keverets @keverets@librem.one

❝Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her greatest discovery. […] Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.❞ — Jeremy Knowles, discussing the complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her revolutionary discovery. (via alliterate)

OH WAIT LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT CECILIA PAYNE

• Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

• Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because she was a woman, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

• Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

• Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne — after telling her not to publish).

• Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

• Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard, and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.

• Cecilia Payne is awesome and everyone should know her.

(OP: Matthew Gardner)

The promised writeup of how I discovered that the Feeld dating app was protecting private data by doing client-side filtering: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/70061.html

On One Wheel, the now defunct quarterly unicycling publication by the Unicycling Society of America, claimed that someone named Ben Dova survived the Hindenburg by fast rope descent for most of the way to the ground before gravity did the rest. Can't be real, right? Well

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

Do not run multiple blockers just use ublock origin
https://infosec.exchange/@AAKL/112989621877545179

The trend of building surveillance into all new smart TVs is "incredibly invasive and little understood,” EFF’s Jacob Hoffman-Andrews told @arstechnica. "Nobody wants a snooping and snitching television, but lately that's all you can buy.” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/tv-industrys-ads-tracking-obsession-is-turning-your-living-room-into-a-store/

Okay bicycle people: I know of Strava and would like to try something like it. But I would prefer something that is open source, community run, and maybe even something I could self-host. Any ideas?

#Cycling #Strava

Great resources for finding alternatives to the Big Tech software people often feel trapped using:
https://switching.software/

by @switchingsoftware

It turns out that this does exactly what it says and I don't know what I expected

Premier Ford will pay Molson Coors and Anheuser Busch MILLIONS to break a 10 year contract 16 months early in order to speed up 24/7 alcohol access in #Ontario gas stations & corner stores.

Many people think that the Beer Store is owned by the province of Ontario, but in fact it’s owned by a consortium of brewers.
🙄 #DougFord is paying this consortium $600 million of our tax dollars to cancel the existing contract prematurely so you can buy #beer anywhere.

#priorities #BoozeOverHealthcare

The Way Things Work (1994)
Personal Computer

Google Search has told people to use gasoline in spaghetti, drink urine, and eat rocks. It said President James Madison graduated from college 21 times, and that there's no country in Africa that starts with the letter K.

This is *one week* after Google executives and engineers spent almost two hours on stage evangelizing about the power of AI at Google I/O. I really don't know if I've seen another product failure this bad in recent history.

https://www.howtogeek.com/google-search-ai-overview-responses/

When I talk about digital privacy, there is always some smug genius who shrugs and tells me, "Who cares? We all know we don't have any privacy anyway." Nothing could be more wrong. Convincing you that the fight is already over to the way people in power get you to stop resisting.

So, I knew that signal had ensured that desktop installs weren't first-class users of the account and had no way of backing up messages. I didn't realize that there was no backup option of any kind on iOS at all, and no way to keep messages when switching platforms. That's, uh, kind of a big deal?

I looked into this because a friend on iOS has stopped using signal. They have a really important relationship that started on signal, and while it's since moved elsewhere, they don't want to lose all the original chat logs. So they bought a new phone and just keep the entire old phone somewhere safe, because there's no other option. The result is annoying (for me) and shitty for them — because the data still isn't backed up.

But it's ok, we've got stickers, Giphy support, and stories, and that's more important than absolutely basic security features.

Most common 4 digit PINs.
https://jwz.org/b/ykP8