An amputee chasing his dreams amidst the Gaza war

Eleven-year-old Asif Abu Mahadi is a resident of the Gaza Strip.His dream was to become a football player, but his leg was amputated after an Israeli bombing...#AlJazeera #AlJazeeraEnglish #FirstPerson #Gaza #Gazaairstrikes #Gazabombardment #Gazahumanitariancrisis #Israel #IsraelHamaswar #Israel-Palestineconflict #Israeliarmy #IsraelibombardmentonGaza #KhanYounis #Nuseiratrefugeecamp #Palestine #alJazeera #aljazeeraEnglish #aljazeeralive #aljazeeravideo #aljazeeraEnglish #aljazeeralatest #aljazeeralive #aljazeeralivenews #gazaairraids #gazablockade #gazashortages #gazaunderattack #hamas
An amputee chasing his dreams amidst the Gaza war

XScreenSaver 6.04 out now

XScreenSaver 6.04 is out now, including iOS and Android.

I wrote two new hacks this time, Nakakin and ChompyTower.

I've long been fascinated by the Nakagin Capsule Tower, and since it is being demolished this month, I figured I'd write a screen saver about it.

I also recently picked up a couple of very cool books: Nakagin Capsule Tower, The Last Record and Nakagin Capsule Style. I don't speak Japanese, but the photos are great!

Other notable stuff:

• On X11, I figured out how to work around the antisocial idiocy inflicted upon us by the GNOME and KDE built-in screen lockers, so it's no longer necessary for each user to hack GNOME and KDE in order for video players to inhibit screen blanking. See the comments at the top of xscreensaver-systemd.c for the vile details.

The installation instructions in the man page reflect this: let me know if they seem inaccurate.

• You can now set your image directory to the URL of an Internet Archive "collection" and it might even work. I added special-case for scraping IA, which was necessary because their implementation of RSS feeds is criminally negligent. See the comments in xscreensaver-getimage-file for the vile details.

And if you know who is responsible for the code on their end, please try to convince them to make their RSS feeds not be completely useless. (My contact there just laughs and backs away like it's the third rail.)

#computers #firstperson #linux #mac #maps #phones #security #xscreensaver

How to fix social media

What we need is this one simple trick:

A site that scrapes, collates, and de-dups your friends' posts on every social media site, and then shows you the union of all of those posts as one feed.

This is the only way to break Facebook's back: to allow your friends' transition from one social network's data silo to another to be so gradual and effortless that you don't even notice it happening.

The thing that makes this difficult, of course, is not the coding, but the fact that if you succeed at it in any meaningful way, the sky will blacken with lawyers, and the data silos' spending on technical countermeasures will absolutely smother you.

It is hard, intentionally so, for people to quit a social network because that's where all their friends are and you can't get them all to move at once. But if it were possible for someone to move to a new service in such a way that neither they nor you lose that connection, then the barrier to switching would much lower. The services would have to compete on their merits rather than on your sunk cost.

But by facilitating this, not only would you be in violation of the terms of service of every site, you'd also be posing an existential threat to almost every aspect of their business model. They live for the lock-in. Touch that in a way that actually turns the Eye of Sauron upon you, and it won't go well.

Many of you are already bouncing up and down in your eagerness to go into the weeds with designs of how this could work at a technical level, but -- stop. It's a Small Matter of Programming, and that part doesn't matter at all. Unless you have a plan that solves "lawyers and countermeasures" problem, there's no point. You're looking for your keys where the light is good instead of where you dropped them.

So yeah, I said that step 2 is "and then a miracle occurs". This project is absolutely impossible. It will never happen, and social media cannot be fixed. Surprise!

But that step 2 miracle does have a name, and it is "antitrust legislation". It needs to be illegal for these companies to monopolize and lock in your data. It needs to be illegal for their TOS to prevent entry into the market of the kind of inventions that I'm talking about here. Interoperability and federation would need to be a legal mandate.

Anyway, good luck with that.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#bigbrother #computers #conspiracies #corporations #doomed #firstperson #security #www

Excess deaths

The Economist has published many interactive graphs:

Although the official number of deaths caused by covid-19 is now 6.2m, our single best estimate is that the actual toll is 20.7m people. We find that there is a 95% chance that the true value lies between 14.4m and 24.3m additional deaths.

Including their methodology and source code.

