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The Backdoor To The Entire Internet That Didn't Happen
A rather large drama unfolded a couple of weeks ago when it was discovered that someone had installed a backdoor into an installation utility used by much of the Open Source community. Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility targets encrypted SSH connections [Ars Technica] This was found by accident, a worker was maintaining his own code and found discrepancies in computer performance and investigated. How one volunteer stopped a backdoor from exposing Linux systems worldwide [The Verge] This seems to have been largely the work of one online account that spent years gaining trust in the group that maintain this tool. THE OTHER PLAYERS WHO HELPED (ALMOST) MAKE THE WORLD’S BIGGEST BACKDOOR HACK [The Intercept] The Mystery of ‘Jia Tan,’ the XZ Backdoor Mastermind [WIRED] Today, Fedora announced its own systems all clear of this thwarted backdoor attempt. CVE-2024-3094: All Clear
“I still wanted to help. But I didn’t know what the hell I was doing.”
The Deaths of Effective Altruism
[archive] by Leif Wenar is a critical assessment of the effective altruism movement, taking in Sam Bankman-Fried and billionaires, Peter Singer and other philosophers, and GiveWell and the wider network of charities working off effective altruistic ideas.
^•ﻌ•^ฅ oh, hello ฅ^•ﻌ•^ฅ...
meow.camera
lets you watch live feeds from hundreds (thousands?) of cozy and custom-decorated cat feeders set up throughout various cities in China.
What is a secret?
In the fall of 2004, Frank came up with an idea for a project. After he finished delivering documents for the day, he’d drive through the darkened streets of Washington, D.C., with stacks of self-addressed postcards—three thousand in total. At metro stops, he’d approach strangers. “Hi,” he’d say. “I’m Frank. And I collect secrets.” Some people shrugged him off, or told him they didn’t have any secrets. Surely, Frank thought, those people had the best ones. Others were amused, or intrigued. They took cards and, following instructions he’d left next to the address, decorated them, wrote down secrets they’d never told anyone before, and mailed them back to Frank. All the secrets were anonymous. Initially, Frank received about one hundred postcards back. They told stories of infidelity, longing, abuse. Some were erotic. Some were funny. He displayed them at a local art exhibition and included an anonymous secret of his own. After the exhibition ended, though, the postcards kept coming. By 2024, Frank would have more than a million.Dark Matter: For twenty years, PostSecret has broadcast suburban America’s hidden truths—and revealed the limits of limitless disclosure.
"Magical Cat!"
✨There he is, ✨he's a magical cat, ✨everybody loves him ✨he's a ＭＡＧＩＣＡＬ ＣＡＴ!✨✨✨🧚🦄🧜♀️🧝🐈
(5 1/2 minute video, claymation animation compilation, silly, meow)
(5 1/2 minute video, claymation animation compilation, silly, meow)
Lil Jon has a guided meditation YouTube stream
10 different 10-minute guided mediations by crunk progenitor Lil Jon.
Lil Jon is very serious about meditation, and sharing its benefits. These 10 guided mediations include ones focusing on boosting focus, gratitude, grief, deep sleep, and much more.
What’s neglected is not necessarily justly neglected
The reality is that most writers will be forgotten. Readers don’t have the time or energy to read everything good that’s in print, let alone chase down the far greater number of books that are good and out of print. There are very, very few obsessives like me who dig into the vast piles of forgotten books and try to report back. The canon of well-known, widely taught, in print and easily available writers is only a narrow and well-trodden path through the vast territory called the literature of the past. What lies off that beaten path is much the same as what we see among the new books that are being published today: in other words, great books and awful books and an enormous amount in between. from We Must Rescue Forgotten Geniuses If We are to Read Them by Brad Bigelow [The Neglected Books Page]
What does your daily schedule look like, hour by hour?
I find it a constant struggle to get everything I need to get done done. I am always behind on multiple important things because there simply isn't enough time in the day. However, I see people managing many more responsibilities than I have, so I thought it would be helpful for me to see how other people organize their days.
WELCOME TO THE WOOORLD OF TOMORROW
March 28, 1999: Futurama. It seems to go on and on forever. In fact, the pilot episode of the original run aired 25 years ago tonight, kicking off what would become one of the smartest and most hilarious comedies in TV history. So celebrate with an overview of character intros, ★ key scenes, clips, ♫ songs, and other links, why not?
