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I mostly agree here. I haven't read the Doctorow piece. But I've been having a similar conversation within my professional circles. Yes Crowdstrike screwed up. But humans are gonna screw up. We know this. So rather than discussing who to blame, the better discussion is how so many companies found themselves exposed with no way of taking control of what was happening to their systems.
hachyderm.io/@jenniferplusplus…
in reply to Marco Rogers

@jrconlin @lightweight

Case in counter-point: you could call it broken ticket-toss buck-pass subculture perversely incentivized.

We said "no agent complexity, or if you must, it will have phased and tested/metered roll-outs of changes". We were adamantly overruled. They said "we accept the risk of total revenue outage if this agent breaks catastrophically" and (Catch-22) "you must still ensure no outage" and "you must get budget elsewhere to completely re-engineer your service".



Forget security – Google's reCAPTCHA v2 is exploiting users for profit

Web puzzles don't protect against bots, but humans have spent 819 million unpaid hours solving them Google promotes its reCAPTCHA service as a security mechanism for websites, but researchers affiliated with the University of California, Irvine, argue it's harvesting information while extracting human labor worth billi…
#theregister #IT
go.theregister.com/feed/www.th…

reshared this



Randomly found this song on the YouTube front page, and suddenly the day ahead feels like it will be fun: youtube.com/watch?v=3LGdFKIXr9…


It's happening again!!! They're trying to put the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) up for a vote:

thehill.com/policy/technology/…

As I've written in the past, KOSA is a censorship nightmare that'll drive LGBTQIA+ folks out of social media spaces and suppress any content that Republicans think is harmful to kids.

Please call your reps NOW, especially your Senators. If you have a Republican senator, tell them you're worried this bill will impose an unfair burden on small businesses.




Starting now, the #curl website offers changelog listings per-release. curl.se/ch/ always shows the latest release.

Old links still work of course and the old "all changes in a single page" will remain.

#curl




Frage an blinde folgende: Wo kauft Ihr ungeschützte Epubs? Höre gerade, dass buecher.de insolvent ist, dort habe ich bisher gekauft. deutschlandfunkkultur.de/was-d…
in reply to WestphalDenn

@WestphalDenn Das letzte Mal, als ich mich informiert hatte, fiel meine Wahl auf den ScanSnap iX1600.
in reply to Toni Barth

@ToniBarth Liest sich für Dokumente wirklich gut. Ganze Bücher werden aber,"ohne sie zu zerschneiden vermutlich schwierig.


iOS 18 beta 4: Here’s what’s new 9to5mac.com/2024/07/23/ios-18-…
in reply to 9to5Mac

er, tMobile and Orange went away years ago. DO they still use those idents on their infrastructure?


I have some, hmm. Thoughts on the Alicia's Electric Keys CP70 library that came out yesterday. I think they are best explained via an audio post, so here they are.


Einstweiliger Rechtsschutz gegen #Tracking-Cookies erfolgreich. #Microsoft verliert in zweiter Instanz. § 25 TTDSG/TDDDG zeigt Zähne. Glückwunsch an meine coolen Kolleg:innen bei Spirit Legal. Dieses Urteil ist ein Meilenstein.
#TeamDatenschutz #PrivacyLitigation

rsw.beck.de/aktuell/daily/meld…



#BVerfG #Rechtsstaat #Demokratie #noAfD

Zwei Aspekte scheinen mir bei dem Projekt zur Absicherung der #Unabhängigkeit des BVerfG besonders bemerkenswert:

- die demokratischen Kräfte haben sich in einer sehr komplexen Problematik auf sachliche Kompromisse geeinigt + treten gemeinsam dafür ein

- alle haben darauf verzichtet, "Pakete" mit Themen zu schnüren, die nix damit zu tun haben.

So geht Demokratie.

Hier die Zusammenfassung der geplanten Regelungen :

lto.de/recht/hintergruende/h/b…



Here’s what parenting can look like.

When I told my dad I was trans, my dad’s response was, “Oh! I can send you jewelry now!” (He was retired and made jewelry as a hobby).

Two days latter, I had a letter in the mail addressed to Joelle, the first time “Joelle” ever got mail, with a necklace in it. Later he made me this one. He told me, “I hope I got the colors right, I looked it up online.”

You don’t have to mourn a child transitioning. You can be the first to do so many affirming things.



