More Scams to Watch Out For

The internet is a dangerous place these days and there's always one more new thing to watch out for. Right now, it's fake  CAPTCHAs. 

A real CAPTCHA (which stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart,” by the way — just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it?) runs in your browser. It might ask you to click a box, identify images, or wait for a quick verification. What it shouldn’t do is ask you to send a text message, open your phone’s SMS app, tell you to press a strange combination of keys, or ask you to copy and paste anything into your computer.

Take a couple of minutes to read the article. It may save you a lot of grief later.  

Featured Links - May 6, 2026

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

Springtime swans

• Rip.so, the graveyard of dead internet things. 'rip.so is a "graveyard of dead internet things," with a handsome old-web aesthetic (there's even a <marquee>!) with which to enjoy the sites that time forgot.'
• Russia cloaks launch schedule after spaceport falls in Ukraine’s sights. "We had serious inbound attempts to the cosmodrome that day.”
• Utah first state to hold websites liable for users who mask their location with VPNs — law goes into effect, designed to prevent bypassing age checks. "Senate Bill 73 holds websites liable for users who mask their location." Yet another ridiculous law trying to regulate the internet. 
• Rush Lost Its Beloved Drummer. The Band Is Ready to Get Back on the Road (gift link). "After losing Neil Peart to cancer six years ago, the trio is returning to touring with Anika Nilles, a powerhouse drummer who’s forged her own relationship with the group."
• What if Dark Matter Doesn’t Actually Exist? "Modern cosmology assumes dark matter exists. But what makes us so certain that dark matter is the answer—and what if we're wrong?"
• The Paradox of Medical AI Implementation. "From Missed Opportunities to Missing Evidence."
• Where Have All the Book Reviews Gone? (gift link) "What the rise of A.I. and the gutting of books coverage across U.S. media will mean for literature."
• Windows has a tool that shows every app that touched a file on your PC. "Microsoft's Process Monitor was the tool that surfaced all these activities that I never knew existed. Unlike the Task Manager, which shows resource usage percentages, it reveals the exact files my apps are touching in real time. Seeing the volume of activity gives me a deeper understanding of my computer."
• New Lithium-Plasma Engine Passes Key Mars Propulsion Test. "NASA engineers recently tested a next generation electric propulsion system that achieved new records while requiring lithium metal vapor for fuel and holds the potential to be a gamechanger in propulsion systems for the future of space exploration."
• Amazon stuck with months of repairs after drone strikes on data centers. "AWS stops billing Middle East cloud customers as repairs to war damage drag on."
  
• Break free from the fossil-fuel trap. "We're going to pay an extra +$500 billion for oil and gas this year."
• Don't Save This World. Design the Next One by science fiction author and futurist Karl Schoeder. "In this article I’ll lay it out one of the inventive processes I use. This is an approach common to many of my posts. I’ll present it in four easy stages that you can learn to follow yourself. Then, I’ll give you a couple of fun examples of how I’ve used it." 

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Featured Links - April 1, 2026

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

Note:  There are no April fool jokes in the post.

The rite of spring

• The broligarchy's war on journalism. "The capture of US media by Trump allies is accelerating and the UK is the next in line. Plus: the mystery money behind my old newspaper." The financial shenanigans described here are quite remarkable. If you read The Guardian or The Observer, you should read this. 
• When is an alien invasion not an alien invasion? "Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's alien invasion novel is a time capsule from the Cold War, and a reminder that the threat of nuclear annihilation isn't ancient history." A good review of one of my favourite books from the 1980s that places the book in a wider historical perspective. 
• Endgame for the Open Web. "Now, the centibillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time."
• ‘Truly spectacular’ drug for sleeping sickness simplifies treatment, raising hopes for eradication. "European regulators greenlight new one-dose compound that could help African countries get rid of an ancient burden." 
• ‘Canadians don’t want to come here any more’: anger over Trump squeezes US border businesses. "Shops and restaurants once bustling with tourists now struggle for survival as Canadians think twice about crossing the border." It's not just anger over the tariffs; people do not want to deal with the increasingly obtrusive border searches and the risk of ending up in an ICE detention centre. 
• Computer finds flaw in major physics paper for first time (archive link). "A computer language designed to robustly verify mathematical theorems and expose logical flaws has been turned towards a physics paper – and spotted an error. The discovery raises questions about how many other papers may harbour similar issues."
• How to Home. From Recomendo: "a YouTube channel with excellent videos that demonstrate how to complete common household repairs, such as wiring switches, fixing faucet leaks, and threading wire through walls and ceilings. Unlike many DIY videos, these feature high-quality audio, are well-lit, and aren’t blurry."
• How Alberta’s Separatist Movement Could Shake North America. "The resentments, politics, and risks behind their push to leave Canada." The separatists in Alberta are a small minority, but they are very committed and have ties to the US right. 
• The Hunt for Mr. Deepfakes. "A Toronto-area pharmacist is accused of being the internet’s most prolific peddler of deepfake porn. He’s just the beginning."
• This Week’s Small, Furry and Wet Reminder, That Repair is Still Possible. "Some hope for humanity, brought to you by beavers, with no consultants, no ribbon cuttings, just the ancient art of fixing what we keep breaking." Today, the UK. Tomorrow the world!
• Silicon Valley Giants Finally Face the Music. "Is this the Big Tobacco moment for the tech bros?"
• America and Public Disorder. "You can learn more about the U.S. by traveling overseas and comparing, and five years of that has taught me we accept far too much public disorder. We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size."
•  The life and times of Grateful Dead icon Bob Weir. "We salute the Grateful Dead original, who – in the last 30 years of his life – stepped out from Jerry Garcia’s considerable shadow to emerge as a guitar hero in his own right."

