2022-08-26

Worthy

• Cliff stoll on writing "Cuckoo's Egg"

  "It's not about people," I replied. "The book's about the Arpanet, about crypto systems, about os holes, about how to manage a Unix system."

  "No it ain't," he said. "It's about those hackers in Germany. The bureaucrats in the FBI who have never touched a computer. The NSA people who listen but won't lift a finger. The CIA agents who pester you in Berkeley. It's about the long-hair computer jocks you work with. It's about the nutty living situation you're in. Most of all, it's about you."

• Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?

  the technology could not jump straight to railroads and steam ships because the first steam engines were nowhere near that powerful or efficient: creating steam engines that could drive trains and ships (and thus could move themselves) requires decades of development where existing technology and economic needs created very valuable niches for the technology at each stage. It is particularly remarkable here how much of these conditions are unique to Britain: it has to be coal, coal has to have massive economic demand (to create the demand for pumping water out of coal mines) and then there needs to be massive demand for spinning (so you need a huge textile export industry fueled both by domestic wool production and the cotton spoils of empire) and a device to manage the conversion of rotational energy into spun thread. I’ve left this bit out for space, but you also need a major incentive for the design of pressure-cylinders (which, in the event, was the demand for better siege cannon) because of how that dovetails with developing better cylinders for steam engines.

  • HN comments

etc

• Kia, Hyundai owners told to park outside over fire risk.

  The two manufacturers recalled thousands of Hyundai Palisade and Kia Telluride vehicles last week over the risk of fire while parked or driving because of a problem with the trailer hitch.

• The SLS rocket is the worst thing to happen to NASA–but maybe also the best?

• VP Kamala Harris to attend Artemis 1 moon launch: Harris will attend the scheduled Artemis 1 liftoff on Aug. 29 and will deliver a speech at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

• Plants dying in a drought? Pour them a martini

• Scientists Have Traced Earth’s Path Through the Galaxy via Tiny Crystals Found in the Crust

• Why are there so few economies of scale in construction? Part I

• Comet impacts formed continents when Solar System entered arms of Milky Way -- ScienceDaily

Horseshit

• Extreme rise in porn addiction fueled by working from home according to clinics

• Spiders Are Caught in a Global Web of Misinformation

• Wall Street Friendship Ends in Betrayal, Insider-Trading Charges

• ‘Aquariumgate’ Is New Child Trafficking 4chan Conspiracy

  The main thing to keep in mind here is that there is no evidence of anything here. It is possible for anyone to add a specific location to Google Maps, and none of the aquarium listings viewed by Motherboard were verified by Google, which requires a business to enter a pin number sent by physical mail to the business’ mailbox.

• Labor Exploitation, Explained by Minions

• Life Is Good in America, Even by European Standards | Hacker News

• Seeking Marriage Equality for People with Disabilities Archive link

  For some interabled couples, getting married means giving up lifesaving health care and benefits from the government.

• Walmart lists a 30TB portable SSD for $39. It is, naturally, a scam

celebrity gossip

• George Foreman Sued, Allegedly Sexually Abused Two Minors In His 20s

• Olivia Wilde recalls being served papers at CinemaCon as 'vicious'

• Jeffrey Epstein Associate Steven Hoffenberg Found Dead

Rank Propaganda / Thought Policing / World Disordering

• Why Is a British Baroness Drafting California Censorship Laws?

• Narrative Slipstream Effects

  grand narrative level, everybody is getting off the big turnpike, and there is not going to be a grand narrative slipstream for a while. But smaller scale narrative slipstreams — from family to city-scale — may still be viable.

• Blue-checked podcasting consortium apologizes ‘for the harm done’ by Ben Shapiro showing up at expo where ‘dangerous’ Daily Wire had booth

• Economists have a method for reducing fake news on social media

  to cut down on the spread of false information, the network can set limits on how widely certain messages are shared, and do so in a way that is not overly restrictive to users.

• Oracle started as a CIA project (2014) | Hacker News

  Oracle's mission is to have all bits of data in the world processed or stored on an Oracle system (source: I worked for Oracle, this was the internal mission statement).

• Google to roll out anti-disinformation campaign in some EU countries

• The Malign Genesis of ESG - Part I | The Pipeline

• Cloudflare: Haven for Misinformation

• Researchers caught a pro-US campaign spreading propaganda on social media

• Facebook, Twitter dismantle a U.S. influence campaign about Ukraine

Gun control / Mass shooting

• Omaha Man Charged After Conducting Active Shooter Drill in Which Employees Weren’t Told It Wasn’t Real.

