Nick @internic@qoto.org

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/08/google-loses-dojs-big-monopoly-trial-over-search-business/

Action is still urgently needed to address the highly anti-competitive Google Mobiles Services licensing system and the Play Integrity API which are a major part of Google maintaining their monopolies over search and many parts of the mobile market.

🚨 Breaking News from the Voting Village! 🚨
We are excited to announce a special event that is officially open to the public: a real-world hacking challenge using an internet voting system that's been deployed in actual elections! This is your chance to test your skills and explore the system firsthand. 🖥️🔓
Want more details or ready to participate? Click the link below to find out more and join us in this unique PWNing opportunity!
votingvillage.org/siv

Momentous day for #Bangladesh 🇧🇩

Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, the banker of the poor, as he has been known, will head the country’s interim government after former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina stepped down and fled the country amid a mass uprising against her rule led mostly by students.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/nobel-laureate-yunus-to-lead-bangladesh-interim-gov-t-president-s-office/ar-AA1olvNP?ocid=BingNewsSerp

#MohammadYunus

Anyone who is not following me is illegally boycotting me and I will be suing you. This case is closed.

OH my God y'all my wife (she is a self-taught coder who now teaches biology students to code) only just found out about rubber ducking this morning and she's so excited about it 🥹 she's buying 100 little rubber ducks to give to her students 🥹 she's like "Knowing that this is what REAL DEVELOPERS do will be so good for them" 🥹

#OnThisDay August 6, 2014, ESA's Rosetta mission arrived at the comet Comet 69P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

Celebrate the 10th anniversary of Rosetta's arrival at 67P with one of my favorite videos — The Amazing Adventures of Rosetta and Philae.

https://youtu.be/HD2zrF3I_II?si=OposTAsZl3T5h_xw

#OTD #Rosetta #Comet67P #Animation

Breaking disaster this morning — the annual glacier floods are hitting Juneau, Alaska harder than ever, with a whole neighborhood flooded. Climate change is really hitting home this morning. https://www.ktoo.org/2024/08/05/live-updates-as-annual-glacial-outburst-flooding-impacts-juneaus-mendenhall-valley/ #akleg #alaska

Meet the gargantuan #sunspot AR3780, which just emerged into view. It may a source of strong #solar flares and #auroras over the next few days.

#astrophotography #astronomy #science #astrodon

New: Project 2025 would strip CISA of key election security roles, transfer the agency to a new department, and slash various missions.

Experts say it would profoundly weaken the agency.

My story for WIRED: https://www.wired.com/story/project-2025-cisa-election-critical-infrastructure-security/

Troubling #birdflu study suggests human cases are going undetected
Small sample of #farm workers is enough to confirm fears about #H5N1 #outbreak.
"Due to fears that research might damage #dairy businesses, studies like this one have been few," authors write in summary of their study.
Known infections in #humans have all been mild so far. But experts are anxious that with each new infection, the wily H5N1 #virus is getting new opportunities to adapt further to humans.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/08/troubling-bird-flu-study-suggests-human-cases-are-going-undetected/

@stux

On all platforms, a like and a boost communicate two things:

1) I enjoyed this! (Enjoy)
2) Other people should see this! (Visibility)

On a platform like TikTok, the "like" button gives a score of 1.0 to "Enjoy" and N<1.0 to "Visibility." TikTok gives the "repost" button a score of N>0.0 to "Enjoy" and N<1.0 to "Visibility."

Mastodon gives the "like" button a score of 1.0 to "Enjoy" and 0.0 to "Visibility." It gives boost a score of 1.0 to "Enjoy" and a score of 1.0 to "Visibility."

My frontend villain origin story was when I started asking people why we needed this complexity. People agreed it was complex. But when I asked people to tell me what we bought for ourselves, the answers were vague and unclear. That’s when I knew we had gone astray.
https://mastodon.social/@tef/112903811292290724

As a Blind person i never thought i would be on social media savoring photos. But the communal Mastodon alt text game is so strong that sweet, poetic or silly descriptions abound on my timeline. Thanks to legions of people who take time to write a meaningful description of the ephemera they post, i learn so much about insects, plants, buildings, memes — all dispatches from a dimension of the world that i otherwise wouldn't experience. If you're wondering whether anybody reads these things: YES.

Last week I had to spend hours resetting all the #2FA tokens I had in #Authy because they have elected to use the Play Integrity API to decide whether a device is safe, and that API marks devices using my mobile OS, #grapheneOS, as unsafe, despite the fact that it is a *hardened* version of #Android which is actually *more* secure. Aside from the inherent stupidity of this, it's just unacceptable for a 2FA solution to abruptly stop working; you are potentially leaving your users in a very tough position. As a result, I wouldn't touch Authy with a 10 foot pole in the future.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/07/loss-of-popular-2fa-tool-puts-security-minded-grapheneos-in-a-paradox/

Stuff people keep trying to book me as a psychologist in tech to talk about: AI, developer productivity, imposter syndrome, "Feelings"

Stuff I have something to say about as a psychologist in tech: going from 0-1 in using evidence-based practice in a small org, misconceptions that keep us from identifying others' technical skills, things we are avoiding talking about when we obsess about imposter syndrome, FINE FEELINGS I GUESS

Bloomberg report a vast majority of the CrowdStrike losses reported by customers will be judged by insurance as not covered by policies. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-08-02/billions-in-damages-from-crowdstrike-outage-to-go-uninsured

Researchers gave successive versions of a large language #model information produced by previous generations of the #AI — and observed rapid collapse.

This model collapse could halt the improvement of large language models as they run out of reliable training data and as increasing amounts of AI-generated text pervade the Internet.

Learning from AI-derived texts caused models to forget the information mentioned least frequently as their outputs became more homogeneous. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02420-7

Two cameras, slightly different wavelengths

New and improved ways to measure how gross it is out, explained: heat index, wet bulb, dew point, and a new measure called "stickiness" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-heat-index-dew-point-and-wet-bulb-temperature-describe-summer-weather/

I don't expect many of you to be using Google Chrome, but for those who are and any friends who do: Google pulled a sneaky one to include two tracking technologies on its users. Quick short breaking this down:
https://youtube.com/shorts/30OXJvAAb0g