cdarwin

cdarwin, 8 months ago to random

The Association of Internet Researchers has decided that we will ramp down our use of Twitter, effective immediately.

Instead, we are shifting our activity to Mastodon, where for a few months we have been running our very own server. 👏👍

This means that we will not be tweeting during the #AoIR2023 conference. Instead, we will be posting on AoIR’s Mastodon instance (https://aoir.social).

Membership of this instance is a benefit of AoIR membership. AoIR members have recently been sent an invite link; if you are not a member of AoIR, why not join and also get access to our online community?

https://aoir.org/aoir2023onmastodon/

cdarwin, 4 months ago to Germany

This is the #correctiv investigative report which touched off mass protests across #Germany

Secret plan against Germany

It was the meeting that nobody was ever meant to find out about. Back in November, high-ranking politicians from Germany’s far-right Alternative für Deutschland ( #AfD ) party, neo-Nazis, and sympathetic businesspeople gathered in a hotel near Potsdam.

Their agenda? Nothing less than the fine tuning of a plan for the forced deportations of millions of people currently living in Germany.

https://correctiv.org/en/top-stories/2024/01/15/secret-plan-against-germany/

cdarwin, 5 months ago to random

Three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it.

⚠️The train’s manufacturer is now threatening to sue the hackers who were hired by the independent repair company to fix it.

The fallout from the situation is currently roiling Polish infrastructure circles and the repair world, with the manufacturer of those trains denying bricking the trains despite ample evidence to the contrary.

The manufacturer is also now demanding that the repaired trains immediately be removed from service because they have been “hacked,” and thus might now be unsafe, a claim they also cannot substantiate.

The situation is a heavy machinery example of something that happens across most categories of electronics, from phones, laptops, health devices, and wearables to tractors and, apparently, trains.

In this case, NEWAG, the manufacturer of the Impuls family of trains, put code in the train’s control systems that prevented them from running if a GPS tracker detected that it spent a certain number of days in an independent repair company’s maintenance center, and also prevented it from running if certain components had been replaced without a manufacturer-approved serial number.

https://www.404media.co/polish-hackers-repaired-trains-the-manufacturer-artificially-bricked-now-the-train-company-is-threatening-them/

cdarwin, 9 months ago to random

During the Jan. 6 attack I was on the House floor when rioters broke through the doors and breached the Capitol.

I heard glass breaking and pounding on the doors and I texted Aly, who was seven months pregnant with our second son at the time, "Whatever happens, I love you."

𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐧 𝐈 𝐭𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐨𝐟𝐟 𝐦𝐲 𝐣𝐚𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐭, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐠𝐨𝐭 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐲 𝐭𝐨 𝐟𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭. 𝐓𝐞𝐝 𝐂𝐫𝐮𝐳, 𝐰𝐡𝐨𝐬𝐞 𝐟𝐚𝐥𝐬𝐞 𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐦𝐬 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟎 𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩𝐞𝐝 𝐢𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐢𝐧𝐬𝐮𝐫𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧, 𝐡𝐢𝐝 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐬𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐲 𝐜𝐥𝐨𝐬𝐞𝐭.

That day is one of many, many reasons I know Ted Cruz has got to go. His MAGA extremism is bad for Texas and our country, and it's time to hold him accountable.

I'm running to replace Ted Cruz and give Texans the senator we deserve, and I hope you'll join my team, Ted. Here's the link to make a gift and help build our grassroots movement -- any amount you can spare is truly appreciated: https://go.colinallred.com/8211

Thank you,
#Colin #Allred

cdarwin, 3 months ago to random

If you think any of the relentlessly negative coverage of Biden came out of nowhere -- six months after he was sworn in, reporters were complaining about how boring it was to cover him.

@juliaioffe laid it all out there.
It's not like they were hiding their contempt.

https://digbysblog.net/2024/02/11/the-kewl-kids-are-bored/

cdarwin, 14 days ago to random

Mrs. Clinton accused four justices
— John G. Roberts Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett
— of being “teed up to do the bidding” of conservative political and religious organizations and leaders
— though she believed many Democrats had not realized that during those justices’ confirmation hearings.

“It is really hard to believe that people are going to lie to you under oath, that even so-called conservative justices would upend precedents to arrive at ridiculous decisions on gun rights and campaign finance and abortion,” she said. “It’s really hard to accept that.”

