Off for the Long Weekends

Tomorrow is Canada Day here in the Great White North. We have been blanketed in smoke from the forest fires in Quebec over the last few days, so the skies are grey and the air quality is bad. At least we've been getting some much needed rain, and the plants don't seem to care about the smoke.

Tuesday is Independence Day in the United States, so I doubt many people will be reading the blog. And I'm busy setting up a new computer, so I'm taking a few days off from blogging. I'll be back on Tuesday, July 5. 

Here's a picture of a smoggy Frenchman's Bay taken yesterday morning. No, I didn't shoot it in black and white. 

A smoggy day at Frenchman's Bay

SF Writers' Opinions About AI

Given that AI has been a staple trope of science fiction stories for at least 80 years, (Isaac Asimov's robot series, Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, David Gerrold's When Harlie Was One, to name a few), you'd expect SF authors to have opinios on the subject. And you'd be write. 

Here are a few of the better recent articles on AI written by SF authors. 

• AI is the Scariest Beast Ever Created, Says Sci-Fi Writer Bruce Sterling, "I've seen a lot of computer crazes in my day, but this one is sheer Mardi Gras. It's not proper to get stern and judgmental when the people are costumed and cavorting in the streets. You should go with the flow and enjoy that carnival—knowing that Lent, with all its penance and remorse, is well on the way."
• “We Have Built a Giant Treadmill That We Can’t Get Off”: Sci-Fi Prophet Ted Chiang on How to Best Think About About AI. "Amid an explosion of panic about artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, and runaway algos, the celebrated writer has entered the chat. FYI: A potential Terminator situation is the least of his concerns."
• ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web. "OpenAI’s chatbot offers paraphrases, whereas Google offers quotes. Which do we prefer?" By Ted Chiang.
• Westworld Creator Optimistic AI Is Years From Taking Her Job. "Lisa Joy among writers who see fear and promise of artificial intelligence as a spur for storytelling."

Hate in Peterborough

Peterborough is a small city about an hour's drive northeast of us. We it quite well as we have family and friends there. It's a typical Southern Ontario town, with a downtown full of older buildings and a river running through it. It's a pretty place, but there is a lof of ugliness festering below the surface. 

Back in 2020 and 2021 there were extensive protests there against the pandemic lockdowns, public health measures like vaccination, and especially Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. I remember driving by a large encampment of protestors outside Peterbororgh's city hall. I was there a couple of months ago and the protestors are still out, though somewhat reduced in number.

Sadly, as this article from the Peterborough Examiner shows, they've found a new target, LGBQ and trans people.

Having slurs yelled at you from a truck with “F--k Trudeau” stickers on it is something Melissa Higgs has had to face more often lately.

But unfortunately it’s not just her. Other members of the transgender community are dealing with the same thing every day, she says.

It’s a symptom of the rise of “American-style, alt-right transphobic hate,” she explained, as Peterborough and other places are dealing with an increasing number of incidents against trans people.

“We’ve seen that in a big way at the drag story time events put on at the library; they’ve honestly been getting more and more violent and vicious on the bigotry side … at the most recent one, there was someone with straight-up Nazi imagery,” she said.

Canadians sometimes have a smug attitude when we see news about the alt-right in the United States. "It can't happen here. We're better than that." Well, a lot of us aren't and it is happening here.  

2023 Locus Awards Winners

The winners of the 2023 Locus Awards have been announced. The awards are voted on by readers of Locus, the science fiction and fantasy field's news magazine.

These are the winners in the novel categories.

• Science Fiction Novel: The Kaiju Preservation Society, John Scalzi
• Fantasy Novel: Babel, R. F. Kuang
• Horror Novel: What Moves the Dead, T. Kingfisher
• Young Adult Novel: Dreams Bigger Than Heartbreak, Charlie Jane Anders

Featured Links - June 26, 2023

Links to things I found interesting, but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