The Peril of Tracking Pixels

I've known about tracking pixels for a long time but never figured that they were much of a problem. Of course, they do reveal that you read an email or accessed a web site, but there are riskier things to worry about reading emails or browsing the web. 

But things have changed, as Steve Gibson pointed out in the latest installment of his Security Now podcast. From page 8 of his show notes:

I just learned how far tracking pixels have evolved. They’re easy to miss because, much like cookies, the code their presence on any webpage allows to run is hidden from us. But last Wednesday the 18th, the security researchers at Jscrambler shared what they had recently learned about what TikTok and Meta are doing.

Their headline was: “Beyond Analytics: The Silent Collection of Commercial Intelligence by TikTok and Meta Ad Pixels”. As we’ll see, this writing is targeted at web merchants who are voluntarily adding these insidious tracking pixels to their sites’ own webpages without a full appreciation or understanding of the privacy implications for their visitors. 

It turns out that Meta and TikTok are grabbing both personal information (names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card information) and a log of just about everything that people are doing on sites with these tracking pixels. From the report, Gibson quotes this: 

Meta’s pixel includes a feature called Automatic Events, which is enabled by default. The feature automatically scans page elements and captures information such as checkout interactions and visible payment card details, including the last digits, expiration date, and cardholder name. Since this is the default behavior and not an opt-in, merchants may not be aware that the pixel is collecting this information. On separate sites, Meta captured recipients' full names and delivery addresses when users selected address options during checkout.

This information can be used by Meta to compile a huge database of behaviour that it can sell. It's also presents a risk to anyone using those sites in the case of a security breach at Meta and because the information being sent to Meta may not be encrypted, making it a vulnerability should the user be the target of an attacker. 

Both TikTok and Meta's pixel code can load and begin transmitting data before the website's consent management system has time to block it, meaning information can leave the browser before the user’s choice is applied. Even more concerning is that data may be transmitted in cleartext—occasionally within the request URL itself—exposing sensitive information to browser histories, server logs, intermediaries, and debugging tools.

This vulnerability stems not only from the pixel’s data-collection methods but also from misconfigurations during its implementation or from issues with the website's underlying architecture. Consequently, the attack surface is significantly broader than a surface-level analysis suggest

Using Firefox, which supports the full uBlock Origin, is probably a good idea. Google Chrome supports uBlock Origin Lite (which I am using), but it's not as effective as the original uBlock Origin in blocking tracking pixels, web beacons, and tracking scripts. 

Yet another item to add to my To Do list. 

The Bloated Web Page

I'm constantly annoyed and frustrated by the crap that websites are blasting my phone with when I try t o read an article or browse a web page. Popups, autoplaying videos that refuse to close, ads that jump out and shove the text I'm reading out of the way;; I'm sure you've seen it all.

If you want to get a better idea of what's happening and why, read The 49MB Web Page by Shumham Bose, a developer and user interface design expert. The article was triggered when they looked behind the scenes at what was happening when they opened an article from The New York Times website and found that the browser downloaded 49 MB of data. (That's roughly equivalent to an album of MP3s or 50 books in EPUB format). 

When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.

I don't usually see most of this on my PC because I run an ad blocker (uBlock Origin Lite) that blocks much of the crap that the article discusses.  I use Firefox with uBlock Origin as my default browser on the phone, despite the annoyance of having different browsers on my PC and phone. (I know, I know; it's just laziness that keeps me from using Firefox on my PC). Apps, where publishers seem to consider pushing ads their primary purpose in life, are also problematic. 

I should point out that there are real security problems inherent in the use of programmatic ad auctions and tracking pixels and their associated scripts. (I'll have another post about this tomorrow or Monday). 

This is the best article about web design that I've seen in a very long time. Even if you're not particularly technical, it's worth reading just to understand why your browsing experience is so unpleasant.

Featured Links - March 25, 2026

Things I was interested in but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Bluffer's Park on a cloudy day

• Inside the fiery, deadly crashes involving the Tesla Cybertruck. "Cybertrucks have locked passengers inside and burned so hot they’ve disintegrated drivers’ bones. Victims’ families blame what they say is the faulty design of a truck Elon Musk calls ‘apocalypse-proof’" Just in case you need another reason to not buy a Cybertruck. 
• No Pills or Needles, Just Paper: How Deadly Drugs Are Changing (gift link). "Lab-made drugs soaked into the pages of letters, books and even legal documents are being smuggled behind bars, killing inmates and frustrating investigators."
• Inside the Dirty, Dystopian World of AI Data Centers (archive link). "The race to power AI is already remaking the physical world."
  