  That wildly understates the extreme stupidity of what took place at Catholic Charities in Omaha in May. The great minds who run that operation had hired someone to stage an active shooter drill, complete with a man in a hoodie firing blanks and “victims” lying on the ground with with fake bloody wounds. But Catholic Charities’ managers didn’t tell any of their employees it was going to happen.

• 3D gun printing operation busted in Calgary

Musk

• TWTR Shares Jump As Judge Tells Twitter Musk Additional Data Demands "Seems Warranted"

• Judge rejects Elon Musk’s ‘absurdly broad’ data requests

• Judge blanks Mudge and rules in favour of Twitter in first major disputes

• (PDF) Mudge's redacted Twitter whistleblower disclosure

  • HN comments

• The Tech Industry Is in Its Whistleblower Era

• The Twitter Whistleblower Needs You to Trust Him

• Jack Dorsey reveals his biggest regret about Twitter

• FCC Commissioner Criticizes Reversal of $885M Infrastructure Award to Starlink

• Starlink V2 satellites will use some of T-Mobile’s mid-band spectrum

  • "will transmit direct to mobile phones"

  • Starlink V2, launching next year, will transmit direct to mobile phones

  • SpaceX, T-Mobile to connect satellites to cellphones in remote areas

  • HN comments

  • Interesting trading activity before the SpaceX/T-Mobile announcement

Trump / War against the Right / Jan6

• Is This the Backstabber Behind the Mar-a-Lago Raid? – PJ Media

  If then-president Trump had ordered the FBI to raid the home of Joe Biden over Hunter’s laptop (which would have totally made sense), the Democrats would have exploded. I have my suspicions that our side is afraid to throw down the way the Democrats are happy to do. Biden wasn’t afraid to raid Trump’s house because he knew he could do so without facing backlash.

• Re "Truth Social": $320k in hosting a month for ~8m monthly visits

• In leaked video, Amy Coney Barrett’s secretive faith group drove women to tears

• The (Heavily Redacted) Trump Search Warrant Affidavit Has Been Released

• The Trump Search Warrant Affidavit has been released

• President Joe Biden says ‘it’s like semi-fascism’ that underpins the whole MAGA movement

• Can Magistrate Judges Constitutionally Issue Search Warrants?

• Read the redacted affidavit used to get the Mar-a-Lago search warrant

• Pacer Service Under Fire After Trump Affidavit Crash Reports

Pestilence / Pox / COVID / VaxCult

• YouTube quietly drops some Covid censorship policies, but channels remain banned

• Now That the Pandemic Is Over, The CDC Admits That Natural Immunity Exists And Protects Against Covid

  When the various "emergency power" declarations were passed, giving these Little Eichmanns the power to do what these nebbishy, weak individuals always dreamed of doing if they had the power to do it -- they seized the opportunity. They did what every Super-Mouse Bureaucrat will always do if you give him or her the power to do it: He or she will abuse that power, he or she will do what she got into government to do in the first place, to make the world better, to make people better, and if people refuse to be made better, then to make them be made better.

• NATE SILVER: Liberal Elites May Have Pressured Pfizer to Delay Vaccine — Until After 2020 Election

• Could tiny blood clots cause long Covid’s puzzling symptoms?

• NIH terminates grant after Wuhan partners refuse to share coronavirus info

• Moderna Sues Pfizer and BioNTech over Covid Vaccine

  • Moderna is suing Pfizer over its coronavirus vaccine

  • Moderna suing Pfizer over Covid vaccine technology

  • Moderna sues Pfizer and BioNTech for patent infringement over Covid vaccine

  • Moderna files lawsuits against Pfizer and BioNTech over mRNA vaccine patents

• An Army of Armchair Epidemiologists

• America’s Fall Booster Plan Has a Fatal Paradox

• Can a smallpox drug treat monkeypox? Here’s what scientists know

Culture War / Tribal / Re segregation

• Woman sues psychiatrist for approving gender transition after just one meeting.

• The supposedly racist incident at the Little League World Series and the surprising truth.

