeting” when I’m with my kids and no problem lying to my kids about “needing to work” when I’m on Facebook.

  (tags: parenting funny new-yorker women life work work-life-balance kids)

• Silicon Valley Can't Be Trusted With Our History

  the internet is messing with human cognition in ways that will take decades to fully understand. Some researchers believe it is altering the way we create memories. In one study, researchers told a group of people to copy a list of facts onto a computer. They told half the group that the facts would be saved when they finished and the other half that the facts would be erased. Those who thought that the facts would be saved were much worse at remembering them afterward. Instead of relying on our friends and neighbors — or on books, for that matter — we have started outsourcing our memories to the internet. So what happens if those memories are erased — and if the very platforms responsible for their storage are the ones doing the erasing? That scenario is a threat everywhere, but particularly in countries where the authorities are most aggressively controlling speech and editing history. We say the internet never forgets, but internet freedom isn’t evenly distributed: When tech companies have expanded into parts of the world where information suppression is the norm, they have proven willing to work with local censors. Those censors will be emboldened by new efforts at platform regulation in the US and Europe, just as authoritarian regimes have already enthusiastically repurposed the rhetoric of “fake news.” The reach and power of tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are so new and strange that we’ve barely begun formulating a response. But we can learn from the activists already doing it; from Mosireen, or the team behind the Syrian Archive — six people, with a budget of $96,000, who are preserving thousands of hours of footage from their country’s civil war. The archive recently published the Chemical Weapons Database, documenting 221 chemical weapons attacks with 861 verified videos, implicating the Assad regime in a pattern of war crimes and putting the lie to armchair investigators helping to propagate conspiracy theories in the West. One of its cofounders recently told the Intercept that he spends nearly all his time making sure videos aren’t deleted from the big tech platforms before he gets a chance to download them.

  (tags: censorship syria chemical-weapons assad history youtube video archival mosireen the-syrian-archive archives memory facebook)

• I tried leaving Facebook. I couldn’t - The Verge

  Facebook events, Facebook pages, Facebook photos, and Facebook videos are for many people an integral part of the church picnic, the Christmas party, the class reunion, the baby shower. (The growing scourge of gender reveal parties with their elaborate “reveal” rituals and custom-made cakes seems particularly designed to complement documentation on social media). The completeness of Facebook allows people to create better substitutes for in-person support groups in a wide range of ever-narrowing demographics — from casual interests like Instant Pot recipes for Korean food to heavy life-altering circumstances like rare forms of cancer. Of all people, I know why I shouldn’t trust Facebook, why my presence on its network contributes to the collective problem of its monopolistic hold on people. Everyone is on Facebook because everyone is on Facebook. And because everyone is on Facebook, even the people who aren’t are having their data collected in shadow profiles. My inaction affects even the people who have managed to stay away. I know this, I barely use Facebook, I don’t even like Facebook, and I find it nearly impossible to leave.

  (tags: privacy facebook deletefacebook social-networking social life social-media data-privacy)

• Europe fires back at ICANN's delusional plan to overhaul Whois for GDPR by next, er, year • The Register

  So was it European law experts Hamilton that wrongly advised ICANN that it could request for a "moratorium" over the new law until it came up with a new solution? It seems unlikely given their expertise and the fact it was them that first warned ICANN that it had wrongly persuaded itself that it was not affected by the new law. What seems more probable is that ICANN's staff and management board simply persuaded themselves that they could stall for time for no reason other than the fact that it would be convenient for them.

  (tags: icann fail gdpr whois law regulation eu)

• Warning signs for TSB's IT meltdown were clear a year ago – insider | Business | The Guardian

  The team behind the development were celebrating. In a LinkedIn post since removed, those involved in the migration were describing themselves as “champions”, a “hell of a team” and were pictured raising glasses of bubbly to cheers of “TSB transfer done and dusted”. However, only hours after the switch was flicked, systems crumpled and up to 1.9m TSB customers who use internet and mobile banking were locked out. “I could have put money on the rollout being the disaster it has been, with evidence of major code changes on the hoof over last weekend and into this week,” the insider said. Customers reported receiving texts saying their cards had been used abroad, that they had discovered thousands of pounds in their accounts they did not have – or that mortgage accounts had vanished, multiplied or changed currency. One bemused account holder showed his TSB banking app recording a direct debit paid to Sky Digital 81 years from now. Some saw details of other people’s accounts and holidaymakers complained that they had been left unable to pay restaurant and hotel bills.

  What an incredible shitfest.

  (tags: banks tsb fail banking uk sabadell)

• The brave new world of genetic genealogy - MIT Technology Review

  The combination of DNA and genealogy is a potentially a huge force for good in the world, but it must be used responsibly. In all cases where public databases like GEDmatch are used, the potential for good must be balanced against the potential for harm. In cases involving adoptee searches, missing persons, and unidentified bodies, the potential for good usually markedly outweighs the potential for harm. But the situation is not so clear-cut when it comes to the use of the methodology to identify suspects in rape and murder cases. The potential for harm is much higher under these circumstances, because of the risk of misuse, misapplication or misinterpretation of the data leading to wrongful identification of suspects. The stakes are too high for the GEDmatch database to be used by the police without oversight by a court of law.  However, we are not looking at a dystopian future. In the long run the public sharing of DNA data, when done responsibly, is likely to have huge benefits for society. If a criminal can be caught not by his own DNA but through a match with one of his cousins he will be less likely to commit a crime in the first place. With the move to whole genome sequencing in forensic cases in the future, it will be possible to make better use of genetic genealogy methods and databases to identify missing people, the remains of soldiers from World War One and World War Two as well as more recent wars, and casualties from natural and manmade disasters. We will be able to give many more unidentified people the dignity of their identity in death. But we each control our own DNA and we should all be able to decide what, if anything, we wish to share.