• Resisting the superbugs (archive link). "Canadian researcher Gerry Wright is searching for the next generation of life-saving antibiotics." Unfortunately, discovering a new antibiotic is easier than getting it to market. 
  
• Record-torching March heat ‘virtually impossible’ without climate change. "Friday’s spring equinox may seem like a quaint notion to those already enduring furnace-like 90-110°F summer heat." In this part of the country, we've had a cold winter with more snow than usual in recent years.
• The Trap Always Closes. "Donald Trump, Lyndon Johnson, and wars we can’t win." History shows that Trump can't win this war. His only way out is to stop, and he won't.
• Ryugu asteroid samples contain all DNA and RNA building blocks, bolstering origin-of-life theories. "We are stardust, we are golden ...".
• The World Factbook. "The community-maintained successor to the CIA World Factbook. Comprehensive data on 254 countries and territories." The CIA killed the CIA World Factbook in February and that this site is maintaining the information. 
• Canada wants to build up its long-neglected Arctic. The hard question is how. "Ottawa wants to modernize a region in the north that’s about six times the size of Texas, ‘just like in the 1800s’"
• As SpaceX Launches its 10,000th Satellite, A Photographer Captures the Impact on the Night Sky, "This week SpaceX passed an eye-watering milestone: it launched its 10,000th satellite into low-Earth orbit. The sheer scale of the devices whizzing around above humanity is unimaginable, but photographer Joshua Rozells is helping people see. Rozells’ image, Swamped Skies, is a composite of 343 photos that all contain at least one satellite streak. The Australian photographer didn’t set out to make the image; he originally wanted to capture star trails."
• Project Hail Mary is packed with hard science. An astrophysicist breaks it down. '"Project Hail Mary" is more than just an epic adventure film with beautiful visuals. It's a story that reminds us how important our world is—and how vital science is to our continued existence on it.'
• When Hyperglobalization Meets Chaos. "Choke points are everywhere you look." The crisis over the strait of Hormuz is only the beginning. 
• Historians Say They’ve Discovered a Long-Lost Page From the Archimedes Palimpsest, a Treasure Trove of Rare Ancient Mathematical Treatises. "Three leaves had been missing for more than a century. Researchers found one of them when they decided on a whim to check the archives of a French museum."

Featured Links - March 11, 2026

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

Lactose-free cat

• The Corporate Miscreants Driving the Affordability Crisis. "These 20 firms all have something in common: Their CEOs get paid millions, their workers are being pushed onto public assistance, and voters are fed up with them."
• We’re Training Students To Write Worse To Prove They’re Not Robots, And It’s Pushing Them To Use More AI. The irony of being forced to dumb down an essay about a story warning against the forced suppression of excellence was not lost on me. Or on my kid, who spent a frustrating afternoon removing words and testing sentences one at a time, trying to figure out what invisible tripwire the algorithm had set. The lesson the kid absorbed was clear: write less creatively, use simpler vocabulary, and don’t sound too good, because sounding good is now suspicious."
• NASA’s DART Mission Did More Than Just Nudge an Asteroid, Study Says. "With these new findings, researchers are closer than ever to validating a key planetary defense technique."
• Managing phone media. "Dealing with photos, screenshots, and videos created by your phone isn’t simply a matter of deleting them. In this article, I’ll describe how to move media off your phone and onto your computer, remove media from the cloud, and disable automatic synchronization of media (which is usually the default)."
• Whiteouts, Ice Roads, and Wolverines: What Working at a Diamond Mine in the Far North Is Like. "In minus forty, even a twisted ankle can turn deadly if no one knows where to find you."
• The bombshell results that demand a new theory of the universe (archive link). "Last year, our most detailed map of the universe yet suggested our understanding of dark energy has been wrong for decades. The shock result is reigniting the search for a better cosmic story." This is one of the best articles on the subject of dark matter and dark energy that I have read. 
• The Myth That Wind Farms Are a Guillotine for Birds Is Being Debunked by Hard Data. "The harm caused by wind turbines isn't nearly as bad as you think."
  
• Meat Without The Animals. "Meat cultivated from cells — with no need to raise and slaughter an animal — is now a reality. But can it be made cheaply enough to displace animal agriculture?" 
• Mozilla Partners with Anthropic to Better Secure Firefox. "As Mozilla explains, this isn’t a one-off: Unlike the previous AI-assisted bug reports it’s received, which included false positives that required unnecessary work on its part, the Anthropic bug reports were different. They focused on the Firefox JavaScript engine. And each included minimal test cases to help Mozilla quickly verify and reproduce each issue."
• ‘We’re no longer attracting top talent’: the brain drain killing American science. "As Trump slashes science funding, young researchers flee abroad. Without solid innovation, the US could cease to have the largest biomedical ecosystem in the world."

Featured Links - August 26, 2025

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

Front yard hyacinths. 

The Super-Weird Origins of the Right’s Hatred of the Smithsonian. "The Trump administration has stepped up its antagonism of America’s treasured museums. But conservative antipathy toward the institution began long ago—with the bones of Bible giants."

