Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Normally, making up a fake charity for *someone else's* sick dog, pocketing the money (letting the dog die!) would be the primary thing you'd remember about a person. Yet, I bet, like me, you forgot George Santos even did that...on his way to congress tossing lies like rose petals all along his path, like some kind of elemental sprite of dishonesty.

That's an advantage of doing enough terrible things. No one can hold them all in their mind at once: appreciate the true scope of depravity. LMAO

Meta sues FTC, hoping to block ban on monetizing kids’ Facebook data https://arstechnica.com/?p=1987539

#1 fiction bestseller!

Three days after Amazon announced its AI chatbot Q, some employees are sounding alarms about accuracy and privacy issues. Q is “experiencing severe hallucinations and leaking confidential data,” including the location of AWS data centers, internal discount programs, and unreleased features, according to leaked documents obtained by Platformer.

An employee marked the incident as “sev 2,” meaning an incident bad enough to warrant paging engineers at night and make them work through the weekend to fix it.

https://www.platformer.news/p/amazons-q-has-severe-hallucinations

Chrome’s next weapon in the War on Ad Blockers: Slower extension updates

When ad blocking is a cat-and-mouse game, make the mouse slower.

https://arstechnica.com/google/2023/12/chromes-next-weapon-in-the-war-on-ad-blockers-slower-extension-updates/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

US friends, take note. I went to vote in Berlin today and this was the line in front of the polling station. “But wait! There is no line!” Indeed. There is no line because there need not be one. Because it’s about how polling is organised. If you are standing in a line for hours in order to exercise your democratic rights, it’s because someone wants you to.#polling #democracy #righttovote

Good luck.

I just received a journal peer review suggesting that I did not adequately know the literature, and helpfully providing me an extraordinary tally of 14 papers by the same author that I should be citing.

Degree of difficulty: I co-authored two of those fourteen—and still chose not to cite them.

Although most astronomers think that dark matter is explained by some type of non-interacting particle, it could be that we don't understand how gravity works at the largest scales. The concept of Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), proposes that changes to the theory of gravity itself could explain the observations. And these changes should start to be detectable in wide binary stars. Gaia data is giving astronomers a way to verify, and it seems to be ruling out MOND.

http://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17130

NEW: 23andMe disclosed how many people were victims of its data breach: around 14,000.

But the actual number is bound to be higher because 23andMe also said hackers accessed “a significant number of files containing profile information about other users’ ancestry that such users chose to share when opting in to 23andMe’s DNA Relatives feature.”

The company did not say what is this "significant number," nor how many exactly are these "other users."

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/01/23andme-says-hackers-accessed-significant-number-of-files-about-users-ancestry/

The House Select Committee on the Weaponization of Federal Government (yes, that's its real committee name) held a hearing yesterday you might have missed or tuned out on account of its witness list. But it's worth paying attention to because the far-right GOP's contention that everyone is out to censor their first amendment rights is starting to take aim at info sharing efforts between the private sector and the USG to fight Internet and computer security threats.

The pretext for the subcommittee hearing is a "story" that ran this week that decried the "Censorship Industrial Complex," one of several new buzzwords echoed by Rep. Jim Jordan and other GOP members asking questions. Bear in mind that the folks pushing this narrative use this term interchangeably to describe any "anti-disinformation efforts" (duh):

https://public.substack.com/p/ctil-files-1-us-and-uk-military-contractors

The story and the hearing concerned the insidious censorship threat posed by a shadowy entity called the CTI League, which was allegedly started as a joint public-private partnership but which according to the "Twitter files" useful idiot Matt Taibbi is a cleverly disguised effort to censor republican and conservative views on social media.

In reality, the CTI League was one of several groups that formed around the time of the 2020 pandemic to help respond to the crushing number of phishing and scam websites that were taking advantage of the situation. Here's one example:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2020/04/covid-19-has-united-cybersecurity-experts-but-will-that-unity-survive-the-pandemic/

When asked by a GOP committee member to describe the biggest "bombshell" -- the "most alarming thing" -- to come from "the Twitter files," Taibbi answered that the activities of the CTI League were "shocking." He went on to describe how this group maintained censorship spreadsheets with domains numbering in the hundreds of thousands. But he forgot to mention these were PHISHING DOMAINS!!!!!

Here's the giant whopper: Taibbi said there was "a regular, organized stream of communications between the FBI, the Dept of Homeland Security and the largest tech companies in the country," he said. "They had an organized system for flagging content. Not occasionally, but in enormous numbers involving spreadsheets of accounts that ran into the hundreds of thousands. This was shocking to us. This isn't some crazy conspiracy theory. We've already had 4 federal judges rule that this activity violates the first amendment."

Yeah. There was a spreadsheet that several thousand security people had access to that everyone agreed were malicious or phishous. CENSORSHIP!
https://judiciary.house.gov/committee-activity/hearings/hearing-weaponization-federal-government-4

Amazon Fire TVs have found a new and annoying way to slap you in the face with ads https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/1/23984444/amazon-fire-tv-autoplay-ads-on-startup?utm_content=bufferaa667&utm_medium=social&utm_source=bufferapp.com&utm_campaign=buffer

TRAPPIST-1 is one of the most exciting exoplanetary systems discovered, with seven Earth-sized worlds orbiting a sunlike star, three in the habitable zone. It was hoped that the second planet, 1c, would be similar to Venus, with a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere. But observations from JWST showed that it's airless, more like a super-mercury. A new paper suggests that powerful flares from the red dwarf star couldn't have stripped away its atmosphere.

http://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17699

We’re hiring a JavaScript developer to work on Zotero “translators” — the pieces of code that let people save metadata and files to their Zotero libraries from across the web with a single click.

This is an open-ended contract role that can scale up and down in hours based on availability and workload. If you like web scraping, APIs, data formats, and exploring sites in the browser devtools, send us an email!

https://www.zotero.org/jobs/javascript_developer

NY Times has some great reporting here: Just as the administration of George W. Bush blew off warnings of the 9/11 attacks, Netanyahu's government blew off highly specific warnings a year ago about the Hamas plans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html

Hello #Mastodon!

This is my first post on Mastodon. I am usually to be found on www.unmannedspaceflight.com but I will be sharing space-related images here as well.

LAST ASTRO 101 LECTURE of the semester is about to start gosh I'm so excited. Both to be done, and because it's delightfully overwhelming to fit all of astrobiology, the Fermi Paradox, and The Pale Blue Dot into one lecture.

Anyway, you should take a listen to Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot speech if you haven't listened to it in a while. Astronomy is a humbling experience. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GO5FwsblpT8

Some great #news and #journalism-related accounts to follow on the #fediverse (no bots!) :

@arstechnica
@AnnualReviews
@BBC_News_Labs
@damemagazine
@dw_innovation
@flatwaterfreepress
@HorizonMass
@insideclimatenews
@longreads
@mnreformer
@NewsDesk
@ProPublica
@TexasObserver
@TheConversationUS
@thetyee
@TucsonSentinel
@UnicornRiot
@Windspeaker

US House of Representatives Expels First-Term New York Republican

https://www.voanews.com/a/us-house-of-representatives-expels-first-term-new-york-republican-/7380661.html

Steam drops macOS Mojave support, effectively ending life for many 32-bit games

After February 15, all bets are off for Steam on High Sierra and Mojave Macs.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/11/steam-drops-macos-mojave-support-effectively-ending-life-for-many-32-bit-games/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social