  (tags: gedmatch genealogy dna police murder rape dna-matching privacy data-privacy)

• For the first time, parents will be able to limit YouTube Kids to human-reviewed channels and recommendations | TechCrunch

  FINALLY. what took so long

  (tags: youtube google parents parenting kids apps)

• repealfacts and FAQs.pdf

  Louise Kenny, Consultant Obstetrician and Professor of Maternal and Fetal Health, systematically demolishes anti-choice propaganda points with solid scientific facts

  (tags: repeal repealthe8th science biology medicine pregnancy abortion pro-choice ireland miscarriage)

• twitter thread on incel culture, the "manosphere" and the rest of that toxic garbage

  For the past little while, I've been working on a piece about Toronto's relationship to the alt-right, especially the "manosphere." Unfortunately that research has become relevant. I'm going to share as much as I can here for people who may not be familiar with these movements.

  (tags: incels manosphere 4chan hate internet pua kill-all-normies)

• TheJournal.ie FactCheck is first Irish outlet to officially tackle misinformation on Facebook

  TheJournal.ie FactCheck project has signed on to carry out third-party fact-checking on Facebook. This will involved testing the veracity of articles posted on the platform and attaching a rating and contextual information to contested items.

  Awesome. nice one TJ

  (tags: the-journal fact-checking facebook fake-news facts journalism)

• The Joy Reid fight reinforces how critical the Internet Archive is to modern politics - The Washington Post

  What the Wayback Machine provides, in essence, is a third-party archiving service that largely escapes the influence of the content creators. If you publish a blog on a blogging platform (or a tweet on Twitter, etc.), you still have the power to go in and remove or alter what you’ve written. The Wayback Machine makes it much more difficult to cover your tracks, should you wish to. As more people who grew up creating content for the Web enter positions of authority in media and politics, that archive becomes more important. If the Wayback Machine hadn’t indexed Reid’s site, her words might have been lost. Or if someone had stumbled onto her old blog post, her expert’s argument that the post was fraudulent in some way might carry more weight. But with that index timestamped more than a decade ago, the argument is substantially undercut. Reid’s blog, though, is not currently available on the Wayback Machine. Her old blog updated the file on its server telling automated systems what can and can’t be indexed, a set of instructions that the Wayback Machine’s system respects as it gathers information from around the Web. By changing that file, Reid’s team essentially pulled a curtain down on her past writing.

  (tags: internet-archive archival history joy-reid web blogging wayback-machine robots.txt)

• keiichishima/yacryptopan

  'Yet another Crypto-PAn implementation for Python':

  This package provides a function to anonymize IP addresses keeping their prefix consistency. This program is based on the paper "Prefix-Preserving IP Address Anonymization: Measurement-based Security Evaluation and a New Cryptography-based Scheme" written by Jun Xu, Jinliang Fan, Mostafa H. Ammar, and Sue B. Moon. The detailed explanation can be found in [Xu2002]. This package supports both IPv4 and IPv6 anonymization.

  (via Alexandre Dulaunoy)

  (tags: via:adulau anonymization ip-addresses internet ipv4 ipv6 security crypto python crypto-pan)

• The Handmaid’s Tale doesn’t quite get modern American misogyny - The Verge

  Soft biological determinism doesn’t inevitably lead to harsh oppression, but that’s not the point. In The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood imagined how seeds of xenophobia, misogyny, and authoritarianism could utterly corrupt a popular ideology with many well-meaning supporters — because a Gilead can grow in any group that lets its principles take root. That includes Evangelical Christianity, but also a modern secular rationalism that’s being co-opted by white male supremacists, speaking the language of science and logic. It’s not hard to envision a world that’s as cruel to women as Gilead, which is why watching The Handmaid’s Tale is so exhausting. But despite all its brutality, the show softens a more painful truth: misogyny doesn’t just persist, it evolves.

  (tags: handmaids-tale margaret-atwood science-fiction sf misogyny incels 4chan)

• Parallelizing S3 Workloads with s5cmd

  nice parallel download/upload tool for S3, developed by Peak Games, open source, in Go

  (tags: golang go s5cmd open-source tools cli s3 aws)

• The Australian Bureau of Statistics Tracked People By Their Mobile Device Data.

  The ABS claims population estimates have a “major data gap” and so they’ve been a busy bee figuring out a way to track crowd movement. Their solution? Mobile device user data. “…with its near-complete coverage of the population, mobile device data is now seen as a feasible way to estimate temporary populations,” states a 2017 conference extract for a talk by ABS Demographer Andrew Howe. While the “Estimated Resident Population” (ERP) is Australia’s official population measure, the ABS felt the pre-existing data wasn’t ‘granular’ enough. What the ABS really wanted to know was where you’re moving, hour by hour, through the CBD, educational hubs, tourist areas. Howe’s ABS pilot study of mobile device user data creates population estimates with the help of a trial engagement with an unnamed telco company. The data includes age and sex breakdowns. The study ran between the 18th April to 1st May 2016. [....] Electronic Frontiers Australia board member Justin Warren also pointed out that while there are beneficial uses for this kind of information, “…the ABS should be treading much more carefully than it is. The ABS damaged its reputation with its bungled management of the 2016 Census, and with its failure to properly consult with civil society about its decision to retain names and addresses. Now we discover that the ABS is running secret tracking experiments on the population?” “Even if the ABS’ motives are benign, this behaviour?—?making ethically dubious decisions without consulting the public it is experimenting on?—?continues to damage the once stellar reputation of the ABS.” “This kind of population tracking has a dark history. During World War II, the US Census Bureau used this kind of tracking information to round up Japanese-Americans for internment. Census data was used extensively by Nazi Germany to target specific groups of people. The ABS should be acutely aware of these historical abuses, and the current tensions within society that mirror those earlier, dark days all too closely.”

