Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

My north star is that we will know we're doing it right when we do the research that developers have wished someone had had time or skills or permission to do at their orgs.

Some reflections on behind the scenes:
https://www.drcathicks.com/post/listening-talking-at-leaddev-london

“Based on the reporting so far, the police raid of the Marion County Record [in Marion, KS,] on Friday appears to have violated federal law, the First Amendment, and basic human decency. Everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves," said FPF Director of Advocacy Seth Stern.

"The anti-press rhetoric that’s become so pervasive in this country has become more than just talk and is creating a dangerous environment for journalists trying to do their jobs."

https://freedom.press/news/fpf-statement-on-alarming-police-raid-of-kansas-newspaper/

Most problems that my research area deals with are undecidable, so we either find a complete solution to an approximation of the problem, or we find an approximate solution to the complete problem. These days, when I see an undecidable problem, I feel excited, because I know it's probably an interesting one.

So, I wanna explain why #Hashi's "commercial use" restriction means a proprietary license.

Theoretically, if you were using their project to work on an OSS project that you gave away for free, it wouldn't apply to you, right?

Well, no.

Take, for example, the Kubernetes Project. Kubernetes is a free, open source project, owned by a nonprofit. We also use Terraform to support our infra in a couple places.

Should be fine, right? Nope!

...

Web Environment Integrity has no standing at W3C

“ For a few weeks now we have been hearing concern in the Web community in regard to Web Environment Integrity, and are asked more and more about it. Our silence is due to the fact that the Web Environment Integrity API is not being worked on in W3C, nor has there been any submission to W3C for W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG) review”

#Google #W3C #WebStandards

https://www.w3.org/blog/2023/web-environment-integrity-has-no-standing-at-w3c/

Bogdanov Map, I am so glad I found you!

#mastoArt #codeArt #dynamicalsystem #attractor #bogdanov

In #Physics there are a lot of topics that are widely considered to be hard to understand (entropy is a famous one, but my favourite example is coherence theory in #Optics). Imho, this is almost invariably because of the historical baggage of how they were described originally, before a full understanding was developed.
#ITeachPhysics

Earendel (not -il) is the most distant star observed, 28bn light years away. It's visible because of the gravitational lensing which is pretty easy to see in this image from the JWST.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHL0137-LS

Not every mass extinction in Earth’s history has occurred due to #ClimateChange.

But fossil & temperature records over hundreds of millions of years show climate change is consistently associated with mass extinctions.

'As a journalism professor in Illinois, Meyer said, he had graduate students from Egypt who talked about how people would come into the newspaper office and seize everything so they couldn’t publish. Those students presented a scholarly paper at a conference in Toronto about what it has done to journalism there.

“That’s basically what they’re trying to do here,” Meyer said. “The intervention is just like that repressive government of Egypt. I didn’t think it could happen in America.”'

https://kansasreflector.com/2023/08/11/police-stage-chilling-raid-on-marion-county-newspaper-seizing-computers-records-and-cellphones/

h/t @dangillmor

Whenever I see artwork that suspiciously looks AI-generated

As of one hour ago Terraform is no longer open source

#terraform #opensource

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/commit/b145fbcaadf0fa7d0e7040eac641d9aef2a26433

Fifteen years ago, a couple of MIT students planned to give a talk at Defcon about a vulnerability in the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority's (MBTA) subway fare system. It was entitled Free Subway Rides For Life. The MBTA sued the students, and got a restraining order, canceling the talk and preventing the students from communicating truthful information to the public. I represented them (along with other EFF attorneys).

Fast forward to now. Two high school students have replicated the vuln, extended the research and gave a talk at Defcon this year. No, MTBA didn't bother to fix the problem.... BUUUT they did refrain from suing the researchers this time. And they even invited the students to HQ to give a presentation about their research.

I love this story and these students and am proud to have been a part of this history, and even more pleased that authorities have learned a lesson about appreciating hackers and the important work that you do.

https://www.wired.com/story/mtba-charliecard-hack-defcon-2023/

The North American Jewish community’s official security organization urges Elon Musk to better monitor antisemitic and violent posts. https://www.jns.org/antisemitism/twitter/23/8/10/309702/

Sonos has been unable to fix Arc soundbars’ “pop of death” for over 2 years

It has told users to disable Dolby Atmos.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/08/sonos-has-been-unable-to-fix-arc-soundbars-pop-of-death-for-over-2-years/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

A thoughtful piece on a dominant new COVID variant and rising hospitalizations in the US. (It is, fittingly, named for Eris, the Greek goddess of discord and strife.) https://www.vox.com/health/2023/8/9/23825133/covid-eris-variant-eg5-cdc-pandemic-coronavirus-precautions-masking-booster-vaccine #Covid #Covid19 #Eris #WHO #stillmasking

I wrote about the whole zoom "AI" ToS clause public relations debacle for @WIRED, including what zoom might need to do to gain back customer and user trust, and what other tech creators and corporations need to understand about where people are, right now:
https://www.wired.com/story/zoom-became-a-part-of-daily-life-it-needs-to-tell-users-exactly-how-its-using-their-data/

Students! We can’t prove you cheated with ChatGPT *now,* but do you really want proof coming out in five, ten, fifteen years, right when you’re running for office?

Also worth remembering that tech companies standing up for the right to notify their users of surveillance orders is the only reason that the official DOJ policy for the time period for gag orders is now 1 year instead of indefinite, thanks to Microsoft.