Sylvain Miermont @miermont@social.cleverlibre.org

As part of a new report on digital advertising as a security threat published today by @johnnyryan and me (https://www.iccl.ie/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Europes-hidden-security-crisis.pdf), and previously unreported:

We reveal 'Patternz', a global mass surveillance system that harvests digital advertising data on behalf of 'national security agencies'.

Patternz is operated by a company based in Israel and/or Singapore. It claims to collect data about 5 billion users from 87 ad exchanges and SSPs via 6 data centers around the world.

Thread:

The Israeli bombing campaign in Gaza is reportedly killing children at a rate unprecedented in 21st-century conflict, according to data https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/interactive/2023/gaza-rising-death-toll-civilians/

For more than 1.5 years, the largest interstate war on European soil since WWII has been going on, with likely 1000s of deaths and wounded every week — but it feels like this unprovoked Russian assault is almost out of sight.

Avdijivka is closer to Berlin than Madrid.

Hell™ is not very far.

Here's some of what that money will be used for:

- Improve the current state of accessibility
- Design and prototype a new accessibility stack
- Encrypt user home directories individually

Here's what it will not be used for:

- Persistent reminders to please use Edge as your default browser
- Microsoft Teams
- Clippy 2.0, now powered by a Large Language Model

Sinking taxpayer funds into Microsoft's money pits has always been utterly indefensible. Another world is possible.

@sovtechfund (funded by the German government) just announced a €1M grant towards the @gnome project, an open source desktop environment.

Imagine a world in which governments don't spend billions of dollars in licensing fees every year to make Microsoft richer, and that money instead goes towards _public code_ that belongs to all of us.

That may seem utterly implausible - but every example like this brings us one step closer to it being inevitable and irreversible.

https://foundation.gnome.org/2023/11/09/gnome-recognized-as-public-interest-infrastructure/

NEW RESEARCH: Gas cookers are pumping toxic particles linked to childhood asthma into kitchens, living rooms & bedrooms across Europe.

Dutch scientists measured air quality in 247 homes & found cooking with gas results in almost 2x as much indoor NOx emissions as cooking without.

Revision number 500... 3.5" TFT FeatherWing

for more than a year we've been slowly revising just about every product we make to account for changes in transistors, regulators, diodes, boosters...lots of churn! we're finally up to revision #500 and we're happy to finally get to a product that had to have nearly every component changed: the 3.5" TFT FeatherWing (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3651), the touch driver went from STMPE811 to TSC2007 (https://www.digikey.com/short/v2mf43q9),

LibreOffice Poll:

Do you want LibreOffice videos available via PeerTube?

PeerTube is a video platform for the Fediverse and is an alternative to Google's YouTube.

TILvids will give LibreOffice video space on their decentralized platform that is powered by PeerTube.

LibreOffice has 20.2K subscribers on their Google YouTube channel...

Please BOOST for greater exposure.

#LibreOffice #OpenSource #Fediverse #PeerTube #Privacy #TILvids #FOSS #FLOSS #Video #LibreSoftware @peertube @tilvids

I'm a big fan of district heating because it can unlock huge potential of waste, ambient & renewable heat + flexibility & storage.

But how to clean up existing & deploy new district heating?

New paper by @semoxenaar Richard Lowes and me @RegulatoryAssistanceProject here: https://www.raponline.org/knowledge-center/warming-up-to-it-principles-clean-efficient-smart-district-heating/

136,000 books from the 18th Century.

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY SIX THOUSAND OF THEM.

That would be a point of pride in any library. Making it readable from the Internet, browsable, and downloadable? A pipe dream.

Anyway, here they are.

https://archive.org/details/pub_eighteenth-century?tab=collection

Fascinating both for what it says about dev & what it says about statistics:

A gamedev realized Linux users were just 5.8% of their sales, but represented 38% of bug reports.

Then they looked at those numbers closer, and realized. Linux users were not experiencing more bugs. Almost none of the Linux-user bugs were Linux-related. Linux users were simply *more likely to file bugs*.

Their conclusion: A linux port pays for itself bc it nerdsnipes ppl into giving u free QA

https://techhub.social/@ozone89/111337250473454154

@EU_Commission despairs on erosion of trust in #EU #politics

Then launches the next trust-eroding dystopic #surveillance program.

As Jean-Claude Juncker put it:

> We decide on something, leave it lying around and wait and see what happens. If no one kicks up a fuss, because most people don't understand what has been decided, we continue step by step until there is no turning back.

I'm pro-European 🇪🇺 , care about #privacy and #HumanRights. My faith is severely tested.

https://last-chance-for-eidas.org

That booking rail tickets, Europe-wide, is a pain is well known

But how would you actually go about fixing the problem - both legally and technically?

I have had a go at sketching out the ways towards the solution, and the four building blocks of a solution

#CrossBorderRail

https://jonworth.eu/how-to-actually-build-europe-wide-multimodal-public-transport-booking-platforms/

At @cOAlitionS_OA we are envisioning a community-based scholarly communication system fit for #OpenScience in the 21st century, based on five principles.

🟠https://www.coalition-s.org/towards-responsible-publishing

Follow this thread 🧵for a quick overview!
#OpenAccess #ResponsiblePublishing [1/7]

Helping someone debug someone, said they asked chatgpt about what a series of bit shift operations were doing. He thought it was actually evaluating the code, yno like it presents itself as doing. Instead its example was a) not the code he put in, with b) incorrect annotations, and c) even more incorrect sample outputs. Has been doing this all day and had just started considering maybe chatGPT was wrong.

I was like first of all never do that again, and explained how chatGPT wasnt doing anything like what he thought it was doing. We spent 2 minutes isolating that code, printing out the bit string after each operation, and he immediately understood what was going on.

I fucking hate these LLMs. Empowerment is learning how to figure things out, how to make tools for yourself and how to debug problems. These things are worse than disempowering, teaching people to be dependent on something that teaches them bullshit.

@blinken was asking me about damage to ICs earlier.

Subtle stuff like bad memory bit cells is rarely if ever visible optically, especially on modern technology.

But blown IO cells from ESD/EOS are often quite obvious due to the extreme amounts of energy involved compared to what the device was intended to survive.

Here's a 100x view of an ATMega3216 that had been subjected to ~12V on the UART RX pin due to a ground fault. (I think @quantumdude836 might have been the one who sent me this chip years ago??)

You can clearly see the power and ground lines in the protection diode are completely fused and the surrounding glass dielectric is cracked.

An energy blind spot?

Clothing, tyres, digital devices, packaging, detergents and countless other everyday items are made from petrochemicals.

Petrochemical feedstock accounts for 12% of global oil demand.

#journalists: "It’s way too early to know whether Mastodon and its underpinning, a protocol called #ActivityPub, is the ultimate way forward. There are risks with any online system.
BUT
1) The risks of giving up your autonomy to billionaire sociopaths are in your face at this point. 2) And it is not remotely too early for those who rely on Twitter to find alternatives they control."

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/01/04/journalists-and-others-should-leave-twitter-heres-how-they-can-get-started/

It's been a really fascinating experience, watching every tech CEO that I've worked with (or for) over the last few months be reduced to an incoherent shill, incapable of talking about their company or mission without constantly singing the importance of "adopting AI to stay competitive."

It's really replaced "virtual property/NFTs/Crypto/Blockchain" etc as something you sprinkle onto a shareholder meeting to convince 65 year old hedgefund managers that barely touch computers you're making the Next Big Thing and deserve their money. It's a whole new tech bubble just waiting to burst, again, lol.

Good news: Better 'missed connection' protection on European trains as Eurostar and five more operators join the AJC (Agreement on Journey Continuation) https://www.railtech.com/all/2023/10/25/eurostar-and-five-more-operators-join-the-agreement-on-journey-continuation-what-does-it-entail/