Scientists Propose a Smarter Way to Hunt for Alien Radio Signals. "We might find intelligent aliens by looking for them the same way they’d find us."

Covid and Our Arteries. "A new study on acceleration of vascular aging adds to the body of evidence." Yet more reasons to do whatever you can to avoid catching COVID.

4chan will refuse to pay daily online safety fines, lawyer tells BBC. "A lawyer representing the online message board 4chan says it won't pay a proposed fine by the UK's media regulator as it enforces the Online Safety Act."

The 9 Worst RFK Jr. Decisions to Date. "By every measure, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s tenure as Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) has been — and continues to be — a disaster. His actions undermine scientific progress, public trust, and the health of millions. In a mere matter of months, his agenda has left lasting scars on America’s public health infrastructure, while reverberating globally by undoing decades of progress in vaccination and disease prevention."

Sadopopulism and the Fascist MAGA Ethos. "Trump’s policy is to inflict pain, even upon his own voters. But why does this work, and what will stop it?"

Five Ways to Fight Trump's Fascism. "People are constantly asking me — what can I do? Between now and the 2026 midterm elections, here are five practical steps you can take to make a difference." YouTube video from Robert Reich. 

We Are All Lisa Cook. "Nobody is safe from weaponized government."

The “Peace in Our Time” Moment. "Why Trump’s Deal With Putin Echos Munich 1938." The similarities between now and 1938 are clear. 

Dude, you broke the Future! A talk by SF author, Charlie Stross, from the 34C3 conference in 2017. It's eight years old now and still relevant. (YouTube video)

Featured Links - August 12. 2025

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

Summer flowers looking a bit wilted

Bullets in the windows. "Until now, it was only a metaphor." This is horrifying and should have had more prominence in the news. 

Scientists reveal Alaska could get up to two minutes’ warning before the next big quake. "A new study suggests Alaska could get 10–120 seconds of warning before major quakes, with more seismic stations adding up to 15 extra seconds. Researchers emphasize challenges like harsh winters, remote sites, and alert transmission delays, but say the benefits could be lifesaving."

The War for the Web Has Begun. "One of the internet's biggest gatekeepers has accused a rising AI star of breaking the web's oldest rules. The explosive feud could change how we all get information online."

 A Valid HTML ZIP Bomb. "Many sites have been affected by the aggressiveness of web crawlers designed to improve LLMs. I’ve been relatively spared, but since the phenomenon started, I've been looking for a solution to implement. Today, I present a zip bomb gzip and brotli that is valid HTML."

2025 Aurora Awards. "The Canadian Science Fiction and Fantasy Association (CSFFA) today announced the winners of the 2024 Aurora Awards for Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror in an online awards ceremony."

Why Are We Funding This? "People often wrongly believe that scientific progress is made by a few “great geniuses” working on a few “big questions,” and that those geniuses have some sense in advance of what the answers are going to be. In reality, knowledge is advanced by many independent teams of people working on chipping away at the boundaries of knowledge a little bit at a time. Sometimes doing so leads to a world-changing discovery. Other times it just tells us one more thing that doesn’t work, a vital step toward eventually learning what does work."

Featured Links - August 5, 2025

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

A farm north of Oshawa

• The 10 apps I can't live or work without - on Windows, Mac, and mobile. I've been reading Ed Bott's articles and listening to him on podcasts for years. You can trust his research and his opinions. You might also want to read this article he wrote about the comments section for the article. 
• Midcentury Dreams. "Chesley Bonestell and Willy Ley's The Conquest of Space". I remember that book fondly, and the movie that was based on it.
• Flourishing chemosynthetic life at the greatest depths of hadal trenches. Life at 9 km. deep in the ocean. This might bode well for the prospect of life in the outer icy moons of the solar system. 
• A perfect storm (gift link). "As wildfires and storms fuel climate worries, the rise of weather content on social media shows there's a fine line between preparation and obsession."
• I Trusted Gemini With a Web Search and It Sent Me Straight to a Scam. "AI is creeping into more parts of the internet, answering search queries, recommending downloads, and even deciding what emails deserve your attention. But just because it sounds helpful doesn’t mean it always knows what it’s doing."
• Dennis McNally’s Last Great Dream: Memories of Working with the Grateful Dead, Tracking Kerouac and Exploring How Bohemians Became Hippies. I definitely want to read this.
• De-Google Project Update. "I introduced this family project in the spring of 2024. I won’t reproduce those arguments for why we’re working on this, but in the current climate I feel like I hardly need to. Since that post, our aversion to Google dependency has only grown stronger. Progress has been non-zero but not fast."

