ECP NetHappenings Newsletter 9-22-2021

Science, Surveillance, Metaverse and more

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Science

A giant space rock demolished an ancient Middle Eastern city and everyone in it – possibly inspiring the Biblical story of Sodom

China brings Covid19 amd Evergrande to the world.
Covid-19 origins: Chinese defector claims Wuhan Military Games was first superspreader event

Peter Kropotkin was a Russian aristocrat who renounced his titles, became a scientist and anarchist, and wrote many significant works, but none so important as MUTUAL AID, his 1902 treatise on the role of cooperation in evolutionary biology. Painstaking researched and beautifully argued, MUTUAL AID reveals the scientific fraud of “social Darwinism,” and its claims that hierarchy and exploitation are evolutionary inevitabilities baked into our very nature.

Surveillance

Researcher discloses iPhone lock screen bypass on iOS 15 launch day

Phones sold in Europe by China’s Xiaomi Corp have a built-in ability to detect and censor terms such as “Free Tibet”, “Long live Taiwan independence” or “democracy movement”, Lithuanian government has discovered

K12 Student’s Privacy Rights: Eye-opening reporting from @mkeierleber and @The74 on some of the technology that schools are using to keep tabs on kids, scanning their online messages, documents, and browsing history.
Where Gaggle tracks student’s online behavior

Apple Wallet is getting verifiable COVID-19 vaccination cards

Metaverse

It was called the “party line” in the 40’s when we used the telephone.

“The metaverse is the next generation of the internet…let’s unpack the things people have in mind.” Watch with your audio on for a 2-minute whirlwind explainer that gets into details. Two minute tour of the Metaverse: unpacking (most) of the stuff people are thinking about when they talk about it. #metaverse #games #blockchain #cloud #gamedev

HBO show won’t be filmed in Texas over abortion law, creator says

A strange moment in jazz history I’d never heard of before—when the great jazz trombonist Jack Teagarden was saved from legal prosecution because a Texas flood interrupted his 1921 court hearing. It’s like a scene in a Coen brothers movie.

David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” said he will not allow filming for his upcoming HBO show to take place in Texas due to the state’s new abortion law.

Democrats

MSNBC – 9/22/2021 – #MorningJoe asking why did democrats put out a bill that did absolutely nothing to tax big corporations? “Because that’s the habit the Dems got into over the last 40 years and have only in the last few years … remembered, oh yea we were the party of labor” https://pic.twitter.com/UNBnTXYF8a

Sarah Kendzior @sarahkendzior
“The way the Dems try to dodge accountability is through this veneer of respectability: ‘We can’t rock the boat.’ Well, the boat is sinking. And we’re on the boat. And when you act, you won’t be rocking the boat — you’ll be steadying it.” — @gaslitnation
Vice President Kamala Harris could simply overrule the Parliamentarian, or the Senate could fire the Parliamentarian…but since the Parliamentarian creates such an amazing excuse for Democratic inertia, they aren’t!
https://www.patreon.com/posts/parliamentarian-56443627

HODL

As appears to be tradition, smaller #Bitcoin HODLers can often be found stacking $BTC after significant corrections.The minnows @woonomic refers to, with < 10 $BTC, have accelerated their accumulation since the sell-off in mid-May. They now hold a collective 13.9% of supply.

Stablecoins are used to move money from one exchange to another, whereas poker chips are casino-specific. Gensler referring to US Dollar backed digital stable coins as “poker chips” shows he is not operating in good faith as a regulator. That’s not mistaken word choice, it’s intentional defamation hoping his audience doesn’t know better. Technically poker chips are not regulated by the SEC. Trump’s father bailed the donald out using casino chips. HSBC is calling for crypto regulation particularly on stablecoins, and also expressed enthusiasm for CBDCs. The ironyyyyy *cough* $881M laundered for drug cartels. If regulators really want to protect investors, they should look at insider trading / front-running activities by employees of exchanges. Not fucking stablecoins. Or users’ private data. Or boxing retail out of early-stage investment opportunities.

Republican = Evangelical

Huge hack reveals embarrassing details of who’s behind Proud Boys and other far-right websites
Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, a nonprofit whistleblower group, said some researchers call the Epik hack “the Panama Papers of hate groups,” a comparison to the leak of more than 11 million documents that exposed a rogue offshore finance industry. And, like the Panama Papers, scouring the files is labor intensive, with payoffs that could be months away.

@Amy_Siskind
I worry how numb we have become to our near brush with authoritarianism – when it is revealed that there was a memo with a 6 step plan for a coup, and it doesn’t even get top of the hour news coverage – let alone consequences for all involved. We are in danger of a repeat folks!

