I just checked my spam folder and found that Twitter has been emailing me tweets every day for months..

I'm not writing an entire blog post about how stupid a US TikTok ban would be because this is all that needs to be said:

If the Chinese government is in your threat model, don’t install TikTok on your device. Otherwise, your actual problem is surveillance capitalism.

A wide range of Android phones are vulnerable to attacks that fully compromise the devices at their deepest level: the baseband. Fixes have yet to be delivered, except to a subset of vulnerable Pixels. In the meantime, Google and Samsung advise, users should do something that's not possible for most vulnerable devices: turn off VoLTE. Both Google and Samsung declined to provide further, actionable guidance to at-risk customers. Worse, even if/when it's possible to turn off VoLTE, this advice completely neuters most phones of any kind of voice calling capability.

This incident once again underscores the security mess of the Android ecosystem. It also demonstrates the lack of cooperation Google and Samsung regularly exhibit in keeping their customers safe.

Super sad.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/03/critical-vulnerabilities-allow-some-android-phones-to-be-hacked/

It is so easy to hate on SVB and say their depositors should be take the loss along with their shareholders and the stock market in general... but IMO you are forgetting the pain an economic shock will cause everyone.

And ignoring that stopping runs on a majority of small and medium sized banks and preventing hundreds of startups from failing all at once is pretty cheap both economically and politically versus the alternatives.

In a FAIR world, advocates of deregulation would pay the price and progressives would be rewarded. Does anyone think we live in that world.

We can debate the virtues and moral hazards all we want; the simple truth is that the companies who deposited billions in SVB were acting responsibly punishing them would only exacerbate all sorts of terrible outcomes.

SVB management made some mistakes, not huge ones, and their shareholders paid the price. That's likely the best outcome of a bad situation.

@jerry Any chance you could be available to chat for a few minutes about a digital signature based user authentication solution we want to port to mastadon?

My schedule is pretty flexible and I would really value your input.

If anyone notices a big spike in productivity this afternoon, it is absolutely unrelated to the fact that Reddit has been down for almost an hour.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was getting you to click “I Agree” to the 1,956-page user agreement without reading it.

I'm glad everybody got a couple of days of schadenfreude out of their systems, because if SVB deposits are still locked down on Monday then:

1) Companies are going to start missing payroll and will fire/furlough normal folks (ACH has to happen Monday for 3/15 paychecks)

2) Small-Medium businesses all over will start pulling out of smaller banks, causing national contagion

3) There will be massive consolidation into the TBTF banks

“The average American home has tripled in size in the past half-century, although families have become smaller. A household in the US contains, on average, 300,000 individual items — no wonder one in ten households rents a storage unit and one in four people with a garage say it is too full of stuff to house a car.”
- Annie Lowrey, in The Climate Book

GET THE BOOK -- https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/709837/the-climate-book-by-greta-thunberg/

#Economy #Economics #AntiCapitalism #ClimateChange #Environment #Sustainability

Nothing says Pro-Life more than Death Sentences.

Yikes to the oh-shit: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/10/silicon-valley-bank-is-shut-down-by-regulators-fdic-to-protect-insured-deposits.html

There is only one libertarian position on gender-affirming health care, and that's to let it be a private decision of doctors, patients, and parents if a minor is involved. Worries that some people might regret it are no more a case for criminalization than the fact that lots of people regret taking drugs is a case against drug decriminalization. And if your worry is that we need to protect kids from bad choices, you need *much* weightier evidence of harm than anti-trans people can point to.

Not a drag queen, not a trans woman, not a librarian, not a non-binary elementary school teacher. A youth pastor. Another youth pastor.

#news #lgbt #trans #drag #translivesmatter #lgbtrightsarehumanrights #religion #childmolester

I am shell shocked by the latest battery news.

https://www.thecooldown.com/green-tech/shellfish-batteries-crab-lobster-science-biodegradable/

Today on the first day of Women’s History Month I learned that after no fault divorce was finally legalized in 1970, female suicide rates dropped 20%🤯

The "strong 1950s family unit" that the GOP is nostalgic about ignores record high female suicide, suffocating domestic violence, & zero female financial autonomy.

But maybe that's GOP's goal all along?🤔
#WHM2023

The reason TikTok is such a threat is because it's not a Chinese platform, it's a global platform controlled by China. Theoretically at any point China could use it to drag foreign users into their sphere of influence. Twitter was a threat for the exact same reason. The difference being it's not a theoretical future problem. Its owner is already actively spreading Russian propaganda, amplifying fascists talking points, and openly admitted to manipulating the algorithm for his own personal gain. You currently have hundreds of millions of international users under the influence of a far-right pro-Russia Autocrat. If I was in charge of banning social media platforms I'd be watching TikTok very very closely, but I'd be holding a Defcon1 five alarm fire meeting about Twitter right now.

Web hosting giant GoDaddy made headlines this month when it disclosed that a multi-year breach allowed intruders to steal company source code, siphon customer and employee login credentials, and foist malware on customer websites. Media coverage understandably focused on GoDaddy's admission that it suffered three different cyberattacks over as many years at the hands of the same hacking group.  But it's worth revisiting how this group typically got in to targeted companies: By calling employees and tricking them into navigating to a phishing website.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/02/when-low-tech-hacks-cause-high-impact-breaches/

I am still trying to wrap my head around snow boarders on Mt. Tom and blizzard warnings in Southern California but any precipitation on the west coast is fine with me.

But IDK which member of the Biden Climate Cabinet will the QDP and Fox blame for the 470,000 Michigan residents without electricity following an ice storm?


https://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/3873887-more-than-450000-remain-without-power-in-michigan-after-ice-storm/

Enough of the behind the back turnovers.

It’s amazing how businesses want to run on data, but when presented with the successfulness of a 4-day work week, that’s not the data they want