Yet, she also had tough words for her former colleagues. In the Senate, she said, Democratic lawmakers did not push hard enough to block the confirmation of the justices who would go on to overturn federal abortion rights. When asked in confirmation hearings if they believed Roe was settled law, the nominees noted that Roe was precedent and largely avoided stating their opinion on the decision.

Those justices “all lied in their confirmation hearings,” she said, referring to Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh and Coney Barrett, all of whom were appointed by Mr. Trump. “They just flat-out lied. And Democrats did nothing in the Senate.”

“More people have got to wake up, because this is the beginning,” she said. “They really want us to just shut up and go home. That’s their goal. And nobody should be in any way deluded. That’s what they will force upon us if they are given the chance.”

She added: “I know history will prove me right. And I don’t take any comfort in that because that’s not the kind of country or world I want for my grandchildren"

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/25/us/politics/hillary-clinton-abortion.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

cdarwin, 2 months ago to random

From 2017:

Before Trump was sworn in, he and six of his aides said there were no contacts between the campaign and Russians. ZERO. Turned out 15+ Trump people had 100+ contacts with Russian officials, known spies, cutouts and oligarchs. This massive lie has defined Trump's presidency.

https://www.americanprogressaction.org/article/the-russia-connection/

cdarwin, 11 months ago to random

‘It was an accident’: the scientists who have turned humid air into renewable power

The promise of #electricity from humid #air – #hygroelectricity – is capturing researchers’ imaginations.

In May, a team at the University of Massachusetts Amherst published a paper declaring they had successfully generated a small but continuous electric current from humidity in the air.

“To be frank, it was an #accident,” says the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao. “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that #forgot to plug in the #power.”

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/02/it-was-an-accident-the-scientists-who-have-turned-humid-air-into-renewable-power?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

cdarwin, 8 months ago to random

1836: A teenage girl with blue-grey eyes and an oceanic mind is bent over an astronomy book, preparing to revolutionize our understanding of the planet.

No university anywhere in the world would admit her.
No scientific society would grant her membership.

Still, Eunice Newton Foote would go on to become the first scientist to link atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to rising planetary temperature https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/09/12/eunice-newton-foote/

cdarwin, 2 months ago to random

Around 30 lawsuits have been filed around the country as cities, states, and Indigenous tribes seek to make the Oil industry pay for the costs of climate change

Until recently, most of these cases had been stuck in limbo.

Oil companies were trying to move them from the state courts in which they were filed to federal courts, a more business-friendly setting.

But just in the past year, the Supreme Court declined to hear their arguments to relocate these cases on three separate occasions, most recently clearing the way for Minnesota’s case to proceed in state court.

That means executives from Exxon Mobil, BP, and other oil giants may soon have to defend their actions in front of a jury.

“Last year was a really pivotal year in terms of getting past the industry’s big push and their delay tactics,” said Alyssa Johl, vice president for the legal program at the Center for Climate Integrity, an environmental advocacy organization that provides support for these cases.

“That issue and that effort has been put to rest, and now they have to face the music.”

The long delays might have strengthened the legal arguments against fossil fuel companies.

💥Researchers have uncovered more details about what oil companies knew about climate change and when, 💥and the science connecting fossil fuel emissions to climate disasters has matured, arming cities and states with more evidence.

All the while, the effects of climate change — the heat waves, the blazes, the wildfire smoke — have only grown more obvious, and more costly.
Last year, the U.S. recorded a billion-dollar disaster every two weeks.

https://grist.org/accountability/big-oil-climate-lawsuits-trials-attribution-science-exxon/

cdarwin, 2 months ago to random

Boeing union wants a board seat and a say on plane safety

#Boeing's largest #union is in contract talks with the beleaguered airplane company for the first time in more than a decade
— and it's seizing the moment to push for cultural change.

The International Association of Machinists is taking the opportunity to negotiate beyond standard line items like pay and retirement benefits — they want a real say in quality and safety standards.

"It's very important to us that we build a safe, quality airplane," Jon Holden, president of the 32,000-member International Association of Machinists District 751, said earlier this month as talks began.

The union represents 32,000 workers who assemble airplanes in factories in Washington state.