AT&T abandons pledge, makes contributions supporting Republican objectors

EDUCATIONAL CYBERPLAYGROUND
“LAST PAGE OF THE INTERNET”

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WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR DIMWITTED FAMILY MEMBERS WHO REFUSE TO GET THE VACCINE

https://spillover.global/ranking-comparison/

SpillOver produces a detailed risk report for each virus, and its ‘Risk Comparison’ tool allows users to compare and contrast ranked viruses

“SARS-CoV-2 showed the world with devastating clarity the threat undetected viruses can pose to global public health. SpillOver, a new web application developed by scientists at the University of California, Davis, and contributed to by experts from all over the world, ranks the risk of wildlife-to-human spillover for newly-discovered viruses.” The tool is linked to a study published in the journal PNAS, in which the authors identified the most relevant viral, host and environmental risk factors for virus spillover. Then the team ranked the risk from 887 wildlife viruses using data collected from a variety of sources, including viruses detected by the USAID Emerging Pandemic Threats PREDICT project, which UC Davis’ One Health Institute led from 2009 to 2020.
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e2002324118 [PDF]
pen Source Framework (https://osf.io/mb6qn/?view_only=f6326d48d7d941afa7af02714819a1a2)

Misinformation and public opinion of science and health: Approaches, findings, and future directions
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e1912437117
[PDF]

Misinformation in and about science
https://www.pnas.org/content/118/15/e1912444117 [PDF]

(Mis)informed about what? What it means to be a science-literate citizen in a digital world.
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912436117  [PDF]

Educational CyberPlayGround NetHappenings Newsletter Science

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#SCIENCE

#CLIMATE #WATER

Netflix’s ‘Seaspiracy’ Is A Powerful Appetite Suppressant

Tampa Bay stares down environmental disaster from Piney Point phosphate plant

Taiwan water shortage: President says to brace for a shortage

How Vincent Bolloré won control of Ghana’s biggest port

What Can We Learn from a Big Boat Stuck in a Canal? – BIG by Matt Stoller

Suez Canal: Egypt’s First Female Captain Falsely Blamed for Ever Given Jam

Barrier Reef doomed as up to 99% of coral at risk, report finds

US fossil fuel companies took billions in tax breaks – and then laid off thousands

India Demands Rich Nations Like The U.S. Clean Up Their Climate Mess, Signaling A Shift

Big Meat and Dairy Companies Have Spent Millions Lobbying Against Climate Action, a New Study Finds

#HEALTH #COVID #CANNABIS

MORE “You are not fully immunized until you are at least 2-2.5 weeks out from complete vaccination- that means 2 to 2.5 weeks after your second Moderna or Pfizer shot, or 2 to 2.5 weeks after your only J&J shot,” she explains. “This is important because you are not fully protected from COVID disease until you are fully immunized.”
“You may go out to dinner with friends who are either vaccinated or are low risk of complicated COVID. However, if anyone in your friend’s household is unvaccinated and has a high risk condition—advanced age or comorbid condition putting them at risk of severe COVID— you cannot eat out with them. In addition, you cannot eat inside of a restaurant. You should be eating outdoors. Indoors, you would be mixing with multiple households of people who may not be vaccinated and may have at-risk individuals in their households.”

Epidemiologist Who Helped Wipe Out Smallpox Issues Stark Warning About COVID-19 Variants

#LongCovid is the pandemic after the pandemic. All the loud voices who’ve been shouting “but the economy..” in the last year should reflect on the effect of LC on it. Highest prevalence (1 in 6 at 12 wks) in working-age adults.

Study suggests that the modern anti-vaccine movement is shaped by Christian nationalist ideology

Panic Rooms, Birth Certificates and the Birth of GOP Paranoia

The world abandoned COVID-19’s best antidote: Whistleblowers

Two-thirds of epidemiologists warn mutations could render current COVID vaccines ineffective in a year or less

Senate will act on marijuana legalization with or without Biden

1st Americans had Indigenous Australian genes

Arabian coins found in US may unlock 17th-century pirate mystery

#ISP #TELCOMS #BROADBAND #HUMAN RIGHTS #INTERNET #TECHNOLOGY #FCC

“The main business of humanity is to do a good job of being human beings, not to serve as appendages to machines, institutions and systems.” – Kurt Vonnegut

Tim Berners-Lee says internet access should be a basic right.

Fortunately #CCPA regulations state: “The consumer exercises their choice by affirmatively choosing the privacy control, including when utilizing privacy-by-design products or services” Meaning that browsers *can* offer privacy by default.