Featured Links - June 3, 2025

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

Springtime at the marina

• What are ultra-processed foods, really? "We dug into the research and answered your questions."
• The MAHA Report Is a Health Hoax: RFK Jr. Just Cited Studies That Don’t Exist. "America’s top health official tabled a report filled with fake science, dead links, and ChatGPT hallucinations. This isn’t policy—it’s malpractice by executive order."
• Predicting and Preventing Alzheimer’s Disease. "With all the advances in both the science of aging and artificial intelligence (AI), we are in a propitious position to accurately and precisely determine who is at high risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease years before signs of even mild cognitive deficit."
• 5,000-Year-Old Bread Recipe Recreated in Turkey—and Locals Can’t Get Enough. "A bread made from ancient grains is rising again in Turkey, and it's a big hit." Not only does it taste good, but it's made from drought-resistant plants.
• HellCaptcha: Accessibility Theater at Its Worst. "hCaptcha's "Accessibility" Mode Is a Fucking Cookie. And it's wrapped in a maze of broken promises, bad design, and outright user hostility."
• Massive security blunder: Russian nuclear site blueprints exposed in public procurement database. "Russia is modernizing its nuclear weapon sites, including underground missile silos and support infrastructure. Data, including building plans, diagrams, equipment, and other schematics, is accessible to anyone in the public procurement database."
• Changing of the guard and Best laid plans. "What does a change in ownership for the genre's legacy short fiction magazines mean for the SF/F community?" The science fiction magazines, especially Analog and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, were my gateway into the genre.
• The Radical Development of an Entirely New Painkiller. "The opioid crisis has made it even more urgent to come up with novel approaches to treating suffering." Finally there’s something effective." This article gives real insight into the complexity of developing a new drug.
• ‘My mother didn’t try to stab my father until I was six’: Alan Alda on childhood, marriage and 60 years of stardom. "Best known as Hawkeye in the TV series M*A*S*H, the 89-year-old actor, director and writer has another hit on his hands with a revamp of his 1981 movie The Four Seasons. He talks about his Parkinson’s disease, Woody Allen – and what he really thinks of Donald Trump."

Featured Links -- December 15, 2024

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

Birds on ice

The best science images of 2024 — Nature’s picks. "A breathtaking total eclipse, courageous penguins, volcanic smoke rings and more." There are some truly incredible images here. Best viewed on a large computer monitor. 

Google Timeline location purge causes collateral damage. "Privacy measure leaves some mourning lost memories." If you rely on Timeline data more than three months old, you should read this.

Miranda’s Last Gift (gift link). "When our daughter died suddenly, she left us with grief, memories—and Ringo." A beautiful and moving tribute by David Frum to his late daughter, and her dog. 

Debunking Every Myth You Hear Against Universal Healthcare. "Whether you are politically left or right, you should want Universal Healthcare as a human right—here are the receipts on why."

Powerful solar storms are a nightmare for farmers. 'Our tractors acted like they were demon possessed'. "When the sun's fury disrupts high-tech farming, precision turns to chaos." It does make me wonder if the universe really is out to get us. 

Alena Tensor—a new hope for unification in physics. "Our new article published in Physica Scripta brings new hope that such a theory exists. It demonstrates that the use of a certain mathematical object called Alena Tensor reconciles various physical theories, including general relativity, electrodynamics, quantum mechanics and continuum mechanics. Will this finally allow scientists to unify descriptions used in physics?" Some highly speculative new physics theorizing. 

Refinement of post-COVID condition core symptoms, subtypes, determinants, and health impacts: a cohort study integrating real-world data and patient-reported outcomes. "PCC can be categorized into four distinct subtypes based on ten core symptoms. These subtypes appeared to share a majority of pathogen and host-related risk factors, but their impact on health varied markedly by subtype. Our findings could help refine current guidelines for precise PCC diagnosis and progression, enhance the identification of PCC subgroups for targeted research, and inform evidence-based policy making to tackle this new and debilitating condition."

The latest in poker cheats: Tiny cameras that can see cards as they’re dealt. ""Several recent schemes were uncovered, so should players everywhere be concerned?" Only if you're playing $10,000 buy-in poker. 

Battery prices continue to drop, lowering the cost of electric vehicles. "The price of lithium-ion batteries in China has decreased by 51 percent in the past year. Lower battery prices make electric vehicles cheaper than fossil fuel cars in many segments, and large-scale battery solutions in energy systems become more profitable."

New to Bluesky

I will never forgive Elon Musk for ruining Twitter, which was an essential service for many people. Twitter is still there, as X, but it's a pale shadow of its former self and has become a cesspit of right-wing and misogynist content, some of it posted by Musk himself.

So what are the alternatives? 

There are now three major platforms vying for users.

• Threads is Facebook's offering. It has the largest user base but being a centralized platform under the control of Mark Zuckerg's Meta has put off many users, myself included.
• Mastondon is a federated and distributed system which means it can't be bought by a billionaire with an agenda. Mastodon is relatively small (about 10,000,000  users). 
• Bluesky is also potentially a federated platform though currently it has only one central node. It's probably the closest to the original Twitter in design and feel and recently has surpassed Mastodon in usage. 

I'm not going to discuss Threads as I am not on it nor do I plan to join up.

I have been on Mastodon for two years and it's become my replacement for Twitter. It doesn't have the reach or variety of users that Twitter had, but I'm finding the overall quality of what I'm seeing there much higher than what I saw on Twitter at it's peak. You can find me there at @ksoltys@twit.social. 