This is likely its "first time ever" proposing terms like this, Holden said.

As part of that effort, 🔸the union wants a seat on Boeing's board of directors🔸, Holden told the Financial Times this week.

"With what's going on these days, we are oftentimes the last line of defense," he told the paper. "We have to save this company from itself."

Union representatives on the board "would serve as a check on the CEO," Leeham News, a trade publication, wrote in January — urging a board shakeup at the company.

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/28/boeing-union-board-contract

cdarwin, 3 months ago to random

The idea that Biden’s difficulty in pinning down the year of his son’s death shows his incapacity — in the middle of the Gaza crisis! — is disgusting.
As it happens, I had an hourlong off-the-record meeting with Biden in August. I can’t talk about the content, but I can assure you that he’s perfectly lucid, with a good grasp of events. And outside that personal experience, on several occasions when I thought he was making a serious misjudgment — like his handling of the debt ceiling crisis — he was right and I was wrong.
And my God, consider his opponent. When I listen to Donald Trump’s speeches, I find myself thinking about my father, who died in 2013 (something else I had to look up). During his last year my father suffered from sundowning: He was lucid during the day, but would sometimes become incoherent and aggressive after dark. If we’re going to be doing amateur psychological diagnoses of elderly politicians, shouldn’t we be talking about a candidate who has confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and whose ranting and raving sometimes reminds me of my father on a bad evening?

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/02/06/opinion/thepoint/krugman-biden-age?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

cdarwin, 3 months ago to golf

Mark Twain once said: “golf is a good walk spoiled.”
Some American communities are realizing that a golf course is a good outdoor space spoiled.

A small number of shuttered #golf #courses around the country have been bought by land trusts, municipalities and nonprofit groups and transformed into #nature preserves, #parks and #wetlands.

Among them are sites in Detroit, Pennsylvania, Colorado, the Finger Lakes of upstate New York, and at least four in California.

“We quickly recognized the high restoration value, the conservation value, and the public access recreational value,” said Guillermo Rodriguez, California state director with the nonprofit 🔹Trust for Public Land, 🔹which bought the San Geronimo course, in Marin County, for $8.9 million in 2018 and renamed it San Geronimo Commons.

https://kottke.org/24/02/the-fledgling-movement-to-rewild-golf-courses

cdarwin, 4 months ago to random

A South Dakota tribe has banned Republican Gov. Kristi Noem from the Pine Ridge Reservation after she spoke this week about wanting to send razor wire and security personnel to Texas to help deter immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border and also said cartels are infiltrating the state’s reservations.

“Due to the safety of the Oyate, effective immediately, you are hereby Banished from the homelands of the Oglala Sioux Tribe!” Tribe President Frank Star Comes Out said in a Friday statement addressed to Noem. “Oyate” is a word for people or nation.

Star Comes Out accused Noem of trying to use the border issue to help get former U.S. President Donald Trump re-elected and boost her chances of becoming his running mate.
https://apnews.com/article/oglala-sioux-reservation-governor-ban-south-dakota-9f811bbd1ffaadf979e4353ad6e961ad

cdarwin, 5 months ago to random

The ability to change features, prices, and availability of things you've already paid for is a powerful temptation to corporations.
Inkjet printers were always a sleazy business, but once these printers got directly connected to the internet, companies like HP started pushing out "security updates" that modified your printer to make it reject the third-party ink you'd paid for:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
Now, this scam wouldn't work if you could just put things back the way they were before the "update," which is where the DRM comes in.

A thicket of IP laws make reverse-engineering DRM-encumbered products into a felony.
Combine always-on network access with indiscriminate criminalization of user modification, and the enshittification will follow, as surely as night follows day.
@pluralistic
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/08/playstationed/

cdarwin, 6 months ago to random

Companies With Flexible Remote Work Policies Outperform On Revenue Growth

A new report released Tuesday by Scoop, a hybrid work management startup that also compiles the data set Flex Index, includes an analysis of remote work policies and revenue growth at 554 public companies done in partnership with the Boston Consulting Group.

It found that the average public company that gives employees choice over whether to come into an office also outperformed on revenue growth over the past three years by 16 percentage points, compared to companies with more restrictive policies.

