Show newer
ijk64✅ boosted
ijk64✅ boosted

LIVE: Managers from NASA and @NorthropGrumman give an update on #CRS19, the next cargo resupply mission to the @Space_Station, scheduled to launch on Tuesday, Aug. 1, from @NASA_Wallops: youtube.com/watch?v=PCIaD73bVD
#AskNASA your questions about the mission.
#NASA

ijk64✅ boosted
ijk64✅ boosted

The Right to Lie: Google's "Web Environment Integrity" Proposal is a Geyser of Badness Threatening to Swamp the Open Web. 

If your computer can’t lie to other computers, then it’s not yours.

This is a fundamental principle of free and open source software. The World Wide Web abides by this principle, although we don’t often think of it that way. The Web is just an agreed-on set of programmatic interfaces: if you send me this, I’ll send you that. Your computer can construct the “this” by whatever means it wants; it’s none of the other side’s business, because your computer is not their computer.

Google’s so-called “Web Environment Integrity” plan would destroy this independence. “Integrity” is exactly the wrong word for it — a better name would be the “Browser Environment Control” plan.

In the normal world, you show up at the store with a five dollar bill, pick up a newspaper, and the store sells you the newspaper (and maybe some change) in exchange for the bill. In Google’s proposed world, five dollar bills aren’t fungible anymore: the store can ask you about the provenance of that bill, and if they don’t like the answer, they don’t sell you the newspaper. No, they’re not worried about the bill being fake or counterfeit or anything like that. It’s a real five dollar bill, they agree, but you can’t prove that you got it from the right bank. Please feel free to come back with the right sort of five dollar bill.

This is not the Open Web that made what’s best about the Internet accessible to the whole world. On that Web, if you send a valid request with the right data, you get a valid response. How you produced the request is your business and your business alone. That’s what software freedom is all about: you decide how your machinery works, just as other people decide how their machinery works. If your machine and their machine want to talk to each other, they just need an agreed-on language (in the case of the Web, that’s HTTP) in which to do so.

Google’s plan, though, steps behind this standard language to demand something no free and open source software can ever deliver: a magical guarantee that the user has not privately configured their own computer in any way that Google disapproves of.

The effrontery is shocking, to those with enough technical background to understand what is being proposed. It’s as though Google were demanding that when you’re talking to them you must somehow guarantee, in a provable way, that you’re not also thinking impure thoughts.

How could anyone ever agree to this nonsense? Must all our computers become North Korea?

The details of your own system’s configuration are irrelevant to — and unnecessary to accurately represent in — your communications with a server, just as your private thoughts are not required to be included, in some side-band channel, along with everything you say in regular language.

If a web site wants to require that you have a username and password, that’s fine. Those are just a standard part of the HTTP request your browser sends. But if a web site wants your browser to promise that it stores that username and password locally in a file named “google-seekritz.txt”, that’s not only weird and creepy, it’s also something that a free software (as in libre) browser can never reliably attest to. Any browser maintenance team worth its salt will just ship the browser with a default configuration in which the software reports that to Google when asked while, behind the scenes, storing usernames and passwords however it damn well pleases.

Indeed, the fundamental issue here is the freedom to have a “behind the scenes” at all. Environments in which people aren’t allowed to have a “behind the scenes” are totalitarian environments. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s simply the definition of the term. Whatever bad connotations the concept of totalitarianism may have for you, they come not from the fancy-sounding multi-syllabic word but from the actual, human-level badness of the scenario itself. That scenario is what Google is asking for.

My web browser (currently Mozilla Firefox running on Debian GNU/Linux, thank you very much) will never cooperate with this bizarre and misguided proposal. And along with the rest of the free software community, I will continue working to ensure we all live in a world where your web browser doesn’t have to either.