CJ relaxing

• 7 Ways Google Has Ruined Fitbit. "Since acquiring the wearable device maker, Google has frustrated many Fitbit users by removing features and delivering lackluster updates." As the owner of a Fitbit Sense, I am really disappointed in how Google has handled Fitbit after they purchased the company. 
• Original six' who painted iconic Garden River bridge reveal how they did it. "The six men who helped paint the words 'This Is Indian Land' on the side of the rail crossing are being revealed publicly — 50 years later — after breaking their vow of silence." The slogan is still painted on the bridge, and you can drive by it on your way to the Sault.
• Firehose quantities. "Generative AI has the potential to lock us into an ecosystem of empty stories." An excellent post by Andrew Liptak on how generative AI is affecting the science fiction and fantasy genres, both literary and film/TV. 
• Tale of the tape. 'Listen to Roger Nichols's long-awaited "Second Arrangement" cassette.' A long-lost Steely Dan song is rediscovered.
• Mass Shootings, Firebombings, and Death Threats: The Anti-LGBTQ Hate Spike Revealed. "A joint report from GLAAD and ADL puts hard numbers behind the rise in hate against America’s queer communities."
• Why Malware Crypting Services Deserve More Scrutiny. "If you operate a cybercrime business that relies on disseminating malicious software, you probably also spend a good deal of time trying to disguise or “crypt” your malware so that it appears benign to antivirus and security products. In fact, the process of “crypting” malware is sufficiently complex and time-consuming that most serious cybercrooks will outsource this critical function to a handful of trusted third parties. This story explores the history and identity behind Cryptor[.]biz, a long-running crypting service that is trusted by some of the biggest names in cybercrime."
• Here’s how we could begin decoding an alien message using math. "A new mathematical approach looks for order in strings of bits."
• Bluesky is just another Twitter clone and that isn't a good thing. "The much hyped social media app Bluesky is meant to be doing things differently, but can its approach to content moderation really build a new social sphere, asks Annalee Newitz."

Photo of the Week - June 25, 2023

I know that I've been posting a lot of flower pictures recently, but they are pretty, and there are a lot of them to take pictures of. This one is from our backyard.

Fujifilm X-S10 with 16-80 mm. F4 at 54 mm., F4, 1/1400 second, ISO 160, Astia film simulation

Saturday Sounds - Garnet Rogers at Caffe Lena

Nancy and I have been fans of Garnet Rogers since we began dating in the 1980s, and I've lost track of how many times we've seen him perform (probably around 30 times). That being said, with injuries, the pandemic, and age, Garnet isn't performing as much as he used to. We did see him at the Acoustic Harvest gala concert in May, but as part of a large group of musicians, he only performed two songs. 

So it was a very pleasant surprise to see that Caffe Lena posted a video of his full show from earlier in June to their YouTube channel. Garnet is in fine form, both instrumentally and vocally, and covers a wide selection of his songs, both old and new, along with several covers. The sound quality is excellent, although it's out of sync a bit from the video. Enjoy. 

 

Some Historic Printing Technology

Glenn Fleishman, a tech journalist who is occasionally on the This Week in Tech podcast, is also an amateur historian of early printing technology. In this blog post, he writes about something called Stanhope moulds and plates. I had never heard of them until seeing his post.

The so-called Stanhope process relied on plaster molds made from forms of type—full pages or smaller laid-out arrangements. A liquid plaster mixture was poured on the form in a special frame, then baked in an oven and removed. Liquid lead alloy could then be poured into the mold in yet another specialized frame, cooling almost instantly. The plaster mold would then be broken off and the remains of the plaster chiseled out. The result solid plate could go directly on press. Any number of molds could be made from the same plate.

This technique was used across the 1800s but still had significant limits—time, cost, and complexity, based on my research. It’s unclear how widely it was employed. The perfection by the early 1860s of a paper-based method, called flong, had a very quick uptake because a flong could be bent into a hemisphere and cast as a curved plate used on a high-speed rotary press.

Cory Doctorow On How Platforms Die

I've just finished reading Cory Doctorow's essay on how platforms like TikTok evolve and die. It's one of the most insightful pieces of writing about the internet and modern technology that I've read in a long time. Also, Cory has coined a new term that I really like: "enshittification". 

If you've been noticing that your Google search results are full of crap, or you can't find anything useful on Amazon, you'll want to read this. 

HERE IS HOW platforms die: First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market," where a platform sits between buyers and sellers, hold each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

Loving Aliens

Meeting aliens has been a staple topic in science fiction since at least the 1920s. Could that meeting turn into love or sex. That's a fit topic for SF author, Charlie Stross, who dives into it in this blog post. 

