Nick @internic@qoto.org

Debates about tech and human rights often hinge on a distinction between public and private entities, with some folks arguing that basic rights protect people from government abuses, not corporate ones.

In this law review article, Andrew Keane Woods summarizes how this public/private distinction has led to policy problems as tech corporations privatize important societal functions that used to be public.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4343908

Reading all these articles about the high traffic from AI bots, here is my experience from a small German hoster: It's a huge problem, and it is getting worse very fast. There are bots like claudebot from Antrophic which are so aggressive that they block whole systems, outranking actual attacks for example against WordPress. And they change their AWS cloud IPs so often that blocking doesn't help for long and they also ignore robots.txt. Our on-call is regularly alerted for such issues.

Academic Mastodon friends, I'm hoping you can help me out. I'm looking for good examples in academic papers of well-written sections recommending areas for further research. I need to dig into the format and language for a project.

It could be in any field, discipline or publication. And yes, it can be your own paper!

I'd love to know what you like about the example you pick, too.

Boosts on this are welcome, thank you.

@academicchatter @academicsunite @academiccommunity #Language Writing

I've never been so insulted by something I 100% agree with.

(From X: https://x.com/forrestbrazeal/status/1797643911516786986 )

#softwaredevelopment

There is a mysterious connection between #algebraic #surfaces and solutions of non-linear differential equations called the #Painlevé equations. Marta Mazzocco
@unibirmingham Pieter Roffelsen and I
@sydney_uni show surprising variations on this connection: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.10541

The men working out at my (outdoor) gym this morning were all like "I know a half dozen kind of terrifyingly young men who died from heart issues this year what is happening" and then someone brought up covid and they were like "is covid still a thing people get?" And I, a person only lately cleared to work out again after having heart issues from covid, obviously I said nothing because truly there is no point

HSA provider HealthEquity has determined that a cybersecurity incident disclosed earlier this month has compromised the information of 4,300,000 people.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/healthequity-says-data-breach-impacts-43-million-people/

Time for my monthly reminder to support your instance. Most instances are volunteer run and paid for by donations, including from the instance administrators. I know these are tough times and not everyone can afford it, and that is OK (I am personally out of work, so I understand that first hand).

You can generally find information to donate on youe instance's "about" page. For example, https://infosec.exchange/about, for those on infosec.exchange.

Thank you for being here and making this place awesome, regardless of your ability to donate.

tl;dr: High reliance on CO₂ removal (#CDR) is bad for CO₂ emissions, as we as land, water, and fertilizer use. But CDR does have a role. Policies should focus on reducing emissions by 80–90%, and CDR can address the remaining 10–20%, especially in hard-to-abate sectors.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-50594-5

The year is 2032. The last Olympic swimming pool on Earth is drained directly into a server farm so a kid can use #ChatGPT to write the last fan letter to the last Olympic swimmer before they all die of dehydration

Good Lord, how depressing is that Google Gemini ad about getting the AI to write your kid’s fan letter to her hero athlete? Why not get Midjourney to make a picture to enclose as well? What do they think it means for a child to write a fan latter, or for a recipient to read one?

*sigh* Wear those N95 masks I know a lot of you hate but wear them at least indoors and get those vaccinations up to date.

https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/covid-numbers-spiking-ottawa

#Ottawa #Covid #CovidIsAirbone

#nasa and #nsf funding senate versus house

😬 +8% senate, -8.9% house

“One notable discrepancy between the Senate and House is in funding for NASA’s #EarthScience programs. The Senate proposes $2.37 billion, an 8% increase over this year’s funding, matching the president’s request. The House proposed an 8.9% cut to $2 billion, largely reflecting Republican views that #climate research is not a high priority.”

https://www.science.org/content/article/u-s-senate-spending-bill-sets-congressional-clash-over-research-spending

Nobody takes more in government handouts than a billionaire

https://jalopnik.com/half-of-teslas-q2-profit-came-from-your-taxes-1851606200

“ #Texas sues Biden administration to limit teenage access to birth control.”

It begins.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/26/texas-teenage-birth-control-lawsuit

Trump wasn't being cagey or ambiguous when he told white Christian nationalists that this will be the last vote they need to make if they help elect him.

But you can be sure Big Journalism will just laugh it off as another "there goes Trump again" minor story, or at most a one-day story.

If Harris said something like this, you would never hear the end of it.

https://www.mediaite.com/trump/trump-cryptically-declares-you-wont-have-to-vote-anymore-if-he-wins-second-term/amp/

@ProPublica is doing some of the best investigative journalism in the country. This week, it has an update on one of its education stories. Shrub Oak International School in New York promises personalized assistance for autistic students with complex needs but ProPublica discovered neglect and abuse. As a result of their reporting, some states are now telling their public schools not to send pupils to the private, for-profit boarding school.

https://www.propublica.org/article/shrub-oak-international-school-lawsuit-washington-state-autism

#Education #Schools #NewYork #Autism #DisabilityRights #Newstodon #NewstodonFriday #FollowFriday

@thomasfuchs What have things come to, when you can’t get a reliable code review from a weird QAnon anti-vax dude on a decaying social media hellsite run by a Nazi hopped up on ketamine.

Rosalind Franklin was born #OTD in 1920. Her X-ray diffraction work was critical for establishing the helical nature of DNA.

Image: Vittorio Luzzati / Jewish Women’s Archive

For a deeper read on the Crowdstrike incident and the market fragility and negative externalities that drove the poor processes therein, check out Bruce Schneier's essay in @lawfare https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-crowdstrike-outage-and-market-driven-brittleness