(Cross-posted at https://rants.org/2023/07/the-right-to-lie-and-google-wei/ .)

ijk64✅ boosted

Scientists shocked by a dramatic lack of Antarctic sea ice: “If…this is a functional collapse of the system, that means we need to reappraise our sea level projections…As scientists we have a real responsibility not to mess this up.” @readfearn theguardian.com/world/2023/jul #climatechange #climate

ijk64✅ boosted

gamutRF - very cool orchestrated RF speed scanner and collector. Scales with any number of SDR's and x86 or ARM devices, together comprising a compact network.

How fast? 3x Pi's and 3x USRPs will sweep 6GHz in 7 seconds.

Includes spectrogram output tool and a pipeline for translating raw recordings into gnuradio format. It sports two little APIs, one for scanner updates, the other for scanning control:

github.com/iqtlabs/gamutrf

#SDR, #radio #sigint

ijk64✅ boosted

btw if if you want to understand why #Blizzard shipped a halfass game, read this WaPo article from December. Basically the #Diablo4 dev leads were indecisive for years, then they got fired for sexual harassment, half the team quit, and the new studio they merged in had never done an ARPG before, then execs said "you need to launch before we merge with MSFT, so crunch for two years during COVID"
washingtonpost.com/video-games
And it worked! We all just gave them $700M+ to pay themselves bonuses with.

Show thread
ijk64✅ boosted

Apple has announced plans to require developers to submit reasons to use certain APIs in their apps starting later this year with the release of iOS 17, iPadOS 17, macOS Sonoma, tvOS 17, and watchOS 10 to prevent their abuse for data collection. thehackernews.com/2023/07/appl

ijk64✅ boosted

Twitter was able to change the logo of their iOS app but not the name, since Apple requires app names to be at least 2 characters.

They’re also still referring to the app as Twitter in the update notes (via
@sferik)

ijk64✅ boosted

Nearly every material, whether it is solid, liquid, or gas, expands when its temperature goes up and contracts when its temperature goes down.

There are a few exceptions, but by and large, materials conform strictly to this principle. There is, however, a class of metal alloys called Invars (think invariable), that stubbornly refuse to change in size and density over a large range of temperatures.

For over 100 years, the source of this unique property has remained a mystery, but now, researchers have finally discovered the mechanism that causes Invars to behave the way that they do.

It's my latest for work.

caltech.edu/about/news/some-al

ijk64✅ boosted

🎉 #GitHub Next is hiring! A rare opportunity to join a small but mighty team. 100% kind, thoughtful, and smart humans whose mission it is to improve software development, for all developers (and future developers!) You may know us from such efforts as Copilot and CopilotX, though we do not limit ourselves to research on AI things. It's just another tool in the toolbox.

boards.greenhouse.io/github/jo

Please boost for reach! We're a team that has the agency of a startup, the resources of a GitHub, and broad latitude to define what we investigate. It's my dream job. Maybe it's yours? ❤️✌️

ijk64✅ boosted

And I caught Microsoft at doing this nasty thing again.

First time I noticed Microsoft doing this on Microsoft Designer website: collar.place/@Sominemo/1102751

"We'll be as evil as your local laws allow us"

ijk64✅ boosted

MIND NUMBING HEAT!

Like a hot tub: Water temperatures off Florida soar over 100 degrees, stunning experts

A buoy near Manatee Bay recorded an astounding 101.1-degree water temperature Monday, a temperature common for hot tubs.
#News #GlobalWarming #climatechange #weather #ClimateEmergency #climatecrisis #AureFreePress #Florida

nbcnews.com/news/weather/hot-t

That nagging feeling… I really hope that someone got that girl wingstop.

ijk64✅ boosted

Important sets:
ℂ the complex numbers
ℕ the natural numbers
ℚ the rational numbers
ℝ the real numbers
𝕏 the set of fascists wannabes
ℤ the integers

ijk64✅ boosted

Proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you have always known.

ijk64✅ boosted
ijk64✅ boosted

@ariadne I’m assuming it only works under X11 too 👀

ijk64✅ boosted

apparently twitter has a new logo that is like the X11 logo

Show older
Mastodon BASIC experimental (Futex BBS)

Futex BBS