  (tags: abs australia tracking location-data privacy data-privacy mobile)

• Use the GDPR to find who has advertised to you on Facebook, and get them to delete your details

  Sometimes you get ads on Facebook and you are just not interested in what they’re selling. This is a way to find out who has uploaded your email address into facebook to target ads at you, and then- if you’re in the EU- how to use the new General Data Protection Regulation to get those advertisers to delete you from their system.

  Totally going to do this. roll on May 25

  (tags: gdpr facebook privacy ads data-privacy eu)

• Debugging Stuck Ruby Processes — What to do Before You Kill -9

  good tips on using gdb to gather backtraces (via Louise)

  (tags: debugging gdb ruby linux unix threads ops)

• Palantir Knows Everything About You

  This is so fucking dystopian:

  Operation Laser has made L.A. cops more surgical — and, according to community activists, unrelenting. Once targets are enmeshed in a [Palantir] spidergram, they’re stuck. Manuel Rios, 22, lives in the back of his grandmother’s house at the top of a hill in East L.A., in the heart of the city’s gang area. [...] He grew up surrounded by friends who joined Eastside 18, the local affiliate of the 18th Street gang, one of the largest criminal syndicates in Southern California. Rios says he was never “jumped in”—initiated into 18. He spent years addicted to crystal meth and was once arrested for possession of a handgun and sentenced to probation. But except for a stint in county jail for a burglary arrest inside a city rec center, he’s avoided further trouble and says he kicked his meth habit last year. In 2016, Rios was sitting in a parked car with an Eastside 18 friend when a police car pulled up. His buddy ran, pursued by the cops, but Rios stayed put. “Why should I run? I’m not a gang member,” he says over steak and eggs at the IHOP near his home. The police returned and handcuffed him. One of them took his picture with a cellphone. “Welcome to the gang database!” the officer said. Since then he’s been stopped more than a dozen times, he says, and told that if he doesn’t like it he should move. He has nowhere to go. His girlfriend just had a baby girl, and he wants to be around for them. “They say you’re in the system, you can’t lie to us,” he says. “I tell them, ‘How can I be in the hood if I haven’t got jumped in? Can’t you guys tell people who bang and who don’t?’ They go by their facts, not the real facts.” The police, on autopilot with Palantir, are driving Rios toward his gang friends, not away from them, worries Mariella Saba, a neighbor and community organizer who helped him get off meth. When whole communities like East L.A. are algorithmically scraped for pre-crime suspects, data is destiny, says Saba. “These are systemic processes. When people are constantly harassed in a gang context, it pushes them to join. They internalize being told they’re bad.”

  (tags: palantir surveillance privacy precrime spidergrams future la gangs justice algorithms data-protection data-privacy policing harrassment)

• _Building a Bw-Tree Takes More Than Just Buzz Words_, SIGMOD 2018

  'An account of our disappointing journey to build a open-source lock-free Bw-Tree for the Peloton DBMS.' 'In 2013, Microsoft Research proposed the Bw-Tree (humorously termed the “Buzz Word Tree”), a lock-free index that provides high throughput for transactional database workloads in SQL Server’s Hekaton engine. The Bw-Tree avoids locks by appending delta record to tree nodes and using an indirection layer that allows it to atomically update physical pointers using compare-and-swap (CaS). Correctly implementing this techniques requires careful attention to detail. Unfortunately, the Bw-Tree papers from Microsoft are missing important details and the source code has not been released. This paper has two contributions: First, it is the missing guide for how to build a lock-free Bw-Tree. We clarify missing points in Microsoft’s original design documents and then present techniques to improve the index’s performance. Although our focus here is on the Bw-Tree, many of our methods apply more broadly to designing and implementing future lock-free in-memory data structures. Our experimental evaluation shows that our optimized variant achieves 1.1–2.5× better performance than the original Microsoft proposal for highly concurrent workloads. Second, our evaluation shows that despite our improvements, the Bw-Tree still does not perform as well as other concurrent data structures that use locks.' Finally: https://twitter.com/andy_pavlo/status/986647389820747776 : 'Our results show that @ViktorLeis's ART index and @xexd's MassTree and a non-fancy B+Tree are currently the best for in-memory workloads. Skip Lists are always terrible.'

  (tags: skip-lists algorithms data-structures storage bw-trees mass-trees benchmarks performance multithreading lock-free locking trees)

• Securing wireless neurostimulators

  The latest generation of such devices come with remote monitoring and reprogramming capabilities, via an external device programmer. The manufacturers seem to have relied on security through obscurity (when will we ever learn!) with the very predictable result that the interface turns out not be secure at all. So we end up with a hackable device connected directly to someone’s brain.

