The Promenade in Star Trek Deep Space 9 has some businesses you wouldn't expect.
When in production in the 90s I'm guessing staff never assumed this would become public. (A Thread)
#StarTrek #DS9 #DeepSpace9 #ContentWarningUnbridledNerdiness
In case folks aren't aware, the Internet Archive now has a scholar version with a huge collection of academic work available.
#academicchatter #academicmastodon #academic #education #open
People are annoyed by Youtube ads. Instead of spending too much energy to disable ads, start to upload your videos on Peertube:
Peertube is to Youtube what Mastodon is to Twitter. But better because people don’t need to create an account, they can subscribe to your videos channel directely with their Mastodon account (or other Fediverse tool).
My video channel: @oneploumshow
Let’s raise awareness about Peertube:
One of the world's largest online travel agencies, Booking.com, is being used by fraudsters to trick hotel guests into handing over their payment card details.
How do I know? The fraudsters tried the trick with me.
Threat intel people: if you are at a company that can offer 404 Media tools, data, resources, and you want help our journalism, get in touch. I'm continuing to cover criminal groups, drug traffickers etc. I have pDNS, always interested in other tools
Obviously we went from salaries to $0. As a four person startup we don't have the funds to pay for access to certain tools. Some people already like what we do in general and help out. Email, DM or Signal if there is anything you think would be useful to us.
https://www.404media.co/high-life-hackers-national-menace-acg-the-comm-braiden-williams/
I just learned about subplot mosaics in @matplotlib today, and I think it's neat.
https://matplotlib.org/stable/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.subplot_mosaic.html
Mathematicians and math educators only, please. Which is correct?
(Background - Math was my best subject, but it was decades ago, and now that I’m tutoring my niece I run into things like this… This is a genuine request for assistance, not a trap!)
At some point, probably long after I left a math class, I started assuming the square root sign meant both roots. I am now becoming aware that it only means the principal (positive) root, and if you want both roots you have to be explicit.
Comments very welcome.
The HTTP/2 protocol 0-day got a lot of attention last week. It was definitely a big deal, as evidenced by its ability to cause 4xx and 5xx errors for Cloudflare customers. But the thing I think a lot of people didn't understand is the vulnerability really only affected load balancers and super big cloud providers. They were all patched by the time we learned of the vulnerability. What I think a lot of people lost sight of was that there are already a million other easier ways to DDoS smaller players who had yet to patch, so they weren't really affected.
Here is a Proof of Concept demonstrating the #samba smbd CVE-2023-3961 #vulnerability
1. On victim host running vulnerable Samba set up a unix domain socket only accessible as root user:
$ sudo socat UNIX-LISTEN:/pwned,mode=700,fork stdout
2. On attacking host:
$ smbtorture -U "" -N ncacn_np:victimhost[/pipe/../../../../../pwned] rpc.echo
At least stock Debian install samba allows anonymous exploitation in this manner. This is quite alarming, to say the least.
Note: smbtorture is built as part of samba build procedure – On Debian based systems you can use sudo apt build-dep samba && apt source samba && cd samba-* && dpkg-buildpackage to get it. Specify LD_LIBRARY_PATH as needed to make it find the necessary shared objects.
Note that smbtorture will talk MS-RPC protocol to the unix domain socket, and as such is not directly useful as generic #exploitation tool. #Weaponizing the vulnerability is left as exercise of the reader.
In my opinion, what most people are missing about the @AsahiLinux and @marcan efforts is that most system integrators like Dell, Lenovo don't dedicate even a tenth as much time to Linux support as the Asahi team does These companies usually restrict themselves to ensuring vendor driver availability and some lightweight QA which more often than not results in an experience fraught with quirks from faulty hardware support that you have to add on top of the usual Linux desktop UX caveats.
Before sharing a take on #socialmedia, 4 questions to consider:
1) How likely is it that my words will be interpreted as I intended them?
2) Do I have an informed perspective?
3) Might I hurt others, even unintentionally?
4) What communities might I not be seeing on this issue?
"Evacuation orders by Israel to hospitals in northern Gaza are a death sentence for the sick and injured"
Link to full World Health Organization statement: https://www.who.int/news/item/14-10-2023-evacuation-orders-by-israel-to-hospitals-in-northern-gaza-are-a-death-sentence-for-the-sick-and-injured
Meanwhile, the communications minister of #Israel is proposing emergency regulations that would allow police to arrest citizens and journalists who publish content deemed to "harm national morale.” https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-war-minister-seeks-arrest-journalists-harm-national-morale
Oh, speaking of Wikipedia, there's a small group of blind editors which I'm a part of called WikiBlind. We can provide help and advice to people using screen readers for editing Wikimedia projects, including bypassing that bloody captcha that Wikimedia still hasn't provided an accessible alternative for. That really grinds my gears.
Anyway, if that's something you're interested in, have a look here.
People who pull crap like reporting other people because they're "doing Mastodon wrong": you are making Mastodon worse, not better. You are driving people away who have every right to be here. Stop it. If you can't be helpful, don't say anything. I block people like this on sight.
I encourage others to fight back against the HOA types: they're making the Fediverse worse for all of us. Be a friendly, helpful neighbor, not a Church Lady.
'ChatGPT use shows that the grant-application system is broken' https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03238-5 - I'd go further; that LLMs can fool bureaucracies with bullshit shows the role of bureaucracy has never been to properly order and regulate, but simply to obfuscate the location of real power
Police in #Illinois say a boy was killed and a woman critically injured after they were stabbed by a man who targeted them because they were Muslim. https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2023/10/15/23918129/muslim-hate-crime-wadea-al-fayoume-plainfield-joseph-czuba-palestinian-israel-war-murder
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.