Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

New from 404 Media: hackers broke into an AI hiring chatbot, were able to hire or reject applicants, see personal info. I was sent a 30 min video of access. Also showed the chatbot seemingly automatically rejecting an applicant based on certain criteria https://www.404media.co/hackers-break-into-hiring-ai-chat-bot-chattr/

Mandiant, the Google-owned company that sells cyber security services for large sums of money, got its Twitter account hacked last week.

Today, @mandiant issued a terse and vaguely-worded update that strongly suggests (1) the password protecting the account was weak and readily guessable and (2) the account had previously used SMS, the weakest form of 2FA available before eventually allowing 2FA to lapse entirely. I asked for clarification and a representative responded: "we ultimately aren’t going to be sharing further details at this time."

It's reasonable to ask billion-dollar security companies to account for mistakes that have the potential to harm customers or the public at large. So much for transparency.

Young astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar presented his results on electron degeneracy pressure and the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star to a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society #OTD in 1935.

This maximum mass is now known as the "Chandrasekhar Limit." It is about 1.4 M☉, or 3 x 10³⁰ kg.

Below this mass a spent star settles down into a stable white dwarf. More massive stars continue to collapse, eventually becoming neutron stars or black holes.

Photo: Getty Images

This tracking stuff on the Internet is past ridiculous. I notice that when I pull up my Orders page on Amazon, uBlock blocks 133 items. When I pull up Accuweather for my town, it blocks 273 items.

Here on Mastodon, both uBlock and Privacy Badger read zero. Funny how that is.

#Internet #privacy

Twin Peaks

Vaðhorn, showing off. 1086 metres/3562 feet of gorgeousness.

Midday in early November, between Daladalur in Fáskrúðsfjörður and Breiðdalur in Fjarðabyggð, eastern #Iceland.

Please read the ALT tag for more...
@photography

#DailyPhoto #TravelThursday #WeatherPhotography #LandscapePhotography

Well, Google, ya gone and done it.

I just uninstalled Chrome, and installed Firefox. The last two days, YouTube turned to shit on me - won't load videos, is clearly heavily throttled. I switch to Firefox - YouTube works perfectly.

If you've been putting off abandoning Chrome, it's a LOT easier than I expected. Firefox imported my history, my logins/passwords, bookmarks, and so on. Completely painless. Chrome has become thoroughly enshittified. Leave it behind.

I'm very excited to announce the first column of my "Decay Theory" series for Atlas Obscura. This one's about the death of the suburban American shopping mall. It's easy to write off the closure of malls as the result of online shopping - but their fate was likely sealed years before Amazon became the brick and mortar shredding juggernaut it is today. Here's the link! https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-life-and-death-of-the-suburban-american-mall

Which force is stronger: gravity or electromagnetism?

Unfortunately this question is like "if they had a fight, which would win: a lion or a shark?" It depends on the details. Like: are they fighting on land or in the water?

So, we should be more precise. Suppose you have two electrons. They repel due to electromagnetism - this is usually called the 'electrostatic' force - and they attract due to gravity. The electrostatic force between them is about 4.17 × 10⁴² times bigger than the gravitational force.

But suppose you have two protons. Their charge is just as big as that of the electron, with the opposite sign. But they are 1836 times as massive. So now we have to divide by 1836². The electrostatic force between protons is only 1.24 × 10³⁶ times bigger than the gravitational force. Still a lot, of course.

These statements are true for a wide range of distances. We could talk about what happens if the distance between the particles gets really small or really big, but very conservatively any distance between 10⁻¹⁰ meters and 10¹⁰ meters should be fine here.

Thanks to facts like this, people often say that electromagnetism is 10⁴⁰ times stronger than gravity. That's both vague and very rough, but it's easy to remember.

When you're dealing with stars, something very different happens. Their tends to be very small, per atom - precisely because electromagnetism is so strong that a highly charged star would explode! So the gravitational force between stars is vastly bigger than the electrostatic force between them.

And the same is true of other really big things, like planets or galaxies.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gr22g7UK6l8

Hi. This is Renée, the head of Infoblox Threat Intel (@knitcode). Myself and a few of my researchers are sharing this Mastodon account. Our plan is to toot about suspicious and malicious activity in DNS. Our team tends to write very in-depth papers and want to use Mastodon to complement that with nuggets we've seen, updates on the DNS threat actors or TTPs we are seeing, and articles we are reading. Here goes! #dns #threatintel #malware #phishing #cybersecurity #infosec #infoblox #introduction

It's official: NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital (which includes Columbia and Weill Cornell) is reinstating its mask requirement for all visitors, staff, and patients.

Project Diana pointed an SCR-271 bed-spring radar antenna at the rising moon #OTD in 1946 and broadcast a series of short signals.

Each signal echoed off the moon and returned about 2.5s later, proving that radio could penetrate the ionosphere.

This was an important result for the nascent field of satellite communications, but reports of the project ignored the contributions of a Black physicist.

Image: https://cybercoe.army.mil/SIGNALSCH/OCOS/HISTORY/history_project_diana.html

Hey after a life of running my own businesses or making my own jobs I've never had one of these to celebrate

I, uh, I got promoted! 🎉

Celebration suggestions welcome. I am getting pie.

There won’t be any surprises when #NASA #NASAGISS #GISTEMP and #NOAA announce their official 2023 #temperatures tomorrow. #Climate #ClimateChange … … tune in (link here to YouTube…) https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-noaa-to-announce-2023-global-temperatures-climate-conditions/

The real headline here should be:

"Even after being purged with no explanation, prominent journalists cling to toxic platform hellbent on undermining a free press"

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d948x/x-purges-prominent-journalists-leftists-with-no-explanation

Okay, so people are encouraging me to post more here, but maybe to ignore the replies... So I'll post my latest on Elon/Bill Ackman and their rather confused take on free speech that seems focused on punishing journalists for reporting on things these billionaires don't like. https://www.techdirt.com/2024/01/10/free-speech-absolutist-elon-musk-temporarily-bans-journalists-as-free-speech-absolutist-bill-ackman-threatens-slapp-suit-against-journalists/

Of course I support #TheBezzle #Crowdfunding by @pluralistic - which Audible will not sell as an #audiobook because of #DRM BS. #PrisonTech, #DotBomb #Enshittification and the same Martin Hench I loved in the previous book, #RedTeamBlues that you can bundle with this pledge, if you missed it.