Scratchpad for September 20 2020
Vinyl LPs sell more than CDs for the first time in 3 Decades. On the one hand it’s an interesting development, on the other is unfortunately mainly driven by major labels reissuing just about everything and flooding the market.
Amazon’s Alexa for landlords is a privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Stasi true believers of the dissolved GDR must be slapping their foreheads in a sudden realization of their flawed approach back when. Make it a service.
Privacy advocates are failing to respond to the “nothing to hide” argument. “Up until the 1980s spying was very labor intensive and hard to scale. You could only spy on one person at a time. With the advent of big data digital data processing, falling prices of surveillance equipment, as well as dirt-cheap storage and compute technologies, that is no longer true. Through economies of scale, it is cheaper to monitor and spy on a hundred thousand people than on hundred people.”
ARM is about to be sold. This is just pathetic. To paraphrase Eric Schmidt: “if you want to keep it, don’t sell it”.
Cyberpunk 2077 assets, logos and vectors. I do know a few designers who go nuts over this kind of stuff. Notable that they offer vector data to download for non-commercial usage.
Fuck You Startup World. Thank you. Yes. To all of it.
endlessh is a SSH tarpit that slowly sends an endless banner. Of limited use nowadays but fun to think you’re throwing at least a little bit of sand into the gears of automated abuse.
Birthday party on ship may have led to oil spill in Mauritius. Okay, I have nothing.
Raspberry Pi 4 can now boot directly from USB. Very nice indeed.
Gene editing to produce ‘super dad’ livestock. Another fine example of “doing it because we can” without stopping to think if we should.
Amazon to Provide Computer Science Education for More Than 550,000 K-12 Students Annually Across More Than 5,000 Schools Nationwide Amid COVID-19 Pandemic. Welcome to the future of education, powered by the largest tech companies in the world. What could go wrong?
Nearly two-thirds of US young adults unaware 6m Jews killed in the Holocaust. I’m sure the Amazon CS course will tremendously help to rectify this.
NASA is about to film an Estee Lauder ad in space. Twenty years ago this would have been a plot device in a second-rate comedy movie. Linked to Slashdot since the original is paywalled.
COVID-19 Round 2 is Here Cogent arguments all around. Worth to open for the NHS-approved visual guide alone.
The Yelp local economic impact report shows that 60% of the businesses closed since the beginning of the pandemic have permanently folded.
Why are Amnesty International monitors not able to observe the Assange hearing? As AI is considered a public institution with no special rights or provisions, the question should be why the public is effectively mostly barred from the proceedings and why there is so very little mainstream reporting on this trial.
Someone asked an online tracking company for all of their data. Not that I’m particularly surprised by this. By now any kind of tracking protection, ad blocker and other privacy measures are just digital self-defense.