“I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.” (BOOOO)
Ted Gioia: "Tech leaders gathered in Austin for the South-by-Southwest conference a few days ago. There they showed a video boasting about the wonders of new AI technology. And the audience started booing." [Xitter link]
Gioia argues that users are becoming much more wary, not only about "AI," but about tech in general.
Shohei Ohtani's interpreter accused of massive theft
Shohei Ohtani, singular baseball talent and recent recipient of the largest contract in sport history, has always been close with his interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. On Wednesday Ohtani's lawyers have accused Mizuhara of a massive theft to pay off gambling debts. The day before Mizuhara and Ohtani's camp had a different story: Ohtani knew about the gambling debts and had agreed to pay them off.
Was Ohtani just covering for a friend, or was he taken advantage of? Did he knowingly pay off a bookie despite MLB rules against such interactions?
Reality has a surprising amount of detail
Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality. You can see this everywhere if you look. For example, you’ve probably had the experience of doing something for the first time, maybe growing vegetables or using a Haskell package for the first time, and being frustrated by how many annoying snags there were. Then you got more practice and then you told yourself ‘man, it was so simple all along, I don’t know why I had so much trouble’. We run into a fundamental property of the universe and mistake it for a personal failing.Blogger John Salvatier talks stair carpentry, boiling water, the difference between invisible and transparent detail, and how paying closer attention to the beguiling complexity of everyday life can help you open your mind and break out of mental ruts and blind spots.
Embrace, extend, enhance.
What are your favourite general-interest browser extensions in 2024?
They don't make them like they used to
I was on the phone, asking for a theoretical quote to reupholster a five-year-old or so midrange sofa, which cost more than $1,000 when new. That task, the upholsterer told me, would run me several times more than the couch was originally worth, and, owing to its construction, it was now worth nowhere near its sale price. The upholsterer proceeded to lecture me, in a helpful, passionate, and sometimes kindly manner, about how sofas made in the past 15 years or so are absolute garbage, constructed of sawdust compressed and bonded with cheap glue, simple brackets in place of proper joinery, substandard spring design, flimsy foam, and a lot of staples. Until recently, people had no reason to suspect that a $1,200 sofa would be anything less than high quality; the vast majority of the stuff in stores was fairly well made, and you could sit on it to test it. Today, not so much. [...] A combination of factors, including world-altering shifts in labor, manufacturing, transportation logistics, and middle-class American aesthetics, has created a grim scene: a two-year-old, $1,200 Instagram sofa—busted, on the curb, waiting for the large-item trash pickup or an enterprising scavenger who doesn’t realize just how shitty this thing is.Dwell.com asks: Why Are (Most) Sofas So Bad?
[RSS PSA] Reminder to update your MetaFilter RSS feeds
Last month, an apparent error in Feedburner caused several of MeFi's legacy RSS feeds to not update for up to a week (at least in my popular feed reader, Feedly). The problem has been fixed -- for now. But it's an important reminder that the Feedburner platform is increasingly unreliable -- if it were ever shut down by Google, the thousands of readers who rely on those feeds to keep up with the site may lose contact without even realizing it. The good news is that the site has a new set of self-hosted feeds that should remain active no matter what Google does. So, if you read the site using an RSS reader, please take a moment to update your reader to the new feeds -- and check the related posts on MetaFilter and Ask MetaFilter for a list of posts you might have missed during the outage.
vini vidi vici (via)
is it OK to link to a friend on a "(via)" link?
Ceci n'est pas un curry
From Britain's to Japan's, in between there is no single dish or word "curry" in its county-of-origin, India. Yet this family of dishes comprises one of world's favorite foods. It can describe anything from “a sauce or gravy—it can be with or without spices" (Raghavan Iyer, 660 Curries) to "shorthand glossing over an entire subcontinent’s worth of food. It’s the type of concept that takes what it wants from the original, and mixes in whatever else is ready-to-hand" (MyAnnoyingOpinions). Historians believe that inerudite British colonizers anglicized the Tamil கறி kaṟi, meaning "sauce," and exported it as a blanket term for any spiced dish from South Asia. Thai and Malaysian curries have their own origin. Yet, curries still have a history older than colonialism (previously). From bunny chow to monty python, what's your favorite curry?
"An incomplete and infuriating list"
Things Unexpectedly Named After People.
For example: Main Street in San Francisco is named after Charles Main. By Roland Crosby. Via.