• At Least 13 U.S. Hospitals Perform Gender Transition Surgeries on Minors

• Black Alabama pastor wrongfully arrested while watering his neighbor's flowers

• Swastika Mountain in Oregon may have a new name soon

Edumacationalizing / Acedemia Nuts

• US Government to make all research it funds open access on publication

• Texas requires ‘In God We Trust’ signs in schools. A man wants some in Arabic

  • HN comments

• Duolingo has math now (and it’s kind of hard)

• Missouri school district revives paddling to discipline students

• The Elite Overproduction Hypothesis - by Noah Smith

  But looking back at that big bump of humanities majors in the 2000s and early 2010s (the raw numbers are here), and thinking about the social unrest America has experienced over the last 8 years, makes me think about Peter Turchin’s theory of elite overproduction. Basically, the idea here is that America produced a lot of highly educated people with great expectations for their place in American society, but that our economic and social system was unable to accommodate many of these expectations, causing them to turn to leftist politics and other disruptive actions out of frustration and disappointment.

• Remote scan of student’s room before test violated his privacy, judge rules

  • HN comments

• The Toxic Culture of Rejection in Computer Science – ACM SIGBED

  • HN comments

Media / ShowBiz / Advertising

• Biggest story in books: Penguin Random House trial ripping lid off publishing

• Amazon Reportedly Makes Offer to Acquire Electronic Arts

  • HN comments

  • Amazon set to buy Electronic Arts

  • CNBC: Amazon is not going to make a bid for Electronic Arts

• Twitter Is Adding Podcasts to Its Platform

• Rebooted MoviePass says it had over 460k waitlist signups within 24 hours

• Meta's big problem: Everything about VR looks supremely uncool

• NBC Considers Cutting Back Programming Hours in Prime Time

TechSuck

• Show HN: Use AirPods motion sensor to track/correct posture in real-time

• LastPass Security Incident

  • LastPass developer systems hacked to steal source code

• A Hacking Campaign Stole 10k Login Credentials from 130 Different Org

• The GPU shortage is over. The GPU surplus has arrived

• Unstripping Stripped Binaries | Hacker News

• North Korean malware and more observed on Black Hat network • The Register

• Apple and Globalstar Rumored to Announce Satellite Connectivity Feature

Crypto con games

• The Crypto World Can’t Wait for ‘The Merge’

• Algorithmic stablecoin USDN depegs as liquidity drops

• Hetzner bans running Ethereum PoS nodes

  • HN comments

  Hetzner disallows running any software related to any cryptocurrencies, so be it mining, trading, storage of blockchain data for analysis, operating a node (mining/staking/farming/whatever). It doesn't seem to be specific to Ethereum (PoS or PoW) but generally about any sort of software that interacts with cryptocurrencies (or data coming from cryptocurrencies).

• Reddit’s CEO explains why he’s still big on the blockchain

Economicon / Business / Finance

• Amid housing crises vacation towns limit short-term rentals

• Uber Jackpot: Inside One of the Greatest Startup Investments of All Time

• Firms’ unwise addiction to mergers and acquisitions

• Digital mortgage lender Better.com is conducting its 4. layoff since December

• CDS Volumes now $6.6Trn higher than last year

• Gen Z Is Overestimating the Average Starting Salary by $50K, Survey Finds

• Minneapolis Rents Drop, Bucking National Trends

• “Rising Home Prices Are Mostly from Rising Rents”

• DOJ in early stages of drafting possible antitrust suit against Apple

Shortages

• CO2 Shortage has food producers scrambling

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

• U.S. Government Effort to Tap Private Weather Data Moves Along Slowly

• GOP Fury over ESG Triggers Backlash with US Pensions at Risk

  • HN comments

• The Biden White House is putting Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz and other Republicans on blast for slamming student loan relief, as they had federal loans forgiven. 

  • White House exposes hypocritical Republicans who had their PPP loans forgiven

• Clinics win battle over meaning of 2016 FOIA amendments | Cornell Chronicle

  Seife agrees: “The decision circumscribes Exemption 4 in a really important way,” he said, “and in my future FOIAs I will be able to quote this every time and make sure FOIA officers understand that they must be able to show a foreseeable harm from disclosure in order to withhold confidential commercial information.”

• USPTO to add surcharge on non-DOCX patent applications in 2023

• That video of Mount Rushmore for your YouTube channel could now land you in jail — shocking court decision transforms First Amendment rights

Student Loans

• Debt Babies - by Mike Solana - Pirate Wires

• Biden’s Student Loan Forgiveness Could Test Legal Powers

• Megan McArdle on student loan forgiveness

• Cancelling student debt is essentially printing money

  If you honestly believe cancelling debt has no real negative impact, surely you’d be in favor of cancelling more debt. Ginnie Mae (and to a lesser extent Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac) loans are guaranteed by the US government, meaning even if they’re held by private parties, any losses in principal will be reimbursed by the government. If you’re hesitant at all about the economic impacts of this move, you should be equally as critical of student loan forgiveness.

