Paul Sutton @zleap@social.cleverlibre.org

Okay, Mastodon friends, I rarely ask for amplification about my day job, but I personally pushed for my employer to make a big investment in enabling the fediverse, and I'd love for everyone to show that the support is appreciated. On June 28, you can join us for a (FREE!) hands-on conversation about how the Fastly team worked to support @Mastodon while the service was under a *massive* DDOS attack. Everyone who cares about scaling the fediverse should join: https://learn.fastly.com/security-mitigating-ddos-and-traffic-surges-with-mastodon @devs

The US Cyber and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has decided that internet-facing management interfaces can’t be secured properly, and has told US government agencies to disable them. They have 14 days to comply. #CyberSecurity

https://www.itnews.com.au/news/cisa-bans-remote-management-of-network-devices-596865

Got all the HAL games out of storage to take an updated family picture! 😍 #MSX

On This Day, June 14: Grenfell Tower fire kills 72 in London https://www.upi.com/Top_News/2023/06/14/On-This-Day-Grenfell-Tower-fire-kills-72-in-London/4211686700349/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

In light of the recent #redditblackout , it seems appropriate to repost the fantastic @catvalente essay:

Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media

I’m so tired of just harmlessly getting together with other weird geeks and going to what amounts to a digital pub after work and waking up one day to find every pint poisoned. Over and over again. Like the poison wants us specifically. Like it knows we will always make its favorite food: vulnerability, connection, difference. I’m so tired of lunch photos and fanfic and stupid jokes and keeping in touch with family across time zones and making friends and starting cottage industries and pursuing hobbies and meeting soulmates and expressing thoughts and creating identities and loving TV shows and reading books and getting to know a few of your heroes and raising kids and making bookshelves and knitting and painting and fixing sinks and first dates and homemade jam and, yes, figuring out what Buffy characters we are, listening and learning and hoping and just fucking talking to each other weaponized against us. Having our enthusiasm over the smallest joys of everyday life invaded by people who long ago forgot their value and turned into fodder for the death of thought, the burial of love.

These were our spaces, little people who just wanted to connect. And one by one, they get turned into battlefields where we have to fight just as hard to exist as we do in the real world. And every time a few more people you never thought the Absorbaloff of hatred and gleeful sadism would slurp up don’t come along to the next safe place, and start trying to take it away before anyone can get there.

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

What totally infuriating scammy bullshit is this!! The github user donspablo forks popular repos, adds his OWN sponsorship links all over them, then uses bots to increase his fork count to look like the official project. Definitely hope @GitHub take this shit down.

For example:
https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/compare/dev...donspablo:pixelfed:dev

5. In Trump's case there is literally an audio tape where he admits he knows a document is classified national defense information and shows it to people with no security clearances anyway

That's willful and intentional

Body of 14-year-old Edmonton swimmer found a week after he went missing - #Edmonton #Alberta #missingperson #missingpeoplecanada #missingincanada

Police have confirmed that a body found in the North Saskatchewan River near Smoky Lake, Alta., is that of a 14-year-old swimmer who was swept away in Edmonton a week earlier.

"Our thoughts are with the family and friends of the young boy...

More Info: https://missingpeople.ca/body-of-14-year-old-edmonton-swimmer-found-a-week-after-he-went-missing/

Today is one of the saddest days in the history of this country.
The day an ex-president is arraigned on federal charges, and his entire political party rallies behind him because the Law should apply to each and every one of us, BUT to them.

Will Trump’s Indictment Spark a Second-Wave Insurrection? https://truthout.org/video/will-trumps-indictment-spark-a-second-wave-insurrection/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon

Companies pull out of Uganda, NGOs suspend services after Anti-Homosexuality Act signed https://www.washingtonblade.com/2023/06/13/companies-pull-out-of-uganda-ngos-suspend-services-after-anti-homosexuality-act-signed/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon&utm_campaign=companies-pull-out-of-uganda-ngos-suspend-services-after-anti-homosexuality-act-signed

#Labour rules out universal #childcare for young children in fiscal credibility drive

Here we go again. Show some creativity, take some risks, show people you care. Start with the money and nothing will get done. Nothing will change. Hopeless.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jun/13/labour-rules-out-universal-childcare-for-young-children-in-fiscal-credibility-drive

I need a job!

