Sylvain Miermont @miermont@qoto.org

GREAT change is approaching. NIST will standardise prohibition of requirement of composing passwords from various character styles, and requirement for periodic password changes. These are harmful and obsolete rules. Now they will be treated as a cybersecurity weakness https://pages.nist.gov/800-63-4/sp800-63b.html

Imports of Russian LNG via the Rotterdam LNG terminal recently doubled. Share of Russia in overal EU gas imports rising again too, to 17% in the first half of the year, helping to fund Russia's war against Ukraine.
https://www.telegraaf.nl/nieuws/2059999398/haven-rotterdam-plots-vol-met-russisch-gas-maas-in-de-wet

Sad to see that it's New Zealand's turn to suffer the potentially deadly costs of a right wing government's contempt for scientific expertise.

Skimping on geohazards monitoring and risk assessment in a country bisected by a plate boundary? What could go wrong?

#geology #NZ #earthquakes #volcanoes

https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/gns-cuts-could-devastate-critical-work-according-to-85-international-scientists/NO5K3PBALRE2RBSZXO4EQ4GSEU/

LinkedIn is now using everyone's content to train their AI tool -- they just auto opted everyone in (except folks in the EU, it seems)
I recommend opting out now (AND that orgs put an end to auto opt-in, it's not cool)
Opt out steps: Settings and Privacy > Data Privacy > Data for Generative AI Improvement (OFF)

We shouldn't have to take a bunch of steps to undo a choice that a company made for us.
Orgs think they can get away with auto opt in because "everyone does it".
If we come together and demand that orgs allow us to CHOOSE to opt in, things will hopefully change one day.

LinkedIn seems to have auto enrolled folks in the US, but hearing from folks in the EU that they are not seeing this listed in their settings (likely due to privacy regulations).
If you're outside of the US, I'm curious if you're seeing this?

It's Ig Nobel season again! This one's remarkably depressing! 😀

"Longevity data are used for projections of future lifespans, and those are used to set everyone’s pension rate. You’re talking about trillions of dollars of pension money. If the data is junk then so are those projections. It also means we’re allocating the wrong amounts of money to plan hospitals to take care of old people in the future. Your insurance premiums are based on this stuff."

https://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023

It has been a tremendous privilege to be part of a 68-strong international cross-disciplinary team of scientists trying to solve the puzzle of a #seismic signal that was observed around the globe for nine days. A massive #rockslide into a #Greenland #fjord generated a #tsunami with 200 meter run-up that coalesced into a long duration seiche. Our findings are published in the journal Science this evening.

https://www.science.org/content/article/megatsunami-remote-fjord-rang-earth-bell-9-days

After decades of stagnation, Japan is engaged in a multibillion-dollar industrial policy to jump-start the lackluster economy and recapture its position as a tech innovator. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/business/2024/09/14/tech/japan-tech-leader-reclaim/ #business #tech #rapidus #semiconductors #chipmakers #hokkaido #globaleconomy

Fun* fact in this video: the 'disposable' vapes thrown away in Britain alone contain enough lithium batteries to make 1.2 Million e-bikes.
I've been independently powering things with vape batteries that I've rescued before seeing this video. Pull out the cell, add a cheap usb charging module and you have a fully rechargeable 3.7v power source. If you need higher voltage you can put them in series and you can even get multi-cell balancing modules for next to nothing if you want to have a few in parallel for more current.
I don't trust them for anything critical, but they're great for low-budget projects as the cells are completely free. My bike lights are all powered by them (one can run a flashing bike light for a couple of weeks' use), as well as various other things that had their batteries die, or that didn't come with rechargeable batteries.
I also only charge them somewhere flameproof, though I haven't had any issues so far.
#making #electronics #reuse
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehp23hrrEHY

Architects and civil engineers are licensed because their mistakes can bring down bridges and buildings. Electricians are licensed because their mistakes can burn down houses. Their work is inspected by third parties because the stakes are so high.

None of this stops small scale folks from doing their own DIY electrical or construction, given that it passes inspection when it's important enough.

At this point, software developers can have this level of financial and now physical impact. Smart cars are killing people. IoT devices are getting hacked and they could destroy massive amounts of infrastructure, burn down houses, bring down airplanes, etc. So when do we start requiring SDEs to be licensed and bonded?

