Nick @internic@social.cleverlibre.org

Gentle reminder for anyone who might be thinking of purchasing books for their significant other(s) this holiday season: take a photo of their bookshelf.

I promise you the bookstore clerk will be able to use this to good effect.

Deeply troubled by this decision that will only fund tech education in the absence of DEI support, enshrining the exclusion and discrimination that have been built into engineering for decades

https://www.wpr.org/uw-regents-dei-programs-funding-robin-vos

Here we go with the Facebook defederation civil war again...

You can now access Apple’s official diagnostics tool online for DIY repairs

Parts pairing still irks right-to-repair activists, though.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/12/you-can-now-access-apples-official-diagnostics-tool-online-for-diy-repairs/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

An exciting development for a new Covid vaccine: inhaled single dose induces strong mucosal immunity and protection in multiple species, including non-human primates, and prevents transmission across all variants assessed

https://nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06809-8

Blog entry: When agencies procure custom software, but keep the source closed, they are putting themselves at a significant disadvantage. There are some enormously compelling arguments—and some surprising arguments—in favor of agencies preemptively publishing source code. https://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/2023/12/publish-open-source/

So much for people saying Threads won't support Fediverse integration. I've been dogfooding the feature since before the service launched and the team has 100% been planning to support interoperability with Mastodon from day one.

Kudos to all the folks on the Threads team who've been working on this. So glad to see this test announced before the end of the year.

https://www.threads.net/@zuck/post/C0zXcQmxO77

New long-sleeve shirts and tote bags fresh from the Signal test kitchen!

Shirts are available in S - 3XL in Natural & Black.
Totes are available in Black.

https://signal.org/blog/trend-report-use-signal/

Manufacturer deliberately bricked trains repaired by competitors, hackers find

The train manufacturer accused the hackers of slander.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/12/manufacturer-deliberately-bricked-trains-repaired-by-competitors-hackers-find/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Does anyone have a helpful primer on Mastodon searches? I want to do things like finding all posts from user X who mentioned the phrase y. I seem to remember reading a post that provided the syntax, but web searches are now failing me.

I know some people don't want their public Mastodon posts to be searchable. This reminder isn't for them. It's for everyone else: Please take a minute to update your Mastodon preferences to make your public posts searchable. This ensures more people can easily find your public posts on a given topic. This makes Mastodon a more useful place for all of us and gives Mastodon holdouts more incentive to join the fediverse.

The Polish hackers who heroically fixed a series of NEWAG passenger trains that the manufacturer had artificially bricked with DRM are now being threatened with lawsuits from NEWAG. NEWAG has also filed a complaint with Polish authorities and has demanded the trains be removed from service.

Hackers fixed the trains *with permission from the trains' owner*

Repair expert told us this is "classic OEM bullshit," just on a train this time

https://www.404media.co/polish-hackers-repaired-trains-the-manufacturer-artificially-bricked-now-the-train-company-is-threatening-them/

A red-letter day in the Kingdom of Weinersmith
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/05/opinion/space-billionaires-sex.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

FFmpeg multithreading has landed in the dev branch! This is going to be a really big deal once it lands in a stable release; looks like it should mean substantial performance improvements. https://www.phoronix.com/news/FFmpeg-CLI-MT-Merged

So I can finally tell you about one of the things I've been being SUPER impatient about:

If you're out in the world and happen to see a magazine with the words "Time," "Special Edition," "Artificial Intelligence," and "A New Age Of Possibilities" on the cover, you uhh… might wanna give pg. 28 a look 👀

The @verge's Nilay Patel writes eloquently about how journalism erred in relying on "platform daddies" like Twitter. He says, rightly, that they shouldn't make the same mistake now.

But he doesn't mention federated systems like Mastodon, offering only the briefest nod to Bluesky, and that comes in a passing quote from a journo is is making the same mistakes.

https://www.theverge.com/c/features/23993135/twitter-breaking-news-history

CVS, Rite Aid, Walgreens hand out medical records to cops without warrants

Lawmakers want HHS to revise health privacy law to require warrants.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/12/cvs-rite-aid-walgreens-hand-out-medical-records-to-cops-without-warrants/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Even CNN is picking up the "hey, uh, Netanyahu actually helped fund Hamas to destabilize the peace process" story:

https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/11/middleeast/qatar-hamas-funds-israel-backing-intl/index.html

NOT NEWS: Stanford epidemiologist who wrote 324 papers from 2020-2022 expresses grave concern about the proliferation of "extremely productive authors" who wrote a mere 180 or more papers during the same period, suspects fraud is at play, blames global South.

NEWS: Nature sees fit to cover it.

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03865-y

At least 347 species known to have been killed by house cats are threatened, endangered or extinct. Please keep cats indoors https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cats-kill-a-staggering-number-of-species-across-the-world/