Monthly Archives: August 2019

Tufts Ph.D. ‘Punished’ for Reporting Adviser’s Fabricated Research: Lawsuit

Posted on 2019-08-28 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: The publication process is BS. It's an obvious consequence of the incentive structure. Nearly everyone in academia know this, but I've never seen anything resembling an effort to change things in nontrivial ways.
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Microsoft’s only gone and published the exFAT spec, now supports popping it in the Linux kernel

Posted on 2019-08-28 by pappp

Source: The Register

Article note: This will be a major convenience thing both for building embedded things that use large flash storage, and for interacting with cameras and such from Linux machines.

exFAT heading towards Open Invention Network's Linux System Definition

Microsoft has published the technical specification for exFAT, a file system widely used for removable storage devices.…

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Please Add RSS Support to Your Site

Posted on 2019-08-27 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Fuck's sake yes. Enable Notifications: Fuck No. Join Mailing List: No. RSS subscription: Maybe, it lets me manage your noise to work for me. I've had some sites who killed their RSS (eg. Woot) and I just forgot existed for extended periods of time because "put it in the managed queue" is the only reasonable way to interact with the modern glut without completely abdicating curation to a third party.
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The Threat of Fake Academic Research

Posted on 2019-08-27 by pappp

Source: Schneier on Security

Article note: Summary: "Oh no, a nation-state actor might intentionally publish fake research... like we keep catching academics doing because the incentive structure encourages them to."

Interesting analysis of the possibility, feasibility, and efficacy of deliberately fake scientific research, something I had previously speculated about.

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Google defends tracking cookies—some experts aren’t buying it

Posted on 2019-08-26 by pappp

Source: Ars Technica

Article note: As the article obliquely points out, behavioral tracking is _only_ valuable in net-harmful ways. No one except the ad brokers is making any extra money from hyper-targeted advertising. The 'content producers' aren't actually getting any extra revenue from gathering reams of behavioral data, and now the reams of behavioral data are available for abuse. The rent-seeking middle men, and bad actors seeking to stir shit and manipulate people are the only ones coming out ahead on this regime, and society at large would be better without them. Furthermore, you shouldn't need to be me (with graduate degrees in computing-adjacent fields) to hope to even lessen the degree of surveillance and surveillance-based harassment you are subjected to.
Google defends tracking cookies—some experts aren’t buying it

Enlarge (credit: Leni Tuchsen)

Google's Chrome team is feeling pressure from competitors over ad tracking. Apple has long offered industry-leading protection against tracking cookies, while Mozilla recently announced that Firefox will begin blocking tracking cookies by default. Microsoft has been experimenting with tracking protection features in Edge, too.

But Google has a problem: it makes most of its money selling ads. Adopting the same aggressive cookie blocking techniques as its rivals could prevent Google's customers from targeting ads—potentially hurting Google's bottom line.

So in a blog post last week, Google outlined an alternative privacy vision—one that restricts some forms of user tracking without blocking the use of tracking cookies any time soon.

Read 11 remaining paragraphs | Comments

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The online silencer market is booming — just don’t call it a silencer

Posted on 2019-08-26 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: So, alarmist BS aside, I learned something useful from this article. The legitimate reason those "Everything but drilling the holes" suppressor kit "Filters" have proliferated recently is that currently the average backlog for filing an ATF Form 1 (to legally manufacture NFA item) is like 20 days, and a Form 4 (to transfer an NFA item) is like 200 days.
US-POLITICS-GUNSDominick Reuter AFP/Getty Images

Dozens of retailers sell de facto silencers, making it easy for gun owners to avoid federal screening and registration

Continue reading…

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Researchers propose a new approach for dismantling online hate networks

Posted on 2019-08-22 by pappp

Source: The Verge - All Posts

Article note: Hmm. The "composed of loosely connected clusters of tightly connected individuals" thing is not surprising, basically all social systems look like that. The "When you try to mass-deplatform a group, it leaves for somewhere it will be dominant" observation is not surprising, there are lots of visible cases. The other thoughts are _weird_ though. Non-unifomly banning, knocking off small groups and random problematic individuals, aiming to slowly dissociate rather than trigger a mass migration seems like a reasonable response to that information, but is the opposite of the "Consistent rules, applied consistently" thing that is required for a platform to be trustworthy for anyone. Baiting fights between rival groups so they expend all their energy fighting is ..sometimes appealing and hilarious... but the opposite of the now-forgotten "Don't feed the trolls" rule that always seemed to keep things much less obnoxious than the present era of performative outrage.
Network stock

How do you get rid of hate speech on social platforms? Until now, companies have generally tried two approaches. One is to ban individual users who are caught posting abuse; the other is to ban the large pages and groups where people who practice hate speech organize and promote their noxious views.

But what if this approach is counterproductive? That’s the argument in an intriguing new paper out today in Nature from Neil Johnson, a professor of physics at George Washington University, and researchers at GW and the University of Miami. The paper, “Hidden resilience and adaptive dynamics of the global online hate ecology,” explores how hate groups organize on Facebook and Russian social network VKontakte — and how they resurrect...

Continue reading…

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Researcher banned on Valve’s bug bounty program publishes 2nd Steam 0-day

Posted on 2019-08-21 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Aaand this is why you don't shit on security researchers when they try to do the right thing.
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An oral history of the AIM away message

Posted on 2019-08-21 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: It's an interesting history, and I certianly do have fond memories of AIM, both the interpersonal kind and the "OSCAR doesn't support encryption" kind. It's also interesting that it completely ignores IRC in its telling.
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Sunsetting Mercurial Support in Bitbucket

Posted on 2019-08-20 by pappp

Source: Hacker News

Article note: Huh. I was recently working on something hosted on bitbucket with mercurial for the first time in years and was refreshed by how much less gross mecurial is than git (granted, mercurial is still aggravatingly slow). It's very weird to see the over-complicated "Hammering a nail by de-orbiting a space station" ergonomic nightmare that is git become de-facto standard.
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