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Links July 2020

iMore has an insightful article about Apple’s transition to the ARM instruction set for new Mac desktops and laptops [1]. I’d still like to see them do something for the server side.

Umair Haque wrote an insightful article about How the American Idiot Made America Unlivable [2]. We are witnessing the destruction of a once great nation.

Chris Lamb wrote an interesting blog post about comedy shows with the laugh tracks edited out [3]. He then compares that to social media with the like count hidden which is an interesting perspective. I’m not going to watch TV shows edited in that way (I’ve enjoyed BBT inspite of all the bad things about it) and I’m not going to try and hide like counts on social media. But it’s interesting to consider these things.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting Locus article suggesting that we could have full employment by a transition to renewable energy and methods for cleaning up the climate problems we are too late to prevent [4]. That seems plausible, but I think we should still get a Universal Basic Income.

The Thinking Shop has posters and decks of cards with logical fallacies and cognitive biases [5]. Every company should put some of these in meeting rooms. Also they have free PDFs to download and print your own posters.

gayhomophobe.com [6] is a site that lists powerful homophobic people who hurt GLBT people but then turned out to be gay. It’s presented in an amusing manner, people who hurt others deserve to be mocked.

Wired has an insightful article about the shutdown of Backpage [7]. The owners of Backpage weren’t nice people and they did some stupid things which seem bad (like editing posts to remove terms like “lolita”). But they also worked well with police to find criminals. The opposition to what Backpage were doing conflates sex trafficing, child prostitution, and legal consenting adult sex work. Taking down Backpage seems to be a bad thing for the victims of sex trafficing, for consenting adult sex workers, and for society in general.

Cloudflare has an interesting blog post about short lived certificates for ssh access [8]. Instead of having user’s ssh keys stored on servers each user has to connect to a SSO server to obtain a temporary key before connecting, so revoking an account is easy.

3 comments to Links July 2020

  • Norbert Preining

    Interesting attitude towards public shaming. So your (according to your support statement here) support public shaming and assume that humans cannot change. OTOH, law protects perpetrators of far more severe crimes due to privacy issues.

    I really think that public shaming – as it is common especially in the anglo-saxon law system – is a good approach to improving the situation. Not to speak of the danger of incorrect shaming, assumptions of innocence, and all that. But this is a very similar approach to the cancel culture movement. The new “executive branch” and “juridical branch” is merged into a simple mob activity. I don’t think this is an improvement to our society.

  • Norbert: It’s funny how conservatives say “don’t break the law and you don’t need to fear the police” in spite of the evidence of police doing bad things and “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear” in spite of the evidence of surveillance programs hurting innocent people. But then when anyone on the left side of politics calls someone out for bad behaviour they make claims like yours.

  • Norbert Preining

    I don’t see how the one is connected to the other? I’m the first to call out breakage of privacy, failure to protect civil rights by police, but that does not inhibit me to consider shaming wrong.

    So what do you want to imply? Some political black-white categorization?