The first problem with a human/alien relationship is obviously determining whether the alien is in fact alive at all, or just an oddly-shaped rock: then determining if it's a heterotroph or an autotroph, whether it has separate cells with nuclei or is a syncitium or rhizome network, does it have rigid walls or flexible membranes ... and then we go down the variant-biochemistry rabbit hole.

(As you probably guessed, I'm not a fan of the "humans with extra latex make-up on their head" school of alien biology in SF.)

For example, oxygen. We breathe oxygen! Can't live without it, in fact. But did you know that for about the first two billion years of life on Earth oxygen was a deadly poison to pretty much everything? And there was almost no free oxygen in the atmosphere because the Earth's crust still contained huge quantities of unreduced iron compounds. It was only about a billion years ago when the crust finally became fully oxidized that free oxygen began building up in the biosphere ... and poisoned 99.9% of all the life on Earth, because it was an excretory end product of early plant life, and most organisms back then were methanogens.

But wait, there's more!

Interesting Dark Matter Research

I've always found the idea of dark matter and dark energy somewhat unpalatable. I understand the evidence behind it, but does it really point to dark matter or could there be another mechanism, such as proposed by one of the modified gravitational field theories. 

Be that as it may, there is a lot of interesting research going on in the field, including at the University of Toronto.  

There’s some potentially big news on the hunt for dark matter. Astronomers may have a handle on what makes this mysterious cosmic stuff: strange particles called “axions.”

Rather than search directly for axions, however, a multinational team of researchers led by Keir Rogers from the University of Toronto looked for something else. They focused on the “clumpiness” of the Universe and found that cosmic matter is more evenly distributed than expected.

So, what role do axions play here? Quantum mechanics explains these ultra-light particles as “fuzzy” because they exhibit wave-like behavior. It turns out their wavelengths can be bigger than entire galaxies. Apparently, that fuzziness plays a role in smoothing out the Universe by influencing the formation and distribution of dark matter. If that’s true, then it goes a long way toward explaining why the matter in the cosmos is more evenly spread out. It implies that axions play a part in the distribution of matter in the cosmos.

Featured Links - June 19, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• Typefaces based on the London Underground's dot matrix train signs. I'm surprised that TFL hasn't been selling their own version of the typeface. 
• Is Generative AI Bad for the Environment? "A computer scientist explains the carbon footprint of ChatGPT and its cousins."
• The Fires Here Are Unstoppable. "The first foreign firefighters to reach Quebec amid Canada’s worst wildfire season on record said that some of the blazes were 100 times bigger than any they had ever seen." (Gifted article-no paywall)
• The dark side of Amazon returns: Boxes getting sent back has metastasized to an $816 billion yearly problem. 
• Rethinking the Universe: Astronomers Disturbed by the Unexpected Scale of James Webb’s Galaxies. "The first results from the James Webb Space Telescope have hinted at galaxies so early and so massive that they are in tension with our understanding of the formation of structure in the Universe. Various explanations have been proposed that may alleviate this tension. But now a new study from the Cosmic Dawn Center suggests an effect that has never before been studied at such early epochs, indicating that the galaxies may be even more massive."
• Study finds that COVID-19 could cause brain cells to fuse, leading to permanent damage. "The real-world implications of this study and many others done on the neurological impacts of COVID-19 are staggering. The damage to brain cells shown in the study is irreversible. Repeated bouts of COVID-19 are likely to compound the effect, leading to progressive neurological decline in individuals who are repeatedly reinfected, not to mention effects on other organ systems."
• Why is the North Atlantic breaking heat records? "Some spots are nearly 4 degrees Celsius above normal for this time of year."
• How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S. "Lauren Davila made a stunning discovery as a graduate student at the College of Charleston: an ad for a slave auction larger than any historian had yet identified. The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction."

Photo of the Week - June 18, 2023

Some small blue irises at the house of my late mother-in-law. She did love her flowers. Taken with my Pixel 4a. 

Irises

 

Saturday Sounds - Treemonisha - Scott Joplin

Treemonisha is an opera composed by Scott Joplin in 1911. It was never performed in full during his lifetime and the first complete performance wasn't until 1972. Since then, it's been staged several times, including by the Luminato Festival in Toronto this month. I attended a sold-out performance Thursday night and was very glad I did. 

My taste in opera runs very much to 20th-century and later works, especially those by Philip Glass and John Adams, so I wasn't sure how much I would enjoy this. But the performance was excellent and the music an interesting mix of classical, dance, and gospel styles. Given how well the opera was received by the Toronoto audience, I'm sure it will continue to be performed. 