The #curl release stream is live at twitch.tv/curlhacker
#curl


KI-Ampel in Essenbach verärgert Autofahrer | heise online heise.de/news/KI-Ampel-in-Esse…


Konečně jsem se rozhoupal vyzkoušet vyhledávač #Kagi. Zejména mi tím došlo, jak moc Google stagnuje, jak moc se překlopil na stranu inzerentů, nikoliv uživatelů. Na Kagi zatím cením hlavně to, že polovinu první strany výsledků nezabírají reklamy (kdy jste u Googlu naposledy mohli kliknout na první výsledek?) a že můžu výsledky snadno přeházet nahoru/dolů podle svých preferencí – k tomuhle existuje i vtipný globální žebříček „toho nejhoršího z webu“: kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboar…
#kagi
This entry was edited (3 months ago)
in reply to Tomáš Znamenáček

Ja jsem ho zkousel pred nejakou dobou a tak nejak jsem dosel k zaveru, ze vyhledavani jako sluzbu moc nepotrebuju. Google je pro me ve vetsine pripadu spis zkratka/bookmark na par webu (SO, Wiki, news...).

Vyhledavani, jako objevovani neceho, pouzivam treba 2-3x tydne.

A pak jeste vyhledavani jako x-ray, ale to je taky vyjimecne.

Ale koukam na jejich changelog a mozna to zase zkusim.



Long form - on transphobia and trans women as basilisks

That thing transphobes do, where something trips in their brains and they end up doing nothing but obsessing about trans women, while probably in a darkened room with no clean underwear surrounded by empty pot noodles and bags of their own urine.

There is a pop-psychology concept amongst tech geeks of a "basilisk". This is something that, once you become aware of it, it breaks you. You cannot come back once you have experienced the basilisk. It's a one way ticket to, usually, madness, or perhaps total system shutdown. It's generalised from the idea from antiquity of the basilisk as a creature that turns you to stone.

There's a fun story called Blit - linked here, infinityplus.co.uk/stories/bli… about a visual basilisk. Another example is something called Roko's Basilisk which is basically Pascal's wager for atheists who spend too long in Silicon Valley (it's stupid, but some of the terrible people with more money than sense, like Musk and Thiel, actually appear to believe it, and are therefore broken by it, and I reiterate, it's really, really stupid).

Anyway, in the latter case, Roko's Basilisk breaks you by becoming aware of it, BUT, here's the thing: it only works on certain people. They have to be susceptible, and in the case of Roko, the susceptibility lies around a particular weak spot in the ability of otherwise intelligent people to think critically and realise, "this is fucking stupid".

But, here's the thing, TO THOSE WHO ARE SUSCEPTIBLE, I've realised that trans women are a basilisk.

Look at people like Graham Lineman, J K Rowling, and a load of less famous people who have ended up in the same state. They all reached a point where SOMETHING relating to the fact that trans women exist tripped them into some downward doom spiral that has basically pushed their brain into a self-reinforcing state of insanity that they can't recover from.

There are probably several psychology PhDs for the taking on the subject of this.

But it seems I, and many women like me, are basilisks. This is a public post. Some of the people hate reading it have already passed the trigger condition. If you're one of them, you should probably empty some of those bags of your own wee and eat a fresh vegetable, if you can. Good luck!

My name is Sarah, and I am a basilisk. Fear me.



24px? 44px ? Wait, 48dp on Android, hu? What is the size of an accessible button exactly?
Well, it depends (haha). @eric clarifies a lot of miss conceptions around the minimum WCAG-conformant interactive element size.

Short answer:
- For 2.5.5 (AA), your target must be 24px, you can use padding (extend the size) or margin (add spacing) to achieve it. This doesn’t apply to link in blocks of text.
- Same for 2.5.8 (AAA) except you need to achieve 44px.

@Eric


#curl 8.9.0 is out: daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/07/24…

2 CVEs fixed
11 changes
260 bugfixes

by 80 contributors, out of which 47 authored commits

in 63 days since the previous release

#curl

Bubu reshared this.

in reply to daniel:// stenberg://

and (finally) official curl container 8.9.0 is available, try it out > podman run docker.io/curlimages/curl:8.9.0 -V

daniel:// stenberg:// reshared this.



Hanna sat down with Henry from @techlore for an in-depth talk about #privacy, #encryption, and #email!

You can watch the full interview here 👉 youtu.be/0wgpuiIoG_g

in reply to Doerk

@zeitfalle
Now you can say: But I have to exchange a key with PGP as well, but that's what public keys are for.
in reply to Tuta

I only got the chance to listen to this yesterday.

Great interview. Thank you to both Hanna & Henry!



Navigating Hotel Apps as a Blind Traveler: Accessibility Challenges blog.usablenet.com/navigating-…


Blind Barbie and Assistive Technology For Visual Impairment veroniiiica.com/blind-barbie-a…


Your Build AI Questions—Answered aira.io/build-ai-faq/


> Fast forward to 2018. OpenAI releases GPT-1, and suddenly, the future of content creation becomes crystal clear. AI-generated content, indistinguishable from human-written text, is on the horizon.

