ML2 @mathlover@social.cleverlibre.org

Google is down party! YouTube, Gmail, Drive are all down. Maybe some alternatives to their services have some time to shine now.

Alternative to gmail? @Tutanota Alternative to YouTube? Odysee.com Alternative to Drive? Nextcloud, @operationtulip

#YouTubeDOWN #Google

You guys know I like to bash Go, but... FUCK!

"The Go security team has determined that the root causes of the vulnerabilities cannot be reliably addressed."

Ok, your language design has some serious flaw that can't be fixed, so they are basically saying "Yup, a core library is going to be vulnerable for a long time".

Also, this is going since August 2020, according to the related post. Project Zero works way fast (30 days) to disclose issues on every other project, but on a project from their own company, 4 months.

Google surely cares about the well-being of the internet, sure.

Link: https://mattermost.com/blog/coordinated-disclosure-go-xml-vulnerabilities/

The Roots of Big Tech Run Disturbingly Deep https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/07/opinion/google-facebook-mergers-acquisitions-antitrust.html

I would love it if I could just download and seed a torrent of some CC-licensed course materials from any number of universities — especially for some niche courses rather than just the "giant lecture hall" 101 courses.

I think the ADA lawsuit against Berkeley probably really damaged that dream, but in general I see it as a very disappointing failure of open / libre culture ☹

The myth that Trump has always tried to push as part of his "Keep America Conned" initiative was that he was successful with the economy, when in real numbers he's had the worst economic record of any president in over 70 years.

He was a documented, verifiable economic failure as president, among all the other failures, of course. More outlets should be covering this.

Trump will leave office with a historically bad economic record -
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/13/politics/trump-economy-record/index.html

#IT #privacy #encryption #global #uk #politics #democracy

Let me be absolutely clear here.

I am utterly against child pornography. Period!

However, while the Children's Commissioner for England may have good data and a genuine concern for sexual abuse, she is utterly clueless about the wider issues.

For many years the UK Government has used child pornography and safeguarding issues to erode privacy and out-China China in terms of state surveillance.

Encrypted messaging putting children at risk of abuse, says watchdog

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/dec/08/encrypted-messaging-putting-children-at-risk-of-abuse-says-watchdog

Paranoid hat:

Remember this morning failure on Google services? They response is was that a quota on user login was preventing the users from logging in.

Well, a few hours later, there is a vulnerability disclosure on go xml library, which affects elements such as SAML, a distributed authentication protocol.

Wouldn't it be weird if both were linked?

It was in August of 2020, as I was recovering from a year of personal struggles, that I decided to create a map of the Fediverse, intended for a web shop that me and the owner of an instance I was a moderator on had set up. Being a fan of mediaeval and early modern maps, I decided that my map would be a homage to those.

A map is always a work in progress, and can never be complete. Including every instance on the network would be a monumental task, and would've resulted in something more akin to an atlas than a map. I had to draw a line somewhere, and decided on mapping the top 100 instances, ranked by total status count. Some of these had since gone offline and were taken off the list. A select number of instances were excluded because people objected to their inclusion. To the resulting list, instances proposed by other users were added.

Fediverse instances don't have meaningful physical locations. An instance for German speakers could be hosted in France, for example. In many cases, there is no geographical theme at all. The Fediverse is a virtual world and has no topology, so I opted to make an elevation map. Coastlines and water bodies were derived from this map by intersecting it with a sea level plane.

I grouped the instances into thematic provinces, and the provinces into thematic regions, which were in turn assigned locations by free association. Instances with geographical themes were assigned locations roughly corresponding to their associated real-world locations on a world map. To suggest latitude and give the map a more organic feel, the place names were arched in concentric circles.

A research trip was made to a library, where I found books containing old maps. Sea monster designs were selected from them, together with a design for the compass. These were then cleaned up by manually tracing and recolouring them.

I shared previews of the map as I was working on it, and the feedback was positive. At this point, however, it became evident that the web shop wouldn't succeed, and the map project was shelved.

In November of 2020, I decided that I would try my luck as a freelancer, so I began to brainstorm and write down ideas. In December of the same year, I remembered the map I had made, and decided that I would give it some final touches and actually publish it:

https://thj.no/product/carta-fediversi-2020/

Facebook hit with antitrust probe for tying Oculus use to Facebook accounts https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/10/facebook-hit-with-antitrust-probe-for-tying-oculus-use-to-facebook-accounts/?guccounter=1

Oh god no...

https://www.denofgeek.com/tv/alien-tv-series-xenomorph-to-earth/

#movies #alien #hollywood #tv

@Lynx here, have some hemlock 🍷

...

i can't really blame anyone though, why risk your livelihood for some random topic? the chances that you get cancelled are real, your colleagues won't take any flak for you (because they'll also get canceled..).

as long as there is no public outcry that these methods aren't even remotely ok, nothing will change. if the media is really to blame for anything, regardless of their political alignment, then for allowing to happen and actively taking part in canceling. for better or worse, journalism killed itself.

earlier this week, Elon announced he's moved from California to Texas.

today, Oracle Corp announced it's moved its headquarters from California to Texas.

the reasons for nuking Texas keep going up.

comments about THE REAL RACISTS usually make me cringe but... what the fuck is this

Academia Selects for Careerist Cowardice

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/homo-consumericus/202006/academia-selects-careerist-cowardice

……Now let’s examine academia. What are some essential traits that an academic must possess? Of course, to be an academic, one must be intelligent although as I explain in The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, many of the dumbest ideas originate from academics. Beyond intelligence, one must be highly educated in their areas of expertise typically having obtained a PhD. Intellectual fierceness is likely to be missing from a description of what an ideal academic should possess. Incidentally, I am referring here to a polymath intellectual and not merely a hyperspecialized academic who solely weighs in on matters within their very narrow areas of expertise. Many professors are not in the least bit intellectual. They have chosen a career rather than pursued a calling for truth. Someone with little formal education might in reality be more of an intellectual than a professional academic. In any case, a public intellectual must exhibit intellectual brawn, and the reality is that most academics do not have such temperaments. Yesterday I posted the following comments on my social media, which I reproduce here:

"Academics should be intellectual @USNavy SEALs, exhibiting intellectual fierceness, cerebral tenacity, neuronal courage, & cognitive freedom. Instead, most are afraid of their shadows, tepid to utter a single interesting or controversial syllable. Academia selects for cowardice. Most academics know this to be true but they are unwilling to look deep within and truly pursue an intellectually pure and honest life. Careerism forces them into shackles of self-censorship. It’s tragic."

As someone who has been in academia my whole life, I am always astonished by how tepid most academics are, pathologically afraid to utter the most banal of positions, lest they might be ushered out of town by the Cancel Culture mob. A true public academic should be an intellectual brawler capable of using all of their cognitive training and intellectual acuity to head off to every intellectual battle ready to defend their positions. It does not matter whether you are a historian, a physicist, a psychologist, or a neuroscientist, you should be able to step into the ring of ideas and debate people respectfully albeit forcefully.

An academic who is too insecure to step into the public arena, and who hides from difficult conversations is not worthy of being labelled an intellectual. Moving forward, it is imperative that we attract people into academia who not only possess the necessary cognitive abilities to succeed but also the obligatory temperaments to be Navy SEALs of ideas. The battle of ideas is won by those who are intellectually courageous, who are cerebrally bold, and who are unencumbered by the orthodoxy. Let us foster an ethos that promotes intellectual honey badgers and not one that rewards cowardly mice and conforming sheep.

#IT #surveillance #biometrics #iBorderCtrl #Horizon #science #funding #global #eu #ethics

Sci-fi surveillance: Europe's secretive push into biometric technology

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/10/sci-fi-surveillance-europes-secretive-push-into-biometric-technology

In the rush to close & lock the door on asylum seekers before vacating office, the Trump administration is inflicting real harm on refugees. https://trib.al/nxA3RjA
https://twitter.com/hrw/status/1337507308763570182 #India #Trump

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Full-List of bots: https://joejoe.github.io/mastodon

The Web We Have to Save

"The Web We Have to Save
The rich, diverse, free web that I loved — and spent years in an Iranian jail for — is dying.

Why is nobody stopping it?"

See the Full Article Here

Amazing art on the post header. See the FULL SIZE image here, lots of detail

This article is brilliantly written and illustrated. 🤔

Partial Quote below :

"Is this trend driven by people’s changing cultural habits, or is it that people are following the new laws of social networking? I don’t know — that’s for researchers to find out — but it feels like it’s reviving old cultural wars. After all, the web started out by imitating books and for many years, it was heavily dominated by text, by hypertext. Search engines put huge value on these things, and entire companies — entire monopolies — were built off the back of them. But as the number of image scanners and digital photos and video cameras grows exponentially, this seems to be changing. Search tools are starting to add advanced image recognition algorithms; advertising money is flowing there.

But the Stream, mobile applications, and moving images: They all show a departure from a books-internet toward a television-internet. We seem to have gone from a non-linear mode of communication — nodes and networks and links — toward a linear one, with centralization and hierarchies.

The web was not envisioned as a form of television when it was invented. But, like it or not, it is rapidly resembling TV: linear, passive, programmed and inward-looking."

Must Read. 😉

https://medium.com/matter/the-web-we-have-to-save-2eb1fe15a426