Here are three videos.

The first a performance by the Houston Grand Opera. Video quality is not great and there are Portugese subtitles, but I haven't been able to find a better one.

The second is a recording of the Houston Grand Opera but the video is the score and libretto.

The third is a short documentary.

Next-Generation COVID Vaccines

The original COVID vaccines were a medical miracle, but they have become less effective as COVID continues to spread and mutate. Researchers have been looking for ways to create a vaccine that will be resistant to COVID's continuing mutations. 

Here's a long article that summarizes current developments in that search. TL;DR: There's some good news.

 I’ve been reporting on progress of different types of next generation Covid vaccines separately from time to time. With this post, I’m switching to more frequent updates of developments across the next generation board. That includes intranasal and other mucosal vaccines, vaccines targeting more coronaviruses than SARS-CoV-2 – the one that causes Covid-19, as well as vaccines aiming to provide more variant-proof protection against Covid. To catch up on the background, check out the April posts on mucosal vaccines and pancoronavirus vaccines.

Highlights coming in this post: There are positive early clinical trials results for a self-amplifying mRNA vaccine aiming to protect against all SARS-CoV-2 variants, more preclinical results for pancoronavirus vaccines – including an intranasal one – and some information on the US government Project NextGen. Plus, there are now 6 countries that have authorized mucosal Covid vaccines, and there’s some more data from clinical trials.

The Ukrainian Dam Collapse Is an Ecological Disaster

The news from Ukraine tends to focus on the current status of the war and the immediate flooding effects of the dam collapse. But there's a growing consensus that the dam collapse is an ecological disaster that will have effects for generations and will extend well past Ukraine itself.

From Scientific American:

It’s too early for a thorough assessment, of course. But take the issue of flooding for agriculture and for soils in general. Some places in the region grow rice, for example, with very heavy use of pesticides. The region also has a big problem with groundwater salinization because of intensive irrigation over the years. So those pesticides, salt and huge amounts of oil that entered the Dnipro River from the disaster are mixing with the clean water from the reservoir, blending into a toxic broth that is washing over everything. Our government estimates that up to 500 tons of oil could end up in the river. This is one of the big concerns we have, and it will have consequences for nature, for agriculture and for people’s drinking water. And on top of that, the destructive power of the floods is threatening some important protected areas.

From Wired:

 Alongside wildlife in the Ukrainian part of the steppe live farmers, many of whom grow grain. The Ukrainian Agrarian Council estimates that the Kakhovka disaster could lead to a 14 percent drop in Ukraine’s grain exports. The country is the world’s fifth-largest exporter of wheat—meaning there will be serious knock-on effects for countries that rely on imports. Farmers in the area also produce cherries, plums, apples, tomatoes, eggplants, and other crops, says Susanne Wengle, an associate professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame. “These orchards have been growing for generations. It’s very unclear how they can recover,” she says. Hook adds that even once the flood waters recede, there could be significant but less obvious damage to tree roots underground that could blight vegetation in the coming months. Flood water can sometimes carry sediments to tree roots and block oxygen.

For communities that depended on the Kakhovka Reservoir for drinking water and the irrigation of farmland, it will be difficult if not impossible to replace this water resource, says Volodymyr Starodubtsev of the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine, via email.

 

Radio Garden Update

A couple of years ago I posted about Radio Garden, a website that lets you play radio stations from anywhere around the world just by pointing to that location on a map. It's a cool site, but I find it somewhat awkward to navigate.

At the time of my original post, I noted that there were Android and IOS apps but didn't look at the Android app. Big mistake. The Android app is wonderful and much easier to use than the web-based version. 

As well as just playing a station, the app gives you the location and the title of the song that's playing. You can also see a list of stations in the area and ones that a popular in the country. You can also search for places and radio stations and save them as favourites. There are in-app adds but I haven't found them to be too obtrusive.

I've added this to my media folder and will be using it when I want to listen to some random music. It's fun to listen to stations halfway around the world. 

Thanks to Dwight Silverman for the tip about the Android app.

The Atlantic Is Getting Hot

This is scary. From Twitter, posted by Dr. Thomas Smith, associate professor of geography at the London School of Economics.

Things began to look very unusual two months ago.