This article summarizes: What a Single Metric Tells Us About the Pandemic:

As a measure of pandemic brutality, excess mortality has its limitations -- but probably fewer than the conventional data we've used for the last two years. [...] It accounts for huge differences in the age structures of different countries, some of which may have many times more mortality risk than others because their populations are much older. And to the extent that the ultimate impact of the pandemic isn't just a story about COVID-19 but also one about our responses to it -- lockdowns and unemployment, suspended medical care and higher rates of alcoholism and automobile accidents -- excess mortality accounts for all that, too. [...]

But the U.S. took the opposite course. In 2020, the U.S. had done a bit worse than average among its OECD peers. In 2021, when pandemic outcomes were often determined by the relative uptake of American-made vaccines, the U.S. did much, much worse than that. In country after country in Europe, the pandemic killed a fraction as many last year as it had the year before. In the U.S., it killed more. A year ago, it was possible to defend the American record as merely below average -- worse than it should have been but not, judging globally, cataclysmically bad. Today, it is cataclysmically bad, which is both outrageous and ironic, given that it is largely American vaccine innovation that has changed the pandemic landscape for the rest of the world. [...]

How did this happen? The answer is screamingly obvious, if also, in its way, confusing: The U.S. drove an unprecedented vaccine-innovation campaign in 2020, which empowered much of the world to turn the page on the pandemic's deadliest phases, then, in 2021, utterly failed to take advantage of its power itself. But what is perhaps even more striking is that American vaccination coverage isn't just bad, by the standards of its peers, but getting worse. About two-thirds of Americans have received two shots of vaccine, a level that is in line with Israel and not far off from the U.K., though below many other wealthy countries. [...]

But over the last six months, the country has had an opportunity to make up that gap with boosters and has simply not taken it. Only 29 percent of Americans have had a booster shot of vaccine, which puts us behind Slovenia, Slovakia, and Poland and means that less than half of those people happy to be vaccinated a year ago have chosen to get a third shot through Delta and Omicron. Booster campaigns seem like an obvious opportunity for easy public-health gains, yet remarkably few Americans seem to think it's worth the trouble.

And here's an email exchange I had just yesterday. We are catastrophically fucked.

From: ...

To: jwz@dnalounge.com

Hi,

I am vaccinated but don't have my booster, me and my friends would like to come to DNA lounge and I had a lot of fun last summer but haven't been able to anymore, is this going to change anytime soon?

Let me know,

Thanks,

From: jwz@dnalounge.com

To: ...

Go get a booster.

From: ...

To: jwz@dnalounge.com

I have had covid twice... I don't see the point

Previously, previously, previously, previously.

#bigbrother #dnalounge #doomed #firstperson #grimmeathookfuture #plague

MITM Instagram

Dear Lazyweb,

It has been over two years since I last asked this, so I'll ask again:

How do I mitmproxy the Instagram app, from macOS, iOS (real or emulated), or Android (emulated)?

Answer only if you've seen it work with your own eyeballs, please. No guessing. No "here's a 4 year old page that says it should work."

Please read the extensive comments on the previous post for all of the things that didn't work last time.

Last time, I was able to solve my problem by proxying the Flume app, but it hasn't been updated in 3 years and that binary now crashes at startup, even on macOS 10.13.

The proximate goal is to figure out what goes in a 'configure_to_story' request when adding a 'link' sticker, using the private instagram API.

Previously, previously.

#computers #corporations #dnalounge #firstperson #lazyweb #mac #phones #security

Following the money

One thing that has long baffled me about our ongoing global clusterfuck has been the push to just pretend that it's not happening. Who benefits financially from that?

I think the answer is, commercial landlords and hotel financiers.

Backing up:

I don't think that the dropping of all mitigation measures happened just because "people" are "over it". I don't think it's some spontaneous groundswell. People have been given permission to say they're "over it", by misinformation campaigns that have been inflicted upon them.

Random individuals may be driven by infantile short-sightedness, but they are being encouraged in this by businesses, governments and state actors; they are being given cover to just pretend that it's not happening. Businesses are legendarily short-sighted, rarely able to see past the end of the quarter, but more than two years into this, shouldn't they have seen some patterns emerge? Even from the point of view of Capitalism Red in Tooth and Claw, how is it in their interest to have their employees dying by the thousands? To have them become saddled with life-long disabilities that will impact work and jack up the companies' own insurance costs for decades to come?

