tobychev @tobychev@qoto.org

Today I published a state-by-state guide to all of 2024's state supreme court races.

Abortion, voting rights, & other civil rights issues keep coming down to who voters put on bench... & they're electing 82 judges this year.

No excuse to not know! https://boltsmag.org/your-state-by-state-guide-to-the-2024-supreme-court-elections/

NASA has selected 3 teams to develop the Lunar Terrain Vehicle (LTV) - Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab.

The 12-month feasibility task-order will be followed by down-selection to one vendor.

Rover-as-a-Service - vendor is responsible for DevOps and , transportation to the moon’s south polar region.

Key req'ments – carry 2 suited astronauts, remote controlled uncrewed operation, robotic arm, operate in extreme temps at the lunar South Pole.

https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-selects-companies-to-advance-moon-mobility-for-artemis-missions/
1/n

War is failure.

Moral failure, diplomatic failure, democratic failure, systems failure.

War is what failure looks like. https://mastodonapp.uk/@georgepotter/112208562115386469

“It would be untrue to say that we are not afraid of Putin and threats to us”, says Russian exile news site Meduza’s editor-in-chief Ivan Kolpakov. Read my interview with him on Scoop! https://www.scoopmagasin.se/artiklar/english/meduza

"or" and "else" are both common constructs in programming languages, but "or else" is typically a syntax error. this is a major deficiency. we need to be able to threaten our code.

Report into MS breach is out: https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-04/CSRB_Review_of_the_Summer_2023_MEO_Intrusion_Final_508c.pdf

I had a tweet in 2021 saying MSTIC should not use the Nation State Notification process to hide breaches from the public.

That was a reference to the Affirmed Networks breach - aka Azure for Operators - listed in this report. They hid it.

The website for Azure for Operators at the time had Satya’s face on it.. that breach, which they refused to share details about, apparently led to this one.

Assam’s land sale ban between Hindus and Muslims may be unconstitutional – but it's happening anyway

Scroll found that the bar on inter-faith land sale has already been unofficial policy in Barpeta district since 2019.

#assam #land #communalism #hindutva #BJP #BJPStates #IndianMuslims #india

https://scroll.in/article/1065849/assams-land-sale-ban-between-hindus-and-muslims-may-be-unconstitutional-but-it-s-happening-anyway

Dr Ali Frolop on good form this morning. But Douglas has confided in me that the size of the internet in bits is now > Avogadro’s Number, so data should be an uncountable noun, like water
#astrodon

https://arxiv.org/html/2403.19937v1

"Me: Can I see that book from 1571?
Librarian: of course."

she looks looks it up on the shelf list, which looks centuries old in the Biblioteca Angelica in Rome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblioteca_Angelica

4/6

In Pusesavali: doctored images, destroyed lives

In Maharashtra, majoritarian Hindutva mobs are whipping up the communal cauldron. Photoshopped images, doctored videos and rumours are enough to set them off, resulting in the loss of Muslim lives and property.

#maharashtra #satara #pusesavali #HinduMobs #IndianMuslims #CommunalViolence #hindutva #MaharashtraPolice #BJPStates #india

https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/in-pusesavali-doctored-images-destroyed-lives/

Researchers are beginning to capture data that seems to show Meta's pivot away from political and news content.

This shift on Facebook, between spring and winter 2023, is wild:

https://psychoftech.substack.com/p/social-media-that-is-bad-for-the-world

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/

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/