Tech Boys

Bill Cosby has justly been whisked away to prison for the next three to ten years. Cosby--let's just go ahead and assume his prison name will be Puddin'--is being shipped off to the Phoenix State Correctional Institution (SCI Phoenix) to serve his time. It's not a nice place: according to The Root , the clink where Puddin' will be spending his twilight years is rife with racism. Racial slurs, religious discrimination and other demeaning personal attacks are purportedly inflicted upon the prison's population by the facility's staff on a routine basis. Mind you, the staff aren't one hell of a lot safer. It's a high caliber shitshow. From The Inquirer : In letters and phone calls to family and reporters, and in official grievances, they've reported a raft of complaints about the conditions in the new prison and, especially, about loss, vandalism, or destruction of their personal property during the move. Several described racial slurs and graphic ima...

Cats have a tendency to fit themselves into places that they have a hard time getting out of: behind refrigerators, the highest branches of a tree or, in this case, underneath a shed. Fortunately, for this kitteh, a bunny was on standby to help extricate it from its self-imposed prison. from Boing Boing https://ift.tt/2QiBc4K via IFTTT

That sure was an expensive 420 joke. Tesla CEO Elon Musk has agreed to pay $20 million and step down from his role as chairman of the board of the company he founded for three years, in a deal with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The worst humiliation Elon Musk will have to face won't be the $20 million fine or the loss of his role as chairman. Elon Musk now has to have a boss. Hope they hire a good tweet editor for him, too. Musk didn't admit or deny that he misled investors under the civil fraud charge. Tesla was not charged with fraud. From Matthew Goldstein at the New York Times : The S.E.C. announced the deal two days after it sued Mr. Musk in federal court for fraud and misleading investors over his post on Twitter last month that he had “funding secured” for a buyout of the electric-car company at $420 a share. It is not clear why Mr. Musk changed his mind and agreed to settle but shares of Tesla have been hit hard since the S.E.C. filed the la...

MIT Comparative Media Studies researcher/instructor Chris Peterson is an adrent supporter of the Math Prize for Girls, and as part of his work with the organization, he's learned about the way that STEM fields were once considered inherently feminine, while the higher-status humanities were dominated by men -- it's the subject of some outstanding feminist scholarship by Professor Maria Charles. Peterson tweeted a quote from Maria Charles's work on the subject in a discussion of the upcoming Math Prize for Girls, and then found that his Twitter account had been suspended, without any explanation (he was given a chance to appeal the suspension, but has been told he might have to wait for days to find out what Twitter thought he did wrong). Peterson thinks he tripped over Twitter's new ban on "dehumanizing speech," which is meant to improve the quality of Twitter discourse by prohibiting Tweets that attack whole groups of people (formerly, Twitter banned atta...

The UK Conservative Party's annual conference is about to kick off in Birmingham, and the Tories have distributed an app ahead of time to all attendees: senior ministers, government officials, members of the press, party members, and others. The app has a fatal design-flaw: anyone could login as any attendee, provided that you knew that person's email address. As Guardian columnist and Jacobin writer Dawn Foster explained in a tweet , you could effect this login "just with their email address, no emailed security links, and post comments as them." Once logged in, you could see the user's private mobile phone number, change that person's profile, and, as noted, post comments under their name (the app has been updated to close the vulnerability). Twitter users are speculating about which UK data-protection laws this violates and what sort of penalties the party may face as a result of the breach. More trenchantly, this undermines the Conservatives' signa...

Kavanaugh didn't just DARVO his way through yesterday's hearing : his bluster, tears, rage, and blame-shifting also allowed him to dodge a remarkable number of questions raised by the senators. Ford, by contrast, answered virtually every question put to her. Vox went through the transcript and painstakingly logged whether each question raised was addressed. They confirmed the impression that Kavanaugh was dodging the questions and Ford wasn't, and produced an excellent interactive graphic that allows us to visualize the both witnesses' forthrightness and drill down on each question and statement. from Boing Boing https://ift.tt/2OjlqcG via IFTTT

This NSFW film examines a fictional incel named Sam, starting with his agonizingly tense interaction with a young woman and reaching a disturbing culmination. Via the Vimeo blog : The term “incel” is short for “involuntarily celibate.” It was originally coined in the early ‘90s by a website created for people to share their experiences of sexual inactivity. Since then, “incel” has evolved into an internet subculture of men who unwillingly remain sexually inactive and often employ hateful ideas of misogyny and racism to justify their plight. Merizalde first became interested in the subject after the 2014 mass shooting in Isla Vista, California in which 22-year-old Elliot Rodger targeted a nearby college sorority, killing six people and injuring fourteen others before committing suicide. Rodger was posthumously heralded a hero among incel communities for these actions and according to Merizalde, the event was uniquely disturbing due to the ability to track “the trail of vlogs that ...

As today's businesses grow, so too do their IT needs. That's why demand (and pay) is high for experts who can keep these businesses online. Now, demand alone won't get your foot in the door, as employers expect you to bring some certifications to the table that validate your skills. There are plenty of certifications out there, but choosing ITIL could take you further in your career. The  Ultimate ITIL Certification Training Bundle can help you get certified, and it's on sale for $49. ITIL is a set of detailed practices for IT service management that focuses on merging IT services with the needs of business. By introducing ITIL practices into a workplace, you can better help a business create cost-effective practices, manage risk, and ultimately build a more stable yet scalable operation. This collection features 14 courses on the IT service lifecycle, operational support, and other ITIL concepts. In addition to getting valuable ITIL knowledge, each course will reward...

Yesterday, at least 90,000,000 Facebook users were forced to log back into the service without any explanation; later, the company revealed that at least 50,000,000 of them had been hacked, but wouldn't say how . In a detailed anatomy of the hack based on an explanation provided by Facebook vice president of product management Guy Rosen, Motherboard's Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai and Jason Koebler provide insight into the mechanics of the breach. The vulnerability was in Facebook's somewhat esoteric "View as" feature. This feature allows Facebook users to assure themselves that the privacy settings they've chosen for their posts are working as intended. If you make a post that you want your parents to be able to see, but not your boss, "View as" will let you preview the post as if you were your boss, and then as if you were your parents, and confirm that you've got the confusing welter of Facebook privacy options right. The attackers were abl...

When news broke yesterday that Facebook had suffered a breach affecting at least 50,000,000 users , Facebook users (understandably) began to widely share links to articles about the breach. The articles were so widely and quickly shared that they triggered Facebook's spam filters, which blocked the most popular stories about the breach, including an AP story and a Guardian story . There's no reason to think that Facebook intentionally suppressed embarrassing news about its own business. Rather, this is a cautionary tale about the consequences of content filtering on big platforms. Facebook's spam filter is concerned primarily with stopping spam, not with allowing through storm-of-the-century breaking news headlines that everyone wants to share. On a daily basis, Facebook gets millions of spams and (statistically) zero stories so salient that every Facebook user shares them at once. Any kind of sanity-check on a spam filter that allowed through things that appeared to be...