Category: Wandering.Shop

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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Stumbled across a mention of SyFy’s notoriously bad adaptation of the first two Earthsea …

Stumbled across a mention of SyFy’s notoriously bad adaptation of the first two Earthsea books and went looking for commentary on it. I think this scathing article by Le Guin herself gets the idea across.
https://slate.com/culture/2004/12/ursula-k-le-guin-on-the-tv-earthsea.html

#fantasy #earthsea #whitewashing

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I briefly considered tracking it down to see for myself how bad it was, but after re-reading that article….Nope! Not gonna bother!

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Re: Juice Jacking

Replying to a post about this alert warning against using public phone chargers in case they were modified to install malware.

The other day I was wondering how effective the default “no data transfer” mode on Android is at protecting against this type of attack. Unfortunately the articles I found tend toward either “malware could get around that too! Even if your phone is off!” or “this has yet to be seen outside security conference demos.” So, not terribly conclusive!

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Apparently this Apple Store was vulnerable to a side channel attack.

Apparently this Apple Store was vulnerable to a side channel attack.

Burglars tunnel through Apple Store’s neighbor, allegedly steal $500K in iPhones

“Breaking through an Apple Store’s secured doors sounds like a tall order, even for ambitious burglars. But what if you didn’t have to get through the Apple Store’s doors after hours and could instead break into the unassuming store next to it?”

@arstechnica

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Start saving the embedded content locally

At this point, nobody should trust anything shared from Twitter to keep working. If you embed tweets in your blog, newspaper, whatever, you need to start saving the embedded content locally. (Or just, *sigh* screenshot it.)

https://www.theverge.com/2023/4/6/23673043/twitter-substack-embeds-bots-tools-api

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If they’re already blocking embeds from one site, it’s only a matter of time before they start blocking them elsewhere. Like, say, in newspapers with unfavorable coverage. Or they make embeds paid-only content.

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The fact that employees were even *able* to share private photos taken by the in-car …

The fact that employees were even *able* to share private photos taken by the in-car cameras indicates that the cameras were not, as claimed, “designed from the ground up to protect your privacy.” (Not surprisingly, it's Tesla.)

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/04/tesla-workers-shared-images-from-car-cameras-including-scenes-of-intimacy/

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Downside of using euphemisms like “state affiliated media” when what you mean is “state propaganda …

Downside of using euphemisms like “state affiliated media” when what you mean is “state propaganda outlet” is that dishonest people can weasel their way into labeling things that aren't propaganda outlets the same way.

NPR Was Twitter’s Example Of What Should NOT Be Labeled ‘State-Affiliated Media.’ Then Musk Added The Label And Retconned The Policy

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Whether T. rex and other predatory dinosaurs had lips

Paleontologists investigate whether T. rex and other predatory #dinosaurs had lips like lizards, or protruding teeth like crocodiles (though as the article notes, pop culture has latched onto the latter).

https://wapo.st/3zlDnNK
(gifted article link)

A T. rex skull with three artists' renderings of what its head might have looked like in life: One with its upper teeth protruding over its lower jaw, one with its teeth completely covered, and finally one showing the second version roaring, showing the teeth inside its mouth.

@science

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@science Oh cool, at least one of the paper’s authors is on the fediverse and has posted an infographic on the analysis:

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