There seems to be 3 types of studies on "sustainable" levels of material use :

• "There seems to be a consensus that this level of extraction is sustainable, I'll just use that"
• "Here are all the target proposals, I'll just choose that one for no reason at all"
• "Hey this target could be feasible because surely there will be some ENORMOUS MATERIAL EFFICIENCY GAINS in the decades to come. Let's also assume that it is desirable."

The Internet Archive losing its appeal means one thing: pirate stuff. Pirate brazenly. There’s no point trying to do it the nice way - you’ll get shut down anyway. Copy, share, and archive to your heart’s content. It’s the only way we’re keeping digital media and our cultural memory intact.

Others have said this, but the Internet Archive's appeals-court loss to Big Publishing is a disaster for everyone but the cartel of companies and a tiny number of A list authors.

The publishers will tolerate libraries only as long as they can control everything about how books can be loaned. If public libraries were being invented today, the cartel would make their core functions illegal.

https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/4/24235958/internet-archive-loses-appeal-ebook-lending

By popular demand, here is the same thing as text.
Phrack Inc
Breaking The Spell
It can feel like the world is in a dreamlike state; a hype-driven delirium, fueled by venture capital and the promises of untold riches and influence. Everyone seems to be rushing to implement the latest thing, hoping to find a magic bullet to solve problems they may not have, or even understand.
While hype has always been a thing, in the past few years (2020-2024), we have witnessed several large pushes to integrate untested, underdeveloped, and unsustainable technology into systems that were already Going Through It. Once the charm wears off, and all the problems did not just magically disappear, they drop these ideas and move on to the next, at the cost of everyone else.
Many of these New & Exciting ideas involve introducing increasingly opaque abstraction layers. They promise to push us towards The Future, yet only bring us further from understanding our own abilities and needs. It's easy to sell ideas like these. What isn't easy, is creating something both practical and sustainable. If we want to make the world more sustainable, we need to understand the inputs, outputs, dependencies, constraints, and implementation details of the systems we rely on. Whenever we make it more difficult to know something, we inch closer to an information dark age.
After the past several decades of humanity putting all of its collective knowledge online, we are seeing more ways to prevent us from accessing it. Not only is good information harder to find, bad information is drowning. it out. There are increasing incentives to gatekeep and collect rent on important resources, and to disseminate junk that is useless at best, and harmful at worst. In all of this chaos, the real threat is the loss of useful, verified, and trusted information, for the sake of monetizing the opposite.
Fortunately, there are still hackers. For every smokescreen that clouds our vision, hackers help to clear the air. For every new garden wall erected, hackers forge a path around it. For every lock placed on our own ideas and cultural artifacts, hackers craft durable picks to unshackle them. Hackers try to understand what lies beyond their perspective.
Hackers focus on what is real, and what is here.
We can move forward through this bullshit. We can work together to maintain
good information, and amplify the voices of those who are creating and
curating it. We can learn how things actually work, share the details,
and use these mechanisms to do some good. We can devise new methods of
communication and collaboration, and work both within and between our
communities to jam the trash compactor currently trying to crush us to death.
Hacking is both a coping mechanism and a survival skill. It represents the
pinnacle of our abilities as humans to figure out how to use whatever tools.
we may have, in whatever way we can, to do what we need to do. Hacking is a
great equalizer, a common dialect, a spirit that exists within all of us.
It has the power to shape the world into one we want to live in.
The hacker spirit breaks any spell.

A project to make it so you can fab chips in a hack space

https://hacker-fab.gitbook.io/hacker-fab-space

« You're not doomscrolling, you're hopequesting.

You need those tiny pieces of joy from seeing friends and strangers share their art, their good news, their wacky unique selves.

We need light to live.

And we find it in each other. »

@Ruth_Mottram Another dimension of the pristine myth is the idea of a “degraded” forest. This is a really dangerous and misleading category, as across the world many legislators protect only “intact” forests and allow plantations etc to be established in “degraded”forests. They are written off. But there is no such thing as a permanently degraded forest, they can and do recover quite quickly.

Suspect we're going to see ever more geoengineering /carbon sequestration schemes - generally inadequate, unlikely to work, and/or actively harmful. But at least this one on seaweed is beautifully illustrated.

https://www.science.org/content/article/can-dumping-seaweed-sea-floor-cool-planet-some-scientists-are-skeptical