We've got stunts like this, where Maskless Mayor Breed gathers together a Rogue's Gallery of the world's worst businesses and pressures them into forcing their employees back into their cars and cubicles:

By committing to San Francisco, these businesses and many more are investing in this city and the people who live and work here. We are excited to welcome people back to downtown to work, dine, and experience our arts and culture. March is a new chapter for SF!

Which, due to character limits, she followed up with a second twit containing nothing but a list of the various companies' twitter handles. Ideally she'd be forced to wear their logos on her blazer like a NASCAR jacket, but she probably wouldn't even be embarrassed by that. Scarlet letter my ass.

tbreisacher: If the @SFPride parade was a tweet:

London Breed:
>
>> @BankofAmerica @BlackRock @sffed @FibroGenInc @GapInc @warriors @Google @HOKNetwork @Invitae @jpmorganchase @Meta @salesforce @united @Kilroyrealty @Mastercard @Microsoft @Orrick @SFGiants @SFSymphony @SPUR_Urbanist @Uber @usfca @Visa @WellsFargo

If a CEO wanted their employees back in the office for whatever reason (they think they're more productive, more controllable, whatever) they would just DO it. they don't need permission. They don't need the mayor campaigning for it. It's literally their call, and theirs alone. So why is the mayor campaigning for this? On whose behalf? We know it's not the CEOs, those are the targets of the campaign.

Part of the party line on this has been about the financial pain suffered by other downtown businesses, so is this on behalf of the hot dog cart on the corner? The food truck, the pizzeria, the upscale lunchtime businessman steakhouse?

No. Those businesses have no lobbying muscle at all. And more to the point, the various mayors and governors gave zero fucks about those businesses during the decades when the tech companies were building their own "free" cafeterias and restaurants directly into their office towers. Those companies did the math and figured out that if they served their employee a $6 meal in-house, they'd get an extra 2 hours work out of them every day. And all they had to do was shank that hot dog cart, that food truck, that pizzeria. The mayor gave zero fucks while that was happening.

So who's left?

Commercial landlords. They see the spectre of the Googles of the world deciding that they need half as much floor space, and strong-arming their way into smaller leases, or just defaulting on it and daring them to fight it out in court. "We're Google, what are you gonna do?"

I think that those are the donors on whose behalf Breed is lobbying. That's why she wants us to believe the pandemic is over. So that when the CEOs tell everyone to get back to work, to justify those downtown tower leases, that the drones don't just quit. She, and the landlords, require the consent of the abused.

Notably, it will not be the employees of the commercial real-estate holding companies whose lives will be put at risk by these back-to-the-cubicle policies.

Who else, though? Here's another clue:

Breed is currently on a corporate-funded tour of the Great Houses of Europe, glad-handing movers and shakers in the capital cities, putting on her dog-and-pony show about how San Francisco is still a great tourist destination. Hitting all the talking points countering the Fox News stories about blood in the streets, telling everyone the Tenderloin is still a safe and welcoming place for High End Retail.

So who benefits from that? Which lobbyists will be pulling those strings? Airlines, obviously, but more importantly, hotel financiers, and the money-laundering oligarchs who love them.

As we learned from Scooby Doo, Donald Trump and Lex Luthor, it's always a real estate scam.

Always.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #bigbrother #conspiracies #corporations #doomed #firstperson #plague #sf

jwz (rss, unofficial) wrote the following post Sun, 20 Feb 2022 17:21:50 +0100

Y2038

Your periodic reminder that we are closer to the Y2038 bug than the Y2K bug:

SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2038-01-18 19:14:07") -> **2147483647;** 
SELECT UNIX_TIMESTAMP("2038-01-18 19:14:08") -> **NULL;** 
SELECT VERSION() -> 10.4.22-MariaDB-log

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #computers #doomed #firstperson #linux #time_t

Instagram: How not to do messaging

Though Facebook is really good at a few things -- being a rage amplifier; providing a clean, well-lit space for fascists; and allowing unmedicated schizophrenics to find each other and thereby elevate their delusions into national movements -- it's important to remember that they are actually stultifyingly incompetent at just about everything that comprises what most people think their business is.

Sadly, my businesses still have a presence on Facebook and Instagram because choosing not to use those services essentially means choosing not to advertise , and that's not really a stand we can afford to take during this pandemic apocalypse.