Bluesky has experienced a large surge in membership over the last month, most of it coming from Twitter users who can no longer stomach Musk's antics. I signed up recently and my handle is @ksoltys.bsky.social. 

So far, I haven't been very active as I'm gradually finding my way around. The interface is very close to Twitter's, but lacks many features that Twitter had or that Mastodon currently has. (One example: in my Mastodon client, when I sign in, I can go to the my last location in the feed rather than having to start at the top and work my way backwards). 

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on Bluesky right now. But I am going to list a few resources that I've found helpful in getting started there.

• How to use Bluesky Social: Everything to know about the popular X alternative. "Bluesky is one of several social networks striving to offer an alternative to the site formerly known as Twitter. Here's how to join and use it."
• An Unofficial Guide to Bluesky, by Debbie Ridpath Ohi. 
• Maybe Bluesky has "won". "November has sucked so far. One upside of the terrible nonsense is that more people are fleeing X. Many are choosing Bluesky. I’ve seen a bunch of takes about this recently, but I keep seeing things I disagree with. I figure that’s a good enough excuse to write more about this weird-assed social network."
• r/BlueskySocial on Reddit.

Featured Links - November 18, 2024

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

The marina waiting for winter

How to Stay Covid Safe When in Hospital. "A guide to navigating the risk of hospital acquired Covid - as well as how to manage overall risk of nosocomial infections and hospital derived complications." Reading this article may save your life.

Civil rights icon Ruby Bridges Hall discusses Norman Rockwell's famous painting. "Ruby Bridges became a civil rights icon when she was 6. Yet she didn't realize it for decades. The world knows her as the little girl in Norman Rockwell's famous 1963 painting, The Problem We All Live With, a black child being escorted to a white New Orleans school by federal marshals."

What Is RSS? If you aren't using an RSS reader, you're online life is a lot more complicated than it needs to be. I use Feedly and would have a hard time living without it.

In Memoriam: Thomas E. Kurtz, 1928–2024. Kurtz was the co-inventor of BASIC, arguably the most influential computer language. It was the second one I learned, after encountering FORTRAN in university.

Half-Life 2 remaster drops; no word on Half-Life 3. "Half-Life 2 RTX, a remaster of the original game featuring all kinds of fancy, cutting-edge graphics tech, has been revealed in full force and looks absolutely beautiful." I can't wait to play this! It's too bad there's no release date yet.

Trump Claims a Mandate, But He’s Wrong And It Will Cost Him. "Trump is already overreaching, giving Democrats a clear opening."

The Ghosts of John Tanton. "Today’s contentious immigration debate is the construct of one man’s effort to halt overpopulation, brace for climate change and preserve “European” culture. Now climate change is amplifying environmental concerns that have always run through the white supremacy and the anti-immigration movements. Experts warn that extremists who seize on global warming to justify violence are part of a far right trend to reclaim environmentalism as their own."

Featured Links - November 11, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. Sorry for all the politics this week, but I think you can understand why.

Autumn colour contrast

• Science is revealing the true stories of Pompeii’s victims beneath the ash. "Analysis of ancient DNA rewrites what we know about the relationships between the people buried there in A.D. 79."
• Coping Strategies. "Governance--like theories--should be as simple as possible, but no simpler." From SF author and futurist, Karl Schroeder. 
• Readying the Resistance. "A Democratic guide to minimizing harm from the coming Trump term."
• Now what for public health? "We need to be ready for a new world."
• Concert Archives. "The concert database for fans, by fans. Explore, Track, and Share the Experience." This is a cool site for digging into your personal concert history.
• 1000 Nuclear Reactors. "That's how much solar and wind electricity is sitting around waiting to be plugged in." Some encouraging news on the environmental front, but utility companies need to get out of the way. 
• It’s Find Out Time. "“I never thought the leopard would eat my face,” sobs woman who voted for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party." Voter remorse is going to be a big topic in the coming days. 
• November 8, 2024. Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American newsletter. In this one, she discusses the role of right-wing misinformation in the election and ties it to a similar period in American history. 
• Making Money in the Next Four Years, and Why You Need to Plan Now to Support Your Favorite Creators. Good advice from John Scalzi on how you can help your favourite creators weather the next (at least) four years.
• NASA Quiet Space Fan Research to Benefit Commercial Space Stations. "Controlling noise inside spacecraft helps humans talk to each other, hear alarms clearer, get restful sleep, and minimizes the risk of hearing loss. It is best to control the noise at the source, and in spacecraft the noise often comes from cabin ventilation and equipment cooling fans."
• XOXO. "This post annotates a talk I gave on August 24, 2024 at the final XOXO Festival in Portland, Oregon. The talk was about why I left the internet, how the Covid Tracking Project got me back online, and most of all how the work we did at CTP led to me to believe that we—the weirdos of internet-making and online life—have to not merely retreat from the big-world social internet, but fix it."
• Toronto crypto company CEO kidnapped, held for $1M ransom before being released. This is at least the 171st instance of suspects using physical violence to steal bitcoins. 

Featured Links - October 28, 2024

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

A burning bush in full flame

•  ‘Fandom has toxified the world’: Watchmen author Alan Moore on superheroes, Comicsgate and Trump. "Enthusiasm can be a productive force for good, but our culture has rapidly become a fan-based landscape that the rest of us are merely living in."
  
• Political Polarization and Health. "In addition to social determinants of health, such as economic resources, education, access to care and various environmental factors, there is growing evidence that political polarization poses a substantial risk to individual and collective well-being."
• Inside the Bungled Bird Flu Response, Where Profits Collide With Public Health. "When dairy cows in Texas began falling ill with H5N1, alarmed veterinarians expected a fierce response to contain an outbreak with pandemic-sparking potential. Then politics—and, critics say, a key agency’s mandate to protect dairy-industry revenues—intervened."
• Posse Comitatus and the Insurrection Act. "The limitations on Trump deploying the military in terrifying ways are almost non-existent."
• A Priceless Business Leadership Lesson From The Grateful Dead. "Phil Lesh, the Grateful Dead’s singularly iconic and beloved bassist, died last week at age 84. He was a beautiful musician, a wonderful man, a sweet soul. He also – through his identifiably unique approach to his instrument and how it becomes so integral to the band’s creative development – exemplified more than just music. And the lessons we learned from him – and the boys – are more applicable to business than ever before. "
• How a conspiracy-fueled group got a foothold in this hurricane-battered town. "Over the course of 11 days, a supermarket parking lot became a snapshot of the chaos that can unfold in some corners of post-disaster America." I hope this isn't a preview of coming chaos, but I am afraid it might be.
• How Google is Killing Bloggers and Small Publishers – And Why. "A couple of weeks ago, in a moment of caffeinated inspiration/despair, I sat down and wrote a long Facebook post as to why we were ditching Google and switching to DuckDuckGo. Today I want to dive even deeper into this topic, and give you a first-hand account of how Google is killing hundreds of thousands of blogs and small publishers. And maybe give you some insight as to why they are doing so."
• Math Is Still Catching Up to the Mysterious Genius of Srinivasa Ramanujan. "Born poor in colonial India and dead at 32, Ramanujan had fantastical, out-of-nowhere visions that continue to shape the field today."

Internet Life

Science fiction author Peter Watts has written an interesting blog post about the possibility life emerging spontaneously inside the internet. That's not a new idea; SF authors have been exploring the idea for years (Skynet in The Terminator series, Robert J. Sawyers WWW trilogy are just two examples), but now AI researchers are looking at how it might actually happen. 

Now Blaise Agüera y Arcas and his buddies at Google have rubbed our faces in our own lack of vision. Starting with a programming language called (I kid you not) Brainfuck, they built a digital “primordial soup” of random bytes, ran it under various platforms, and, well…read the money shot for yourself, straight from the (non-peer-reviewed) ArXiv preprint “Computational Life: How Well-formed, Self-replicating Programs Emerge from Simple Interaction”[1]:

“when random, non self-replicating programs are placed in an environment lacking any explicit fitness landscape, self-replicators tend to arise. … increasingly complex dynamics continue to emerge following the rise of self-replicators.”

Apparently, self-replicators don’t even need random mutation to evolve. The code’s own self-modification is enough to do the trick. Furthermore, while

“…there is no explicit fitness function that drives complexification or self-replicators to arise. Nevertheless, complex dynamics happen due to the implicit competition for scarce resources (space, execution time, and sometimes energy).”

Watts summarizes the research in (relatively) non-technical detail. It's fascinating and more than a little bit scary. After reading the post, do check out his novel, Maelstrom, cited in the post, in which he explored some of the implications 15 years ago. 

Featured Links - September 30. 2024

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

Seagulls at the beach

• iPhone, Android Users Warned After 50,000 Message Email Bomb Attack. It doesn't sound like a common problem, but it could be really messy if you get hit by it.
• The Internet Archive’s Fight to Save Itself. "The web’s collective memory is stored in the servers of the Internet Archive. Legal battles threaten to wipe it all away." I am appalled at the way big business is attacking the Internet Archive. 
• Physicists Reveal a Quantum Geometry That Exists Outside of Space and Time. 'A decade after the discovery of the “amplituhedron,” physicists have excavated more of the timeless geometry underlying the standard picture of how particles move.'
• "The fall of Kodak wasn't because of digital cameras" says History in the Dark.  "The once-mighty camera giant was actually an early pioneer of digital tech, and if it wasn't for the iPhone things could have been so different."
• The Tragically Hip: The small-town band that united Canada. If you don't know about The Hip, you are missing something special. The new documentary about them on Amazon Prime is wonderful.
• Marvel and DC lose trademark on "superhero". "Marvel and DC have jointly held the trademark for the word "superhero" since 1980, but no longer. The United States Patent and Trademark Office, in response to a petition from Superbabies, Limited, has canceled the trademark. Anyone can now produce works using "superhero" without fear of a lawsuit from either of the entertainment behemoths." Another blow against the evil empire.
• 45 years ago CompuServe connected the world before the World Wide Web. CompuServe was my introduction to online life, sometime in 1985. 
• Canada’s Leaders Must Reject Overbroad Age Verification Bill. "Canadian lawmakers are considering a bill, S-210, that’s meant to benefit children, but would sacrifice the security, privacy, and free speech of all internet users." It seems that legislative ignorance and stupidity about the internet is not limited to the US and Britain.
• Paralyzed Jockey Loses Ability To Walk After Manufacturer Refuses To Fix Battery For His $100,000 Exoskeleton. "traight's experience is a nightmare scenario that highlights what happens when companies decide to stop supporting their products and do not actively support independent repair. It's also what happens without the protection of right to repair legislation that requires manufacturers to make repair parts, guides, and tools available to the general public."

