Lou Katz @lou@entropyservice.com

In light of a bit of snark I've been seeing here, please remember that (Conservative) Prime Minister Harper muzzled Canadian scientists in 2013 and Alberta has never rescinded those rules.

Wireless doorbells resting on their chargers.

It's difficult to view as anything but an essentially political statement that it takes editing source files and recompiling the #Mastodon stack to simply increase the maximum permitted post length at any given Mastodon site. This should have been made an easily configurable runtime parameter long ago, and the fact that it still hasn't is extremely problematic.

American Businessmen looking at cancer research: meh, I don't think we need this really

American Businessmen looking at a 5-slide powerpoint with a single line going up on the last slide that a twenty year old consultant made and labeled "five bazillionty dollars": give this man everything

Sometimes The Onion just writes the perfect headline.

#TheOnion

I recently broke the frames of my bifocals. Really aggravated about my eyesight. I use bifocals for driving, for distance (+2.5) and dashboard (roughly arm's length, +3.5), but I need about +4.0 for desktop computer, and about +5.0 for reading/phone/tablet/detail work. I find progressives unsuited for desktop computer due to the restricted size of in-focus area. Currently I carry around FOUR pair, the bifocals for driving, over-the-top sunglasses, +4.0 readers, and +5.0 readers.

Say it with me: "If you collect the data, you better have a plan for what happens when it's leaked."

Furthermore, the data broker industry must be destroyed.

https://www.404media.co/hackers-claim-massive-breach-of-location-data-giant-threaten-to-leak-data/

@adamshostack @karpathy all of the science in ML is being swamped by nonsense

The fact the richest man in the world is successfully meddling with elections all across Europe and America, should have you worry about all the other rich people that aren't publicly announcing it.

holy living fuck, it is amazing to be running #debian instead of #windows again after all these years. i feel like i'm alone with my computer instead of, like, being in the room with a bunch of adtech execs.

#foss #OpenSource

Them: Naww! Did you adopt a cat?

Me: No. That’s my biological cat.

We had no idea “Democracy Dies in Darkness” was a mission statement.

Trump: The King of Hate: The attempt to get around the Constitution on birthright citizenship by claiming the U.S. doesn't have "jurisdiction" over undocumented immigrants is total bull. The clear intent was to exclude the children of diplomats who have diplomatic immunity. If the U.S. didn't have "jurisdiction" over undocumented immigrants, they couldn't be arrested, charged with crimes, jailed, etc. And obviously, that's not the case. So many hateful people -- and they all love Trump because he's the King of Hate.

Because this is the talk of the #internet again: you don't preserve digital media by stuffing the One True Version in an #archive. Make countless copies and scatter them to the wind. Make each a different format. You don't know which of them will still be readable next decade, so *don't try to guess*.

That goes for analog media too. The Library of Alexandria contained copies. Many classic paintings only survived as copies.

Copying is how life itself beats death. Embrace it.

The peculiar tragedy of X is that it has made one nostalgic for Twitter - rather like missing a toothache while experiencing electrocution.

Buried in a story about yet another Elsevier journal editorial board resigning en masse (Journal of Human Evolution, https://retractionwatch.com/2024/12/27/evolution-journal-editors-resign-en-masse-to-protest-elsevier-changes/), there is an alarming new development in Elsevier's publication practices:

"In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage."

The Dome Paradox: A Loophole in Newton's Laws

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjZB81jCGj4

***** Lauren's Blog: [What say you, Spock?] My Proposed Terminology to Describe Bypassing Social Media Face ID Age Verification Systems *****

https://lauren.vortex.com/2024/12/24/terminology-bypassing-face-age-verification

All the talk now is about using AI-based mechanisms to authenticate social media users as being not underaged for access, through analysis of their faces on video feeds. The multitude of ways in which this could fail in both directions (declaring faces either older than they really are, or younger than they really are, not to mention how you determine from a face if someone is 15.5 or 16 years old when the minimum age required for access is 16) are far too many to even list here.

But given all of the attention, I feel that we need terminology to quickly describe the entire area of bypass techniques targeting these age verification/gating systems.

I propose the term:

BALOK

As in, "The 11-year-old easily baloked the system and gained quick access."

or:

The free software was capable of baloking the ID portal within seconds to bypass the age restrictions.

BALOK is an acronym for:

Bypassing Age Locked Online Keys

Of course, fans of the original "Star Trek" already know what's really going on.

Balok was an alien in the first season of "Star Trek" from an episode called "The Corbomite Maneuver". In appearance he was a very young, vulnerable child. But in his audio and video communications with the Enterprise ship, he employed an artificial booming voice and what turned out to be a menacing appearing puppet to fool the Enterprise crew into fearing him.

The parallels with the current face ID age verification systems are obvious.

Children will be baloking the social media age gating systems in a myriad number of ways, while adults who were supposed to have access will be blocked due to both face analysis errors and technology access problems. Not everyone uses smartphones with cameras to access social media, and many people rightly fear sending video images of their faces to these or other firms due to justifiable concerns about potential abuses.

I anticipate both freeware baloking software and baloking as a (largely free) service. Kids will band together in groups to develop new baloking techniques. They are extremely resourceful when it comes to these areas, more so than the vast majority of adults.

Balok knew that it was easy to fool his potential adversaries with a faked persona. The ingenuity of kids today pretty much guarantees that their own efforts to balok the social media firms, and in essence the politicians who pushed age blocks in the first place, will be even more successful in the real world.

--Lauren--

Greed is immoral — but health care greed is worse https://www.alternet.org/heath-care-greed/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon