A Lovely 10C Site!

But, perhaps the most frustrating part in all of this, is that whenever these copyright maximalist authors and publishers are confronted about this, they twist themselves into knots to say "well, I actually love libraries, but…" before beginning a bunch of arguments that show they do not, in fact, like libraries. Sometimes, however rarely, a maximalist just comes out and admits the facts: they fucking hate libraries.

The latest example of this is Kenneth Whyte, a small publisher of Sutherland House Books in Canada, who seemed to think now was the time to take to the pages of The Globe & Mail to whine about libraries competing with book stores that sell books. Of all the things to be bothered with right now. Even the setup of this column is just ridiculous, arguing that libraries -- with their public taxpayer funded support -- are unfair competitors to booksellers

I'm saying it again folks: if libraries were created today, copyright holders (publishers and most authors) would sue them out of existence. They put out PR statements saying "we love libraries" but deep down inside, they really hate them.

This from Mike Masnick on a post Kenneth Whyte, a small publisher of Sutherland House Books over in Canada wrote for The Globe and Mail shows why.

Analogue estimates that the hardware should actually start to be delivered to customers in May, 2021. That’s due to “the unfortunate global state of affairs and supply chain challenges outside of our control,” according to the company, and they’re hardly the only indie hardware outfit feeling the pinch of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on tech suppliers.

The good news is that so long as you’re patient, the Pocket will almost certainly deliver the goods. Analogue isn’t new to this, having successfully shipped multiple products in the past, including the Nt mini, the Super Nt and the Mega Sg. Each of these more than delivered on their promises, offering fantastic performance in bringing classic games to modern TVs and displays — without relying on emulation.

Analogue Pocket has changed a bit since it was originally introduced last year, with the start and select button relocated to the base of the front of the device, a design change designed for “optimal comfort,” according to the company. The Dock you can use to connect the Pocket to your TV for a big-screen gaming experience also now features a recessed USB-C port to make the connection more stable.

I surely hope Nintendo doesn't shut this project down closer to release like they always do. I'm hopeful that it can be released but I'm also waiting for that shoe to drop.

cc @streakmachine

Two sources close to or inside the underground hacking community provided VICE with screenshots of an internal panel they claim is used by Twitter workers to interact with user accounts. One source said the Twitter panel was also used to change ownership of some so-called OG accounts—accounts that have a handle consisting of only one or two characters—as well as facilitating the tweeting of the cryptocurrency scams from the high profile accounts.

Yikes!!!

Let's start with a simple comparison. On the first two Tuesdays in April 2019 (uneventful days a year ago), about half of the people woke up before 7:00am to start their day. It was most common to wake up between 6:30am and 7:30am. But one year later, on the first two Tuesdays in April 2020, many countries were in the initial stages of lockdown with most people waking up after 7:00am local time. There's a shift to a later wake up time. The data here controls for day of week, part of month, tries to remove naps, and only includes people who tracked on all four days.

If we want to dig further, we have to account for the day of week. Because sleep is shifted during normal times too, notably on weekends. Here's several months of sleep with bars marking the time in bed, using the median time across everyone (about 100,000 people). Weekends are colored orange while weekdays are colored blue, so you can see that on average people go to bed half an hour later, but wake up nearly 1.5 hours later on weekends.

Here's a nice post on how the pandemic is affecting our sleep, and it's interesting.

The vulnerability, which was uncovered by a researcher at Check Point, would allow hackers to intercept and interfere with users’ emails and network traffic, tamper with services, and steal users’ credentials, by exploiting Windows’ Domain Name System (DNS) Server; DNS is essentially the protocol that translates between website names and their corresponding IP addresses.

The vulnerability can be triggered by a malicious DNS response, which could lead to a heap-based buffer overflow, according to Check Point. The vulnerability, which Check Point has dubbed SigRed, is widespread as it affects all Windows Server versions, according to Microsoft.

Wow, that's a long time. I guess it's well done to @phoneboy and crew.

Imahara worked for years at storied special-effects firm Industrial Light and Magic, where he worked on films such as A.I: Artificial Intelligence, Galaxy Quest, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, the two sequels to The Matrix, and George Lucas' Star Wars prequel trilogy. On the last of those, he was responsible for restoring and recreating the iconic R2D2 robot for the new films. Imahara also created Geoff Petersen, the comedic robot co-host from The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.

But he is probably best-known to most people as a member of the build team on MythBusters for many years, with co-hosts Tory Belleci and Kari Byron. On the show, Imahara was often portrayed as the geek of the group as he worked on robots and computers related to the myths that were tested over the course of the series. He was an infectiously positive personality on screen and was beloved by fans.

He was also a fan of live-action role-playing and was a widely known and well-regarded figure in many online communities, as well as in the Los Angeles robotics, science, and geek culture social scenes. He is remembered by friends and colleagues as a down-to-earth, warm, and positive human being.

This hurts a lot since I'm always fond of Grant over the years especially during his time on MythBusters.

Brain aneurysms are just terrible. A huge loss to a talented, humble person. :(

Signal’s Secure Value Recovery (SVR) is a cloud-based system that allows users to store encrypted data on Signal’s servers — such that even Signal cannot access it — without the usability headaches that come from traditional encryption key management. At the moment, SVR is being used to store users’ contact lists and not message content, although that data may be on the menu for backup in the future.

The challenge in storing encrypted backup data is that strong encryption requires strong (or “high entropy”) cryptographic keys and passwords. Since most of us are terrible at selecting, let alone remembering strong passwords, this poses a challenging problem. Moreover, these keys can’t just be stored on your device — since the whole point of backup is to deal with lost devices.

If an attacker is able to dump the memory space of a running Signal SGX enclave, they’ll be able to expose secret seed values as well as user password hashes. With those values in hand, attackers can run a basic offline dictionary attack to recover the user’s backup keys and passphrase. The difficulty of completing this attack depends entirely on the strength of a user’s password. If it’s a BIP39 phrase, you’ll be fine. If it’s a 4-digit PIN, as strongly encouraged by the UI of the Signal app, you will not be.

This makes me and a lot of people concerned and I hope they address this and quickly.

Even if you don’t sign in with Facebook in a particular app, the app will run Facebook’s code in the background just for having the SDK included. You don’t need a Facebook account for it to track you either, they can track people very well without one.

Fact is, you can't escape Facebook.

Hence this morning when a lot of mainstream apps like Spotify and Pinterest crashed due to the SDK

Gajim 1.2.0 has been released. More than a year after the release of Gajim 1.1.3, it is finally time for Gajim 1.2. A year put at use to develop new features, clean up old code, and fix bugs. Highlights of this release are (amongst others): improved group chat system, completely rewritten network code, and a new account creation assistant. And there is much more to discover. Gajim Development News: June already brought Gajim 1.2, python-nbxmpp 1.0, and many plugin updates. But there is more: Blind Trust Before Verification for OMEMO, drag and drop improvements, and a new translation service for Gajim.

Here's their latest issue.

Each country is represented by a tone and an expanding blip on the map when a death from Covid-19 is recorded. Each day is 4 seconds long, and at the top of the screen is the date and a counter showing the total numbers of deaths. Every country that has had a fatality is included.

Must watch video.