Bil @bliman@tweetrex.co.uk

Nevermind me, just getting some water...

The last 10 years or so of tech:

2013: Blockchain! It's a like a database, but slower and worse!
2016: VR! It's like monitors, but slower and worse!
2021: NFTs! It's like pictures, but slower and worse!
2023: AI! It's like algorithms, but slower and worse!

Happy Birthday to all you privacy minded folks who tell nosy web forms their date of birth is 01/01

China Coast Guard bullies a Philippines ship.
#AureFreePress #News #China #philippines

By the way, #AIArtIsTheft https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fD9UNah7TU

K, I apparently am late to the "sharks have been around for a ridiculously long time" thing. I mean, I know they're ancient, but I really did not have a clue just how ancient, relative to other "things that have been around forever".

The one that blew my mind is the age of sharks relative to the existence of the universe.

By our best understanding, the Big Bang happened about 13.8 billion years ago. Sharks have existed on Earth for about 450 million years. That means sharks have existed for approximately 3% of the entirety of the existence of the Universe.

Standard "some things that sharks are older than" list:

Saturn's rings (~100 million years old)
The Pleiades cluster (75-150 myo)
One galactic orbit of the sun (200-225 my)
North Star, aka Polaris (estimated at ~70 myo)
The Atlantic Ocean (~150 myo)
Pangea (formed ~335 million years ago)
Trees (390 myo)

Missed this a couple of weeks ago from Consumer Reports -

"How to Turn Off Smart TV Snooping Features"

All smart TVs—from Samsung, LG, you name it—collect personal data. These TV privacy settings limit what manufacturers learn.

https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics/privacy/how-to-turn-off-smart-tv-snooping-features-a4840102036/

Another approach is to use nothing on the TV itself, and feed video in from another source entirely.

I’ve been in the Computer Science field long enough to have seen multiple rounds of the AI hype machine. It’s always snake oil, smoke and mirrors. It never even approaches what a reasonable person would consider to be a thinking machine.

What it really turns out to be is an elaborate “pump and dump” scheme where early investors push the hype, knowing it’s all BS. Once a sufficient number of rubes jump on the bandwagon, the early investors cash out at a profit and leave the gullible behind to absorb the losses when people eventually realize that there is no value anywhere in the AI companies.

Oopsie! There went your retirement plans!

Do not be fooled by this chicanery.

The Retro Gaming playlist is back:

➡️ https://fedi.video/w/p/9pehsk38cS6m3Y3HHZqd8U

This is a collrection of hundreds of PeerTube videos about gaming from classic computers and consoles, including the games themselves, the hardware, the culture, the history, repairs, customisation, mods and related topics.

Alongside the well-known stuff, the videos also cover a lot of rare and obscure things too.

#RetroGaming #Gaming #Retro #Atari #Nintendo #Sega #ZXSpectrum #PCEngine #NeoGeo #WonderSwan #ArcadeGames

@davidho

Seeing 4 giant SUVs drop kids at school is a pathetic theatrical farce. First stuck on the small road to the school, negotiating who goes first in a two-way street not fit for these monsters. Then stuck in traffic on the way out, their internal combustion engines burning while idling, attempting to get out. Some call this "freedom", and meanwhile, public transport is effectively non-existent.

It takes 50 minutes to drive to the school from our home during rush hour, but only 15 to cycle. And these drivers couldn't care less, in their mobile air-conditioned living rooms. And not a second thought for the impact of their choices on the future of their very own children.

"The International Energy Agency has said that annual CO2 emissions from the world’s 330m SUVs reached almost 1bn tonnes last year."

This is criminal.

#waroncars #banSUVs

136,000 books from the 18th Century.

ONE HUNDRED THIRTY SIX THOUSAND OF THEM.

That would be a point of pride in any library. Making it readable from the Internet, browsable, and downloadable? A pipe dream.

Anyway, here they are.

https://archive.org/details/pub_eighteenth-century?tab=collection

Bought some Anker Soundcore Liberty 4 NC Adaptive Noise Cancelling Earbuds

I did say a few months ago I would absolutely not buy another pair of earbuds like the Apple EarPods (mine only lasted a month past the warranty date) or the Samsung Earbuds, as they just seem so overpriced for something where you can’t replace the battery. T ...continues

See https://gadgeteer.co.za/bought-some-anker-soundcore-liberty-4-nc-adaptive-noise-cancelling-earbuds/

#earbuds #review #technology

https://www.jefftiedrich.com/p/holy-shit-donald-trumps-reckless-586?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=1162742&post_id=137901201&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ibba&utm_medium=email

NASA’s Psyche mission is ready for launch—no one knows what it will find

Psyche will go to a metal world with plasma engines and lasers. It's not sci-fi.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/nasa-is-about-to-launch-a-mission-of-pure-discovery-to-a-metal-asteroid/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

"Quotation marks" change shape, position, and orientation from one language to another. In this map, we show the symbols to quote direct speech.

https://mapologies.com/symbols/

#quote #Denmark #dansk #symbols #writting #quotationmark #map #mapologies #culture #LanguageLearning #maps

5 years ago today, journalist Jamal #Khashoggi walked into the #Saudi consulate in Istanbul.

Saudi agents murdered him there and hacked his body to pieces.

In 2021, US intelligence concluded Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman himself had approved the operation.

This is a terrifying and sobering write-up by Retool on so many levels. It's about about a recent spear-phishing via SMS attack on employees, followed by voice phishing attack that deepfaked an employee's voice.

Retool said just one of its employees fell for it, which is of course is all it takes. Here's the scary part:

"The voice was familiar with the floor plan of the office, coworkers, and internal processes of the company. Throughout the conversation, the employee grew more and more suspicious, but unfortunately did provide the attacker one additional multi-factor authentication (MFA) code.

The additional OTP token shared over the call was critical, because it allowed the attacker to add their own personal device to the employee’s Okta account, which allowed them to produce their own Okta MFA from that point forward. This enabled them to have an active GSuite session on that device. Google recently released the Google Authenticator synchronization feature that syncs MFA codes to the cloud. As Hacker News noted, this is highly insecure, since if your Google account is compromised, so now are your MFA codes.

Unfortunately Google employs dark patterns to convince you to sync your MFA codes to the cloud, and our employee had indeed activated this “feature”. If you install Google Authenticator from the app store directly, and follow the suggested instructions, your MFA codes are by default saved to the cloud. If you want to disable it, there isn’t a clear way to “disable syncing to the cloud”, instead there is just a “unlink Google account” option. In our corporate Google account, there is also no way for an administrator to centrally disable Google Authenticator’s sync “feature”. We will get more into this later."

https://retool.com/blog/mfa-isnt-mfa/