Nick @internic@qoto.org

A new #Louisiana law goes into effect Thursday that will make it a misdemeanor for anyone, including #journalists, to be within 25 feet of a #police officer if the officer orders them back.

#News #Crime #CriminalJustice #CivilRights #Protests #Journalism #PressFreedom #Government #FirstAmendment

https://www.propublica.org/article/louisiana-police-buffer-law

They got @geoff back at the helm at https://css-tricks.com/ he's been doing great cleaning the design up and getting content flowing, including big beefy guides. He's doing better than I ever did, so that's a win.

This is an increasingly used technique, policymakers would do well to familiarize themselves with it. https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9614.html

EXTREMELY naive question (I have no experience and likely none of the required technical skills): how hard/expensive would it be to host a #PeerTube instance for scientific talks? Any legal headache, beside getting people authorization?

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

The article unfortunately leaves out most of the points we made in the thread.

GrapheneOS supports hardware-based attestation and it's entirely possible for Google to allow it as part of the Play Integrity API. They choose to ban using GrapheneOS.

I wish I could give more people some perspective into how things change on here when you are an instance administrator.

I just received a report against a user who isn't even a member of my instance. Remember, this is a single user instance. I am the only user.

This is a person of color who has been vocal in the current drama surrounding anti-Black racism on mastodon. The report comes from a very large and very prominent instance focused on LGBTQ+ communities.

Looking for resources to use in astronomy education or outreach? Want to take a deep dive into topics in astrophysics?

NASA’s Universe of Learning has several curated collections of images, videos, activities, and more that focus on specific topics and targets.

Check them out:
https://universe-of-learning.org/informal-educators/science-resources/

@blogdiva @polotek fwiw, Eugen is no longer calling all the shots, @renchap is now making more of the engineering decisions, and having a small team is absolutely not by choice, but instead constrained by funding as noted in the 2022 annual report figures: https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2023/10/annual-report-2022/

Basically you can't hire full-time engineers without money. Each full-time engineer based in Europe costs you about €80k/year on average; folks based in America have much higher salary requirements too.

@mekkaokereke @davey_cakes I pretty actively try to work on the Mastodon Moderation tooling, and I'm working on something that should help with sharing, distributing & ingesting moderation data thanks to NLNet funding.

Always open to hearing pain points & working with people to try to improve things.

@davey_cakes

What if they got funding to hire a full-time engineer and PM, working on moderation tooling? What if they got UXR from folks on what changes would be needed to the admin and user interfaces? Would they accept it?

What if folks bootstrapped an ecosystem of composable moderation services?

So far, I haven't seen evidence that the answer would be no? It might have been no years in the past, but today, it might be a yes.

I feel like today, "resource constraint" is the big obstacle.

@KimCrayton1 is one of the people that I'm bringing with me to my convo with @renchap .

Context:
https://dair-community.social/@KimCrayton1/112854600825016604

* She should not have to experience this
* It should be easier for admins at DAIR, and across the whole Fediverse, to prevent this

The content that drew the harassment was simul-posted on Mastodon, BlueSky, Twitter, and other social networks. Only Mastodon drew this level of racist replies. I need you all to believe Black folk when we say that Mastodon *is* the nazi bar.

#QT https://dair-community.social/@KimCrayton1/112854231460652234 UPDATE from my instances moderators

“None of these people are coming from known racist instances, it’s just wack-a-mole”

I chose this space because its owners are used to being targets

Due to my work, they invited me to join so I trust them

I share these stories because too many of you live with the delusion that “if I don’t see it, it’s not happening” which means that the victims of this shit are left to fend for themselves

I'm excited to share that I am heading back to the Senate this Fall to work with Senator Gary Peters (D-MI) on science policy related to energy, agriculture, water, the environment & more!

A Fortune 50 company paid a record-breaking $75 million ransom payment to the Dark Angels ransomware gang, according to a report by Zscaler ThreatLabz.

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/dark-angels-ransomware-extorts-record-breaking-75-million-ransom/

A time-sensitive heads up for DigiCert customers:

"DigiCert is warning that it will be mass-revoking SSL/TLS certificates due to a bug in how the company verified if a customer owned or operated a domain and requires impacted customers to reissue certificates within 24 hours.

It is unclear how many certificates will be revoked during this process, but the company says it affects approximately 0.4% of the applicable domain validations they have conducted between August 2019 and June 2024.

DigiCert is one of the prominent certificate authorities (CAs) that provides SSL/TLS certificates, including Domain Validated (DV), Organization Validated (OV), and Extended Validation (EV) certificates."

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/digicert-mass-revoking-tls-certificates-due-to-domain-validation-bug/

We are looking for a full-time experienced iOS developer for the official Mastodon app!

You will work closely with the core team (including Eugen & me), as well as our designer, to ensure that we have the best possible experience on Apple platforms.

This is a remote position, with at least 4 working hours in common with the Paris/Berlin timezone.

We are able to open this position thanks to all of the people donating money to the project ❤️
https://mastodon.social/@MastodonEngineering/112875546269005188

O #Linux hivemind, hear my plea:
Using Ubuntu 24.04 LTS, Firefox is no longer opening file dialogs. I can't save, download or open any files, basically. I've just switched to Firefox 130.0a1 (2024-07-30) (64-bit) in case it helps, but no (I think I was probably on 128.0.31- before).

It says things like this:

[Parent 14903, Main Thread] WARNING: Can't open portal file chooser: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: No such interface “org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser” on object at path /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop: 'glib warning', file /build/firefox/parts/firefox/build/toolkit/xre/nsSigHandlers.cpp:187

(firefox-nightly:14903): Gtk-WARNING **: 18:56:58.540: Can't open portal file chooser: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: No such interface “org.freedesktop.portal.FileChooser” on object at path /org/freedesktop/portal/desktop

...halp?

Once the stuff of progressive pipe dreams, now even centrists like Biden are questioning the court’s outsized power. https://theintercept.com/2024/07/29/biden-supreme-court-reform-presidential-immunity-ethics/

"the German publishing giant Axel Springer ... is suing Eyeo, makers of Adblock Plus, on the grounds that changing HTML to block an ad creates a 'derivative work' of Axel Springer's web-pages...

Axel Springer's filings cite the Sony/Datel case, using it to argue that their IP rights trump your property rights, and that you can only configure your web-browser, running on your computer, which you own, in ways that it approves of." - @pluralistic

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/29/faithful-user-agents/

In everyday life we encounter two kinds of forces: energetic forces and entropic forces.

When you hold a rock you feel it pushing your hand down. This is an energetic force: raising the rock increases its energy, while lowering it lowers its energy.

When you stretch a rubber band, you feel it pulling back. This is an entropic force. You're not mainly increasing its energy as you stretch it. You're decreasing its entropy! You are taking the tangled polymers in the rubber and forcing them to line up more neatly.

We see here a fundamental truth of thermodynamics: when the temperature is constant, the world wants to minimize its 'free energy', which is energy minus temperature times entropy. So the rock pushes down to reduce energy, but the rubber band pulls back to increase entropy.

When you compress a cylinder of gas, it pushes back. Is this an entropic force or an energetic force... or maybe a mixture of the two?

Yes, the force is due to the pressure of the gas. When you compress the cylinder, molecules of gas inside are bouncing against the cylinder's head, pushing back. That's a perfectly fine explanation at the microscopic level. But you can still ask: are you increasing the energy of the gas, or decreasing its entropy... or both?

Think about it a minute, and then I'll tell you. Someone told me the answer, but I decided it's not quite that simple, so I'll explain the answer I came up with.

I wrote a blog article about this stuff, too.

(1/2)

https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2012/02/01/entropic-forces/