Martin Ruskov @mapto@qoto.org

You have an PhD in #DigitalHumanities and have plans continuing research in this field? 6-years #PostDoc position #UniGraz in the Departement of Digital Humanities #DHGraz available! #jobs submission deadline: 8.12.2025 more info at https://jobs.uni-graz.at/en/jobs/20af80cd-d585-a918-51ad-67aa2a9b70c0

“We don’t need super intelligence to save us, because we’re already a superintelligent species. We just need to move from singularity to plurality.”

The plurality Tang speaks of is the cooperation between opposites: “Instead of treating conflict as a volcanic eruption that must be extinguished immediately, we should tap into that magma — that reactive energy that emerges from disagreement — to find solutions and build a kind of geothermal plant to resist the heat.”

That's an extremely clever idea: "she tries to reduce the time she spends online by keeping her screens in grayscale..."

https://english.elpais.com/technology/2025-11-02/audrey-tang-hacker-and-taiwanese-digital-minister-ai-is-a-parasite-that-fosters-polarization.html

The super-rich are not just overconsuming carbon, but also actively investing in and profiting from the most polluting corporations.

“The climate crisis is an inequality crisis. The very richest individuals in the world are funding and profiting from climate destruction, leaving the global majority to bear the fatal consequences of their unchecked power.”

via @oxfam

https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/person-richest-01-produces-more-carbon-pollution-day-someone-bottom-50-produces-all

Thankfully, public pressure has once again pushed the EU Council to withdraw its dangerous plan to scan encrypted messages. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/once-again-chat-control-flails-after-strong-public-pressure

November 1, 1755, one of the most powerful earthquakes recorded in European history hits Lisbon. The earthquake was followed by a tsunami and a fire storm claiming an estimated 30.000 to 60.000 victims.

The Great Lisbon Earthquake did not only play an important role in the history of Lisbon, but also in the history of geoscience.

https://blogs.egu.eu/divisions/ts/2018/11/03/lisbon-at-the-down-of-modern-geosciences/?fbclid=IwY2xjawNzIT5leHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETBOMmd5Tnc5Qm1vN2pMN1c1AR7G-OlJtKb14FWPINW_Z2gG5cfvBoo_tZRikFl3mpchk-fg29Xr-Kf-HX3LHA_aem_xaiz4IENmWDlGTFaNmWFtg

💔 Thinking about this blue whale weaving through shipping traffic instead of simply feeding and living in peace. No animal should have to struggle like this.⁣
⁣
This is why ocean sanctuaries matter. Safe zones where marine life can rest, recover and thrive, free from industrial pressure.⁣

actual artist (not AI) created Portland frog prints & tees for sale 🐸 by Gwen Katz

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2019846827/hop-shirt

Your #cyclingfallacy is…

“People should wear helmets when cycling, that would make it safe”

https://www.cyclingfallacies.org/en/people-should-wear-helmets-when-cycling.html

#cyclingfallacies #RoadSafety #helmet

#YesWeCasque #YesWeKask
French joke ☝️

🚨🚨🚨 Absolutely insane stuff here. @lorenzofb spent months working on this story.

Peter Williams, former L3Harris Trenchant boss — the division that makes cyber exploits, zero-days and spyware for Western governments — has pleaded guilty to selling Trenchant's exploits to Russia.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/29/former-l3harris-trenchant-boss-pleads-guilty-to-selling-zero-day-exploits-to-russian-broker/

If you're a journalist writing about this Azure outage, don't forget to ask Microsoft how much of their code is "AI-generated".

Satya Nadella claims 30%:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/29/satya-nadella-says-as-much-as-30percent-of-microsoft-code-is-written-by-ai.html

#Outage #Azure #Microsoft

But an analysis of social media suggests something else. Many people and groups on the radical and far-right are harnessing a process known as audience capture in order to influence political policy.

A group of anonymous X accounts is said to follow a “posting-to-policy” strategy. These accounts – some of which are run by disaffected Westminster professionals – post to inject their grievances into online discourse.

To explore this dynamic, and how Reform’s recent u-turn has been shaped by it, we analysed the online networks that drove conversation about “mass deportations” on X over the past year. Using computational methods, we identified four distinct sub-communities defined by their retweet relationships. These sub-communities were formed around far-right influencers, radical right influencers, Advance UK/free-marketeer influencers – and around the Reform party.

Discussion of mass deportations in 2024 was almost exclusively dominated by the far-right and the anonymous accounts of the radical right. Fast forward to April 2025 and we find Lowe, Habib and a wider range of rightwing influencers have entered the conversation in support of the policy.

Finally, in September, following Reform’s August announcement, you can see Farage and key Reform personnel supplant the influencers as players in a movement they had little role in creating. In doing so, the party has aligned itself with a policy that less than a year ago it vehemently rejected.

A group of scientists set out to study quick learners. Then they discovered they don't exist | KQED https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/62750/a-group-of-scientists-set-out-to-study-quick-learners-then-they-discovered-they-dont-exist

As I'm screwing with a device trying to get wifi working, it occurs to me: Why are we still dutifully setting MAC addresses from flash rather than letting the ethernet card take a random one?

MAC addresses are the fucking Digital ID that everyone keeps railing against, the thing is written in the factory, it's logged in the DB, so it's connected to your identity when you buy the device, then it's being emitted out on any LAN you connect to.

Successful nonviolent movements for change require more than street protests. A human rights expert outlines 10 effective actions citizens can take: https://buff.ly/kpfD4ke

Total cost of today’s AWS outage will be in the billions of dollars. https://www.cnn.com/business/live-news/amazon-tech-outage-10-20-25-intl?post-id=cmgzdye9q00003b6ngdv69nyh