Matt Panhans @mpanhans@librem.one

Breakthrough in geothermal energy 👇👇

An US company managed to generate a whopping 3.5 megawatts of 100% RE electricity at a full-scale, 30-day test.

The plant will connect to the grid later this year and power Google's data centers and infrastructure throughout Nevada.

#GettingStarted, hope everyone is having a great day!

The Wikimedia Foundation, which serves as the non-profit host for #Wikipedia, @wikidata, @mediawiki, and other free knowledge projects, has joined the Fediverse as @wikimediafoundation - welcome!!

Help! Help! I am trapped
in a haiku factory!
Save me before they

We also met with the amazingly professional Predator, Apache and Blackhawk pilots that were stationed there for training and deterrence purposes. It’s astonishing to me just how squared away these soldiers were – not a question I asked phased them.

About 109 billion people have lived & died. Each grain of sand represents 10 million.

This stunning data visualization of human life by Max Roser was published in 2022.

Today there would be 805 green grains representing 8.05 billion people living on Earth. #science #art

RIP Gianfranco Poggi. A very lucid writer. I had lunch with him as a grad student and embarrassed myself by answering his "What are you working on?" question twice. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses and I didn't realize he was looking at someone else the second time. He kindly removed them. His writing on the state is excellent. He has several smaller books built out of lectures—one on Simmel, one on Durkheim—that are very good introductions, too.

Our Berkeley Center for Data Science & Environment is hiring another Research Software Engineer / Data Scientist!

Details (including expected salary) at https://dse.berkeley.edu/jobs/research-software-engineer-data-scientist

Please boost and reach out w/ questions!

My mental reframing exercise for the day:

I’m hiring.

My team, which is overseeing the modernization of IRS IT with $10 billion+ from the Inflation Reduction Act, needs a coordinator. Someone early career who is beginning to see how much room for improvement there is with Federal IT, and is equipped for a high-profile mission.

Please boost.

https://openopps.usajobs.gov/tasks/5842

LA Times: How an untested, cash-strapped TV show about books became an American classic

https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/tv/story/2023-07-11/reading-rainbow-levar-burton-40th-anniversary

(h/t to @gbhnews from another social)

#LeVarBurton #ReadingRainbow #PBS

Real Internet of Shit stuff here. Ebike firm goes belly-up, but the encryption key to unlock your bike is stored on its very-soon-to-disappear servers.

https://mastodon.notsobig.co/@phill/110701490478043590

One of the world's very strangest volcanoes, and easily one of my favorites is Kawah Ijen in Indonesia. These photos of lava are not color enhanced or photoshoped, the lava from Kawah Ijen is just that beautiful electric blue color. The lava is an incredible blue due to an extremely high sulfur content--because sulfur burns blue.

In normal volcanoes, you can sometimes catch the blue tint of volcanic gasses betraying the presence of sulfur coming into contact with oxygen, but at this volcano there is so much sulfur in the lava and air that it appears blue, and spits blue flames.

The crater during non eruptive periods is a sulfur mine, and you can find massive nearly pure sulfur crystals there. The crater lake of Ijen is enormously toxic and the sulfuric gasses in the crater can kill.

“These sh*t e-scooters are everywhere!!”

remade my whole website in Quarto and it looks much like it once did but oh man was it way easier to do. highly recommended if you want more flexibility and automation than like a Google Site but still want it to be simple and easy https://nickchk.com/

The Dutch government has officially launched their own Mastodon server, State Secretary of Digitalisation @avhuffelen announced today! The server lives on the official domain of the Dutch government, at social.overheid.nl.

The Secretary mentions in her announcement a letter to the government explaining her support for 'value-driven alternative social networks', such as Mastodon. For more information on that, check out
https://fediversereport.com/dutch-government-officially-launches-mastodon-server/

The FTC has stayed taking Ls (losses) in recent years. A judge just dismissed the FTC’s attempt to block Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision.

This is what happens when instead of focusing on its mission of protecting consumers, the FTC succumbed to the anti big tech narrative being pushed my media like the NYT.

And now it keeps getting embarrassed by losses in court.

https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/11/23779039/microsoft-activision-blizzard-ftc-trial-win

Whoa. Sophos researchers just announced that they’ve uncovered 133 malicious drivers signed with legitimate digital certificates, and found 100 of of those 133 drivers were signed by Microsoft.

https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2023/07/11/microsoft-revokes-malicious-drivers-in-patch-tuesday-culling/

From the post:

"Today, Microsoft issued Security Advisory ADV230001 as part of their July Windows Update that addresses Sophos’ discovery of more than 100 malicious drivers that had been digitally signed by Microsoft and others, dating as far back as April 2021."

"They also released Knowledge Base article 5029033, which includes new, more detailed information on the technical measures Microsoft has taken to protect against these malicious signed drivers. Sophos has had protection measures in place since 2022 that could detect the presence of, and block the installation of, these drivers."

https://msrc.microsoft.com/update-guide/vulnerability/ADV230001

https://support.microsoft.com/help/5029033

I wrote recently about one of the bigger names in signing malware as a service:

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/06/ask-fitis-the-bear-real-crooks-sign-their-malware/

Here we go again.

Tons more malware signed by Microsoft again. Good on Sophos here for telling them.

Microsoft have got to sort this out. Aside from being super embarrassing for them, it’s pretty woeful that they keep trying to sell us on the idea they block malicious drivers when they keep directly signing them. At least flag packed files, MS.
https://news.sophos.com/en-us/2023/07/11/microsoft-revokes-malicious-drivers-in-patch-tuesday-culling/

Why Don’t We Build Skyscrapers Out Of Wood?. This is Ascent Milwaukee. A gorgeous combo luxury apartment and retail space. But if you look closely, you might notice something special about this building… Figured it out yet? It’s made out o... https://undecidedmf.com/why-dont-we-build-skyscrapers-out-of-wood/