Do any of you guys have any first hand conversion data you'd be willing to post?  I'm most interested in retail, but any type of device conversion comparison data would be interesting.

https://www.ansa.it/english/news/lifestyle/arts/2022/01/18/22-of-italians-have-stopped-using-social-media-in-last-year_6efd3f1d-179e-4432-bfee-0bf7b945b35e.html

Quote
The three main reasons for abandoning social media are getting tired of the content (35%), the excessive presence of fake news (25%) and concerns over one's privacy (21%), the survey said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope

Down 1.4% from last year.

Viewing website HTML code is not illegal or "hacking," prof. tells Missouri gov.

The security flaw uncovered is one thing, how they handled it is something else.

What hobbies do you all like to do?  What got you interested?

I'll go first...

Linux

I got into using Linux as a desktop computer way back in 98 with Mandrake 5.2.  I thought it was so cool that there were people putting together an open source operating system, that it was available for free and that one could get as under the hood as one wants.  After some time I got into Debain and the Debain derivatives.  I came out with my own, and for a while it was rated in the top 10 in popularity.  These days I'm just a user again, but maybe someday when I have a bit less responsibility I'd like to get more involved again.

Inexpensive SBCs

I just love single board computers.  I love their efficiency, their small size, how they make the most of their space, how they run on less energy than the cooling fan of a regular computer, and I really love their silence.  This stemmed from my work with Linux, I started to tinker with fanless Mini-ITX computers.  It is a fantastic scene in 2021.  The Raspberry Pi as really brought affordable and relatively powerful ARM based SBCs into the commodity space and has fostered a community to the point where there is now strong demand for computers in this space.  I'm pretty sure SBCs will continue to be an interesting place to tinker.  As for now I am content with my current setup.

Exercise

I started weight training at 13.  Did it more or less consistently until my mid twenties.  I kinda slacked after having a couple of kids, but started back up again after I decided to do something about the extra weight I was carrying around.  Covid has kept me out of a gym for going on two years now, but I have a pretty good home routine; it's a combination of calisthenics and dumbbell exercises.  I'm also going for quick evening walks after dinner and am doing some skateboarding with the kids when possible.

Flashlights

I know this one may seem a little silly, but flashlight have changed a lot in the last 10 years.  The high performance ones have microcontrollers and some of them run on open source software that is hackable.  There are floody lights the that could fit in your palm that could light up an entire football field.  There are lights that could easily reach 1000m that could fit in your pocket.  The technology is rapidly evolving.  Unfortunately, you're not going to find any of these lights at your local Walmart.

...

There are other things I am into, but I don't currently dedicate much time to at the moment.  I like to learn about the history of technology.  I'm also pretty into physical anthropology.  Performance cars are an old obsession of mine that's hard to kill.

Obviously video format, but worth watching.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng

Pretty interesting.  A breed of wild dogs that roam the South with DNA roots going back to Asia and are likely the descendants of dogs who crossed the land bridge with early Native Americans.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolina_Dog

I'm looking something that allows for some flexibility when it comes to links and descriptions.  I suppose a good wordpress plugin would work too.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2021/06/08/global-sting-fbi-run-messaging-app-tricks-organized-crime/7601886002/

QuoteANOM, the FBI's encrypted device company, was used by more than 300 criminal organizations in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Europe that unknowingly communicated about narcotics shipments and exchanged incriminating pictures, including ones showing cocaine hidden in food shipments, according to the Justice Department.

Eight hundred have been arrested from around the world. Several tons of marijuana, cocaine and methamphetamine have been seized, as well as different currencies totaling $48 million, officials said.

The investigation, dubbed Operation Trojan Shield, began after the FBI dismantled a Canadian encryption device company in 2018 and forced criminals to find other ways to communicate. The FBI and the Australian Police Force created ANOM, which officials said was similar to the blind carbon copy email function. Every text message, photo, and audio sent through the platform – more than 27 million in all – was collected and stored in a server and reviewed by the FBI.**

**So, that's a whole hell of a lot of collateral damage for privacy advocates who just had their nightmare come true.  Imagine using an app because you think it is secure only to find out that it automatically CC'd some FBI database to be sifted through in hopes of finding a crime.


A pcmag.com article for further reading

https://blog.mozilla.org/security/2021/06/01/total-cookie-protection-in-private-browsing/

QuoteAt Mozilla, we believe that your right to privacy is fundamental. Unfortunately, for too long cookies have been used by tracking companies to gather data about you as you browse the web. Today, with the launch of Firefox 89, we are happy to announce that Firefox Private Browsing windows now include our innovative Total Cookie Protection by default. That means: when you open a Private Browsing window, each website you visit is given a separate cookie jar that keeps cookies confined to that site. Cookies can no longer be used to follow you from site to site and gather your browsing history.

Could you all do me a favor and log a th3Core outage times and duration in this thread?  Tech support keeps promising that they are on top of it, but we keep getting failures.  I'm not always online so I've missed some of them.  Thanks.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/linux-fellow-bans-university-contributing-kernel

QuoteThe University of Minnesota isn't making any friends in the Linux community. Phoronix reported that Greg Kroah-Hartman, the Fellow at the Linux Foundation responsible for stable releases of the Linux kernel, has banned the University from contributing to that kernel after two students purposely added faulty code to it.

The students in question published a research paper titled "On the Feasibility of Stealthily Introducing Vulnerabilities in Open-Source Software via Hypocrite Commits" on February 10. Those so-called "hypocrite commits" were defined as "seemingly beneficial commits that in fact introduce other critical issues."

The research proposal, PDF

The email exchange

Here are a few things I really got wrong:

• Google's stock was way over priced at their IPO
• The iPad was a stupid idea, who would want a computer without a mouse and keyboard?
• Netflix back-burnering DVD rentals in favor of streaming will never work

https://domain.glass/keyword-suggest/

Seems handy, hopefully it stays up for a while.

I was doing a bit of research on LoRa mesh networks when I stumbled across this article highlighting various protocols and technologies being used in place of centrally controlled networks -- some quite old and some pretty new.

https://changelog.complete.org/archives/10231-recovering-our-lost-free-will-online-tools-and-techniques-that-are-available-now/

Found this one recently:
I'll tell you a DNS joke but be advised, it could take up to 24 hours for everyone to get it.

and you don't use tmux already you really should learn how to use it.


Tmux has two really good features that make life in a term window much easier:

1 It allows you to split up a screen into as many physical spaces as you want.  See picture.

2 It allows you to close off and relaunch a session without losing your workflow or to lose your place in the process.  Any application/tasks launched will continue run in the background and you could check in on them from anyplace you like.  That means you could start a task at the office, close down the term, go home and ssh and relaunch tmux to pick up the processes like you never logged out.


https://www.hamvocke.com/blog/a-quick-and-easy-guide-to-tmux/

Quote"The hacker changed the sodium hydroxide from about 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million," Gualtieri said on Monday, during a briefing about the attack. "This is obviously a significant and potentially dangerous increase. Sodium hydroxide, also known as lye, is the main ingredient in liquid drain cleaners. It's also used to control water acidity and remove metals from drinking water."

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/09/965791252/fbi-called-in-after-hacker-tries-to-poison-tampa-area-citys-water-with-lye

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/02/jeff-bezos-to-step-down-as-amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-to-take-over-in-q3.html

QuoteAmazon CEO Jeff Bezos will step down later this year, turning over the helm to the company's top cloud executive Andy Jassy, the company announced Tuesday. Bezos will transition to executive chairman of Amazon's board.