silveradept | So the last few weeks have been eventful

Let us begin with good news - a person who had spent a year with an active tuberculosis infection has been cured of it, after spending several days in isolation after being arrested for public health reasons. One also hopes that this curation also doesn't come with a surprise bill or penalty of any sort that would make the mistrust she had in the state and county health officials justified.

Bob Newhart, comedian with an absolute command of delivering the absurd in a deadpan style, at 94 years of age.

A decision that floored just about everyone who had to react to it in real time: the withdrawal of Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr. from the United States presidential race and endorsement of his vice president, Kamala Harris, to be the Democratic candidate for President. This came after significant rumblings in the Democratic Party about the President's debate performance against his opponent, and likely having several polls thrust in his face about what his continued presence in the race would do to his chances and others' chances of victory. The timing on the announcement, however, came after the Repulican convention finished, and the swift suite of endorsements of Kamala Harris has at least a few speculations that once the withdrawal had been decided upon, figuring out the timing of when to drop the album for greatest effect was on. (Scalzi also talks about Kamala Harris's ability to win and also the fact that because the President is no longer running for re-election, he now has until the inauguration of the next president to run wild, including with the new powers the Supreme Court foolishly granted in anticipation of having the Republican candidate in the office.)

Expect a torrent of misogynoir about the candidacy of Kamala Harris, first with "I think a black woman can win, but not this one," and "I would support a black woman, but other people won't," and then, when those don't work, the harder, less socially-acceptable to whites versions. The US election is once again shaping up (yet again) to be an election where the options are someone who may not be the most ideal (or even a particularly ideal) candidate, but who is firmly in the camp of continuing the democracy and someone who has no intention to continue the democracy, but who promises that by removing democracy, the Time That Never Was can finally return to us, the supposedly glorious era of White Men Uber Alles where women could look forward to terrible marriage, awful pregnancy, and the possibility of poisoning their husband with arsenic when it finally became too much for her, where the non-white could look forward to being "put in their place" and systematically exploited and denied any opportunity to do anything or obtain anything, and where queerness simply disappears and is never spoken of again, except when it resurfaces as being something that the local pastor or the national politician has been for all their life and has been arranging to exploit those who cannot consent for their own purposes. It's already out there, and more than enough of the Republican and Republican-aligned have said out loud and on the record that this is what they want. (So one of the important things that we have to figure out now is how to make sure that all the people who are able to vote actually get to exercise that vote, rather than having those votes suppressed through gerrymandering and election interference.)

And if you think they won't, well, they already had to send out a notice saying "Please don't be racists and sexists when you attack Kamala Harris." (The slug on this URL makes it sound like the Republicans actually managed to do this, but no, it's a desperate plea to not do it.) Because it's too tempting to both the Republican candidate, his vice presidential pick, and many of his flunkies and enablers to rely on what they believe has worked for them before. The brighter among them remember to use at least some kind of euphemism or attempt not to be explicit, but the fig leaf they hide behind doesn't actually hide anything at all. If to looks like there may even be a glimmer of possibility that Kamala Harris could win, the polite forms will likely vanish.

There are also some interesting sidebars, like Nikki Haley attempting to silence a group that changed their support from her to Kamala Harris after she endorsed the Republican nominee and are deliberately trying to recruit more people who would have voted for Haley to vote for Harris instead.

The Elon of Elon's folly refuted claims made by the Republican nominee that he was giving $45 million per month to help in Republica election, claiming the $45 million was only once. The msot difficult part about assessing such a claim as that is that it's nearly impossible to follow the money and where it comes from once it disappears into shell entities and superPACs expressly designed to make it so that large amounts of cash can be laundered untraceably into politics.

The United States Senate passed a bill that intends to specifically censor protected speech in the name of protecting minors from accessing protected speech. And it expects any place that might offer the possibility of user-generated content to do the policing and identifying necessary to comply with the censorship provisions of the bill. An excellent summary of the things that the Kids' Online Safety Act gets wrong and expects private companies to do in the name of complete vagueness by

synecdochic. And the Senate clearly got this wrong because they passed a bill that the sponsor specifically said she wanted to use to censor queer and trans people. So many of the supposedly liberal coalition were apparently too afraid of being seen as allied with predators to defend the rights of children and teens. The Senate version of the bill may not make it through the House, but that doesn't necessarily mean that a bill of that nture will pass through eventually.