And since I still have to manage this shitshow, here's me pissing in the wind again about how terrible it is to try and actualy use it.

I've written before about the mind-boggling unusability of Instagram's inbox-management for business accounts: that the messages are partitioned into four different places with four different interfaces with no rhyme or reason. It's just unfathomable how anyone is able to communicate with their customers through this disaster. [Narrator: "They cannot. They mostly don't try."]

Well, a couple years ago, Facebook integrated Instagram into this "Facebook Inbox For Business Suits" thing or whatever they're calling it today. In theory, now you can use a Facebook web page instead of the postage-stamp-sized Instagram app to manage your messages while typing with your thumbs like an animal.

Take a look at the image to the right. Zoom in. Let the hate wash over you. I'll wait.

• First indignity: you have to make the window be basically full screen width or none of those icons on the right show up, because it's got 3 different sidebars (not shown). And even then, sometimes the message author's profile picture appears on top of the buttons , making them unclickable.

• The "All Messages" tab is not all messages. So the very first words on the page are already a lie. You still have to click through to the four other tabs to see everything.

• When it shows you an Instagram "story", you almost never get to actually see it. Stories usually expire after 24 hours, but I look at this page once a day and I can't remember the last time a story actually showed up as something other than a broken-image box.

• When it does actually show you the contents of an Instagram story or post, it is 240 pixels wide. You can't resize it. You can't click on it to open it in a new window. You can't copy its URL. Hope your eyesight is good!

• When it shows you Facebook messages or replies, it doesn't show you the actual message. It shows you the post on which the messages were made. And it is always set to "Most relevant comments", meaning it's showing you the top-rated 5-of-30 or whatever, in bogosort-order. Because that's what you want to see in your "Facebook Connect Businessy Direct Comments Suite". Not the most recent message, but one that was popular two weeks ago.

• There is no "mark all read" button. You have a thousand messages in the list, but a couple of them, 700+ messages ago, are marked as unread, making the unread count up top useless? Congratulations, you get to click a thousand times to clear that. Also, the position of the "delete" button changes every time. Sometimes those 5 buttons are horizontal, but sometimes they wrap to 2 or 3 lines, depending on... I don't even know what. (See "Facebook Cow Clicker".)

• Once you have deleted a message, it is gone forever. There is no Trash folder. The message itself exists, and everyone can still see it, you just have no way to navigate back to it from "Facebook Presents Inbox by Marc Jacobs" or whatever this is.

• That "Exclamation point" button means "Mark as spam". As far as I can tell, it's the same as Trash. It does not even move it to a spam folder, because as I said, folders aren't a thing. There is no Spam folder, nor a Trash folder, not an Archive folder. And it absolutely for sure does not report the message as spam. It's just a handy busy-box for you to click that does nothing, like calling 311 about a blocked bike lane.

• Is there a way to report abusive Instagram messages? Sure there is, there's a "Report" item hidden on a dot-dot-dot popup menu in the "User" sidebar! That takes you to a FAQ telling you to run the Instagram app on your phone, find the message again (good luck with that), and report it from there.

• If it's a Facebook comment, there are context menus for blocking and reporting, that work completely differently. What you want is a button that means "report this abusive asshole and make them go away forever". What you get is three different paths to report comments, delete comments, and block users, which take like 14 clicks, and if you miss one step, some or all of those things don't happen. Also it's entirely possible that "block" means "don't show this person's abuse to me personally, but do continue showing them to everyone else who looks at my business page." After all these years, I still have no idea.

• My business account manages multiple Facebook and Instagram pages. Do messages to all of them show up in the same place? Hahahahahahahaha no. Each one gets its own separate "Instagram By Facebook Inbox Business Message Console Business" page.

• Oh yeah, those red message count badges at the top? They never change as messages are read or tabs are changed. I mean, that sounds too hard, right?

One might hope that this incompetence indicates that they simply don't have employees who know what they're doing, and one might dream that maybe that's because Facebook is just too embarassing a place for the competent to work. Maybe the people capable of getting jobs elsewhere took my advice and quit. But that's wishful thinking. Ethics are not correlated with programming skill. It's just that they don't give a shit. Tools to allow businesses to use Facebook to intermediate communication with those businesses' customers are not a priority. As a rational, sane person, the things that you expect are part of Facebook's business are not. If you think you are their customer, or even that your customers are their customers, you are wrong.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #computers #corporations #doomed #firstperson #spam

Oddly specific botnet

Whoever once had the address "mim@mcom.com" has a vast and extremely enthusiastic botnet trying to crack their password on mcom.com's (nonexistent) IMAP server, from 20,000+ unique IPs in the last 30 days.

