@acjay@qoto.orrg has moved @acjay@qoto.org

If you ever get too popular on the Fediverse, you're going to destroy a few websites.

I "only" have ~12,000 followers, and I'm wrecking websites.

What will happen when someone gets 1 million followers and sends out a link?

#Academics of Mastodon,

What’s an argument or finding of yours that you think of as potentially important to the broader public, but which you’ve never quite been able to get out there?

Maybe it wasn’t timely enough for an op-ed, or it felt too niche to an ideas editor, or you never had the time or confidence to write it up for a general audience. But you still wish more people knew about or understood it. I always love to hear these things.

@academicchatter

@josh @academicchatter

although we know, as scientists/doctors, way way way more about how the human body works then we did even 20 years ago, we still are not even close to knowing enough to make new pharmaceuticals on demand, or to understand the nervous system
even our understanding of the immune system still has huge gaps

It's here...Graze for Mastodon ...for Firefox!

Use Mastodon 🐘 on desktop?

I made a browser extension to make following people, favoriting, bookmarking & boosting toots on remote instances as easy as your home instance! (1-click)!

Install Graze For Mastodon
https://jmz.fyi/GrazeForFirefox (:ff:Firefox)
https://jmz.fyi/GrazeForChrome (:chrome:Chrome)

🙌 Appreciate the boosts! 🙌

#mastodon #MastodonTips #fediverse #feditips #TwitterMigration #NewToMastodon #GrazeForMastodon #fediverse #firefox

Heck, the Facebook share button in its current form is clearly a conscious and intentional ripoff of the #Twitter Quote Tweet function and it simply does not enable the same kind of abuse.

The problem clearly isn't in having software-implemented quotes themselves. I'm inclined to agree with Annalee Newitz's diagnosis of the problem — "nonconsensual virality": if someone chooses to spotlight you on Twitter there's not a whole lot you can do about it. (cont'd.)

Since lots of people don't seem to know this: there is a totally free library app called borrow box where you can download free ebooks and audiobooks to your heart content. The books are returned automatically, so there are no late fees. You can reserve and renew books for free, too. All you need is a standard library membership. #books #library #BorrowBox #freebooks #audiobooks #audible #amazonprime

A user on the cybercrime forum Breached is selling what they claim is info scraped via Twitter APIs from 400 million Twitter profiles, including email, name, account name, follower count and in many cases phone number.

The seller told me they scraped the data using the same set of weaknesses in Birdsite APIs that allowed the scraping (and publishing) early this year of profile data on 5.4M Twitter users.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/54-million-twitter-users-stolen-data-leaked-online-more-shared-privately/

They said they scraped the data via an exploit that was patched earlier this year, in the login api, and specifically the part of it that checks for duplicate accounts.

That, according to the seller, leaked the Twitter user ID, which was then converted via another Twitter API into a username. They also said that same iterative process worked for user telephone numbers.

The vulnerability that was reportedly used to scrape the previously dumped 5.4M twitter user data set was reported to Hacker One on Jan. 1, 2022.

https://hackerone.com/reports/1439026

The seller released 1,000 new records as a teaser, and is trying to get Twitter to buy the data for an undisclosed amount.

They also pasted a number of "celebrity" accounts directly into the sales thread. Curiously, this record set does not have the phone number associated w/ my Twitter account. But it was in the 5.4M scrape that got released on the same forum last month. However, I removed the burner phone number from my profile around the time the seller said they scraped this data (beginning of 2022).

The data in both the teaser and the 1,000 user file includes follower counts for each user, and a spot check on about a half dozen of them show follower numbers consistent with what Archive.org and Sociable says about follower accounts at the beginning of Jan 2022/end of December.

They are selling it through the escrow service set up by the administrators of the forum, which is what you'd expect to see in a real offering for this volume of data.

😄

Did you know that Billy Joel put out a heavy metal album?

And do you know some people (wrongly!) believe it's the worst album of all time?

Here's the album!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7s8PHnCTGI

making PACER free would reduce the federal deficit by $14M over ten years, but

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/no-free-pacer-us-lawmakers-exclude-proposal-spending-bill-2022-12-20/

So, you've run https://debirdify.pruvisto.org/ , https://fedifinder.glitch.me/ and https://twitodon.com/ to migrate from Twitter, and then searched via https://fediverse.info/explore/people but still feel like your timeline is empty? Then have a look at https://followgraph.vercel.app/ which looks up all the people you follow and then the people that *they* follow to suggest new people for you.

Journalist profiles on the Washington Post can now include Mastodon links. Here's what it looks like: https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/drew-harwell/

Hey, everyone who follows me who is hacking on somethigna round ActivityPub/fediverse — please reply here and share a link to your app/GitHub/Glitch! Would love to show off all the creativity that's happening right now. (And please boost so your friends can share their projects too.)

@anildash I've built a toy/hack Node.js #ActivityPub server which exposes (some of) the #MastodonAPI in the front end. That means you can connect to it with a Mastodon client app and send/receive messages. It's helped me figure out how this stuff works and hopefully will help others understand too https://github.com/ringtailsoftware/cubiti

Washington Post journalists on Mastodon:

@willoremus
@taylorlorenz
@teddyamen
@tonyromm
@Shira
@rachellerman
@pbump
@NaomiNix @nitashatiku
@jeremybowers
@JosephMenn
@Ddiamond
@databae
@cristianolima

Please let me know who I'm missing!More to come.