Featured Links - September 23, 2024

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

Sunset clouds

•  ASPI’s two-decade Critical Technology Tracker. "The US led in 60 of 64 technologies in the five years from 2003 to 2007, but in the most recent five years (2019–2023) is leading in seven. China led in just three of 64 technologies in 2003–20074 but is now the lead country in 57 of 64 technologies in 2019–2023." This should be no surprise to anyone.
• Amazing engineering: How to stretch a cruise ship. "Slicing huge cruise ships in half, then welding in an extra segment to lengthen them, is more or less a license to print money for cruise operators – so this 'jumboization' surgery is becoming very common. Let's take a look at how it's done."
• Chinese researchers figure out how to detect stealth aircraft using Starlink satellites. The US military must be very worried about this. 
• The crypto bros who dream of crowdfunding a new country. It's an interesting idea but I can't see how it could be implemented in practice. It's a bit reminiscent of Robert Charles Wilson's The Affinities. 
• 20 Million Cards: A Sports Memorabilia Gold Mine Uncovered in Virginia (gift link). "Three years ago, a businessman bought a collection of roughly 20 million sports cards from its reclusive owner. Now he wants to show it to the world." He has 5 Babe Ruth cards!
• How Google Chrome is declaring war against ad blockers. "Ghostery's CEO and Director of Engineering break down the new Manifest V3 changes, and why they're bad news for anyone who wants to block ads."
• Massive China-state IoT botnet went undetected for four years—until now. "75% of infected devices were located in homes and offices in North America and Europe."
• The Searchers (gift link). "Dave Eggers on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab."
• Lawsuit wants Canadian lake to be legally defined as a person. "A court has been asked to declare Lake Winnipeg a person with constitutional rights to life, liberty and security of person in a case that may go further than any other in trying to establish the rights of nature in Canada." This is a central idea in Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, and I hope it gains traction. If corporations can be legal people, why not lakes?

Featured Links - September 9, 2024

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

Family home - for a family of foxes

• A new era in hurricane tracking begins. "Inside the dangerous mission that could revolutionize how we hunt nature’s most terrifying storms."
• Arecibo Wow! I: An Astrophysical Explanation for the Wow! Signal. "We hypothesize that the Wow! Signal was caused by sudden brightening from stimulated emission of the hydrogen line due to a strong transient radiation source, such as a magnetar flare or a soft gamma repeater (SGR). These are very rare events that depend on special conditions and alignments, where these clouds might become much brighter for seconds to minutes. The original source or the cloud might not be detectable, depending on the sensitivity of the telescope." Another LGM contact bites the dust. 
• NARA recovers famed 1982 Grace Hopper lecture recorded on obsolete media format. An important piece of computing history has been preserved.
• Second Circuit Says Libraries Disincentivize Authors To Write Books By Lending Them For Free. "What would you think if an author told you they would have written a book, but they wouldn’t bother because it would be available to be borrowed for free from a library? You’d probably think they were delusional. Yet that argument has now carried the day in putting a knife into the back of the extremely useful Open Library from the Internet Archive."
• After seeing Wi-Fi network named “STINKY,” Navy found hidden Starlink dish on US warship. "It's no secret that government IT can be a huge bummer. The records retention! The security! So government workers occasionally take IT into their own hands with creative but, err, unauthorized solutions."
• A Word, Please: Coffee-shop prompt stirs ChatGPT to brew up bland copy. "A short article about a new coffee place prompted grammar expert June Casagrande to check her work against AI. The latter created tepid copy that included weak sentences and left out relevant details."
• Russia Bought the Right. "The cost was around $10 million so far, but this might just be the first of many bombshells." 
• Meet the right-wing Canadian influencers accused of collaborating with an alleged Russian propaganda scheme. "Tenet Media founder Lauren Chen allegedly took funds from pro-Moscow outlet." The Canadian connection to the previous story. 
• Are Some Ultraprocessed Foods Worse Than Others? (gift link) "A new study may offer the biggest clues yet."
• A window into the body: New technique makes skin invisible. "Researchers have developed a new way to see organs within a body by rendering overlying tissues transparent to visible light. The counterintuitive process—a topical application of food-safe dye—was reversible in tests with animal subjects, and may ultimately apply to a wide range of medical diagnostics, from locating injuries to monitoring digestive disorders to identifying cancers."
• Tonga eruption that poured 150 metric tons of water vapor into the stratosphere affected the atmosphere for years. "A new study builds on previous research into the underwater volcano's effects on the climate."