Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

New: the Taliban took control of the domain "queer.af" (af being the TLD of Afghanistan). With the Taliban now controlling the country, it is taking back domains. This had the effect of killing the queer.af Mastodon instance https://www.404media.co/taliban-shuts-down-queer-af-domain-breaking-mastodon-instance/

Amazon’s algorithm “deliberately” hides the best deals, lawsuit claims

Hundreds of millions of Amazon's US customers have overpaid, class action says.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/02/amazons-algorithm-deliberately-hides-the-best-deals-lawsuit-claims/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

I feel like such an underachiever. I have had a Flipper Zero since it launched and I still have the same number of cars I started with. #InfoSec #Canada

The 0day dumpster fire that is the security hardware industry rn continues unabated this week.

From Rapid7:

"Critical Fortinet FortiOS CVE-2024-21762 Exploited
Feb 12, 2024

On February 8, 2024 Fortinet disclosed multiple critical vulnerabilities affecting FortiOS, the operating system that runs on Fortigate SSL VPNs. The critical vulnerabilities include CVE-2024-21762, an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in SSLVPNd that could allow remote unauthenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code or commands on Fortinet SSL VPNs via specially crafted HTTP requests.

According to Fortinet’s advisory for CVE-2024-21762, the vulnerability is “potentially being exploited in the wild.” The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added CVE-2024-21762 to their Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) list as of February 9, 2024, confirming that exploitation has occurred."

https://www.rapid7.com/blog/post/2024/02/12/etr-critical-fortinet-fortios-cve-2024-21762-exploited/

https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/alerts/2024/02/09/cisa-adds-one-known-exploited-vulnerability-catalog

I have to admit, the fact that I've seen a ton of birds on here in the last 48 hours and still have no idea what the score in the game was is pretty great.

Feeling like the choices you're making about what you want, and what you don't want, to see, is a pretty great thing.

Up to isomorphism?
Nah, but I'm definitely down to isomorphism.

Research from the Fraunhofer Institut shows that in Germany, tire wear is the single largest source of microplastics, and it's much larger than the next source which is -- wait for it -- abrasion of plastic from road surfaces.

Sounds like Germans like to burn rubber (except that car tires are no longer ctual rubber but a composite containing lots of plastic).

https://www.celticwater.co.uk/bloghow-does-plastic-get-into-the-ocean-plastic-pollution-from-roads/

In grad school I met some of the luminaries of algorithms and complexity theory, including Laci Babai who proved that graph isomorphism (GI) has a quasi-polynomial time algorithm.

GI is this notorious problem in complexity theory because it's in NP, but not known to be NP-hard, nor known to be in P. They call it "between P and NP." Decades of work have gone to trying to resolve its complexity. And in every talk about GI, they mention that the theory work is all just theory, while the people who want to solve GI in practice have lightning fast algorithms to do so (much faster than the theoretical best suggests).

I recall at CCC one year, I sat around with Bill Gasarch and Lance Fortnow, who had the endearing habit of chatting with young grad students about P vs NP even though we didn't know shit. The conversation turned to GI, and I asked who uses these fast algorithms. They both said something along the lines of, "my friends in chemistry say it's important, but that's about as much as I know."

Well, finally this week I've got my foot in the door with some chemistry experts who are willing to chat about GI. I've found their open source code, and as long as the chemistry domain knowledge isn't too overwhelming, I'm hoping this will make for an excellent chapter of Practical Math for Programmers.

Good morning! It’s the first Tuesday in February, and so you’re all invited to look through Wikipedia’s List of common misconceptions (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions) per xkcd custom.

That wealthy tech 46-year-old who’s trying to live forever?

Avoiding booze and sleeping well and taking supplements and experimenting with injecting himself with blood plasma from his 18 year old son?

Turns out he got COVID in 2022 …

… and by his own report lost 15% of his ling capacity, from which has yet to recover

Excellent post about the lessons from this, by Nate Bear: https://www.donotpanic.news/p/the-billionaire-who-wants-to-live

(Via @AnnaAnthro and @EverMama8_)

Every day lately people ask me why the Dev Success Lab has been successful & every day I'm like "science wants to be free." You want social science at your org? Get leaders who are willing to invest in it, protect it and get out of the way. Take it out of product depts and take it out of marketing depts.

I'm hiring (2) scientist roles and I literally cannot even read through the number of resumes from psychologists who want to help software teams. You think the talent isn't there? IT'S THERE.

Meanwhile in Canada

“If you’ve ever been blown away by an image of outer space, it’s a pretty safe bet it was taken by a spacecraft.”
Not the best opening for an article on modern astronomy 🙄
Amateur & professional ground-based astronomy continues to generate spectacular imagery & scientifically, cutting-edge ground-based telescopes will play a vital role well into the future, as the construction of the wide-field Rubin Observatory & the 39-m diameter European ELT demonstrate.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/feb/11/space-telescopes-hubble-james-webb-nasa-astronomy

From the series “Astrophysics In The Forest” here a black hole with an accretion disk and its axial relativistic jet.
#photography #astrophysics #forest #Astrodon

Do you, or have you ever, used a graphical user interface? If you use #Windows, #macOS, or any version of #Linux with a window manager or desktop environment, you can thank Dr. Clarence "Skip" Ellis.

Dr. Ellis worked at Xerox PARC, the research organization that developed the modern GUI. Icons, windows, the mouse, Ethernet-based networking, laser printing - all of these (and more) came out of PARC. Dr. Ellis led the team that created Officetalk, the first program to use icons and the Internet. He got his start at 15 years old showing a local tech company how to reuse punch cards, which was a game-changer back in 1958.

Oh, and he was also the first black man to earn a PhD in Computer Science.

#BlackHistoryMonth #BlackHistory #BlackMastodon #ComputerScience @blackmastodon

https://elective.collegeboard.org/clarence-skip-ellis-computer-science-pioneer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarence_Ellis_(computer_scientist)
https://www.redhat.com/en/command-line-heroes/season-6/clarence-ellis

@perigee @slothrop

Most software is designed to be great for a very small set of people and one of many varieties of terrible for nearly everyone else.

"Accessibility Options" are so limited and fall short of what's possible. Even though most people will have poor vision as they age, or struggle with touch interfaces due to dexterity at some point in life.

I wish there was a way to bring more focus and investment to this issue.

They did WHAT
https://retractionwatch.com/2024/02/05/no-data-no-problem-undisclosed-tinkering-in-excel-behind-economics-paper/

In ads: Our apps mind their business. Not yours.

In court: Given Apple’s extensive privacy disclosures, no reasonable user would expect that their actions in Apple’s apps would be private from Apple.

#Privacy #Security #Cybersecurity #Apple #iPhone #InfoSec #dataprivacy