Never give up hope, it might work some day!

Though I am impressed by the IP space they control, I guess.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #computers #doomed #firstperson #nscp #security #spam #www

It's a Series of Logarithms

Fake-cry more, fashy boy.

Kyle Rittenhouse's judge bestie, ladies and gentlemen:

"Ipads ... have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three-dimensions and logarithms," the defense team argued. "This isn't actually enhanced video. This is Apple's iPad programming creating what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there."

Schroeder responded that the prosecution shouldered the burden of proof that Apple does not use artificial intelligence to manipulate footage.

Ok, everybody's going to be dunking on that logarithms thing for a long time, because let's face it, it's hilarious, but let's not lose sight of the fact that this is a fascist judge searching for loopholes to let a fascist, white supremacist terrorist murderer go free.

Before the trial, Schroeder ruled that the men shot by Rittenhouse cannot be referred to as 'victims" by prosecutors. Defense attorneys may, however, call them "arsonists" or "looters" if they could justify those labels. [...]

Judge Schroeder's phone suddenly rang to the ringtone of God Bless the USA. Released in 1984 by Lee Greenwood, the song is popular in conservative circles and often played as Trump's entrance theme during his rallies.

Previously.

#uncategorized #bigbrother #computers #doomed #firstperson #stormtroopers

That Innsmouth Look

One used mass media to promote his barely-disguised virulent racism and horrific visions of humanity subjugated by incomprehensible, formless entities. The other was H. P. Lovecraft.

I wonder what Zuckerberg named his cat, though?

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

#uncategorized #ab #conspiracies #corporations #doomed #firstperson #tentacles

XScreenSaver 6.02 out now

XScreenSaver 6.02 is out now, including iOS and Android.

Two new hacks this time, Marbling and Binary Horizon, plus a few minor updates.

Several of the old hacks have been re-enabled on Android, because it turns out that while they didn't work in the emulator, they do work on real Android hardware (of which I have none).

This release was built on macOS 11.6 instead of 10.14, so I think that means that it has native Apple M1 code in it -- though I doubt you'll notice any performance difference over the Rosetta2 emulation.

Also Apple completely changed how code signing works again, because hey, six more months have passed, it's clearly time for a redesign of the most incomprehensible part of their entire ecosystem, right? Is it better? No. No it is not, it's just differently awful. Again. Anyway, let me know if there are signing issues.

I also had to update Sparkle (the "Check for Updates" library), so hopefully auto-updates still work. Let me know.

About Marbling, the new one written by me. It started out fairly simple, but then it took the optimization train to crazytown. Here's the comment from the top of the source:

This generates a random field with Perlin Noise (Perlin's page, SIGGRAPH 2002 paper, Wikipedia entry), then permutes it with Fractal Brownian Motion (Wikipedia page, Book of Shaders, Shader Toy) to create images that somewhat resemble clouds, or the striations in marble, depending on the parameters selected and the colors chosen.

These algorithms lend themselves well to SIMD supercomputers, which is to say GPUs. Ideally, this program would be written in Shader Language, but XScreenSaver still targets OpenGL systems that don't support GLSL, so we are doing the crazy thing here of trying to run this highly parallelizable algorithm on the CPU instead of the GPU. This sort-of works out because modern CPUs have a fair amount of parallel-computation features on their side of the fence as well. (Generally speaking, your CPU is a Cray and your GPU is a Connection Machine, except that your phone does not typically require liquid nitrogen cooling and a dedicated power plant).

Update: Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. A while back someone requested an Apple TV version of XScreenSaver, so I took a crack at it. There's a tvOS target in the Xcode project, but when you launch it, it never instantiates SaverRunner. I imagine there's some xib or storyboard problem, but I couldn't figure it out so I gave up. If someone can get me past that, I'll take another look. BTW, it turns out that one of the hurdles of porting iOS to tvOS is that tvOS doesn't have newfangled UI elements like checkboxes and sliders.

#uncategorized #computers #firstperson #linux #mac #phones #security #xscreensaver