> (…)

> I'm sure that a vast amount of valuable content is being overlooked. Information that you might search for may never appear in Google's results. Not because it doesn't exist, but because Google has chosen not to include it.

vincentschmalbach.com/google-n…

Big Tech eating itself.

in reply to Michał "rysiek" Woźniak · 🇺🇦

My response (Fedi link). Google has a longstanding bias against new sites as part of its Experience, Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT) guidelines, not in spite of them.

LLMs just exacerbated an issue that already had a long history, and Google’s established-site bias has long been visible (though perhaps less so in the past). It’d crawl instantly but not index for weeks or months.


Reply to Google Now Defaults to Not Indexing Your Content by Vincent Schmalbach

Selectivity is long overdue. Marginalia, Stract, and Teclis feel like a breath of fresh air for broad short-tail queries because they downrank or skip pages full of ads, trackers, scripts, and even SEO. However, Google’s selectivity can’t penalise such criteria as that would conflict with its ad business.

Google has a bias against new sites. This makes sense, given their spam potential. I disagree with your argument that a bias against new sites is a pivot away from Experience, Expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT): it takes time for a website to become an authority and earn trust. If delayed indexing of new sites is wrong, then the problem lies with EEAT. I argue that EEAT is a good framework for an answer-focused engine, but a bad framework for a discovery- or surfing-focused engine like Marginalia or Wiby, respectively.


Originally posted on seirdy.one: See Original (POSSE). #Google #SearchEngines


This entry was edited (3 months ago)


Evaluating Adobe’s new cloud-based auto-tagging feature for PDF accessibility abilitynet.org.uk/news-blogs/e…


"The Biden administration has quietly pushed more than a half-dozen countries to weaken, delay or rethink baby formula regulations aimed at protecting the public’s health — sometimes after manufacturers complained, a ProPublica investigation has found."

propublica.org/article/baby-fo…

#PublicHealth #breastfeeding #BabyFriendly #formula #marketing #advertising #business #trade



House Committee Calls On CrowdStrike CEO To Testify On Global Outage yro.slashdot.org/story/24/07/2…



Wise Sons Deli Enhances Accessibility for the Blind and Visually Impaired with RightHear Technology right-hear.com/wise-sons-deli-…


US pol: I will not forgive or forget this RNC moment

Sensitive content




From Ad Identifiers to Global Privacy Control: The Status Quo and Future of Opting Out of Ad Tracking on Android

Sebastian Zimmeck, Nishant Aggarwal, Zachary Liu, Konrad Kollnig
arxiv.org/abs/2407.14938 arxiv.org/pdf/2407.14938

arXiv:2407.14938v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Apps and their integrated third party libraries often collect a variety of data from people to show them personalized ads. This practice is often privacy-invasive. Since 2013, Google has therefore allowed users to limit ad tracking on Android via system settings. Further, under the 2018 California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), apps must honor opt-outs from ad tracking under the Global Privacy Control (GPC). The efficacy of these two methods to limit ad tracking has not been studied in prior work. Our legal and technical analysis details how the GPC applies to mobile apps and how it could be integrated directly into Android, thereby developing a reference design for GPC on Android. Our empirical analysis of 1,896 top-ranked Android apps shows that both the Android system-level opt-out and the GPC signal rarely restrict ad tracking. In our view, deleting the AdID and opting out under the CCPA has the same meaning. Thus, the current AdID setting and APIs should be evolved towards GPC and integrated into Android's Privacy Sandbox.



WOW! Something just let loose on the far side of the sun and Earth (as well as the entire solar system) are getting peppered with hard protons. Debris from the blast emerged in the form of a full halo CME. Hard protons are good at charging spacecraft bodies, fogging their cameras, and causing reboots of onboard computers. Indeed, you can see a hint of the "fog" in the movie above. Each speckle is a hard proton striking the spacecraft's digital camera. spaceweather.com has the latest on this big, BIG boom.

#CME #Boom #protons #SOHO #Spaceweather #FullHaloCME



It's amazing to see how many buses a single subway rail line needs to be temporarily replaced for track construction.

#mbta rail replacement buses for the red line. Full buses every 2-3 minutes, bus berth full of buses. And that's only one line!

Don't underestimate the capacity of a subway train system!

#mbta


A statement that does not inspire confidence:

"Our [Honeywell] Level-6 [Minicomputer from the 1970s] has been deassessioned and shipped to EDF Energy who own and run eight nuclear power stations in the United Kingdom." — ricomputermuseum.org/collectio…



This podcast from Australian radio on the challenges of local journalism is informative. The problems described are not unique to Australia, in as much as they derive from the decline of traditional advertising, thanks to the rise of the Web and social media. Potential solutions are discussed, as are the implications for democracy.
abc.net.au/listen/programs/big…
#media #journalism #democracy