  (tags: security brain health medical devices iot exploits neurostimulators)

• fedora - Should I disable accounts-daemon? - Unix & Linux Stack Exchange

  tldr: yes

  (tags: accounts-daemon ubuntu debian gnome d-bus ops)

• A flaw-by-flaw guide to Facebook’s new GDPR privacy changes | TechCrunch

  Overall, it seems like Facebook is complying with the letter of GDPR law, but with questionable spirit. Sure, privacy is boring to a lot of people. Too little info and they feel confused and scared. Too many choices and screens and they feel overwhelmed and annoyed. Facebook struck the right balance in some places here. But the subtly pushy designs seem intended to steer people away from changing their defaults in ways that could hamper Facebook’s mission and business.

  (tags: gdpr design facebook privacy data-protection data-privacy social-networking eu law)

• Best Practices for DynamoDB

  Amazon have updated this architectural tips doc for DynamoDB users -- good reference

  (tags: dynamodb nosql aws storage databases design coding)

• "Tweeps! What’s the craziest infra incident you worked on at Twitter"

  great thread of Twitter outages and production incidents. I would love to hear more details about these, I love hearing about other people's outages ;) Even reading "over a month of cleanup and some permanent data loss" has me sweating....

  (tags: infrastructure engineering twitter ops outages production)

• Scientists accidentally create mutant enzyme that eats plastic bottles

  Scientists have created a mutant enzyme that breaks down plastic drinks bottles – by accident. The breakthrough could help solve the global plastic pollution crisis by enabling for the first time the full recycling of bottles. The new research was spurred by the discovery in 2016 of the first bacterium that had naturally evolved to eat plastic, at a waste dump in Japan. Scientists have now revealed the detailed structure of the crucial enzyme produced by the bug. The international team then tweaked the enzyme to see how it had evolved, but tests showed they had inadvertently made the molecule even better at breaking down the PET (polyethylene terephthalate) plastic used for soft drink bottles. “What actually turned out was we improved the enzyme, which was a bit of a shock,” said Prof John McGeehan, at the University of Portsmouth, UK, who led the research. “It’s great and a real finding.”

  (tags: plastic recycling enzymes science mutants pet bottles green)

• "Facebook will implement a part of their transparency plan"

  The Transparent Referendum Initiative writes:

  Big News - Facebook will implement a part of their transparency plan - the ability to see the ads that a page has paid for- IN IRELAND FROM 25th. A positive first step. This will help us build out our database, as we wait for a platform fed offline list to be implemented. #8thRef

  (tags: facebook ads transparency ireland repealthe8th referenda voting)

• How to report graphic abortion imagery to the gardai under Irish law

  I tried to report ICBR graphic abortion imagery to the Gardai today and met a lot of resistance. The following thread gives an account of what happened and how someone can effectively report this imagery. 1/x At 2pm on Friday the 13th of April I noticed the presence of ICBR graphic abortion imagery being displayed outside the Nassau street entrance of Trinity. I called Kevin Street Garda Station in order to make a complaint under Section 7 of the Public Order Act 1994 2/x I was told that the Gardai had been instructed by their superiors to not intervene with such imagery and that this direction had come from the Refendum Commission itself. I then called the Refendum Commission in order to query this, as they'd never been involved previously. 3/x A representative from the commission informed me that no such direction had been given to the Gardai as it is not in the commission's remit to influence such imagery. The representative told me that they would contact with Kevin Street Station about this miscommunication. 4/x I then rang Kevin Street Station again to inform them of what I had been told by the Refendum Commission. I was then told that a complaint had to be made in person to either a Garda on the scene or to a local station (Trinity would be Pearse Street), which is understandable. 5/x I informed the Gardai of a similar experience in Dundrum in which the local station had dispatched officers to move along those displaying the imagery to prevent a breach of the peace without a complaint being made in person. 6/x I was finally told that Pearse Street Station would be contacted to have an available car dispatched to Trinity. 8/x TLDR: If you see this imagery, report it under Section 7. If you are told that the Gardai cannot intervene, let them know that other stations have before. If they say they have been directed by the Referendum Commission, let them know there is no such directive on record. 9/x I hope this miscommunication can be cleared up and that both @gardainfo and @RefCom_ie end up on the same page, so that Gardai can continue to do their jobs effectively and respond to public complaints of breach of the peace. 10/10

  Very illuminating.

  (tags: twitter threads abortion propaganda gardai law ireland public-order-act)

• Thomas Mayne (politician) - Wikipedia

  An illustrious ancestor, apparently! 'Thomas Mayne (1832–1915) was an Irish Parliamentary Party politician. He was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Tipperary at a by-election in 1883,[1] and held the seat until the constituency was divided at the 1885 general election. He was then elected for the new Mid division of Tipperary,[2] and held that seat until he resigned in 1890 by becoming Steward of the Manor of Northstead.[3]' He was known for helping Charles Stewart Parnell in a sticky situation -- from http://www.online-literature.com/elbert-hubbard/journeys-vol-thirteen/6/ : 'About six months after this, London was convulsed with laughter at a joke too good to keep: One Captain O'Shea [Kitty O'Shea's husband] had challenged Charles Parnell, the Irish Leader, to a duel. Parnell accepted the challenge, but the fight was off, because Thomas Mayne had gone to O'Shea and told him he "would kick him the length of Rotten Row if he tried to harm or even opened his Galway yawp about Parnell."'

  (tags: parnell thomas-mayne ancestors history ireland nationalism mps 1800s 19th-century kitty-oshea)

• A Taxonomy of Tech Debt | Riot Games Engineering

  Very sensible way to group/classify tech debt work -- we did something similar in Swrve internally at one point, but this is much more evolved

  (tags: engineering software coding)

• Dodgy history of the firm behind "coal power plant reopening to mine blockchain"

  Here's the breathless CNet article: https://www.cnet.com/news/australian-coal-power-plant-reopened-blockchain-bitcoin-applications/ , but it seems Hunter Energy and IOT Group have quite a history going by this Twitter thread

  (tags: twitter companies legal cnet blockchain bitcoin power coal fossil-fuels australia iot-group hunter-energy)

• How to talk to your children about abortion care in the run-up to the referendum

  She pointed out one of the “baby” posters the other day when we were in the car and passed one. I said “Actually that’s a baby seed but the people who paid a lot of money for those posters made it look like a baby on purpose, because they think everyone who has a baby seed should have to grow it into a baby whether they wanted to or not. And that I think that’s telling lies and shouldn’t be allowed."

  (tags: abortion pro-choice kids children education childbirth savita propaganda repealthe8th parenting)

• Uses This / Leonard Lin

  lhl describes the stuff he uses, day to day. Lots of travel gear, drones, Linux and a surprising lack of Macs

  (tags: travel shopping hardware gear uses-this lhl drones vr linux vive chromebook tips)

• #Repealthe8th | Are the Irish Media Up To The Job?

  For years we were subject to speculation and debate about the emergence of new party in Irish politics. Endless coverage for Lucinda Creighton, Michael McDowell and whoever else. All the while, the most incredibly vibrant social movement touching every county in Ireland has emerged and the majority of journalists are unable to write about it. Media comment has concerned itself not so much with the issues but with grave concern that this is happening outside perceived boundaries of respectable politics. This is ordinary people getting together and putting a most unspeakable issue on the agenda and soon to vote – in spite of the Normal Rules. It is not just that regime journalists live in a bubble or don’t care to inform themselves. They genuinely do not understand how this campaign has played out. It is beyond their entire conception. This is what happens when your idea of politics only extends to the ritual of posters on lamp posts.

  (tags: media ireland politics political-correspondents oireachtas-retort analysis society marref repealthe8th)

• Gravis McElroy on Twitter: "The thing that really kills me about the silicon valley hypercapitalist hell spiral...."

  Epic shouty thread about modern Silicon Valley software products.

  We know that no company, regardless of size, can be trusted with this information. We KNOW it will not stay private, our photos of our partners genitals and tax documents will become public either deliberately or accidentally. We know that any company that tries to buck this trend can't be trusted, and even if they are completely, absolutely transparent, it doesn't matter because we will wake up one day to discover they were purchased at 2 AM and the data transfer /already started/ We represent billions in revenue but they hold our info in escrow and that means we don't have enough money to buy their loyalty, because a business considers business money more real than person money.

  (tags: money funding capitalism silicon-valley internet web google facebook banks banking)

• The American Chopper meme, explained - Vox

  "Maybe we should have been blogging in dialectics all along"

  (tags: memes american-chopper dialectics academia discussion plato dialogue)

• If iPads were meant for kids

  A long list of the misfeatures that IOS/Android devices have regarding child use. 100% agreed with this

  (tags: ios ipad iphone parenting devices kids android youtube)

• A Closer Look at Experian Big Data and Artificial Intelligence in Durham Police

  'UK police bought profiling data for their artificial intelligence (AI) system, deciding whether to hold suspects in custody, from ... Experian.' 'The AI tool uses 34 data categories including the offender’s criminal history, combined with their age, gender and two types of residential postcode. The use of postcode data is problematic in predictive software of this kind as it carries a risk of perpetuating bias towards areas marked by community deprivation.'

  (tags: experian marketing credit-score data policing uk durham ai statistics crime hart)

• lemire/JavaFastPFOR: A simple integer compression library in Java

  a library to compress and uncompress arrays of integers very fast. The assumption is that most (but not all) values in your array use much less than 32 bits, or that the gaps between the integers use much less than 32 bits. These sort of arrays often come up when using differential coding in databases and information retrieval (e.g., in inverted indexes or column stores). Please note that random integers are not compressible, by this library or by any other means. If you ever had the means of systematically compressing random integers, you could compress any data source to nothing, by recursive application of your technique. This library can decompress integers at a rate of over 1.2 billions per second (4.5 GB/s). It is significantly faster than generic codecs (such as Snappy, LZ4 and so on) when compressing arrays of integers. The library is used in LinkedIn Pinot, a realtime distributed OLAP datastore. Part of this library has been integrated in Parquet (http://parquet.io/). A modified version of the library is included in the search engine Terrier (http://terrier.org/). This libary is used by ClueWeb Tools (https://github.com/lintool/clueweb). It is also used by Apache NiFi.

  (tags: compression java pfor encoding integers algorithms storage)

• Austerity is an Algorithm

  Fucking hell, things sound grim Down Under:

