We've been considering shutting down our Mastodon instance due to the level of hate directed towards us on the platform including harassment and fabricated stories targeting our project members. We've decided to import the minimal FediNuke blocklist to cut down on some of this from reaching us.
https://writer.oliphant.social/oliphant/the-oliphant-social-blocklist
However, this is far from sufficient as much of the harassment comes from mainstream Mastodon instances. Support for the harassment is pervasive in many open source communities.
City of Hope in Duarte, California, has maintained masking requirements, and this has prevented hospital-acquired #COVID19 there entirely, according to Vijay Trisal, MD, chief medical officer at City of Hope.
“Our policies enabled us to achieve zero nosocomial infections, zero outbreaks.”
Malware found on the Rust package repo (Crate)
Back in December 2022, #Rackspace got hit with ransomware on their Hosted Service, via exploitation of ProxyNotShell - as I reported at the time.
Rackspace have so far spent north of $10m on incident response. This excludes ongoing legal and professional services costs.
Outside of the $10m there are other costs listed. I think it's safe to say the Microsoft Exchange incident cost Rackspace... a lot. https://www.expressnews.com/business/article/rackspace-expenses-ransomware-attack-18331049.php
YIKES.
Following Elon Musk’s lead, Big Tech is surrendering to disinformation
Facebook and YouTube are receding from their role as watchdogs against conspiracy theories ahead of the 2024 presidential election
"The evolution of the companies’ practices was described by more than a dozen current and former employees... The new approach marks a sharp shift from the 2020 election."
Seriously, WTF College Board?
https://gizmodo.com/sat-college-board-tells-facebook-tiktok-your-scores-gpa-1850768077
Well, that's a switch. A guy in a diner in NH on ABCNews tonight...
Diner asks Tim Scott: "If you can't stand up to Trump, how are you gonna stand up to the President of China and Russia.?"
Good question.
Way to go, Ireland! All employers are legally obliged to conduct risk assessments & implement control measures to address indoor air quality, and this includes schools according to their new Codes of practice for Indoor Air Quality:
#CleanTheAir #covid19 #CleanAir IsAHumanRight
So now the deadbird site, formerly known as Twitter, is inviting developers to come back and "build what's next" with the much abused API.
Twitter (and Reddit)'s greed-infused API restrictions wrecked a project we (ASU News Co/Lab) were doing to help journalists send corrections down the same social media pathways as the original journalism.
The idea what we'd ever work with them again is a sick joke.
Global COVID monitoring is crashing as BA.2.86 variant raises alarm
"This is on the shoulders of governments right now."
On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds, introduced the world to Linux through an online post. Linus Torvalds developed the kernel, initially shared as source code, and later as bootable floppy disk images.
Early distributions included Torvalds's "Boot-Root" images, MCC Interim Linux, Softlanding Linux System (SLS), H.J. Lu's "bootable rootdisks," and Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, a commercial distribution.
Do you want "smart" cells for customizable treatment?
Research into creating cells from scratch not only teaches us about the fundamental building blocks of life, but also opens up opportunities to innovate and make life function in new ways
University College London scientists have reproduced the protein scaffolding holding up the structures of cells using not proteins, but DNA, forming strands of oligonucleotides with mutable thicknesses
Wow. This is actually pretty big news.
The first RCT trial for immediate access to HRT--testosterone to transmascs--has published its findings. In it, 52% of those given immediate access to testosterone had an **IMMEDIATE CESSATION** of their previously-present suicidal ideation, compared to 5% of those given a placebo. A treatment being *ten times* more effective than placebo is pretty much as decisive as it gets.
https://www.miragenews.com/testosterone-treatment-boosts-mental-health-of-1029278/
Great news: Free KN95 masks are now available from public health vending machines in NYC.
This is amazing work! Not everyone can afford to buy high quality masks regularly. If we want more people to wear masks, high quality masks should be available for free everywhere. Having them in public health vending machines in NYC is a great first step!
Introducing Bark! Low-latency multi-receiver live-sync lossless audio streaming for local networks. It's like Sonos, but open source, so nobody can brick your devices remotely. It's also written in Rust :)
It sends 48khz uncompressed float32 data over UDP multicast. It can achieve playback sync to within hundreds of microseconds in ideal conditions, and usually to within a millisecond.
I've been working on it in my spare time over the past week, and I'm pretty happy with how it's shaped up. I have three receivers setup and it works remarkably well at keeping everything in sync as I walk around my house. For now it only really works on Linux, and supports Pipewire (and Pulse in theory), but there's no huge impediment to making it truly cross-platform.
It also features a fancy live stats subcommand, which can used on any computer in the same multicast domain to watch the status of the stream cluster:
Theoretical physicist by training (PhD in quantum open systems/quantum information), University lecturer for a bit, and currently paying the bills as an engineer working in optical communication (implementation) and quantum communication (concepts), though still pursuing a little science on the side. I'm interested in physics and math, of course, but I enjoy learning about really any area of science, philosophy, and many other academic areas as well. My biggest other interest is hiking and generally being out in nature.