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Marco Rogers

Okay this is a perfect example of what I was talking about earlier this week. You're building a web browser. One of those most sophisticated pieces of software you can imagine. But meanwhile you bolted this little firebase thing onto it that executes arbitrary code in everybody's tabs. And those folks weren't experienced enough with security practices to understand how potentially dangerous that was.
flipboard.com/@theverge/apps-t
flipboard.com/@theverge/apps-t

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Cat Hicks

I know it's not always for everyone but I absolutely love scientific writing & its wryness. Like this opener: "In order to maintain physical integrity, people must attend to situational cues that may signal various threats in the environment. For example, the smell of fire can alert people to the possibility of physical threat in the environment, prompting them to scan for signs of this potential danger. " (Murphy, Steele & Gross, 2007)

Physical integrity yes that is a general goal 😂

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BrianKrebs

Laying the groundwork for Stop the Steal 2024.

Georgia election board orders hand count of votes in US presidential contest

"Georgia's Republican-controlled state election board voted on Friday to require a labor-intensive hand count of potentially millions of ballots in November's election, a move voting rights advocates say could cause delays, introduce errors and lay the groundwork for spurious election challenges.

The hand count rule, passed in a 3-2 vote, will make Georgia the only state in the U.S. to implement such a requirement as part of the normal process of tabulating results, according to Gowri Ramachandran, the director of elections and security at New York University's Brennan Center for Justice, a left-leaning public policy institute."

reuters.com/world/us/georgia-e

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Nick

I think the argument is even stronger for Mozilla's foray into privacy preserving advertising. The reality is that the current Internet runs on advertising dollars. I think that's bad, and I would like that to change, but if it's possible to change that it will be difficult and take a fair amount of time. In the interim, you can just block or evade advertising if you have a tiny sliver of the browser market, but if you have any significant share then doing so will essentially put you in a battle with every site your users want to visit. Either sites will work poorly on your browser (because they're trying fight your features), or you'll kill the sites your users are using (by starving them of revenue).

That means you have to find some less-privacy-invasive, near-term solution to the advertising funding problem as a bridge to the future. Brave already tried this with their BAT system, but it hasn't really seemed (to me) to go anywhere. Mozilla is making another run at it. I don't know if their solution will be a good one, but it needs to be tried. We cannot grow a significant alternative browser ecosystem by starving site of revenue; that only works for niche browsers.

And doing this work might also put Mozilla in a good position to offer an alternative to advertising-based revenue, just as Brave was trying to do with BAT.

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Nick

A lot of people think generative AI will transform every aspect of computing in the near future. I don't really buy that personally, but I do think it will remain significant for certain use cases, so facilitating integration with generative AI models and experimenting with local models for privacy is not unreasonable.

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Nick

For to be sustainable as a meaningful alternative, they need to grow their browser market share (or at least the market share of gecko-based browsers) and diversify their income stream, and so it is probably true that needs to try some somewhat radical things now (while they still have a bunch of Google cash to use). While I won't defend the ways in which they're rolling them out, their efforts to integrate generative AI and privacy-preserving ad tech make a lot of sense in that light.

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Nick boosted
Lauri Siltala

For fun and curiosity, I have few random sensors logging data at my home 24/7.

Earlier this month, I saw multiple events where my Geiger counter detected significant (not dangerously so) temporary increase in #radioactivity for some reason.

Today I think I got an explanation! The Finnish radiation authority #stuk posted that that they have measured Cesium-137 levels over 20 times higher than usual in the air early this month, likely coming in from the fires raging in #Chernobyl

So cool!

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Phil Plait

A *lot* of wee near-Earth asteroids have even more wee moons orbiting them. Why?

The main culprit could be… sunlight.

scientificamerican.com/article

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Nick

@mdione @apsmith The reflection from glass arises in a slightly different way. Glass is a dielectric, which means when light travels in the material it causes the atoms to sort of stretch a bit, and this interaction between the material and light causes the speed of light in the material to be slower. When light crosses the boundary between two materials with different speeds of light, the beam of light will bend (refraction) and some of it will be reflected back (similar to a mirror). This is the same reason you can see reflections at the surface of water (another dielectric).

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Nick

@mdione I only watched a brief snippet, but I think this video illustrates essentially what @j_bertolotti was describing (how the reflection from each point on the mirror combines to give the angle of reflection):
youtube.com/watch?v=N3levs4TzT

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j_bertolotti

Not a #PhysicsFactlet, but a full beginner-friendly tutorial on how to use speckle correlations for imaging through a scattering medium, complete with a step-by-step guide on how to set up your first experiment and analyse the data (including a full code in Mathematica and one in Matlab to analyse the data, and all the raw data used to generate the plots to make your tests):
#Physics #Optics #Photonics #ITeachPhysics
iopscience.iop.org/article/10.

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Flipboard Science Desk

New evidence points to Wuhan market as source of COVID-19 outbreak.

From New Scientist: "A new study by an international team concludes it is more likely that the virus emerged from wild animals sold at the market and not from a lab escape. The researchers re-analysed data from 800 samples collected at the Huanan market by the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention beginning on 1 January 2020, and also studied viral genomes from the earliest COVID-19 cases."

flip.it/gkExJQ

#COVID #COVID19 #Wuhan #China #Epidemiology #PublicHealth #Science

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Jens Kube

Nächste Woche: Highlights der Physik #hdp24 in #Hannover mit und an der @unihannover ; alle Vorträge live im Stream (und die meisten später auch als Konserve) hier: youtube.com/@HighlightsderPhys Vor Ort noch viel mehr Programm: highlights-physik.de

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Michael Busch

Today on the arXiv:

Jackson & Rozitis 2024, "Thermophysical Modelling of Eclipse and Occultation Events in Binary Asteroid Systems" - arxiv.org/abs/2409.12703

This paper reminds me that there is an asteroid named Doppler. Which makes perfect sense, but is also confusing.

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Lesley Carhart :unverified:

I can't believe voters in the US look at all the stuff people in Europe are protected from with GDPR and they're just like, "nah, we don't want that legislation that has zero negative impact on us, and protects us from our data and art being perpetually stolen for techbro AI space data centers."

It's not even like EU employment protections, where insane Reaganomics BS insists companies will fall to socialism as a result.

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Andrew Lewis Workshop

It's talk like a pirate day! Here I go:

"I just want to access the media I already own in a portable format that I can watch or listen to in high quality on all my devices without DRM or adverts."

Did I do it right?

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Nick

@j_bertolotti And some may assert that it wasn't even consistent and specific enough to really qualify as an interpretation of quantum mechanics at all.

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j_bertolotti

My main problem with the Copenhagen interpretation of #QuantumMechanics is that, if you ask 10 Physicists what the interpretation actually is, you are going to get 11 different (and largely mutually exclusive) answers. #Physics

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Phil Plait

Sooooo…

Once upon a time, Earth may have had rings. Like Saturn's.

Yes, really.

badastronomy.beehiiv.com/p/ear

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Rebecca Watson

My latest: Texas is about to execute a man because doctors said his infant daughter died of "shaken baby syndrome." The only problem is that shaken baby syndrome isn't real. skepchick.org/2024/09/innocent

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