  Things changed in December 2016, when the government announced that the system had undergone full automation. Humans would no longer investigate anomalies in earnings. Instead, debt notices would be automatically generated when inconsistencies were detected. The government’s rationale for automating the process was telling. “Our aim is to ensure that people get what they are entitled to—no more and no less,” read the press release. “And to crack down hard when people deliberately defraud the system.” The result was a disaster. I’ve had friends who’ve received an innocuous email urging them to check their MyGov account—an online portal available to Australian citizens with an internet connection to access a variety of government services—only to log in and find they’re hundreds or thousands of dollars in arrears, supposedly because they didn’t accurately report their income. Some received threats from private debt collectors, who told them their wages would be seized if they didn’t submit to a payment plan. Those who wanted to contest their debts had to lodge a formal complaint, and were subjected to hours of Mozart’s Divertimento in F Major before they could talk to a case worker. Others tried taking their concerns directly to the Centrelink agency on Twitter, where they were directed to calling Lifeline, a 24-hour hotline for crisis support and suicide prevention. At the end of 2015, my friend Chloe received a notice claiming she owed $20,000 to the government. She was told that she had reported her income incorrectly while on Youth Allowance, which provides financial assistance to certain categories of young people. The figure was shocking and, like others in her position, she grew suspicious. She decided to contest the debt: she contacted all of her previous employers so she could gather pay slips, and scanned them into the MyGov app. “I gave them all of my information to prove that there was no way I owed them $20,000,” she says. The bean counters were unmoved. They maintained that Chloe had reported her after-tax income instead of her before-tax income. As a result, they increased the amount she owed to $30,000. She agreed to a payment plan, which will see her pay off the debt in fortnightly installments of $50 over the course of two decades. “I even looked into bankruptcy because I was so stressed by it,” she says. “All I could think about was the Centrelink debt, and once they upped it to 30k, I was so ashamed and sad and miserable,” she says.

  (tags: austerity algorithms automation dystopia australia government debt-collectors robo-debt dole benefit grim-meathook-future)

• The Irish Border's Ladybird How It Works book on The Technological Solution

  amazing

  (tags: ladybird parody funny ireland politics northern-ireland brexit)

• Mythology about security…

  A valuable history lesson from Jim Gettys:

  Government export controls crippled Internet security and the design of Internet protocols from the very beginning: we continue to pay the price to this day.  Getting security right is really, really hard, and current efforts towards “back doors”, or other access is misguided. We haven’t even recovered from the previous rounds of government regulations, which has caused excessive complexity in an already difficult problem and many serious security problems. Let us not repeat this mistake…

  I remember the complexity of navigating crypto export controls. As noted here, it was generally easier just not to incorporate security features.

  (tags: security crypto export-control jim-gettys x11 history x-windows mit athena kerberos)

• Meet the people who've transformed Dublin's streets into a colourful city-wide gallery - Independent.ie

  great article about the Dublin Canvas project -- great success

  (tags: dublin painting street-art art)

• plugin EVs outsell ICE-driven cars in Norway

  56% of cars registered in March 2018 in Norway were plugin EVs rather than fossil-fuel burning ICE vehicles, with Nissan Leafs well in first place

  (tags: evs pevs nissan cars driving norway green ev)

• Another reason why your Docker containers may be slow

  TL;DR: fadvise() is a bottleneck on Linux machines running many containers

  (tags: linux fadvise filesystems performance docker containers ops)

• Online mattress-in-a-box brands: Why are there so many? - Curbed

  “People ask me what it takes to get into this space,” said Bryan Murphy, founder and president of Tomorrow Sleep. “If you have a [Google] AdWords account [to buy digital ads] and you know a subcontractor, you can sell a mattress online.”

  (tags: mattresses business economics retail adwords online)

• tomnomnom/gron

  'Make JSON greppable!'

  (tags: json gron grep cli tools data hacking golang)

• What worries me about AI – François Chollet – Medium

  One path leads to a place that really scares me. The other leads to a more humane future. There’s still time to take the better one. If you work on these technologies, keep this in mind. You may not have evil intentions. You may simply not care. You may simply value your RSUs more than our shared future. But whether or not you care, because you have a hand in shaping the infrastructure of the digital world, your choices affect us all. And you may eventually be held responsible for them.

  (tags: ai facebook newsfeed technology future silicon-valley google)

• Europe dumps 300,000 UK-owned .EU domains into the Brexit bin - The Register

  "As a result of the withdrawal of the United Kingdom, a holder of a domain name does no longer fulfil the general eligibility criteria... the Registry for .eu will be entitled to revoke such domain name on its own initiative and without submitting the dispute to any extrajudicial settlement of conflicts."

  Apply usual Reg pinch of salt of course. The real announcement states 'this information is subject to any transitional arrangement that may be contained in a possible withdrawal agreement, which is an ongoing negotiation between the United Kingdom and European Commission.' So I guess the plan is to get an agreement in place to avoid this.

  (tags: brexit domains dot-eu eu uk dns the-register)

• Dalzells of Markethill

  an Armagh-based home appliance retail shop, apparently doing good deals and with free delivery to Dublin. recommended by Karlin Lillington: "Superb prices, will do multi-purchase deals, FREE delivery to Meath/Louth/Dublin & bend over backwards to offer service & advice"

  (tags: via:karlin armagh shopping appliances kitchen home import tips)

• Earth’s Wonders Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before – Planet Stories – Medium

  wonderful oblique views from space -- these are fantastic (via Kokogiak)

  (tags: via:kokogiak pics photos satellite mapping earth space wonders oblique)

• rr: lightweight recording & deterministic debugging

  aspires to be your primary C/C++ debugging tool for Linux, replacing — well, enhancing — gdb. You record a failure once, then debug the recording, deterministically, as many times as you want. The same execution is replayed every time. rr also provides efficient reverse execution under gdb. Set breakpoints and data watchpoints and quickly reverse-execute to where they were hit.

  (via Kevin Lyda and b0rk)

  (tags: debug gdb mozilla debugging coding cli c++ c)

• Timeline behind the #CopOnComrades controversy

  A very exhaustive timeline of the online defence of feminism against a few left-wing men in Ireland, courtesy of Andrew Flood.

  (tags: coponcomrades left-wing politics ireland twitter facebook irish-times)

• How Good Is Spotify's Audio Quality? · Baron Schwartz's Website

  Various streaming services (Spotify) use lossy formats (Ogg Vorbis); various audio-casting devices (Chromecast) use other lossy formats (AAC). Crappy audio quality issues ensue.

  (tags: chromecast ogg-vorbis aac audio lossy-encoding compression noise fail spotify)

• Forget Facebook, Russian agents have been pretending to be furries on Tumblr

  whaaat the fuck

  (tags: tumblr russia spies fake-news furries yiffing omgwtf)

• 'Stop hosting GDC in SF' twitter thread

  Emre Deniz: 'My GDC feedback was simple: Stop hosting it in SF. I'll be going back for tourist stuff but for the conference it needs to go. SF is a dangerous city and America is not welcome to non western developers. The city hates us being there, we are worried being there, move it.'

  The twitter thread is replete with scary stories of robberies, TSA hassling attendees, etc.

  (tags: san-francisco us safety gdc conferences travel)

• Examine.com

  Scientific review of nutritional supplements and vitamins, rounding up hundreds of papers and weighting them based on the level of evidence provided

  (tags: health food nutrition vitamins supplements science medicine review vitamin)

• Amazon DynamoDB Adds Support for Continuous Backups and Point-In-Time Recovery (PITR)

  excellent! This is a much-needed feature

  (tags: dynamodb storage databases aws ops architecture recovery)

• Colm MacCárthaigh on TLS 1.3 and the risks of 0-RTT

  here's my advice: if you see a server supporting 0-RTT and that server doesn't give you an iron-clad guarantee that when the key is used, it's deleted, and that your EARLY CONVERSATION can't be repeated ... don't use it.

  (tags: colmmacc tls security ssl 0rtt risks networking crypto)

• What's in your migraine kit?

  Good post on workarounds/pain relief/migraine-abortive treatments from the /r/migraine subreddit. Some of the things I've found helpful (ice-cold Coke, headache stick, and of course triptans), and I few I haven't tried yet, so may give them a try. God damn migraines :(

  (tags: migraine headaches medicine health pain reddit tips)

• Brad Templeton's commentary on the Uber robocar killing a pedestrian

  At this point, it does seem as though a wrongful death lawsuit might emerge from the family of the victim. The fame for the lawyer will cause pro bono representation to appear, and the deep pockets of Uber will certainly be attractive. I recommend Uber immediately offer a settlement the courts would consider generous. And tell us more information about what really happened. And, if it's as surmised, to get their act together. The hard truth is, that if Uber's vehicle is unable to detect a pedestrian like this in time to stop, Uber has no business testing at 40mph on a road like this. Certainly not with an inattentive solo safety driver.

  It certainly sounds like they need to answer questions about LIDAR usage on that car.

• Arena

  Film by Páraic McGloughlin A brief look at the earth from above, based on the shapes we make, the game of life, our playing ground - Arena. Created using Google Earth imagery. Pearse McGloughlin and I collaborated on the audio resulting in something between music and a soundtrack. Audio mastered by TJ LippleHear

• awslabs/awscli-aliases

  The AWS CLI tool supports aliases, a la git, so you can do things like "aws whoami" aliased to "aws sts get-caller-identity".

• The NSA Worked to “Track Down” Bitcoin Users, Snowden Documents Reveal

  'Part of the NSA's Bitcoin access, codenamed MONKEYROCKET, involved essentially tricking targets into using privacy software (a VPN app?) that was actually feeding information directly to the agency.'

• HTTP/2 Test

  'A simple HTTP/2.0 test tool'

• SXSW 2018: A Look Back at the 1960s PLATO Computing System - IEEE Spectrum

  Author Brian Dear on how these terminals were designed for coursework, but students preferred to chat and play games [...] “Out of the top 10 programs on PLATO running any day, most were games,” Dear says. “They used more CPU time than anything else.” In one popular game called Empire, players blast each other’s spaceships with phasers and torpedoes in order to take over planets.

  And PLATO had code review built into the OS:

  Another helpful feature that no longer exists was called Term Comment. It allowed users to leave feedback for developers and programmers at any place within a program where they spotted a typo or had trouble completing a task. To do this, the user would simply open a comment box and leave a note right there on the screen. Term Comment would append the comment to the user’s place in the program so that the recipient could easily navigate to it and clearly see the problem, instead of trying to recreate it from scratch on their own system. “That was immensely useful for developers,” Dear says. “If you were doing QA on software, you could quickly comment, and it would track exactly where the user left this comment. We never really got this on the Web, and it’s such a shame that we didn’t.”

  (tags: plato computing history chat empire gaming code-review coding brian-dear)

• Ten Reasons Why I Don't Like Golang

  When I first started programming in Go, my summary of it was, “The good things are great and the bad things are weird and I can live with them.” After another three years and a few large projects in Go, I no longer like the language and wouldn’t use it for a new project. Here are 10 reasons why, in no particular order.

  (tags: golang go coding languages programming gripes)

• A quantitive analysis of the impact of arbitrary blockchain content on Bitcoin

  'People put all sorts of things into the Bitcoin blockchain - some of it objectionable, some of it illegal. Now what?'

  (tags: blockchain bitcoin ledger immutability internet law crime papers)

• Cameras as Traffic Cops – Hacker Noon

  Guy trains model on NYC traffic camera video to detect blocked bike lanes and bus stops. Estimates "the number of tickets being given represents less than .0001% of infractions". (via lemonodor)

  (tags: via:lemonodor future tickets traffic nyc cameras surveillance bike-lanes bus-stops traffic-law)

• Ken Foxe's Beginner’s Guide to FOI

  This guide is designed to be read by members of the public or journalists looking to dip their toes into the world of Freedom of Information in Ireland. It is not designed to be an authoritative guide to FOI, a history book, or an academic text … it is simply a useful introduction to the first steps, the language, and the things you need to know before you start.