“That gap was really surprising to us—and larger than expected,” says Rob Sadow, CEO and cofounder of Scoop, whose Flex Index acts as an online “repository” of remote work policies for some 7,500 companies.

The analysis tracked revenue growth between 2020 and 2022, first normalizing the data for industry performance to eliminate differences between high- and low-growth sectors.

Few studies have yet compared the relationship between revenue growth and companies’ remote work policies, says Nicholas Bloom, an economist and professor at Stanford University who is also an adviser to Scoop. That’s in part, he says, because most survey tools study individuals’ experiences with remote work, rather than corporate policies.

Combined with past research that connects flexible work policies to headcount growth, “collectively they paint a pretty strong picture,” he says of the two reports from Flex Index, even if the data does not suggest remote policies actually cause revenue growth. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jenamcgregor/2023/11/14/companies-with-flexible-remote-work-policies-outperform-on-revenue-growth-report/

cdarwin, 5 months ago to random

Samuel Alito came to the court wishing to overturn Roe and lied about that fact at his confirmation hearings;
Neil Gorsuch didn’t even bother to read the draft opinion authored by Alito before he agreed to put his name to it, or else secretly viewed a draft before it was circulated to other justices;
Amy Coney Barrett has someone in her chambers who wants us to see her as a tormented and complicated woman, even as she refused to do anything but rubber-stamp an opinion that would confirm to the world that she was a token, partisan, politics-haired appointment.
And Brett Kavanaugh? He is precisely as absurdly self-important, scheming, untrustworthy, and ineffectual as we all knew him to be.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/12/new-york-times-scoop-fall-of-roe.html

cdarwin, 10 months ago to random

Pinning a quote from a lost toot of @oliphant :

No Democratic Presidential candidate has received a majority of the white vote since the 60s. (Since the Civil Rights act and realignment of the parties.)

Not one. Not any of them.
None.

Even in the last election, which was the easiest election to make the easiest choice and they failed.

It's why suppressing the black vote is so key to these assholes. Black people understand the assignment. Everyone understands the assignment.

cdarwin, 6 months ago to random

Ban private jets to address climate crisis, says Thomas Piketty

“We have to put class and the studies of inequality between social classes right at the centre of our analyses of environmental challenges in general,” Piketty said.
“If you don’t, you will just not be able to get a majority [of people in favour of strong action] and will not be able to make it.”

The prominent French economist is the author of the seminal work Capital in the Twenty-First Century and one of the world’s leading thinkers on inequality.
His work was highly influential after the financial crisis of 2008, and he is increasingly turning his attention to the climate crisis as a co-director of the World Inequality Lab.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/nov/22/ban-private-jets-to-address-climate-crisis-says-thomas-piketty?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

cdarwin, 2 months ago to random

No cervical cancer cases have been detected in women who have been fully vaccinated against HPV, Public Health Scotland has revealed.

It comes after the human papillomavirus (HPV) immunisation programme was rolled out to girls aged 12-13 in Scotland in 2008.

A study published by Public Health Scotland, in collaboration with the universities of Strathclyde and Edinburgh, found the HPV vaccine was “highly effective” in preventing the development of cervical cancer

https://news.stv.tv/scotland/no-cervical-cancer-cases-detected-in-women-who-had-hpv-vaccine-public-health-scotland-study-finds

cdarwin, 1 month ago to random

It’s not just Donald Trump who’s in Vladimir Putin’s pocket.
For more than 25 years, a large swath of the GOP has enjoyed mutually rewarding relationships with Russian operatives
funding and working with K Street lobbyists, political consultants, super PACs, campaign fundraising operations, disinformation and propaganda campaigns, social media operations, cyber-warfare efforts, money laundering schemes, think tanks harboring Russian intelligence operatives, and much, much more.

