Nick @internic@qoto.org

Anyone in Western North Carolina seeking news but with limited/poor internet access, check out this TEXT ONLY, lightweight version of Blue Ridge Public Radio - please pass this on

https://text.bpr.org/

(h/t @melaniesill )

#NCSTRONG #NCwx #Helene #DisasterRecovery #Appalachia #Asheville

If you have a 23andme account, today is a good day to login and request the deletion of your data: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/03/g-s1-25795/23andme-data-genetic-dna-privacy

Hey, kid! Take some photos that document your city, and your life, and not just landscapes and "pretty" pictures.

Oh, and get your cassette recorder, that you've had since you were six, and record the band you play in.

And record the voices of your Dad and other people who will soon pass away, because you won't be able to remember what they sounded like for more than a few years.

#DocumentYourLife
#DMsWithMyYoungerSelf

Recommendation Challenge! 👀

I am looking for a
Task Management app that has
ALL of the following features:

1. End-to-end encryption 🔐👈
2. Privacy by default 🔒
3. No AI 🚫
4. NO AI! 🙅‍♀️
5. Kanban board 🟩
6. ToDo lists ☑️
7. Team access 👯
8. Hosted remotely (not self-hosted)
9. Cute UI

Nice to have:
- Open Source 🗃
- Affordable 💲
- Desktop app option 🖥️

#TaskManagement #LazyFedi

In March 2019, I broke a story about how Facebook had been storing unencrypted password data for hundreds of millions of Facebook users.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2019/03/facebook-stored-hundreds-of-millions-of-user-passwords-in-plain-text-for-years/

Today, the lead European Union privacy regulator fined Meta ~$100 million for that security/privacy failure, which Facebook said could have allowed any one of its 200,000 employees to see the plaintext passwords for up to 600M accounts.

https://www.reuters.com/technology/eu-privacy-regulator-fines-meta-91-million-euros-over-password-storage-2024-09-27/

Admiration for Hitler was once confined to the internet's seamiest corners.

Now it's reaching millions on the largest platforms, including TikTok, YouTube, Instagram and X, as the far right uses AI voice cloning tools to reanimate the führer's words and ideas for a new generation.

Gift link to our story on the alarming trend, featuring new research from ISD and SITE Intelligence: https://wapo.st/4eCxkH4

A pretty clever phishing email: I got a message warning me that my Twitter account was about to be suspended for suspicious activity, inviting me to click a button to prevent this. The URL the button went to *was* an x.com link, but it used a security vulnerability in Twitter's backend that allowed redirections to push me to an OATH server that would prompt me for my Twitter login and 2FA, and then send the attacker a valid token they could use to take over my account:

I'm reluctant to make a habit out of advertising my papers here. But I'm incredibly happy to finally have this preprint out:

Submersion constructions for geometries with parallel skew torsion (with Andrei Moroianu),
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.14421

I might toot something explaining the background later!

On (differentiable) manifolds, lots of things that we know and love from analysis come for free: smooth functions, differentials, coordinates, vector fields, exterior calculus, integration and Stokes' theorem.

But there is no canonical way of identifying tangent spaces at different points! People like Einstein thought long and hard about this - he called it 𝑡𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑝𝑎𝑟𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑠𝑚.

The thing that may do the job is an additional structure called a 𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑛𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛. A connection allows you to "parallel transport" vectors along a curve (and thus identify the tangent spaces across the curve), or equivalently, to differentiate vector fields - this aspect is called a 𝑐𝑜𝑣𝑎𝑟𝑖𝑎𝑛𝑡 𝑑𝑒𝑟𝑖𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑣𝑒 and usually denoted by something like ∇ (nabla).

However, there is an important subtlety here: How different tangent spaces are identified using parallel transport depends on the chosen path! This gives rise to concepts like torsion, curvature and holonomy.

The 𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑠𝑖𝑜𝑛 of a connection may be thought of as measuring the amount of "twisting around" when you parallel transport a vector in a given direction.

The 𝑐𝑢𝑟𝑣𝑎𝑡𝑢𝑟𝑒, on the other hand, measures what happens to a vector when you parallel transport it along an infinitesimal CLOSED curve. The h𝑜𝑙𝑜𝑛𝑜𝑚𝑦 𝑔𝑟𝑜𝑢𝑝 is defined as the group of linear transformations of the tangent space that are obtained from parallel transporting along closed curves.

The relation between curvature and holonomy is made explicit in the famous Ambrose-Singer Holonomy Theorem. As it turns out, Einstein's dream of teleparallelism - i.e. no dependence on the chosen curve - can only come true if you have a connection which is 𝑓𝑙𝑎𝑡, i.e. with zero curvature.

(2/n)

@dansup I loathe Meta and don't use any of their products. I also have zero problems with Meta joining the Fediverse or participating in technical standards discussions, or with anyone using any open source projects they produce, or with interoperating with them, as long as they continue to do all of those things properly, which they have, so far. Do the same people who oppose all this also oppose the U.N., or international scientific cooperation or technical standards?

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is now visible low in the sky just before sunrise. Best seen using binoculars or a telescope.

Perihelion will be tomorrow. It will get closer to the Sun as seen from Earth in the coming days and be visible in the evening sky after Oct 10. Closest approach to earth is on Oct 12. It may become very bright as it its tail gets backlit by the Sun.

This composite image was taken at Lake George, NSW, Australia on Sep 21 by Lucy Yunxi Hu.
https://apod.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
1/n

I used to be "with it" in terms of web stuff, so friends always come to me for advice. But I am very much no longer with it and can't answer this one, so I turn to Fedi for help.

What are people using these days to run a really small, simple email newsletter?

Boosts welcome, thanks in advance

By me:

Chief among them: mandatory resets, required or restricted use of certain characters, and the use of security questions

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/09/nist-proposes-barring-some-of-the-most-nonsensical-password-rules/

He seems nice

I cannot understand why Big Journalism isn't yelling from the rooftops about the Republicans' voter suppression crusade -- in state after state, working to rig elections.

Even on the rare occasions when journalists notice, they talk about a single state with zero context. It's like spotting a brush fire but never observing that the entire forest is ablaze.

The Republicans are engaged in a direct attack on people's right to vote. It is a direct attack on democracy.

And our media won't see it.

This is a real result in Google.

The term #googling is going to take on new connotations, and they don’t care.

"Doing things that have well-known, efficient, deterministic algorithms with neural nets"

- Apparently every CS paper these days

#CS #CompSci

NPR: Nursing aides feel abandoned as they grapple with mental and physical troubles that stem from their work during the COVID outbreak.#news #NPR https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2024/09/25/nx-s1-5122537/nursing-aides-ptsd-disability-long-covid-early-retirement