tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

Today we completed instrument calibration checks and prepared the data storage racks to receive fresh black hole observation data at a blazing fast 64 Gbps. The storage array for SPT's portion of EHT alone holds ~1.3 petabytes which we will fill up over the course of several days.

I rewired the back of the panel to tidy up all the loose flappy cables. It now manages 600 rpm, which is not too flickery.

A 61-year-old man from County Down has been arrested for historical sexual offences against children in Northern Ireland.

In other news, Jeffrey Donaldson (61), from County Down, the leader of the DUP, has deleted all his social media presences this morning and his party has just called an emergency meeting.

https://www.rte.ie/news/ulster/2024/0329/1440676-man-61-charged-with-historical-sexual-offences/

My new video is out.
DOOM in Space.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zthssUIFG6c

Oh thats grim:

By 2013, Netflix had begun entering into a series of “Facebook Extended API” agreements, including a so-called “Inbox API” agreement that allowed Netflix programmatic access to Facebook’s users' private message inboxes, in exchange for which Netflix would “provide to FB a written report every two weeks that shows daily counts of recommendation sends and recipient clicks by interface, initiation surface, and/or implementation variant (e.g., Facebook vs. non-Facebook recommendation recipients).

Netflix pays fb for ad space
Fb gives Netflix DMs to better target ads
Netflix gives fb back clickthrough and behavioral data, including data from rival advertisers (read: google)

So fb gets to say they dont use private messages for targeting ads, they just share them with whoever can give them more data on you, which is ofc fine.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/netflix-ad-spend-led-to-facebook-dm-access-end-of-facebook-streaming-biz-lawsuit/

This has got to be one of the most complicated alt texts I’ve had to write. #shitpost

Have you ever seen an #astrophotography image where something looked off, like an oddly large #Moon or the #MilkyWay where it shouldn't be?

I just wrote an article in the ESO #blog explaining some methods and tools you can use to find out if these images have been doctored.

Check it out: https://www.eso.org/public/blog/csi-astronomy/

#astrodon #astronomy #photography

Vancouver may soon see a dramatic addition: Sen̓áḵw, 11 towers holding 6,000 apartments. It’s being built by the Squamish First Nation. Since it's on land they own, they don't have to follow Vancouver’s zoning rules. And they've chosen to build bigger, denser and taller than anywhere else in Canada.

Predictably, this rubs against a widespread belief that the Squamish, are an indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest Coast, are living fossils with a duty to embody a romantic vision of life before Europeans came here:

City councillor Colleen Hardwick said “How do you reconcile Indigenous ways of being with 18-storey high-rises?” And Gordon Price, a Vancouver urban planner and a former city councillor, said “When you’re building 30, 40-storey high rises out of concrete, there’s a big gap between that and an Indigenous way of building.”

Neither of these people are members of the Squamish First Nation. Sen̓áḵw existed as a city of cedar longhouses long before Vancouver was built. Its Squamish residents saw their land carved up for railways until their homes were torched and they were loaded onto a barge and shipped away in 1913. Now they're back.

Much of my text was paraphrased from this article by Michelle Cyca, which has more cool pictures:

https://macleans.ca/society/sen%cc%93a%e1%b8%b5w-vancouver/

This WSJ investigation is enormously illuminating. The paper’s findings marry the two conflicting versions I’ve been seeing in the U.S. media and from Team Navalny, ie the deal was far from done vs. Putin killed him just before the deal was signed.

https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-u-s-prisoner-swaps-gershkovich-whelan-be4576f8

According to this WSJ report, Biden met privately at the Oval Office with Scholz to pitch trading for Whelan and Gershkovich. Putin, of course, wants his assassin buddy Vadim Krasikov, but that SOB is locked up in Germany. To “sell” the deal to the German public, how about Russia also coughs up Navalny, who enjoys popularity in Germany.

Biden and Scholz reportedly said, okay, let’s think about this, but “word of the discussions reached the Kremlin via a private intermediary” within a week, before Washington could offer anything formally. (This presumably refers to rumors about Roman Abramovich talking to Putin about the idea of including Navalny in the swap.)

And then, poof, Navalny dies. While this doesn’t conform to Team Navalny’s talk of an “imminent deal,” it does support the main thrust of its claim that Putin ordered Navalny death directly, in relation to his calculations on an exchange deal for Krasikov.

Besides these insights into the Navalny tragedy (including Christo Grozev recruiting Hillary Clinton for the cause, wow), this WSJ article also offers a fascinating look at the partisan politics behind which Americans get swapped and the public opinion and lobbying work that elevates some people over others. (The Griner vs. Krivanek stories are a real indictment.)

Overall, an incredible read.

Good luck finding a story that’s more characteristic of the Putin regime than this: “How the Russian authorities tried to charge a handless activist with strangling a police officer” https://meduza.io/en/feature/2024/03/27/they-try-to-get-rid-of-inconvenient-people

New!! Observations of our Event Horizon Telescope (#EHT) collaboration have uncovered strong & organized magnetic fields spiraling around the edge of the supermassive black hole Sagittarius A* (Sgr A*). Images in polarized light of the #blackhole in the Milky Way center reveal structures similar to those in M87*, suggesting that strong magnetic fields may be common to all black holes. This also hints toward a hidden jet in Sgr A*!
#astronomy #astrodon #scicomm #physics

https://www.ru.nl/en/about-us/news/astronomers-unveil-strong-magnetic-fields-spiraling-at-the-edge-of-milky-ways-central-black-hole

NEW: Facebook snooped on Snapchat users' encrypted network traffic to study how they behaved, unsealed court documents reveal.

This was part of a secret program called "Project Ghostbusters," and even inside the company, it was very controversial.

“I can’t think of a good argument for why this is okay. No security person is ever comfortable with this, no matter what consent we get from the general public. The general public just doesn’t know how this stuff works,” Pedro Canahuati, Facebook's then-head of security engineering, wrote in an email.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-snooped-snapchat-user-traffic/

According to German security services, almost half of Microsoft Exchange Server installations in Germany which have OWA internet facing have critical security vulnerabilities due to lack of patching or end of life software. https://www.bsi.bund.de/DE/Service-Navi/Presse/Pressemitteilungen/Presse2024/240326_Tausende_Exchange-Server_verwundbar.html

Nieuwe #Eurobarometer--cijfers tonen dat een minderheid van de arbeidersklasse en lagere middenklasse in België zich politiek gehoord voelt.

New BJIR-article shows that stronger workplace unionization in 🇳🇴 leads to increased employee participation in further education, lower employee turnover, and higher salaries during further education (but lower post-training wage premiums): https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjir.12802?af=R

Soldiers ignoring a judicial order is the sort of thing that happens in the countries that these people are fleeing.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/immigration/article/sb4-texas-soldiers-threatening-migrants-19362944.php

The Insider (an investigative outlet that has worked extensively with Bellingcat) reports that the color, print, and cut of the clothes visible in photos published by ISIS showing the alleged Moscow attackers match the clothes of the arrested suspects. https://theins.ru/news/270191

Russia’s special forces are still looking for the gunmen who executed at least 40 people at a concert hall outside Moscow today, and no one has yet taken responsibility for the terrorist attack. Updates here. https://meduza.io/en/live/2024/03/22/terrorist-attack-at-concert-hall-outside-moscow