The beauty of everyday things
For the past hundred years we’ve had people championing machine manufacture and value-adding design for objects that did perfectly well without it.
[Yanagi] had several criteria for these everyday miscellaneous things and all of them are worth revisiting because we now know that some things are best when precision machined and manufactured and other things benefit from showing signs of a human hand at work.
We need more IRL events
There's been practically no activity on the IRL MetaFilter page lately. There was a time when it was full of events. This post is to encourage you to create more IRL events and go to them. You'll meet new people, see old friends and make new friends. You'll get to match user names with real names and faces. (To get local IRL alerts, in your MeFi user profile set you location and in preferences make sure "Receive IRL alerts? " is checked)
A genre of swords and soulmates
"Romantasy 'allows women to have it all', says Christina Clark-Brown, who shares book recommendations on the Instagram page ninas_nook. 'There is no damsel who needs saving but rather women are allowed to be powerful, go on epic quests, and find love with a partner who is an equal to them in every way.'" The Guardian has some exciting news for you [Archive] about romantasy. Is what's described, though, a never-before-seen phenomenon? (Of course not.)
Single-topic website clearinghouse?
In reading a recent post on the Blue, the question naturally arose whether there's anywhere online to find high-quality, special-interest websites of the sort that don't fare well on Google. Is that a thing?
Next Friday is Hawaiian Shirt Day!
Twenty-five years ago today, the movie Office Space premiered. Watch the original trailer. Read Roger Ebert’s 3-star review (“a comic cry of rage against the nightmare of modern office life.”) Enjoy an oral history. Read reflections on the impact of the movie from Variety, BBC, and The Guardian. Maybe you want to buy yourself a red Swingline stapler to celebrate?
What's your random (but regular) act of public service?
For example, if I'm in a public restroom that has an overflowing bin (full of crumpled, used paper towels), I'll step on the top layer to squash everything down so there will be more room for future users to discard their paper towel. Or... some people are very alert on transit and yield their seat to the first person who looks like they might need to sit (elder, parents with lots of kids, etc).
How can I become hopeful about the future?
My main interface with the world is news media and Mastodon. The narratives presented there are dire. Inevitable climate disaster. Global authoritarianism. Societal breakdown. How can I convince myself there are 80% odds the rest of my life will be bearable?
The Name of This Cartoon Would Ruin It
Wow, dang! Dang, you guys! There's a new Homestar Runner toon! You can watch it on the website (which now uses Ruffle to play Flash in modern browsers) or you can watch it on YouTube, if you truly must.
There are two types of people in this world.
Tell me some more about two types of people.
No Vehicles In The Park
Why it's impossible to agree on what's allowed.
No Vehicles In The Park is a little game by David Turner made to illustrate how difficult it is to to have policies on things like moderation, spam, fraud, and sexual content that people agree on, even in a trivial case.
Hat tip to Dan Luu
A cat named Fraggle Rock
First 2 weeks of bringing home Fraggle Rock from the shelter,
Week 3,
and commencing Week 4:
daily illustrations by an artist on Tumblr. More on their Fraggle Rock tag (the cat not the show)
[STOP in the name of HUMANITY]
Why Deleting and Destroying Finished Movies Like Coyote vs Acme Should Be a Crime
Whatever the technical legality of writing off completed films and destroying them for pennies on the dollar, it’s morally reprehensible: Oller memorably calls it “an accounting assassination.” Defending it on grounds that it’s not illegal is bootlicking. The practice also has a whiff of the plot of Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”. The original idea of Brooks’ hustler protagonists Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom was to mount a play so awful that it would close immediately, and they can live off the unspent money they raised from bilking old ladies. When the show unexpectedly becomes a hit, they blow up the theater. The biggest difference between the plot of “The Producers” and what happened to “Batgirl” and “Coyote vs Acme” is that in “The Producers,” the public got to see the play.Background: The Final Days of ‘Coyote vs. Acme’: Offers, Rejections and a Roadrunner Race Against Time, in which WB executives axe a completed and likeable film they've never even seen for a tax write-off after a token, bad-faith effort at selling it.
after a year of conversation, the concept of resilience hubs was born.
What does a third place designed not only for community-building, but also for climate resilience, look like?
"I think anything where we’re saying, ‘Here’s an individual kit, go be an individual and care for yourself, that’s missing out on the entire essence of what resilience is." Key aspects and examples of resilience hubs, also depicted in the winning story in Grist’s Imagine 2200 contest “To Labor for the Hive.”