Jonathan Winer, former deputy assistant secretary of state for international law enforcement, has observed
the relationship for years:
“If you go back to the days of Jack Abramoff, when Americans started going to Moscow in the ’90s, and then to Paul Manafort in Ukraine, and so on, you start to see the spine 💥of a secret influence campaign between the Republicans and Russia that has been built up over decades,” 💥he said.
“It goes right up to Tucker Carlson rooting for Putin on Fox today. It has been built up over decades, and
it is not new,
and it deeply infects the Republican Party.
You have two forces with deep political ties that are fighting American democracy 👉in order to keep Putin in power and install a Putin-like system in America.
And to that end, 🔥they have penetrated deep into our think tanks, our media, our journalism—everything.”🔥
https://newrepublic.com/article/165782/republicans-putin-history-relationship-manafort

cdarwin, 1 month ago to random

New Hampshire’s GOP Is Taking a Stand
—Against the Polio Vaccine

The Granite State could be the first to ditch polio and measles requirements for childcare

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/04/new-hampshire-republicans-polio-mmr-measles-vaccine-antivax-bill/

cdarwin, 28 days ago to random

French company #Seabike has developed a swimming device that uses your own leg power to accelerate you through the water at superhuman speeds.
This crank-driven pusher prop looks a bit like an #underwater #unicycle...
The idea is simple enough; you extend the Seabike's pole to the appropriate length, then strap it to your waist with a belt. Then you find the pedals with your feet, and start turning the crank, with the waist strap to push against.
https://newatlas.com/marine/seabike-swimming-propeller/

cdarwin, 5 days ago to random

A pair of Texas professors figured out that their female students have sex and, boy, they do not like it.
So now the philosophy professor and finance professor are suing for the right to punish their students who, outside of class, have abortions.
"Pregnancy is not a disease, and elective abortions are not 'health care,'" University of Texas at Austin professor Daniel Bonevac sneers in a federal court filing with professor John Hatfield.
Instead, Bonevac writes, because pregnancy is the result of "voluntary and consensual sexual intercourse," students should not be allowed time off to get abortions.
If the students disobey and miss class for abortion care, the filing continues, the professors should be allowed to flunk students.
Additionally, Bonevac asserts that he has a right to refuse to employ a teaching assistant who has had an abortion, calling such women "criminals."
https://www.salon.com/2024/06/03/texas-professors-to-fail-students-seek-abortions/

cdarwin, 12 days ago to random

The toxic surveillance business model
– and the big tech monopolies that built their empires on top of this model:

The roots of this business model can be traced to the 1990s, as scholar Matthew Crain’s work illuminates.

In a rush of enthusiasm to commercialize networked computation,
the Clinton administration laid down the rules of the road for the profit-driven internet in 1996.

In doing so, they committed two original sins
–sins that we’re still paying for today.

🔸First, even though they were warned by advocates and agencies within their own government about the privacy and civil liberties concerns that rampant data collection across insecure networks would produce,
they put NO restrictions on commercial surveillance.
None.
Private companies were unleashed to collect and create as much intimate information about us and our lives as they wanted
–far more than was permissible for governments.
(Governments, of course, found ways to access this goldmine of corporate surveillance, as the Snowden documents exposed.)

And in the US, we still lack a federal privacy law in 2024.

🔸Second, they explicitly endorsed advertising as the business model of the commercial internet–fulfilling the wishes of advertisers who already dominated print and TV media.

This combination was–and is–poison.

Because, of course, the imperative of advertising is
“know your customer,”
in service of identifying the people most likely to be convinced to buy or do the things you want them to.

And to know your customer you need to collect data on them.

This incentivized mass surveillance, which now feeds governments and private industry well beyond advertising,
with strong encryption serving as one of our few meaningful checks on this dynamic.

On this toxic foundation, over the course of the 2000s, the Big Tech platforms established themselves
through search, social media, marketplaces, ad exchanges, and much more.

They invested in research and development to enable faster and bigger data collection, processing, and to build and maximize computational infrastructures and techniques that could facilitate such collection and ‘use’ of data.

Economies of scale, network effects, and the self-reinforcing dynamics of communications infrastructures enabled the firms early to this toxic model to establish monopoly dominance.

This was aided by the US government’s use of soft power, trade agreements, and imperial dominance to ensure that the EU and other jurisdictions adopted the US paradigm.

This history helps explain why the majority of the world’s big tech corporations are based in the US, with the rest emerging from China.

The US got a head start, via military infrastructure and neoliberal policies and investment,
while China built a self-contained market, capable of supporting its own platforms with its own norms for content that further limited external competition.

https://www.helmut-schmidt.de/en/news-1/detail/the-prizewinners-speech