1MachineElf

As someone who currently performs information risk management for a financial institution, I'll say that private messaging doesn't need to be banned per-se. It's just that all company business is the responsibility of the leadership, so ultimately, business communications needed to be reserved for business communication platforms over which leadership can enforce policy. Privacy is a component of this.

These banks needed processes and controls to ensure their requirements are being met: Records of electronic communication, technical security controls to ensure the privacy of protected communication, approved communication mediums/channels for different classifications of information, periodic reviews on the adequacy of these controls, etc.

Sometimes the restriction of things like WhatsApp, Signal, etc. are seen as an affront to individual privacy. That's not what this is about. This is about preventing a lot of dangerous scenarios, like:

1. Employees at your bank do something evil that's also against the law, but because they used Signal/WhatsApp, no records of the communication can be used as evidence in court.

2. The bank has invested millions upon millions into an information security program. Someone decides to use Signal/WhatsApp to share sensitive account numbers. Signal/WhatsApp ends up with a vulnerability that exposes the information, rendering the InfoSec program protections ineffective.

3. Like #2, but the information in WhatsApp/Signal is super important. The employees who kept it there all leave and/or get into fatal accidents. How will that impact the bank?

4. Your manager starts a group chat for the team via text message and conversations about work occur. Turns out someone in the conversation is involved with a scandal. Because you talked about work stuff outside of the approved comms channels, your personal phone can now be taken and used as evidence in a court (even if they can't pull the encrypted messages from it!)

It's just better for everyone to keep work communications in one place that the company has control over, and your personal device/apps totally separate from it.

It's disappointing that people on media platforms get satisfaction by labelling those of us sensitive to MSG as xenophobic, however, I understand that it's human nature to invent enemies such that one can feel a sense of self-righteousness. Perhaps the food industry is providing some form of compensation to them in exchange for promoting MSG. Artificial opinions for an artificial flavor enhancer - still leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Recently I watched a great presentation[0] about Overtone by Chris Ford, delivered back in 2012. It was also the first time I saw my SO interested in a programming language talk - she isn't familiar with programming, but she does have a music background.

[0] https://youtu.be/Mfsnlbd-4xQ

Trying to understand the impact of this. What will high school students not learn about gender from an AP psychology course that they wouldn't also learn from TikTok, Twitter, Tumblr, any left-of-center media outlet, or any college campus?

Between the sender and the subject line, this is all one needs to know in many cases. It's preferable that they do not open the email, because in previous instances, simply opening an email triggered the exploitation of a vulnerability: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/security-updates/SecurityB...

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

For US government websites, there could be a legal argument that it unjustly limits access to government services. Would be interesting to see how that plays out in court.

>a corporation specialized in advertising and data harvesting

You could be describing Microsoft in 2023, e.g. Chromium-based Edge, Windows 11 start menu ads, Xbox Live background services being integral to Windows even on government/corporate computers, the unholy marriage of Bing & OpenAI, Windows Live ID, outlook.com, every corporation being cool with putting their data into Azure/Office 365, etc.

Want to try a browser-focused OS experience that uses Firefox? Try Tails OS. It's the Tor Browser based on Firefox.

It would be ironic if Microsoft took the OS, added Edge, and released EdgeOS running on Edgebooks, Edgeboxes, etc.

>If the base is BSD licensed, why would commercial users not use the base rather than the GPL one?

Non-copyleft licences are not a universal business need for commercial users. See Red Hat, Suse, and Canonical for examples. BSD licences are also GPL compatible, so for whoever feels the need to contribute open source BSD licensed code, there is also a one-way street for redistributing it under the GPL. I believe this is an advantage that GPL projects & their username can leverage.

>Why? What does a GPL license let you do that you can't do with a BSD license?

I believe that bad people should not have access to good software. Bad people are incentivized to do sneaky things, and therefore, they avoid GPL licensed software because it legally binds them to be open and honest about their code/intentions. Take what happened with MINIX and Intel ME for example. MINIX has a permissive license that Intel exploited in ways that I'd bet most people here agree are net a negative. If MINIX had been GPL licensed, then Intel would have just chosen an alternative for Management Engine, but at least the options available (i.e., attack surface) would have been reduced.

I even support the SSPL. I don't care if it doesn't meet the pure definition of "open source" because what matters more to me is that it prevents large companies from abusing those who do most of the work supporting FOSS.