Today the charts need no commentary, they speak for themselves.

This is the Atlantic.

North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly 1983-2023

This is so unusual. That's a *huge* amount of energy being transferred to the atmosphere. Expect extreme temperature and storm records. Just the top few metres of our oceans store as much energy as the entirety of our atmosphere. I'm very concerned about later this year into 2024.

There is more information on high sea surface temperatures and their effects in this article. 

Featured Links - June 12, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

• The C-Word Is Everywhere Right Now — And Not in a Bad Way. "It's one of the most divisive words in the English language and — thanks to the LGBTQ community — it is having a moment."
• Passwordless logins are a confusing mess. "In this week's guest column, Jared Newman wonders what it will take to make passkeys truly usable." I am holding off on passkey until some of the issues mentioned in Ed Bott's article get straightened out.
• 5 features Google Pixel should take from third party Android skins. "Pixel's software is Google's "true" version of Android, but other Android versions have some great software ideas that Google should adopt." Yes to all of these, especially the Pro mode for the camera app.
• "Adam And Eve" Conspiracy Theory Hits TikTok After Joe Rogan Podcast. "According to the conspiracy theory, every 6,500 years a major cataclysm hits Earth." More wacko craziness from the ignorant. 
• ChatGPT Goes to Court. "The fault lies not in our machines, but in ourselves."
• A Leaked Tesla Report Shows the Cybertruck Had Basic Design Flaws. '"The “alpha” version of the EV company’s first pickup had problems with braking, handling, noise, and leaks, according to an internal presentation.'
• The Explosive Legacy of the Pandemic Hand Sanitizer Boom. "Three years ago, the FDA declared a manufacturing free-for-all. Now a noxious brew of leftover product is catching fire and making people sick." End-stage capitalism at its best.

Photo of the Week - June 11, 2023

I don't know what this bush is on my neighbour's lawn, but it sure is pretty. Taken with my Pixel 4a.

Beauty in bloom

 

Saturday Sounds - Pink Floyd - BBC Recordings 1967-1971

Although Pink Floyd is best known for Dark Side of The Moon, they released several albums before that huge hit. I think their music went downhill after Dark Side, and their early material deserves more attention. I was an avid fan of their music when I was in university, and the last concert I saw while at school was an amazing performance by Pink Floyd at Ford Auditorium in Detroit in April 1972.  

Like many other bands, Pink Floyd performed many times for the BBC and there are a couple of compilations of their performances which I'm linking to here.

The first is from 1967 through 1969.

The second is from 1970 and 1971.

 

If you aren't familiar with their pre-DSOTM material, this is a good place to start.

We're Toast 40

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

• Supreme Court Wetlands Ruling Defies “Scientific Understanding”. 'It excludes bodies of water federal law “has always been interpreted to cover.”'
• A visual guide to deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. "Fortunes of world’s largest rainforest and its Indigenous inhabitants have risen and fallen with political leadership." The world's lungs have a cancer – humanity. 
• The Upper Atmosphere Is Cooling, Prompting New Climate Concerns. "Scientists are worried about the effect this change could have on orbiting satellites, the ozone layer, and Earth’s weather."
• Beware! The long-buried Colossal-Heat-Monster Kraken is Coming! "Ocean says our time is up."
• The massive smoke plume choking the northeast U.S. is what climate change looks like. "Unearthly skies and unhealthy air resulting from Canadian wildfires may persist for days."
• Earth’s health failing in seven out of eight key measures, say scientists. "Groundbreaking analysis of safety and justice hopes to inform next generation of sustainability policy."
• Idaho lawmakers introduce legislation to criminalize those who administer COVID vaccines. "The bill would make administering an mRNA vaccine -- a COVID vaccine -- a misdemeanor. Sheer insanity. These people are the kind that will kill us all when we get hit with a severe pandemic (air-borne Ebola, human-transmissable H5N1, MERS/COVID cross, take your pick)."
• What's in the Seaweed? Researchers Find ‘High Amounts' of Flesh-Eating Bacteria in Sargassum. "Sargassum seaweed, Vibrio bacteria and plastic debris are interacting in the ocean to create a perfect "pathogen storm" that researchers say could seriously impact both marine life and public health."

Gilead Rising in Canada

I've posted here before about the rise of Christian extremism (let's call it what it is: Christofascism) and the consequences for our democratic society. Although it's more prevalent in the United States, we're now seeing more signs of it here in Canada.

