tingilinde

on trust

Certain critical parts of the Internet work on carefully vetted trust..  here's something frightening from the super-trustworthy EFF.

snip

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DarkMatter, the notorious cyber-mercenary firm based in the United Arab Emirates, is seeking to become approved as a top-level certificate authority in Mozilla’s root certificate program. Giving such a trusted position to this company would be a very bad idea. DarkMatter has a business interest in subverting encryption, and would be able to potentially decrypt any HTTPS traffic they intercepted. One of the things HTTPS is good at is protecting your private communications from snooping governments—and when governments want to snoop, they regularly hire DarkMatter to do their dirty work.

Membership in the root certificate program is the way in which Mozilla decides which certificate authorities (CAs) get to have their root certificates trusted in Firefox. Mozilla’s list of trusted root certificates is also used in many other products, including the Linux operating system.

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a tip of the hat to Greg

 

 

when people bike and walk more often

But roads and laws stay the same you get more cycling and pedestrian deaths.  It is past time to change how traffic moves in urban and even some suburban areas.  Moving towards Sweden's Vision Zero is great, but few places are taking that or even more aggressive approaches seriously.

 

 

dogs in japan

Cheaper than sending kids to college .. but not by much. (via The Washington Post)

 

the mechanics of dietary fiber

Fiber is a loose term and how it operates in the gut has been poorly studied..   that's changing.  Here's a bit on a study that looks at fiber's role in clumping things moving through the gut into dough-like balls.

 

 

the a train express

North to South from the operator's point of view .. a bit different from those Norwegian train journeys

 

on trump's mental impairments

Much has been written, but a short interview with a psychiatrist

tl;dr  He's much more dangerous than if he was just criminal.

 

 

 

the mismatch of cultural and biological evolution

A biologist's take on some of our current major problems

snip

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Biological evolution is an organic process that can never proceed more rapidly than one generation at a time, and many generations are nearly always required for any appreciable change to occur. By contrast, cultural evolution is extraordinary in its speed. Biological evolution is Darwinian, moving by the gradual substitution and accumulation of genes. Cultural evolution is Lamarckian, powered by the nongenetic “inheritance” of acquired characteristics. During a single generation, people have selectively picked up, discarded, manipulated, and transmitted cultural, social, and technological innovations that have become largely independent of any biological moorings.

In their early stages, these two processes would likely have been mutually reinforcing. Our capacity for culture is itself our most potent biological adaptation, enabling a population of weak-bodied Pleistocene primates to gain ascendancy over most of the world. At the same time, as cultural evolution proceeded and we endowed ourselves with language, impressive cognition, complex social organization, and increasingly potent technology, the ability to employ these skills to master our immediate environment almost certainly outran our biological evolution.

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small stores and fresh produce

Small stores don't get good deals on fresh produce and that can lead to food insecurity for some.  A startup is trying to take on the problem.

 

 

on the early use of the term software engineer

Margaret Hamilton and the Apollo project

snip

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I fought to bring the software legitimacy so that it—and those building it—would be given its due respect and thus I began to use the term ‘software engineering’ to distinguish it from hardware and other kinds of engineering, yet treat each type of engineering as part of the overall systems engineering process. When I first started using this phrase, it was considered to be quite amusing. It was an ongoing joke for a long time. They liked to kid me about my radical ideas. Software eventually and necessarily gained the same respect as any other discipline.

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religion for some

fast food french fry ratings..

I'll take a pass

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

on dutch cycling

An interview with the author of a book on the subject..  

It goes much deeper than just bicycles

 

 

dazzling the flies

Why zebras have stripes.

 

kitbull

the latest in the Pixar SparkShorts series..  excellent

where the republican senators stand

A variety of positions as reported by the Washington Post.  Will they stand up for the Constitution and rule of law or are they all in for Trump?

I saw the term TOAD today.   Traitors Of American Democracy  ..  new to me, but descriptive.  It has the unfortunate feature of slandering reptiles though,.

 

 

unplugging parts of the grid

The Battlestar Galactica approach to grid cybersecurity

a tip of the hat to Sukie