Nick @internic@qoto.org

Multifaceted, high-precision campaign targets malicious and benevolent hackers alike.

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/12/yearlong-supply-chain-attack-targeting-security-pros-steals-390k-credentials/?comments-page=1#comments

Apple AI is writing wrong headlines and making up false stories. Here are BBC AND NYT iPhone screenshot of the misleading BBC/NYT notification https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd0elzk24dno.amp

h/t to @johnshier

Yesterdays link to the Let‘s Encrypt blog dragged in some people who seem to think that CAs are unnecessary or even evil.

LE is s very small group who set out to improve the terrible CA situation and the fucking middle box corruptions.

They did that successfully with a budget that a medium sized city spends on its department for car license plates.

So, my advice: don‘t yell at people who made the world somewhat better or you‘ll soon run out of ones who try.💁🏻‍♂️

A reminder to all who may have Visa, AmEx, or Master Card gift cards now and in the future. Often you'll wind up with a small balance on them that doesn't make it worthwhile to make a purchase with it online or in a store. Something like US$1.60 or less.

Go to Wikipedia, Archive.org, your local animal shelter, or just about any worthwhile nonprofit and donate that odd amount on their web page.

#donations #nonprofit #giving #Holidays #Christmas #Kwanza

"Memory-safe PNG decoders now vastly outperform C PNG libraries"

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1ha7uyi/memorysafe_png_decoders_now_vastly_outperform_c/

How to catch the Geminids, one of the strongest meteor showers of the year.

@AssociatedPress reports: "The shower often produces meteors with a distinctly more yellow glow, likely due to the unusual origin material, said Sally Brummel, planetarium manager at the University of Minnesota’s Bell Museum."

https://flip.it/pvsIGt

#Geminids #Meteor #Space #Astronomy #Science

Just finished "A City on Mars" and it was SO GOOD. I learned so much and laughed so hard. Thank you for writing it, @ZachWeinersmith!

Required reading for anyone who thinks we're going to live in space anytime soon (especially the biology section, wowza). I kinda wish I had read the hilarious and informative space law section before SpaceX debris fell near my house...

Also fun to see @michael_w_busch (as well as a bunch of other research colleagues) in the acknowledgements

Euclid's original text on geometry is almost as hard to reconstruct as the Big Bang. All we have is echoes of echoes of echoes.

The oldest surviving copy of Euclid’s book, handwritten on parchment, dates back to 888 AD. That's old - but it's 1200 years after Euclid!

In 1897, some fragments of the book were found in an ancient garbage dump in Egypt. These date back to 300 AD. That's really old - but still about 600 years after Euclid.

How did we get Euclid's Elements? This 'family tree' created by the biochemist Herbert M. Sauro begins to answer that question. It's pretty damned interesting.

The earliest transmission of Euclid from Greece to western Europe went via Arabic, and I'm interested in this stage. At that time western Europe was like the barbarian boondocks, far from the center of the civilized world. Unfortunately Sauro just has one entry saying "Arabic (~800 AD)" for what is actually a complicated process. I'm not scolding him - I just want more!

Luckily more is known about Arabic translations of Euclid. There's a lot already in Heath's famous 1908 translation of the Elements. When I asked around on the History of Science and Mathematics Stackexhange, the nice folks there found two family trees besides Sauro's:

https://hsm.stackexchange.com/questions/18090/what-is-the-family-tree-of-translations-of-euclids-elements

If I had time, I might try to combine all these family trees into one huge beautiful chart.

For more by Herbert M. Sauro, go to his website:

https://euclid.analogmachine.org/early-history

I am super excited to share that my forthcoming book with @alex, THE AI CON: How to Fight Big Tech's Hype and Create the Future We Want, is now available for pre-order!

All the details here: https://thecon.ai/

"Hey, I discovered an amazing formula!"

"Wow, that looks implausible. Did you prove it?"

"No, but I checked it to 15 decimal places!"

"You should have checked it to 20 decimal places."

It's great to make guesses in math. But it really does pay to prove them. A story like this actually happened:

https://mathoverflow.net/questions/251636/numerical-coincidence-why-is-sumxk2-sumxk1-22-for-x-0-8

In fact the "coincidence" shown below not a coincidence at all!

It's a fact about the Jacobi theta functions θ₂ and θ₃, which I define below. These functions are important in the study of elliptic curves. It's not very hard to show that as x gets bigger and approaches 1, we have θ₂(x) - θ₃(x) → 0. But fact it goes to zero very fast, so

|θ₂(4/5) - θ₃(4/5)| ≈ 9.3 × 10⁻¹⁹

We can go on with this game:

|θ₂(9/10) - θ₃(9/10)| ≈ 4.5 × 10⁻⁴⁰

and so on.

My university is owned and operated by the US government, and I'm a govt employee. This means that all my research papers where I'm corresponding author are "US government work", and are in the public domain (according to US law). This means that I CAN'T grant scummy publishers the copyright for my work. Anyone can post it where ever they want since it's in the public domain.

This is an unexpectedly awesome perk of my job. I exist in the corner case of US copyright law that allows academic papers to be distributed as they should be.

@natematias @mako at least Wikipedia is a nonprofit with an open license, so there is a reasonable understanding that contributors are giving their time and effort truly for the commons. Openstreetmaps is similar. I do not do unpaid volunteer work for for-profit companies. There is a history of privatizing volunteer work and data; the first time I was conscious of this happening was with CDDB, which seems almost quaint now: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/05/outliving-outrage-public-interest-internet-cddb-story

**rubs forehead and mutters to self**: as if we don't have enough problems:

"the choice to burn up satellites in the atmosphere may pose a significant risk to the Earth’s climate and the ozone layer, through the resulting alteration of atmospheric chemistry. . . . with a typical satellite weighing of order 1,000 kg [2,200 lb], and being primarily metallic, the steady state injection of metals into the stratosphere by vaporization of satellites would be at least 8,000 tons per year."

https://buttondown.com/creativegood/archive/musks-space-junk-is-a-threat-to-us-all/

#space #SpaceJunk #starlink #climate #environment #pollution #garbage #trash #nature #air

Wow, Framework laptops look awesome!! Thank you for the multiple recommendations, Fediverse! I'll look at this more tomorrow when I (hopefully?) recover from decision fatigue.

Site blocking means the right to choose what websites you visit would be taken away from you and given to giant media companies and ISPs. And the very shape of the internet would have to be changed to allow it. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/04/mpa-doesnt-get-decide-who-first-amendment-protects