The CBC has published a long and disturbing article detailing some of the organizations and people involved in spreading this twisted version of Christianity. 

Liberty Coalition Canada, a conservative Christian advocacy group, is trying to raise $1.3 million to recruit hundreds of Christian politicians and campaign staff to run at all levels of government.

In a document marked "please keep classified" that was obtained by CBC News, the group says its ultimate goal is "the most powerful political disruption in Canadian history."

Working alongside Liberty Coalition Canada are dozens of churches across the country, a number of small media outlets and at least one well-funded think-tank.

While theological and political differences exist among them, many supporters of this movement share a vocal opposition to LGBTQ rights and other social justice causes. 

Several Canadian pastors in the movement also have ties to a controversial branch of evangelical Christianity in the U.S. known as reconstructionism.

Scholars say reconstructionist ideals — often linked to Christian nationalism, the idea that the United States is a Christian country — are influencing how some Canadian evangelicals are responding to issues like legalized abortion, same-sex marriage and added protections for gender minorities. 

Although hardly fundamentalist, the York Region Catholic school board recently voted against flying the Pride flag at its schools to celebrate Pride month, mirroring the anti-LGBTQ hate being spewed by more radical groups. This has happened in other communities and is a disturbing trend. 

Canadians looking at social trends in our southern neighbour often take the attitude, "Well, it can't happen here." Unfortunately, it already is. 

Some Science Fiction Links

Here are a few articles about science fiction and fantasy.

• Publisher's Weekly reviews John Scalzi's next novel, Starter Villsin. If it's anything like The Kaiju Preservation Society, it should be a lot of fun. And the cover will certainly grab a lot of readers.
• Add June's New Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Books to Your Summer Reading List. "Start summer off with 42 new releases from authors like Charles Soule, Ann Leckie, Brandon Sanderson, Fran Wilde, and more."
• 2022 Analog AnLab Award and Asimov’s Science Fiction’s Readers’ Award Winners. The results from the readers' polls for the two digest science fiction magazines.
• William Gibson on how he coined the word "cyberspace" (video). "In William Gibson's classic 1984 cyberpunk novel Neuromancer, he coined the word "cyberspace" as the "consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators" jacked in to the digital network. In this clip from a 1993 Toronto TV program, Gibson tells how he came up with the term."
• Wheel of Time Season 2 Teases Mystery, Intrigue, and Dragons Reborn. "Prime Video has released first-look images from the second season of its epic Robert Jordan fantasy adaptation, premiering September 1." I am looking forward to the second season. WoT was much better than either Rings of Power or House of Dragons.

Featured Links - June 5, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.  

Christ Church in Roches Point

• Salami Slicing, Boiled Frogs, and Russian Red Lines. This is a very good analysis of Russia's strategy in the Ukrainian war and how the Ukraine and the West can counter it. 
• A Compact Fusion Reactor Barely 3 Feet Across Has Hit a Huge Milestone. "Ions inside a compact fusion reactor barely a meter (less than 3 feet) across have been heated to the magic figure of 100 million degrees Celsius (some 180 million degrees Fahrenheit) for the first time in a monumental step towards making nuclear fusion energy a practical reality."
• SpaceX and the science of failure. "When SpaceX’s Starship exploded not long after launch last month, it was generally seen as a failure. But for SpaceX, and for science and technology in general, failure can be the key to success."
• Lost Illusions: The Untold Story of the Hit Show’s Poisonous Culture. 'The show was a groundbreaking smash, but behind the scenes it devolved into such toxicity that even co-showrunner Damon Lindelof now says of his leadership: “I failed.” A powerful excerpt from the new book Burn It Down.'
• Writers On Set. From George R. R. Martin: "I want to say a few words about what I think is THE most important issue in the current writers’ strike: the so-called “mini rooms” that the Guild is hoping to abolish, and the terrible impact they are having on writers at the start of their careers."
• Google’s Android and Chrome extensions are a very sad place. Here’s why. "It was a bad week for millions of people who rely on Google for apps and Chrome extensions."
• The Best EV Brands for 2023. I guess it makes sense that PC  Magazine is now reviewing electric cars. As Cory Doctorow says, modern cars are just computers with wheels.

Photo of the Week - June 4, 2023

Inpatients taking in the sun. These aren't mine, unfortunately. They're in a basket hanging from a fence near our house. Taken with my Pixel 4a. 

Bright red impatients

Saturday Sounds - The Very Best Of Stan Rogers

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the death of Stan Rogers in an aircraft fire in Cincinnati. His untimely death sent shock waves through the Canadian music community. Although he hadn't attained mass commercial success, he was a major star in the folk music world and a top draw at festivals across North America. He was a compelling performer with a voice "that you could swim in", as Sylvia Tyson put it, and a songwriter who could break your heart with a line.

I was deeply affected by his death. In the 1970s I was living in Hamilton, Ontario and was lucky to have seen him perform from the beginning of his career, starting with shows at local coffee houses. My wife helped him research material for songs at the Dundas Public Library. I remember, in particular, one snowy evening at the Knight II coffee house where he performed for an audience of about six people, including the owner and his wife. It was a hair-raising drive getting there through a foot of snow but it I still treasure the memory of that evening. 

Sadly, he only released a handful of albums before his death. I'm linking his best of collection here, but you should check out all of them. 

You can also find some videos of his performances on YouTube as well as the wonderful documentary about his life, One Warm Line, linked below. His performance of "Northwest Passage" which opens the documentary will give you goosebumps. 

His brother, Garnet, has gone on to a long and successful musical career in his own right, and I am very much looking forward to seeing him perform tonight. 

Saturday Sounds - Mike Gordon - Flying Games

WTF, Google!

I did not know, until just recently, that Google was a full-fledged domain registrar, which means it can create its own top-level domains. Earlier this month, it created a bunch of them. Most are innocuous enough: .dad, .esq, and .phd, for example.

But then they added .zip and .mov, and those are a problem. A big problem. 

As pointed out by Steve Gibson in this week's episode of Security Now!, it opens the door to new and very hard-to-detect phishing and malware attacks. From Steve's show notes for the episode:

In other words, threat actors are creating realistic-looking phishing landing pages using modern web tools HTML, CSS and JavaScript which mimics legitimate file archive software, hosted on a .zip domain to elevate social engineering campaigns. In a potential attack scenario, a miscreant could redirect users to a credential harvesting page when a file which is apparently “contained” within the fake ZIP archive is clicked. mr.d0x noted: “Another interesting use case is listing a non-executable file and when the user clicks to initiate a download, it downloads an executable file. Let's say you have an “invoice.pdf” file. When a user clicks on this file, it will initiate the download of a .exe or any other file.”

Additionally, the search bar in the Windows File Explorer can emerge as a sneaky conduit where searching for a non-existent .ZIP file opens it directly in the web browser should the file name correspond to a legitimate .zip domain. Mr.d0x said: “This is perfect for this scenario since the user would be expecting to see a ZIP file. Once the user performs this, it will auto-launch the .zip domain which has the file archive template, and able to appear legitimate.”

The problem, of course, is that the new .ZIP and .MOV TLD’s are also both legitimate file extension names. This invites confusion when unsuspecting users mistakenly visit a malicious website when they believe that they’ve opening a file. They could then be misled into downloading malware.

For more technical details, see this article by security researcher, Bobby Rauch. 

If you are using Firefox, you may be safe from an attack exploiting this feature. Chrome users may want to install this extension. 

 

Movie and TV Reviews - May 2023

Short reviews of movies and TV shows we watched in May.

Movies

• The Pope's Exorcist. Who could resist a movie about the Pope's own exorcist battling a demonic possession in an ancient monastery. It's reasonably well done and moves along quickly. (VOD)

TV Shows

• The Doctor Blake Mysteries (seasons 2-5) We've gotten quite attached to this series. While Blake's adventures with the police are somewhat implausible, the writing and acting are top-notch. We were surprised that BritBox only had seasons 1 and 5, but fortunately, our local library had the rest on DVD.
• Antiques Road Trip (seasons 16-21) We continue to enjoy this show, especially when we are too tired to put in much mental effort. Britain sure has a lot of antique shops. (PBS)
• The Mallorca Files (season 1). We've only watched three episodes of this so far. It's enjoyable mostly for the setting. (BritBox)
• Silent Witness: An older show (1996) about a forensic pathologist in Cambridge. Rather understated compared to some more recent shows, but very well done, though quite grim. (BritBox)