My PhD is drawing to a close.

I'm looking for post-doc research opportunities or web/software development roles, ideally a combination, as in digital humanities research.

My previous research experience is in heritage and higher education for the arts.
My PhD was about knowledge frameworks and the affordances of digital tools and representations in research, in relation to research reuse, transparency and inclusivity.

I would love to be able to contribute more to innovative work on research and knowledge representations.

I am open to new possibilities! In particular I am interested in the possibility of becoming involved in sustainability and biodiversity-related research.

I am a full-stack web developer, and have a good deal of front-end design experience. I am open to all opportunities, particularly remote working!

I am not great at this self-promotion thing...
I will be putting a portfolio site online soon, but am happy to share a CV with anyone who is interested in the meantime.

Thanks for any boosts!

#jobs
#research
#postdoc
#digitalhumanities
#culturalheritage
#sustainability
#biodiversity
#documentation
#representation
#visualization
#education
#knowledge
#remote
#work

There's going to be a new global treaty on plastics reduction next year. Most countries want strong, mandatory action. Plastic producing countries and companies, pretty obviously, don't. Just about anything is better than the free-for-all we have now, but we're at a pivot point. Seemingly small nudges in this document could move the needle by tens of millions of tons one way or the other.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/13/plastic-production-plastics-treaty-environmental-diplomacy

#plastics #environment #oceans #pollution

Greta Thunberg (@gretathunberg) has some strong words for corporate media and for the corrupt system they support...
____________________________

Today, our political leaders are allowed to say one thing and do the exact opposite. They can claim to be climate leaders while they rapidly expand their nation's fossil fuel infrastructure. They can say that we are in a climate emergency as they open up new coal mines, new oil fields, and new pipelines. It has not only become socially acceptable for our leaders to lie, it is more or less what we expect them to do.

I believe the main reason we have reached this point — the reason we are facing this catastrophe — is because the media has allowed the people in power to create a gigantic greenwashing machine designed to maintain business as usual for the benefit of short-term economic policies. The media have failed to hold those responsible for the destruction of our biosphere accountable, effectively acting as gatekeepers for the status quo.

Given the size of our mission and the time we have left to act, there is, frankly, no entity other than the media that has the opportunity to create the necessary transformation of our global society. In order for that to happen, they must start treating the climate, ecological, and sustainability crisis like the existential crisis it is. It has to dominate the news.

Our safety as a species is on a collision course with the current system. The longer you pretend that this is not the case, and the longer you pretend that we can solve this catastrophe within a global societal structure which has no laws or restrictions whatsoever protecting us long-term from the ongoing self-destructive greed that has brought us to the very edge of the precipice, the more time we will waste. Time that we no longer have.
____________________________

That's from page 358 of The Climate Book.
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/709837/the-climate-book-by-greta-thunberg/

Greta is brilliant, and she's 100% right. But will anything change?

#Politics #Media #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency
#Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual

Twitter "has allegedly stopped paying for Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), which host tools that support the platform's safety measures".

"Not only did both its brand safety chief and its trust and safety chief recently resign, but Twitter has also seen hate speech surge....most concerningly, Twitter failed to remove child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) while hosting buyers and sellers"

#Twitter, you're doing great, sweetie.

#TwitterEndTimes #onlinesafety

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/06/hackers-can-steal-cryptographic-keys-by-video-recording-connected-power-leds-60-feet-away/

#News: Dozens of websites tied to the national mental health crisis hotline—988—are sending visitor data to Facebook.

By @jonkeegan and Colin Lecher, copublished with @STAT: #MentalHealth #Privacy #Data https://themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/2023/06/13/suicide-hotlines-promise-anonymity-dozens-of-their-websites-send-sensitive-data-to-facebook

Paul McCartney says AI tools helped rescue John Lennon vocals for ‘last Beatles record’ - McCartney performing at Glastonbury Festival in 2022. | Ph... - https://www.theverge.com/2023/6/13/23759296/the-beatles-now-and-then-restoration-ai-paul-mccartney-john-lennon

2 Active-Duty Marines Plead Guilty To Capitol Riot Charges https://www.huffpost.com/entry/marines-joshua-abate-dodge-dale-hellonen-guilty-plea_n_64885b97e4b04ee51a971ce8?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon