Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Poor editing: You have to read a long, long way down in this otherwise interesting article about Goodreads to learn that it is owned by Amazon.

That fact should have been right at the top, given Amazon's overwhelming clout in the book-sales business.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/dec/18/goodreads-review-bombing

I recently received some spam mentions on this account, and couldn't figure out how to report it to the Friendica admin. I know that on Mastodon there's a menu item for each message to report it. Is there an equivalent tool on Friendica?

#Friendica #moderation #spam

The New York Times once published a news story about Hitler in which the reporter wrote -- and editors approved -- the following: "But several reliable, well-informed sources confirmed the idea that Hitler's anti-Semitism was not so genuine or violent as it sounded, and that he was merely using anti-Semitic propaganda as a bait to catch masses of followers..." (see screenshot).

That should have been an indelible lesson. It wasn't.

The Times repeats its worst failures. It's institutional.

More Titan photos and discussion here: https://www.mattblaze.org/blog/titans/

For over 60 years now, the world has been rigged with an elaborate infrastructure that can effectively end civilization on a moment's notice, whether by deliberate command or mistake. It's never been used.

You might find that to be reassuring proof of the fundamental rationality of world leaders and the robustness of nuclear command and control systems. Or you might wonder at what point our unreasonably good luck will run out.

“The government pimped out #Texas to seek out foreign toll operators from France and #Spain. They put out on the front lawn of the Texas capitol a sign that read ‘Texas is for sale. Name your price.’”

From our magazine: A private equity firm continues to extract profits from the State Highway 288 tollway, while drivers and workers pay a high price for the toll road. https://www.texasobserver.org/txdot-construction-toll-workers-deaths?utm_medium=social&utm_source=mastodon&utm_campaign=audience

#news #politics #transit #safety #USpol #France #WorkersRights

Hey everyone! I'm guessing a lot of you will be buying last minute gifts for people, and those tend to involve gift cards. Be very careful when you're buying these off-the-rack at retail stores that sell gift cards for various popular restaurants and brands. Especially those that are not in particularly tamper-proof packaging.

A friend just shared some photos he took after buying a bunch of Dardens restaurant gift cards for some gifts to clients. They didn't discover until leaving the store that several of the cards had been tampered with, their PIN scratch-offs re-covered with look-alike scratch off stickers. Also, the phony ones seem to have goofy looking barcodes, like they were scanned and printed by a laser printer without enough ink.

The trick here is the thieves pull the card out, scratch off the PIN part, record that, cover up the pin with fake tape, and then shove the thing back in the packaging and put it back on the shelf. Then, when someone buys it, the thieves can access the value on the card the minute it is activated (purchased).

The image shows two of these cards that are non-tampered (left) and two on the right that were. These cards can slide right out of their packaging with a little wiggling, and slide back in the same way.

Some stores keep their gift cards behind the counter for this reason. Might be best going for those instead of the ones in aisle 19.

Tired of Producing Valuable Personal Information for AT&T, Verizon, & T-Mobile to Sell for Profits while You Pay the Bills?

If so, switch your cellular service to AweSIM private cellular service by Purism.

Stop your wireless carrier from tracking you by way of ad tracking technology based on your personal information by switching to AweSIM private cellular service.

At Purism, you are our customer, not our product to be exploited for profits.

https://puri.sm/products/librem-awesim/

Just saw exploit attempts against #OwnCloud CVE-2023-49103 detected by an IDS in the wild. So if you’re running OwnCloud, that’s like the final warning…

NextCloud is not vulnerable to this one.

I talk a lot about the incompetence of digital voting vendors a lot, but HOLY CATS

https://www.paddleyourownkanoo.com/2023/12/14/southwest-airlines-flight-attendants-forced-to-rerun-contract-vote-after-crew-discovered-ballot-system-was-vulnerable-to-fraud/

#infosec

It is nice to see people starting to question the fact that they host and develop free software on a proprietary infrastructure owned by Microsoft and used to scrape training data for their IA.

https://notgull.net/finding-a-forge/ by @notgull

The best time to leave Github was before it was acquired by Microsoft. The second-best time is now. Sooner or later, you will be forced out of Github like we, oldies, were forced out of Sourceforge.

https://ploum.net/2023-02-22-leaving-github.html

3M knew its chemicals were toxic three decades ago, but kept schtum. https://minnesotareformer.com/2022/12/15/toxic-3m-knew-its-chemicals-were-harmful-decades-ago-but-didnt-tell-the-public-government/

#Meta is doing EEE.

You will, eventually, be able to follow any Threads user. You will definitely be able to boost their posts onto your server's feed.

But you will probably never be able to like or comment. And your posts will remain largely invisible to Threads users.

Meta will embrace and extend into fedi, until enough relationships get made that they're reasonably certain they are the center of gravity.

The failure of the Internet to deliver its promise is particularly noticeable when you hunt for repair manuals for a product from the 90s. Used to be, the information would either be there or not there, finable or unfindable.

Now, there are hundreds of algorithmically generated sites claiming to have it just because it appeared in their search logs, generating potemkin village content traps with endless paging, broken-thumbnail named-like-the-file-you-want but actually-just-ebay-photos bullshit

Been catching occasional snatches of "The Big Dig" audio documentary on `GBH.

One tidbit I learned was that in order to secure U.S. federal funding for the Big Dig here in Massachusetts, congressional Democrats in the 1980s offered in trade that the interstate speed limit would go back up to 65 mph from the 1970s fuel efficiency speed of 55 mph.

I wonder a bit about this trade.

https://www.wgbh.org/podcasts/the-big-dig/part-3-all-politics-is-local

I'm planning to go to the #junkyard to get some metal balls out of ball bearings.

I'm loking for >20mm balls, but the internet is unhelpful:

What kind of #machines contain such big ball bearings? The ones in #bikes are only a few mm in size. Should I be looking for #truck axles or what?

#vehicles #AskFedi #bicycle #mechanic

In case you ever wondered how CNN would describe Hitler’s Nuremberg Rallies…

#media #fascism

Palestine will be free.

Design by Josh MacPhee.

Learn more & support the Hebron International Resource Network (HIRN), an organization based in the West Bank working to house Gazan workers deported to the West Bank by Israeli forces. nonviolenceinternational.net/hirn_partner

Also popular is the "intelligence of the gaps" argument analogous to the "God of the gaps" argument.

So yeah computers can calculate but wake me up when they can beat humans at chess. Umm beat them at go. Ummm recognize a cat. Ummm write poetry.

Eventually that argument wears a little thin.

I would like to see better, more subtle arguments that distinguish humans from AI that recognizes the bag of tricks in our own heads.

No one should be surprised by what has happened with Airbnb: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-the-professional-airbnb-landlord-class-is-simply-the-worst/?kwp_0=2322170

Bezos and Musk have it deeply wrong.
The problem isn't that we need a trillion people to have more Einsteins or Mozarts.

The problem is we don't nurture and protect the ones we have.

Stephen Jay Gould wrote: "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops".