JulianOliver

JulianOliver, 2 hours ago to random

Duckduckgo down

JulianOliver, 5 days ago to random

For those of you in Te Whanganui-a-Tara / Wellington, I'm launching a new piece, 'The Closed World', next week at the Dominion Observatory. Commissioned for the ADA Symposium, 2024, it has been a very interesting challenge putting this piece together.

I look forward to sharing a project page for The Closed World soon.

https://ada.net.nz/uncategorized/the-closed-world-julian-oliver/

JulianOliver, 12 days ago to random

For fellow RF geeks out there, an entertaining chart for getting your comms on in the current EM conditions. From https://hamradiofornontechies.com/current-ham-radio-conditions/ #radio

JulianOliver, 12 days ago to random

Nasa says the solar storms could continue over the weekend. A good time to get the SDR out and look for EM blasts in radio land

https://edition.cnn.com/2024/05/10/business/sunspots-disrupt-phones-gps-scn/index.html

https://spaceweather.app/

JulianOliver, 14 days ago (edited 14 days ago) to random

Researchers are calling for urgent regulation in advance of 'deadbots', simulations of the deceased that intervene upon the process of mourning itself.

Such tech would be a textbook example of rampant, self-serving techno-solutionism - of profit over care. Rather than such software being the fruit of recommendations from therapists and psychologists, to meet real needs, unregulated tech like this would instead be forced upon the vulnerable by a predatory market.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/may/09/digital-recreations-of-dead-people-need-urgent-regulation-ai-ethicists-say

JulianOliver, 16 days ago to random

Understanding and getting atop the (now zoonotic) spread of the H5N1 virus is proving difficult as farmers in the US are being uncooperative. They're worried about losing revenue if the word gets out they have an infected herd, and also the issue of all their undocumented cheap labour.

While I'm here, I'm not reading countries urging the US to do all it can to contain the virus, nor calls for international investigations, nor derisive nicknames for it. Telling really.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/inside-the-federal-government-s-tug-of-war-with-states-on-the-bird-flu-outbreak/ar-BB1lTahb

JulianOliver, 18 days ago (edited 17 days ago) to random

The very sharp and studied Teresa Ribera on the future of the EU, ahead of the forthcoming parliamentary elections:

"I think it’s been shown that it’s a huge error – and historically always has been – to think that looking for common territory with the far right is a way to pacify the far right [...] That never works."

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/05/eu-at-risk-of-implosion-as-far-right-seeks-scapegoats-minister-warns

JulianOliver, 20 days ago to random

On the curious thing of Mastodon unknowingly DDoS'ing websites, dubbed the 'fediverse effect' https://news.itsfoss.com/mastodon-link-problem/

JulianOliver, 25 days ago to random

Good piece on the so-called 'dumphone boom', alongside the challenges of offlining in a world now so dependent on smartphones.

"Three in five gen-Zers say they’d like to be less connected to the digital world"

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/apr/27/the-boring-phone-stressed-out-gen-z-ditch-smartphones-for-dumbphones

JulianOliver, 26 days ago to random

Took the bus to town, everyone's on their phones. Got to town, everyone's on their phones.

I want to see a photography exhibition of people waiting for the train, vaping on the back porch, in a queue at a concert, friends sitting opposite at a cafe - all of them looking at their hand as though holding an invisible phone.

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

A short video of a person generously expressing how they feel about self-driving cars.

(via @w0bb1t )

Video of a person standing on top of a Waymo self driving car, supposedly in San Francisco, repeatedly trying to kick on the windscreen. It is shot by another person from a car travelling in the other direction.

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

Notes from The Sixth Mass Extinction:

"When I was a teenager in the 90s, I used to sneak out a lot to go to raves. I used to get back home at like six in the morning and always hated the noise the birds made outside my window. [...]

I’ve just temporarily moved back to that same childhood bedroom in the commuter belt of Munich having spent 15 years working as a photographer in the US. Now, there is literally no noise when I have my window open. No birds at all."

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/22/readers-on-changes-to-the-natural-world-around-them-aoe

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

Look I do think it's worth mentioning that the Moon is drifting away from the Earth 3.8cm each year and that this just so happens to be around about the amount our fingernails grow in the same period.

JulianOliver, 1 month ago (edited 1 month ago) to random

Some incredible Late, Late Anthropocene grimness, researchers found that ocean spray along the North South transect of the Atlantic emits more PFAAs ('forever chemicals') than any sole industrial source. So, standing on the Atlantic coastline (presumably elsewhere too), enjoying the ocean breeze, you are loading up on PFAAs. The ocean is now skinned with the stuff, its primary transporter.

What have we done?

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adl1026

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

The ISS gets a major battery upgrade, 2.6 tonnes of hardware dumped.

Everything wasn't fine:

Nasa: "The hardware was expected to fully burn up during entry through Earth's atmosphere on March 8, 2024. However, a piece of hardware survived and impacted a home in Naples, Florida,"

Father: "It almost hit my son. He was two rooms over and heard it all"

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/514480/nasa-says-part-of-international-space-station-crashed-into-florida-home

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

Last night I opened up YT in a private window, & clicked on an unrelated video to that of the one I had just watched. It was a video on arctic ice melts that turned out to be 100% denialist.

One click & there I was in endless fetid scroll of Jordan Peterson, climate change denial, 'what is woke' explainers, 'lol snowflakes' shorts, Trump propaganda, knife fights, & misogynistic, racist garbage.

Don't tell me Big Tech aren't culpable for the hate out there. They're farming it, on a vast scale.

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to climate

This is a big deal. A whole legal framework has been created, and precedent set, for challenging governments for allowing climate pollution to diminish and/or threaten basic human rights.

"The court really recognised that it cannot be that because everyone is affected no one has the right to seek justice for climate harm,” - Nikki Reisch, climate and energy director at the Center for International Environmental Law.

https://www.theguardian.com/law/2024/apr/13/swiss-climate-ruling-global-impact-european-court-human-rights #climate

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

US lawmakers voted 273–147 to reauthorise the FISA law, allowing for far-reaching and warrantless monitoring of foreign communications, alongside collection of US citizens’ messages and phone calls.

Controversially, the Biden administration has long pushed for this, supposedly as a tool to fight terrorism. In a vaguely comedic left/right political reversal, Trump is railing against it, claiming it was used to spy on him.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/apr/12/fisa-surveillance-act-reauthorized

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

Everyone else: I want a bigger screen
Me:

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

Looks like the spy station installed at the GCSB's Waihopai base here in Aotearoa NZ is/was the NSA-run APPARITION program, used for precision location services during capture-kill operations. Who were the targets? Supposedly whomever FVEY partners deemed to be terrorists.

Continuing the NSA's obsession with ALLCAPS CODENAMES, the station also hosted a system called FALLOWHAUNT, "used for collection (eavesdropping) and processing of VSAT communications"

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/on-the-inside/512851/hager-spy-system-hosted-by-gcsb-likely-to-be-one-used-in-capture-kill-operations #surveillance

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

The IDF have been beta testing 'A.I' on the battlefield. A testimony from 6 Israeli intelligence officers details the use of a new Lavender ML system used to supposedly identify Hamas members for airstrikes.

In pursuit of their targets, a certain number of civilian casualties were permitted, with 2 sources saying "they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants."

"The machine did it coldly. And that made it easier.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/03/israel-gaza-ai-database-hamas-airstrikes

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to infosec

Google fesses up to spying on people's browsing habits in Chrome's not-so-Incognito mode, promising to destroy billions of records tracking U.S. citizens. Sadly it was not out of the goodness of their electric hearts - it took a formidable class action lawsuit (that they'd probably already prepared for):

https://apnews.com/article/google-chrome-privacy-lawsuit-settlement-203cc5063f1a1d4013de1900d9376814 #infosec #privacy

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to opsec

Test case: You get a voice msg from a friend in the middle of the night. They're in a local park and they need your help right now.

Soon, we will not know whether to act.

Time to work on 'code words' with family and friends, to help filter people from their simulations #opsec

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/mar/31/openai-deems-its-voice-cloning-tool-too-risky-for-general-release

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

"[...] if this year’s rate of warming persists, it would give us two full degrees of extra warming by 2034. Add the warming we have already caused (1.5 degrees), and the average global temperature 10 years from now would be 3.5C higher."

Good piece by Gwynne Dyer on the current crazy warming anomaly, in advance of her new book.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/world-news/350229370/climate-anomaly-making-scientists-scratch-their-heads

JulianOliver, 1 month ago to random

The newly launched Copernicus Climate Change Atlas puts the chance of my region warming to 5.69C by the end of the century at the 90th percentile. How about you guys?

https://atlas.climate.copernicus.eu/atlas