Joe Biden commits to cutting internet access prices. That’s either unbundling for telecoms, basically a soft break-up to force competition, or just straight up price regulation by the FCC. [picture]

The FCC Wants Your Broadband Horror Stories: You Know What to Do

AT&T lobbies against nationwide fiber, says 10Mbps uploads are good enough

Android sends 20x more data to Google than iOS sends to Apple, study says

CUTTING THE CORD Five Star 200 mile Indoor/Outdoor Yagi HD TV Antenna Review

Hedy Lamarr – invented and patented the frequency-hopping spread spectrum technology for missile guidance in WW2 that became the foundation of all of our Antenna with bars wifi Antenna with barstechnology today.

#MUSIC

Music makes you smarter

Susan Rogers on the origin of common hearing disorders

Susan Rogers – Music psychology for record makers

Susan Rogers on Prince, production and perception

Educational CyberPlayGround Newsletter Science

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SCIENCE

DNAdots Biology educators and students, as well as those curious to learn more about genetics, may want to check out DNAdots, a free educational resource created by the team at miniPCR bio. DNAdots offers its visitors “bite-sized, simple explanations of modern genetic technologies,” making them excellent ways to gain a better understanding of topics such as personal genetic ancestry testing, DNA barcoding, and gene drives.

Not-for-profit publisher makes big move toward open access science. “Canadian Science Publishing (CSP)–a not-for-profit publisher of peer-reviewed STEM journals–is excited to announce a new transformative open access publishing agreement with the University of California (UC) that will offer unlimited open access publication for UC researchers publishing with its journals.

Genetics Unzipped in honor of International Women’s Day earlier this week, readers will want to check out the March 2019 episode, “Not just the wife,” which celebrates four incredible women scientists. Genetics Unzipped is a wonderful resource for science podcast fans. Dr. Kat Arney hosts the show, and her skills as an award-winning science writer shine as she “unzips” complex genetics topics for listeners outside of the field.

Personal Genetics Education Project
The Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School launched pgEd in 2006, largely in response to the expanding role of genetics in all aspects of society. The pgEd team empowers people with genetics knowledge so that they can make informed decisions in whatever ways the field affects them.

Black in Genetics
Black in Genetics is on a mission to disseminate scientific knowledge and dismantle racism within the field. The organization connects Black geneticists to employers and resources and also provides a space for conversation on advancing equity.

G3
G3 covers three important, and interrelated, topics: genes, genomes, and genetics. A project of the Genetics Society of America, the journal publishes open-access scholarship under a Creative Commons Attribution License.

Teaching Genetics with Dragons
Forget boring Punnett square diagrams and embrace the challenge of distilling complex genetics content into understandable and enjoyable lessons with some help from Teaching Genetics with Dragons. Readers can add some fire to genetics lessons with this platform that uses mythical creatures as a launching point for scientific discovery. Though dragons and genetics may not be an obvious pair, these games prove that creativity is boundless. Three games are available: Geniventure, Geniverse, and Genigames.

Lawmakers want to empower publishers to collectively negotiate with Facebook. “On the heels of a heated standoff between platforms and publishers in Australia, U.S. lawmakers reintroduced a piece of legislation that would allow the news industry to collectively negotiate content deals with tech companies.”

Facebook wants court to dismiss antitrust lawsuits. “Facebook is pushing back against antitrust lawsuits filed by the US Federal Trade Commission and 48 state attorneys general, alleging they failed to show that the social media giant illegally stifled competition and harmed consumers.”

Apple’s new privacy-label database lets you see what data its apps gather on you. “Apps are everywhere, and pretty much all of them gather data about us whenever we use them. In light of that, Apple in December began requiring app developers to list information about the data their apps gather, in an accessible privacy label. Now the company is taking things one step further, with an easily searchable database of privacy labels for Apple’s own apps.”

TIP: Microsoft is ending support for the old non-Chromium Edge. “Support for Microsoft’s Edge browser is ending today — not the new Chromium-based one, but the original Edge that was built as a replacement for Internet Explorer 11. Microsoft now calls it Legacy Edge, and the company announced it would be discontinuing the product back in August. That day has finally come: Legacy Edge will no longer receive security updates, and anyone still using it should start the process of switching to something else.”

Flaws in Apple Location Tracking System Could Lead to User Identification. “Vulnerabilities identified in offline finding (OF) — Apple’s proprietary crowd-sourced location tracking system — could be abused for user identification, researchers said in a report released this month. Introduced in 2019, the system relies on the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology for the detection of ‘lost’ devices, and on the Internet connection of so-called ‘finder’ devices to report on their location back to the owner.”

University at Buffalo computer scientists have developed a tool that automatically identifies deepfake photos by analyzing light reflections in the eyes. “The two eyes should have very similar reflective patterns because they’re seeing the same thing. It’s something that we typically don’t typically notice when we look at a face,” says Lyu, a multimedia and digital forensics expert who has testified before Congress.
The paper, “Exposing GAN-Generated Faces Using Inconsistent Corneal Specular HighlightsDownload pdf,” is available on the open access repository arXiv.