Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

I've been using Inkscape for over 10 years. If I had been using Illustrator for 10 years I would have paid Adobe over $2,500 in "rental" fees for a subscription that stops as soon as I stop paying.

Instead I started paying $5 a month to Inkscape to help make sure we can all use it for free for as long as we want.

#inkscape #openSource

From xkcd's What If?:
What if we aimed the Hubble Telescope at Earth?
https://youtu.be/2LSyizrk8-0

The universe may last forever, but there’s no guarantee. A Big Rip, a Big Chill, proton or vacuum decay are all threats to the cosmos, ushering in a final curtain. It’s “End of Eternity” on Big Picture Science. Listen here: https://bigpicturescience.org/episodes/end-of-eternity

#podcast #science #universe #cosmos #scicomm

Automakers’ data privacy practices “are unacceptable,” says US senator

OEMs collect too much personal data and share it too freely, says Senator Markey.

https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/12/automakers-data-privacy-practices-are-unacceptable-says-us-senator/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

You may have heard about the hate crime where three Palestinian students were shot in Burlington, Vt., last week.

Hisham Awartani has been paralyzed from the chest down.

Here is a fund for his care:
https://gofund.me/d2d08c99

And an article that also links to the fund and explains what happened:
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/palestinian-american-student-shot-vermont-paralyzed-chest-rcna127803

Astronomers found a super-bright supermassive black hole blasting out X-rays so far away its light took over 13 BILLION YEARS to reach us.

https://badastronomy.substack.com/p/a-giant-black-hole-a-long-long-way

Psst: I feel this way too (about trying to write political satire about the post-Brexit UK):

For National Cat Lover’s Month, we’ll take you on a Hubble tour of the beautiful and complex Cat’s Eye Nebula! Located about 4,000 light-years away, this planetary nebula is a visual "fossil record" of the evolution of a dying star: https://bit.ly/47Bxmva
#astronomy #cats

Wait, NORAD tracks my sleigh? In real-time?! This is outrageous! I never gave permission for this!

Goodness gracious, all I want to do is break into your houses and leave gifts relative to how good I think you’ve been, which I’ve been tracking meticulously in my book along with your constant whereabouts and sleeping patterns.

Normalize saying "I don’t know enough about the topic to be able to comment."

This one aged pretty well. IMHO, it's more true now than ever.

This is pretty clever. A phish going around spoofing Wordpress and telling people to install a security update that references a fake CVE. In this case, the "patch" is a website backdoor.

https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2023/12/psa-fake-cve-2023-45124-phishing-scam-tricks-users-into-installing-backdoor-plugin/

@cstross And congrats @jerry for hosting so many of the most-followed accounts in the Fediverse right here on the @Infosec.Exchange instance!

Shout-out to:
@SwiftOnSecurity
@malwaretech
@briankrebs
@micahflee

Link rot is so very, very real.

I just visited a site that 'archives' articles from 2015. The majority of links no longer works.

What to do? You could archive pages, and link to the archived pages (I've seen many people do this). But how durable is that? Will those archival sites exist still in 10 years time?

I'm used to consult books that are centuries old. That we're unable now to archive digital stuff for longer than a couple of years is terrifying. #archives #digitalhumanities

What’s sad is realising you live in a world where every exaggerated analogy you used to make a point is actually happening:

Having Google in schools is like having McDonalds in nutrition class. (I find out that McDonalds does, in fact, sponsor nutrition classes in US schools.)

Having a surveillance capitalist sponsor a conference on free and open source/human rights is like having an oil company sponsor a climate conference. (Forget sponsoring, turns out head of #Cop28 runs an oil firm.)

🤬

Our oligarchs are so rich they don’t need to hire assassins to take care of the pesky journalists who cover their crimes, like they do in less wealthy countries.

They just obliterate the truth tellers and fact checkers with money.

#Meta #Harvard #Disinformation #Corruption

https://live-whistleblower-aid.pantheonsite.io/joan-donovan-press-release/

No further investments in Virgin Galactic, says Richard Branson

Branson's business empire "no longer has the deepest pockets."

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/12/no-further-investments-in-virgin-galactic-says-richard-branson/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Rescued from the physics lab.

@martinvermeer @anand @pluralistic I keep saying this to any profs in the US who will listen. I abhor cheating, but using the possibility of cheaters as an excuse to deploy surveillance and invade the privacy of all students is not on.

We need to be activists to demand the staffing levels in US public education needed to do more nuanced and equitable types of assessment like oral exams, open book, etc. #UCAccessNow

Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine lost off-site power overnight and temporarily relied on emergency diesel generators for the electricity it needs to cool its reactors and for other essential nuclear safety and security functions. - IAEA statement
https://www.iaea.org/newscenter/pressreleases/update-200-iaea-director-general-statement-on-situation-in-ukraine