I believe that a successful GPL-licenced BSD is possible, and I'd take delight in knowing that big tech companies would be disincentivized to used it for some surveillance capitalism product i.e. Google's plans for Fuchsia.

[0] https://www.zdnet.com/article/minix-intels-hidden-in-chip-op...

>DC is a bubble. They don't live in the real world there.

This reminded me of what my Russian -American friend told me about present-day Moscow. The family members they have there are living very happily in the city, with great transportation and healthcare options, completely isolated from the rest of the world and the Ukraine war. I can see how it would be easy to believe Putin's version of reality if that's all you ever were exposed to.

As far as the road towards feature parity goes, it seems that Linux is mostly evolving technical solutions rather than replicating them. Dtrace on Linux is a big project being superseded by eBPF[0] - its the primary example that comes to mind. As a counterpoint, OpenBSD's pledge has been re-implemented on Linux using bpf & seccomp[1].

I still value BSDs as they are developed as complete operating systems rather than as cobbled-together distributions. Users benefit from a more cohesive experience on BSD vs. Linux.

>and the only reason to select FreeBSD is the ability to close-source everything you're doing?

I'd love to have a GPL-licensed BSD operating system. Ideally new features would be prototyped in BSD-licensed BSDs and eventually make it into a stable GPL-licensed version. (I know it sounds crazy...) I don't want to get my hopes up, but the people behind the Hyperbola BSD project have been working on it for some years now[2].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987696

[1] https://justine.lol/pledge/

[2] https://www.hyperbola.info/news/hyperbolabsd-is-an-operating...

This article was valuable to me.

My fiancee's close family, and myself, have been trying to convince her to go to therapy for anger issues. She's always refused and stated that therapy is just for weaklings / white people. If her mom could survive near-death experiences during the Khmer Rouge and not need therapy, then she didn't need it either... So the opening example of Khmer Rouge survivors receiving CBT was a perfect introduction to this article. I really hope she connects with the topic and considers giving therapy a chance.

Also, about this example further in:

>One study (an unpublished doctoral thesis) mentioned in the review found that cultural adaptation – in terms of the languages used and the ethnicity of people involved – led to worse therapeutic outcomes. Hispanic college students who had phobias around giving speeches went through a video-feedback-based treatment in either English, or English and Spanish, and they practised giving speeches either in front of a white or a Hispanic audience. The participants who gave speeches in English to white audiences showed greater reductions in anxiety than the other groups.

One possible explanation is that the Hispanic speakers felt a greater amount of anxiety from a Spanish-speaking audience due to greater cultural expectations. So rather than English being some kind of special anxiety-lessening language, it's more likely (IMHO) that any language other than their first one (e.g., Spanish) would have resulted in an audience with lower speaking standards expectations for the speaker to worry about.

Tangentially, Slavoj Zizek often tells an anecdote of how while in India, some less-affluent people told him that they preferred English because their native Hindi dialects are just embedded with hierarchy and class stratification. I don't know if this is really the case, but if it is, then Zizek's assertion that revolutionary thought can require new language is an interesting one.

Even more tangentally, I am reminded of how I can type better in Dvorak, not just because it is more efficient than QWERTY, but because learning it forced me to drop the bad habits I had carried with me over the years from when I first began using a keyboard to play simple computer games in the late 90s.

Overall the theme is apparently a clean slate / new environment / blank canvas / fresh perspective can be instrumental for transformation.

The Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex anime touches upon this theme, although from an angle more akin to the cyberpunk genre versus 20th century military industrial complex.

SPOILER ALERT

The extremely skilled and elusive hacker which they're investigating, the one that has been plaguing/blackmailing corporations for 5 years, turns out to be mostly* an illusion. The corporations and ruling political party leadership worked together in a scheme to create fake cyber attacks, get them highly publicized, and then profit from government relief/bailout money. Regular people believe someone is terrorizing the country's multinational companies, when in reality, it's just a racket.

*The legendary hacker is actually out there, but their actual role in the story is somewhat of a plot twist.

>Back when I worked at AWS, we surveyed developers to ask what they most valued in open source leadership. You might think that contributing code to well-known open source projects would rank first, but it didn’t. Not even second or third. Instead, the No. 1 criterion developers used to judge a cloud provider’s open source leadership was that it “makes it easy to deploy my preferred open source software in the cloud.”