  (tags: foia foi government ireland ken-foxe)

• Apache Airflow at Pandora – Algorithm and Blues

  sounds like they are pretty into Airflow

  (tags: airflow python apache pandora open-source scheduling dags)

• Who Targets Me

  Microtargeting. Misinformation. Psychographic profiling. Install Who Targets Me [a Chrome plugin] to find out who’s trying to win your vote – and how they’re doing it.

  (tags: ads advertising chrome extensions microtargeting politics facebook)

• Interesting Twitter thread on email UI design, vs Slack

  "When redesigning Outlook, we found two basic groups of users: pilers and filers. Pilers kept a single, ever-expanding list of mail in their Inbox and then worked it down to "inbox zero." Filers wrote rules or manually filed mail into folders, creating an organizational system. Filers rely on their bespoke, highly customized knowledge of where things go in their email system, much like you might organize your kitchen in a way that makes sense to you. You know where the strainer or little corn-cob-holders go, and no one else does (or needs to.) Pilers rely on search to find things in their huge amassed pile. We moved Outlook from the fundamental organization unit of "message" to "conversation" (or "thread") so that when pilers found mail via search, messages would return with the context of the surrounding conversation. Both pilers and filers have one key thing in common: their systems require an affirmative, discrete action to take a mail out of their list. Filers file to a folder when done with a message, and pilers archive/delete. This turned out to be essential for people to feel in control."

  really, "filers" (update:) "pilers" are using the UI that GMail pioneered, where credit is due (as far as I know at least).

  (tags: mail ux ui pilers-and-filers filepile email slack outlook)

• 7% of Scott Kelly's Genes Changed After a Year in Space - Universe Today

  The study took into account possible genomic and cognitive changes between the two [twin] brothers. These findings were recently clarified by NASA, which indicated that 93% of Scott Kelly’s genes returned to normal after he returned to Earth while the remaining 7% points were missing. These were attributed to “longer-term changes in genes related to his immune system, DNA repair, bone formation networks, hypoxia, and hypercapnia.” In other words, in addition to the well-documented effects of microgravity – such as muscle atrophy, bone density loss and loss of eyesight – Scott Kelly also experienced health effect caused by a deficiency in the amount of oxygen that was able to make it to his tissues, an excess of CO2 in his tissues, and long-term effects in how his body is able to maintain and repair itself.

  (tags: nasa space iss spaceflight scott-kelly zero-gravity future microgravity health via:elliot)

• Iterating over hash sets quickly in Java

  Interesting datum:

  My numbers are clear: in my tests, it is three times faster to sum up the values in a LinkedHashSet [than a HashSet].

  (tags: performance java locality memory cache-friendly data-structures hashsets linkedhashsets sets)

• Charging the LEAF | Speak EV - Electric Car Forums

  Excellent reference on charge times and connection types for the Nissan Leaf EV

  (tags: nissan leaf ev cars charging nissan-leaf)

• YouTube, the Great Radicalizer - The New York Times

  It seems as if you are never “hard core” enough for YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. It promotes, recommends and disseminates videos in a manner that appears to constantly up the stakes. Given its billion or so users, YouTube may be one of the most powerful radicalizing instruments of the 21st century.

  (tags: youtube culture politics radicalization crazy machine-learning google zeynep-tufekci)

• BAD TRAFFIC: Sandvine’s PacketLogic Devices Used to Deploy Government Spyware in Turkey and Redirect Egyptian Users to Affiliate Ads?

  This report describes our investigation into the apparent use of Sandvine/Procera Networks Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) devices to deliver nation-state malware in Turkey and indirectly into Syria, and to covertly raise money through affiliate ads and cryptocurrency mining in Egypt. 

  Shame on these vendors.

  (tags: egypt espionage infrastructure turkey syria procera dpi malware hacking sandvine)

• The Myth of Authenticity Is Killing Tex-Mex

  Overshadowed by barbecue in its home state, Tex-Mex is the most important, least understood regional cuisine in America

  I, for one, welcome the revival of Tex-Mex

  (tags: cuisine food tex-mex mexican texas barbecue)

• The Great Igloos of Storm Emma - YouTube

  in a once-in-a-lifetime snowstorm, it appears the young Irish male's mind turns to (checks notes) building an igloo and having a party in it

  (tags: igloos funny ireland storm-emma snow wtf humans-of-the-sesh)

• Git, complicated? Of course not! Commits map to isomorphic contours in source-code phase space

  The inspiration for the classic tweet.

  it’s simplest to think of the state of your repository as a point in a high-dimensional ‘code-space’,  in which branches are represented as n-dimensional membranes, mapping the spatial loci of successive commits onto the projected manifold of each cloned repository

  (tags: git incomprehensible funny jargon topology dvcs)

• From toilets to barbershops, Ireland has become visionaries in the igloo business overnight | JOE.ie

  Igloos and bread are having a bit of a moment during Storm Emma

  (tags: storms storm-emma funny igloos ireland)

• how to deal with obnoxious political ads on Facebook

  tl;dr: hide or report the ads. Both will drive up the cost for the advertiser and limit their reach

  (tags: ads facebook social-media reporting antichoice repeal-the-8th)