Author: Kelson Vibber

In theory, bigger organizations have more resources to secure their data.But smaller organizations also …

In theory, bigger organizations have more resources to secure their data.

But smaller organizations also have smaller datasets to protect. When a giant conglomerate like this loses control of its data, it loses control of a LOT of data.

(Compare it to the impact if it was only your local optometrist's customer list that was leaked. More personal, but a lot fewer people.)

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Flash TV finale

I haven’t watched it, but apparently the big villain in the 4-parter is…

Cobalt Blue.

CBR describes him as a “classic Flash villain” and “iconic.”
https://www.cbr.com/the-flash-cobalt-blue-set-photos/

I’ve been out of the fandom for a while, but back in the late 90s early 2000s there was a large contingent of Flash fans (specifically Barry Allen fans) who HATED the character. Mostly because in the comics he was Barry’s separated-at-birth twin.

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I find this hilarious. Even if it’s just the fact that we’re still in the 1990s phase of the nostalgia cycle, the idea that Cobalt Blue is worth using for a TV series finale? Never would have occurred to people back in the day.

And TBH I kind of feel vindicated for the blog post I wrote back in 2008 arguing that if the character had been introduced back in the Silver Age, he *would* have been a classic.

Cobalt Blue, Classic Rogue?

I guess now he is!?

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Kind of wish I hadn’t deleted that CobaltBluePrime handle on Twitter back in November. It would’ve been perfect to bring it back and post “AT LAST MY TIME HAS COME” or something like that.

(I set it up for a 2011 April Fools’ joke where the blog was rebranded as Cobalt Blue Online for the day and we posted a bunch of Cobalt Blue-themed articles)

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Though I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, this is the show that successfully transformed Vibe into a beloved character!

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“Every week new websites and browser extensions emerge to tunnel through or scramble over the walls, and every week they are …

“Every week new websites and browser extensions emerge to tunnel through or scramble over the walls, and every week they are crushed by rocks and catapults. Punchbowl News will never let the rabble in. Merely thinking about reading one too many *Bloomberg Businessweek *pieces now carries with it a substantial fine. If you attempt to access anything beyond your three monthly allotted *Atlantic *pieces, Jeffrey Goldberg will pay a personal visit to your home and do krav maga on you.”

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-45/the-intellectual-situation/the-new-new-reading-environment/

Regarding the Twitter Files

“The Twitter Files” is a series of cherry-picked internal documents that Musk gave to hand-picked sympathetic journalists (including Matt Taibbi) who then portrayed things like an extensive internal debate over whether to ban Trump after his supporters tried to stop the official count of the election he lost as, somehow, evidence of arbitrary liberal censorship, or the Biden campaign (which was not part of the government at the time) asking Twitter to take down posts containing revenge porn as, somehow, an example of government censorship, getting organizations mixed up and at one point even claiming that 22 million tweets were flagged for takedown by one organization, when the real number was only about 3,000 and they weren’t flagged for takedown, only for review, and Twitter left most of them up.

Techdirt has a whole series of posts pointing out the flaws in the claims. This one’s a good place to start.

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“MJML is a markup language designed to reduce the pain of coding a responsive email.”And yet it takes simpler code to creat…

“MJML is a markup language designed to reduce the pain of coding a responsive email.”

And yet it takes simpler code to create a responsive email than a non-responsive one. You don’t have to use a 1990s-style image table grid to tell people about your weekly specials. You don’t have to specify a font size that ends up being unreadable on phone screens. You don’t have to make multiple columns and then figure out how to make sure they reflow on narrower views.

Still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that the &^$% *Comstock Laws* …

Still trying to wrap my mind around the fact that the &^$% *Comstock Laws* are still on the books.

Between that and the various state laws that went into effect when Dobbs reversed the ruling that declared them unconstitutional…

How many other archaic laws are still out there waiting for someone to realize they can use them as a wedge?

It's clearly not enough to just stop enforcing something for a century or so. You need to actually repeal it.

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Google Photos and Location

I ran into this a while back.

It’s not new
It’s not specific to Pixel photos.

The app and cloud service just don’t have support for modifying the EXIF tags, so if *any* camera has added GPS data, you can’t use Google Photos to change or remove it.

The estimated location is stored in the Google Photos database and can be modified within the app.

You *can* turn GPS off in the camera app.

A few months ago I dug into ways to work around this with photos that had already been taken with the GPS coordinates. Annoyingly, you mostly have to save the photo, remove the tag, and re-upload it.

https://hyperborea.org/tech-tips/gps-remove/

(I take a lot of photos for iNaturalist and reference photos for OpenStreetMap editing, so I’m constantly turning GPS on for those, and then back off for personal photos, and sometimes I forget.)

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The Bell Riots and Night Watch

Though it is kind of weird that I just finished Night Watch last week, in which the main character is stranded in the past and has to take the place of a pivotal figure in a rebellion because the original person ended up dead as a result of the time travel.

I made a point to finish my review of the book *before* I got to this episode.
https://hyperborea.org/reviews/books/nightwatch/

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#DS9 rewatch is up to Past Tense, Part I, in which Sisko, Bashir and Dax …

#DS9 rewatch is up to Past Tense, Part I, in which Sisko, Bashir and Dax are stranded in the year 2024, when the US is dealing with a major homelessness crisis mostly by ignoring it and blaming people for being homeless, stretching social workers to their limits and turning a blind eye toward police brutality, while wealthy San Francisco tech execs act vaguely uncomfortable about it.

It's sort of eerie…but then it's also not like it was that hard to extrapolate from the 1990s.

#StarTrek

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Fedi meta, quote tweeting

Fedi meta, quote tweeting

On whether quote tweeting is harmful:

It was assumed so as an early driver of Mastodon’s design, but not by other Fediverse software.

Widely-held assumptions aren’t proof, and should be tested.

QTs can be used harmfully
So can replies, DMs, and boosts.

I’ve seen articles arguing that *retweets* are the feature that made Twitter super toxic.

QTs’ contribution to toxicity should be evaluated in the context of *every* feature’s contribution, not just its own.

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