  • HN comments

Hunter

• Two Plead Guilty To Stealing Ashley Biden's 'Inappropriate Showers With Dad' Diary

  • Florida Residents Plead Guilty To Conspiracy To Commit Interstate Transportation Of Stolen Property | USAO-SDNY | Department of Justice

  U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said: “Harris and Kurlander stole personal property from an immediate family member of a candidate for national political office. They sold the property to an organization in New York for $40,000 and even returned to take more of the victim’s property when asked to do so. Harris and Kurlander sought to profit from their theft of another person’s personal property, and they now stand convicted of a federal felony as a result.”

  • Trump campaign turned down Ashley Biden diary, urged suspects to give it to FBI | Just The News

• Zuckerberg Alleges FBI Warned FB Of ‘Russian Propaganda’ Before Hunter Laptop Story Broke | The Daily Caller

  • Zuck To Rogan: FBI Warned Facebook Of 'Russian Propaganda' Before Hunter Laptop Story Broke

  • Mark Zuckerberg tells Joe Rogan Facebook was wrong to ban The Post's Hunter Biden laptop story

  “For the five or seven days when it was basically being determined whether it was false, the distribution on Facebook was decreased, but people were still allowed to share it,” Zuckerberg added. “You could still share it, you could still consume it.”

  • Zuckerberg: FB censored the Hunter laptop story for 7 days per FBI request

  • Zuckerberg tells Rogan FBI warning prompted Biden laptop story censorship

Law Breaking / Police / Internal Security

• What Ghillie Suits In The Desert Really Mean

  At some point, that calculus will shift. As the cartels fully absorb the weakness of this administration and their power here increases, things will change. The cartels will decide they can do here what they just did in Tijuana and other Mexican cities, where they openly terrorized the populace.

• 'Unbelievable': Border Patrol agents OPEN gates to let illegal migrants in at southern border | Daily Mail Online

  • The White House Is Creating A Texas-Border Patrol Standoff › American Greatness

• Portlanders Are Scared of Downtown–and of Their Own Neighborhoods

• To Combat Crime, Houston Calls for Mandatory Video Surveillance

World

• Lidl and Waitrose to sell ‘wonky’ fruit and vegetables amid UK drought

• The UK's downturn is a warning for Europe

• Why Europe’s Electricity Prices Are Soaring

• In Germany digital signage to be reprogrammed so that it turns off after 10pm

  • HN comments

• UK energy bills to rise by 80%

• Police identify two children whose remains were found in suitcases in New Zealand

• Macron warns of ‘end of abundance’ as France faces difficult winter

• Pound Likely to Sink to 37-Year Low

• China Deploys Rain-Seeding Drones to End Drought in Sichuan

Russia Bad / Ukraine War

• Spiegel.de uncovers a Russian spy in Italy

  • A GRU Agent Charmed Her Way into NATO Circles in Italy

• Russia burning huge amounts of gas, puzzling experts

• Ukraine narrowly escapes nuclear catastrophe as plant loses power

• Russia Is at War with NATO, State TV Declares, Has No Plans of Stopping

Health / Medicine

• Why stinky sweat is good for you

• Why a workout is good for your gut bacteria

• Scientists explore chemistry of tattoo inks amid growing safety concerns

  • Tattoo inks used in US may contain cancer-causing chemicals

• Johns Hopkins Doctors Discover That a Common Infection May Cause Cancer

Environment / Climate / Green Propaganda

• Deadly heat to surge by 2100, even with emissions reductions: study

• Worm ‘burgers’ could solve world hunger, scientists claim

• California bans sales of new gasoline-powered vehicles by 2035 in milestone step

• Reducing methane is the fastest strategy available to reduce warming

  • HN comments

• Blue states poised to copy California’s gas-car phaseout

• Drought threatens coal plant operations, and electricity across the West

• USDA scattering millions of packets of rabies vaccines for wildlife in 13 states

  The vaccine has been found safe for more than 60 kinds of animals including domestic dogs and cats. Eating a large number of vaccine packets might give dogs an upset stomach but wouldn't cause any permanent problem, APHIS says. About 3.5 million doses of the experimental vaccine Onrab are being distributed in parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Tennessee — which also are getting the approved vaccine — plus four other states.