This seems intuitive, however, I'm puzzled by the next paragraph:

>I’m not suggesting that contributions don’t matter, but they don’t matter for the reasons you might think. One of the things we did well at AWS was to work with product teams to help them discover their self-interest in contributing to the projects upon which they were building cloud services, such as Elasticache. We were not focused on earning kudos from “the community” (the most overused and underdefined word in all of open source), but rather on putting the product teams in a better position to support customers. Guess what? It worked. Although not perfect, a swelling population of AWS product teams is contributing in significant ways to open source projects.

It's bizarre for an AWS stan to endorse the restrictive Llama 2 license in light of what went down between AWS and Elastic/MongoDB. This "swelling population of AWS product teams" who are contributing is only a recent phenomenon and doesn't reflect the historical trend. Personally, I support the SSPL. I'd like to see a dissection of the author's claim discounting the AWS forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana.

One example of the nicer experience, maybe as a by-product of the 1st class ZFS support, is that updating FreeBSD doesn't make me nervous like updating the Linux kernel does. On Linux, you're mostly limited to the kernel versions that have been explicitly tested against ZFS.

I would really like to know more about what this is, but the app itself isn't very descriptive.

Given the relations among genders today, I wonder how differently Machiavelli would have phrased his ideas here.

MSN is a site designed to bring profits to Microsoft. Not where I'd expect to see a Raspberry Pi article.

Google's WEI API is their answer to Microsoft's Pluton, which is Microsoft's answer to Apple's walled garden device attestation, is their answer to...

How should we adapt to a world where this pattern never ends, in a way that preserves our human rights?

So this appears to be a successor to Flash?

Yesterday I discovered flash was used to produce Rob Zombie's Dead Girl Superstar (2001) music video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=WpHViVML_4o

I remember watching it on his flash-heavy website during that era, but it never occurred to me that it was anything more than just a recording converted to a flash video.

Awesome concept, but sadly limited due to a Raspberry Pi CM4 being chosen for the brains. In addition to the availability concern, there are better SBCs out there for time/GPS. The BeagleBone would have been ideal because it supports high-precision PPS out of the box.

Cash and debit are the only forms of payment accepted at Maryland retail dispensaries.

If only it were that simple...

The federal agency is NHTSA. The lawyer there who signed the letter about it being a federal crime is Kerry E. Kolodziej.

Kolodziej also works at Mayer Brown, the same law firm that fought in court against the Massachusetts law on behalf of Alliance for Automotive Innovation.

It is believed the NHTSA letter to automakers was a veiled attempt to circumvent the court battle. It fits squarely into the BS category, subcategory Monumental. Tagged with Regulatory Capture.

>Got an iPhone or Android phone? Then you own a powerful platform tied into your financial life.

Own? It's more like you lease it.

Say for example such an 'everything app' were to exist. What would insulate it from API changes by Apple/Google intended to break core functionality? The fact that WeChat is available for iOS/Android is literally an exception to app store rules. It can only exist in a country where the government can coerce favorable conditions for it's existence.

>February 22, 2023

It's a good article, but not timely.

Another good one from Katsuhiro Otomo - older than Memories (1995), newer than Construction Order Cancellation (1987):

Roujin Z (1991)

If you've seen Stink Bomb in Memories, or Akira, you might notice some visual similarities in how the stories are told.

>Moviegoers have spent over a decade debating whether or not Cobb is awake or dreaming at the end of “Inception,” but Nolan recently said on the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that such debates are missing the ending’s real takeaway: Cobb doesn’t care.

It's my favorite movie, and I've never cared about the spinning top at the end. It doesn't matter if the movie ends with a question mark, I'm just grateful to have experienced a journey of such interesting themes - love, dreams, psychology, etc.

I used Juul for a year, then quit for about 5 months before vaping again for a couple months. During that time of relapse, I used disposable* vapes from Elf Bar. FWIW, Juul is so much better in terms of quality versus these imported disposable vapes. Elf Bars were easier to quit because they were so gross and obviously bad for you. Juul seemed to be healthier (as far as salt-nic vapes go in that regard). Feelings about which one of these approaches should prevail are conflicting. One is objectively worse for you and easier to quit, while the other is not as bad but harder to quit.