For you, but not by us
For better or worse, the web doesn’t work like that anymore. No one clicks a webpage hoping to learn which cat can haz cheeseburger. Weirdos, maybe. Sickos.
No, we get our content from a For You Page now— algorithmically selected videos and images made by our favorite creators, produced explicitly for our preferred platform. Which platform doesn’t matter much. So long as it’s one of the big five. Creators churn out content for all of them. It’s a technical marvel, that internet. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something’s missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web? from Where have all the websites gone?
We are both more isolated and less private than we’ve ever been
Though the city has survived a series of local and national recessions in recent decades, San Francisco is said to be in a ‘doom loop’ because so much office space and so many shops have been abandoned since the pandemic. Tech layoffs drove some of the shutdown, but the industry also enabled a mass white-collar withdrawal from the workplace – employees working from home, sometimes leaving the region to work remotely. More than the shrinkage of the population and the emptying out of downtown, the new mood of the city seems to be influenced by a kind of shrinking from human contact. The city remains the densely urban place it always was, but the way people inhabit it is increasingly suburban, looking to avoid strangers and surprises. from In the Shadow of Silicon Valley by Rebecca Solnit [LRB; ungated]
How to Comment on Social Media by Rebecca Solnit
On Lit Hub, Rebecca Solnit writes about how to comment on social media:
1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’ve mentioned/written a book on/devoted their life to. Listening/reading delays your reaction time, and as with other sports, speed is of the essence.
Здорово! ser la leche! macizo! ヤバイ! knorke!
untranslatable.co
is a searchable database of slang from nearly 100 languages.
Gen Z is two generations, not one
In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up. Germany also now shows a 30-point gap between increasingly conservative young men and progressive female contemporaries, and in the UK the gap is 25 points. from A new global gender divide is emerging [Financial Times; ungated]
Not the Quiet One
Penn Jillette Wants to Talk It All Out
(SL Cracked Interview) Jillette has renounced libertarianism (after being asked to MC an anti-masking event) and is terrified of Trump. He still has a lot on his mind.
Wish It Were Here
Wish you could revisit New York's Tower Records circa 2005, or San Francisco's Sutro Baths before it was demolished in 1964? Disappointed Tourist
is a series of paintings by Ellen Harvey depicting places that no longer exist. Some reach as far back as Ireland's prehistoric rainforest or the City of Troy; others are painfully recent. Each painting is nominated by someone who cares about that place.
Music For Not Sharing Best-of Lists Until 2023 Is Actually Over
It's that time of year again... the time I surface and look around with a sigh and a smile having spent 3 weeks immersed in the Best of 2023 lists from Headphone Commute. As resolutely restrained in its format and delivery (12 unranked lists, albums released in 2023 only, shared sporadically from the 1st January onwards) as it is particular in its choice of genre names, if you can get past the whimsical titles you'll find a treasure-trove of new pathways and inroads to stunning ambient / instrumental / experimental / electronic / modern-classical music.
If you have lost motivation, what has helped you to restore it?
I enjoy things as much as I have ever done but recently I have lost the motivation to make the effort to plan and carry out things that used to make up a lot of my non-work leisure time.
A River Runs To It
These entrancing maps capture where the world’s rivers go.
When Hungarian cartographer Robert Szucs looked online for a map of the world’s rivers based on their ocean destination, he found nothing on a global scale with high resolution. “It’s like, how does this thing not exist? So, I just instantly put it on my to-do list."
In Memoriam
This is intended as a picnic table at the bottom of the garden where anyone who would like to, can come over and share something about a mefite who has died, either this past year or any other.
Slowness is hard for most of us
You want tomorrow to be different than today, and it may seem the same, or worse, but next year will be different than this one, because those tiny increments added up. The tree today looks a lot like the tree yesterday, and so does the baby. A lot of change is undramatic growth, transformation, or decay, or rather its timescale means the drama might not be perceptible to the impatient. from Slow Change Can Be Radical Change by Rebecca Solnit
I can't accept drum 'n' bass, we need jungle I'm afraid.
Brainy quiz show University Challenge gets pedantic over the difference between drum 'n' bass and jungle, and Nathan Filer calls for remixes of Amol Rajan's insistence that "We need jungle I'm afraid!!" The internet responds. My favourites: One Two Three Four. Amol explains his delight at going viral.