If you are looking for examples of what the Project 2025 document intends to do to the country, look around you, especially in those states and localities where the government is already implementing everything that it demands. Child labor, lack of women's freedoms, public schools and libraries threatened with defunding and staff threatened with specious but emotionally-charged messages that says teachers and librarians are pushing sexual material on children, (which means "there are queer books and age-appropriate books about sex available and a child might pick one up") immigration demonization, the demand that history be replaced with hagiography, and all the rest of the things that people are suddenly surprised at when they find their own state or locality has passed the relevant laws and implemented them, so their library is adults-only or they are forbidden from getting reproductive care and further from leaving their state to get reproductive care and that soon there will potentially be law enforcement officers trying to get their private medical records to make sure they didn't get any illegal reproductive care while in or out of the state. Or their school closes because it's been structured so that the funds for vouchers to go to private schools come out of the allotment that a school would receive per student and the school can't rely on any guarantee of having enough funds to continue operating.

So, y'know, as best as you can, exercise your ability to control who is in your localities and your states as well as in the federa offices. As you can already see, states are more than happy to screw over their populations without the feds stepping in. And, as we have seen so far, the high court currently does not believe in crucial democratic values, so appeals to them are unlikely to produce good results, either.

One of the good spots, though, is another court ruling that Customs and Border Protection is not allowed to conduct warrantless searches of U.S. Citizen phones and data devices at the border, which is building a significant amount of case law for the protections of everyone based on ruling in cases of people who are not very sympathetic.

The Japanese company that owns 7-Eleven is looking to improve the offerings of their United States stores to put them on par with their Japanese counterparts, which would be both welcome to have and is a hedge against the potential sales drops of gasoline (the company also owns the Sunoco and Speedway gasoline brands) and ciagarettes (which have high profit margins).

The historical account of a very popular drag king / male impersonator, who made fun of dandyism and then also produced imperialistic wartime propaganda. Which proves that people are always more complex than they appear, especially in promotional advertisements.

The practice of a married woman taking her husbands surname is relatively recent and very English, and had much to do with laws that said a married woman could not own property apart from her husband. And some of those traditions then led to widows and other unmarried persons proclaiming they had the proper qualifications for voting in elections, and therefore should be able to do so.

Dictionaries first intended to raise the level of someone's dicourse, and in doing so, started to stop including some of the more ribald or potentially scandalous words that might describe being gay, a lesbian, or queer in some other dimension.

Survivors of female genital mutilation practices are contracting with skilled surgeons to reverse the procedures and give themselves a gift of not having nearly as much pain and problems. The piece itself talks about the specifics of the practice, and therefore is not necessarily for persons who don't want to read about it.

A presentation about the ways in which technological change often produces workflow change, and that people who are complaining about those changes of workflows are surfacing real issues, rather than expressing fear or an unwillingness to learn the new processes and use them. The best way to do change is, even though it's going to potentially be time-consuming, is to get those people to express their concerns and to acknowledge them and see if there are methods in the new way that can help with transitioning over, or being able to arrange things so they're in familiar places and processes, so that the transition isn't as harsh.

A person being given a prestigious award for disability activiism could not accept it on the stage, because there was no accessible ramp for her to bring her chair onto the stage. And in one of the photo captions to this story, the lack of ramp was apparently because the venue presumed she didn't want one. Which is the sort of thing where someone who recognizes what kind of PR disaster the whole situation is, issues orders to the effect of "This will not happen again." and then a lot of high-level people resign because they've clearly failed.

A Kansas high school installed spyware on all the student computers, using filters and triggering on keywords to ensure that none of their students were able to be students without potentially tripping an "intervention" from the administration based on the black box of the filter software. They proclaim they're saving lives, of course, and that they have exacting criteria of measuring such, but the student journalists all got called in because their work tripped the filters, and the student body as a whole is still being surveilled, and the entity admits that if something like an e-mail trips the filtersm the e-mail is diverted from the intended destination to an administrator's office or other such place. I feel like this is something that needs the "when someone says [z], we say [a] for greater accuracy," because this seems to be a case of a company claiming "AI" and other such things, and it looks a lot more like "filters and occasionally humans" rather than anything intelligent.

Some of those who are in the business of taxonomic naming are
reconsidering whether they want to have genera and species names after famous or celebrated people at the time of the discovery. The upside of having a thing named is that it draws more attention to the thing, but the potential downsides are that the people who are named might yet turn out to be terrible people and, with the example of the beetle named after Adolf Hitler being sought after by white supremacists who want memorabilia named after their great leader, to the point where the species itself is threatened.

Examining the star nose mole's primary sensory organ (the titular star nose) and pointing out that some of the structures on that sensory organ are similar, as points of focus, to human sight structures and bat hearing structures.

In much the same way that people have greater or lesser strengths of internal picture-making, people have variations om how strong their inner voice is. Which will hopefully help contribute to better understanding of human diversity, rather than some new fad or issue that can be used to further discriminate and pathologize others.

In technology, if you were relying on Google's URL shorteners, you'll need to change them out for something else, because soon those shortened URLs won't resolve. And in other Google news, Google has decided they're not going to try and block third-party cookies in Chrome after all, but they're still continuing to tell you they're moving toward a better model of collecting and sharing your data with themselves and advertisers.

the Mozilla Chief Technical Officer attempting to justify why they put in a mechanism for ad companies to identify Firefox browsers, mostly containing "we can't keep the world from continuing to slide into adtech morass, but we can try to make things the least privacy-invasive as we can, which addressed part of the situation, but the part that seemed to be focused on was that Firefox turned on this option by default, rather than making it something the user had to opt-in to. While it's easier to find and disable the Private Attribution checkbox in desktop Firefox, it's not so easy in mobile Firefox. It is possible to disable the item in mobile Firefox as well, through the use of about:config (which may have to be enabled, first) and setting the appropriate flag to false.

Etsy, a store known for all kinds of handmade goods, has decided they're powerful enough and popular enough that they don't need people selling adult and explicit objects on their site, so they will be banning significant amounts of those items and content. So Etsy follows the trend so far as profiting and building themselves up with the assistance of a more adult-oriented community, and then discarding them as soon as they think they can survive without it.

An update to a cybersecurity vendor's driver crashed several Windows-based systems, causing significant infrastucture issues as critical computers found themselves unable to boot until they could get a properly patched driver onto the machines or remove the problematic one after having booted into a recovery mode and then run a new update to get the proper patch. Which happened at the same time as a different outage from Microsoft Azure. As is noted in the Ars article, the CEO of Cloudstrike was also the CTO of McAfee when they sent a bad update that also caused widespread computer failures. And proving that there's still a very long way to go before computer things will ever approach anything resembling intelligence, the summarizing bots on Elon's Folly took seriously the clearly sarcastic and parodic statements of people who were supposedly just starting at Crowdstrike and doing something where clearly nothing could possibly go wrong and created a summary based on those. And, as was noted, since this was a huge fault, plenty of malicious actors tried to step into the situation and use it to their advantage.

Crowdstrike offered $10 Uber Eats gift cards to their IT customers as an apology for the widespread outage and issues they caused, which were then revoked by Uber Eats because they worried it was a large-scale fraud at work. I suspect that's going to say a lot about how much sincerity the company has about what happened, but there's also a certain amount of funny involved because it was "we're trying to apologize to you with a token amount of money to each of you, but because there are so many of you, we got flagged as fraud and you can't redeem them right now. Oops." Yet more computer issues in relation to computer issues. Still, that gift card probably doesn't even compare to the amount of overtime and staffing used to fix the issue and deal with the lost business that happened with the baed update that went out.

It's possible that the issue with Crowdstrike happened because regulators had been critical of Microsoft's previous attempts to leverage their near-monopoly in anti-competitive ways, and therefore solutions like preventing kernel access may have not been available to them without having to do a large amount of convincing regulators they weren't doing it for anticompetitive reasons. When you have a bad reputation, sometimes things that are good still get scrutinized for their possible bad effects.

And then one more story from this situation, where an engineering team developed a method for unlocking their servers correctly and consistently so they could apply the nececssary fixes using a barcode scanner to input the correct BitLocker key. The engineer who developed it and was able to help get the fleet of machines back up and running within a morning is also noted to have wished for thinking of QR codes to do the job, because that could have embedded much more data than a barcode does. All the same, hats off to the team that found a smart solution to the problem that was replicable and accurate basically every time.

Amazon's Alexa-powered devices are apparently a large loss for the company, even as they try to figure out new ways of utilizing Alexa and its services and skills to make a justifiable amount of revenue. I feel like this is one of those situations where Amazon is officially telling us they're hoping people would use Alexa for things that cost money, rather than Amazon using them as a spy device to gather marketing information without disclosing they were doing it. Because I suspect Amazon is probably making much more money on their smart devices that way than they ever will for the stated purpose of said devices.

Elon's Folly decided to opt-in all of their users to allowing their posts and interactions to be used to train Grok, unless they go into their account settings and disable that opt-in. It can be done from the app as well, but only if you choose a setting that goes to the desktop site's settings, at which point the AI material can be disabled as well. If you're still on that site, which a lot of people still are, because the people they think of as people worth following are still there.

Engineers at the Xerox corporation may be the people who most perfectly understand paper jams, even as they continue to persist despite all the attempts to make printers and the paper better and less prone to jamming.

A step-by-step explanation, with fantastic and interactive diagrams, explaining the construction and function of the automatic-winding mechanical watch, one that can keep relatively accurate time and date without the use of circuitry, and which can be manually set on those occasions where the time slips or the day needs correcting because of the vagaries of the current calendar system.

The KnowBe4 security company details how they attempted to hire an IT professional, but instead appeared to have hired a person with a deepfake photograph and who was attempting to install significant amounts of malware on their company laptop. The security software noted, and in the attempts to get the malware off the machine, the deception was apparently exposed.

Last out, someone we can recognize as he keeps showing up with the belief that his argument actually means anything: Mister Gotcha.

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)