tingilinde

happy crows

Using tools appears to make them happy.

 

 

very neat - 2d polymer knitting and unknitting

In a very high and localized electric field. One of those wow - cool! results  (for sciency types only)

 

 

water

too much or too little is problematic. Global warming brings local climate change that can produce either extreme - or both ..  

High water on the Great Lakes (via The New York Times)

 

 

climate change in the italian alps

Change is clearly underway.  (via The Washington Post)

 

 

seen on a t-shirt

 

What is your best skill?

Hindsight.

That doesn’t seem very useful.

Yes I see that now.

 

 

 

useless information

State capitol domes 

at least a diversion from the Trump swamp

a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

 

 

google and tracking protection

Researchers at Princeton comment on Google's excuses for Chrome's lack of privacy protections.

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Blocking cookies is bad for privacy. That’s the new disingenuous argument from Google, trying to justify why Chrome is so far behind Safari and Firefox in offering privacy protections. As researchers who have spent over a decade studying web tracking and online advertising, we want to set the record straight.

Our high-level points are:

1) Cookie blocking does not undermine web privacy. Google’s claim to the contrary is privacy gaslighting.

2) There is little trustworthy evidence on the comparative value of tracking-based advertising.

3) Google has not devised an innovative way to balance privacy and advertising; it is latching onto prior approaches that it previously disclaimed as impractical.

4) Google is attempting a punt to the web standardization process, which will at best result in years of delay.

...

In closing, we want to emphasize that the Chrome team is full of smart engineers passionate about protecting their users, and it has done incredible work on web security. But it is unlikely that Google can provide meaningful web privacy while protecting its business interests, and Chrome continues to fall far behind Safari and Firefox. We find this passage from Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism to be apt:

“Demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the internet is like asking old Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck, or a cow to give up chewing. These demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival.”

It is disappointing—but regrettably unsurprising—that the Chrome team is cloaking Google’s business priorities in disingenuous technical arguments.

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memories

why do some last and others fade quickly?  Some interesting new work.

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Gonzalez explains: "Imagine you have a long and complicated story to tell. In order to preserve the story, you could tell it to five of your friends and then occasionally get together with all of them to re-tell the story and help each other fill in any gaps that an individual had forgotten. Additionally, each time you re-tell the story, you could bring new friends to learn and therefore help preserve it and strengthen the memory. In an analogous way, your own neurons help each other out to encode memories that will persist over time."

...

 

the new telco robocall agreement

Guess what?  It's toothless and mostly meaningless.

 

 

occupational leanings

truckers are solidly Republican - in a recession they'll do poorly.

some interesting bits

not many Republican astrophysicists

 

 

 

a psychiatrist on trump's mental state

begins around the three minute mark

 

1619 podcast is live

The podcast companion to the terrific NY Times 1619 Project is live. 

 

yield curve control

We've been hearing a lot about the yield curve and what it might foretell - but what about yield curve control?  A discussion from the Brookings Institute.

 

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In normal times, the Fed steers the economy by raising or lowering very short-term interest rates, such as the rate that banks earn on their overnight deposits. Under yield curve control (YCC), the Fed would target some longer-term rate and stand ready to buy long-term bonds to keep the rate from rising above its target. This would be one way for the Fed to stimulate the economy if bringing short-term rates to zero isn’t enough. Current Fed Governors Richard Clarida and Lael Brainard have both said the Fed ought to consider adopting YCC, as have former Fed chairs Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen.

Yield curve control is different in one major respect from QE, the trillions of dollars in bond-buying that the Fed pursued during the Great Recession. QE deals in quantities of bonds; YCC focuses on prices of bonds. Under QE, a central bank might announce that it plans to purchase, for instance, $1 trillion in Treasury securities. Because bond prices are inversely related to their yields, buying bonds and pushing up their price leads to lower longer-term rates.

Under YCC, the central bank commits to buy whatever amount of bonds the market wants to supply at its target price. Once bond markets internalize the central bank’s commitment, the target price becomes the market price—who would be willing to sell the bond to a private investor for less than they could get by selling to the Fed?

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

a non-technical discussion of new crypto techniques to counter the rise of quantum computing attacks

Viable quantum computing attacks on cryptography are still in the future, but people realize it's coming and are working on counter measures.  A nice non-technical piece in Science. 

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A full-fledged quantum computer is still years, if not decades, away. But developers have long thought that its killer app will be decoding encrypted messages on the internet and elsewhere, be they state secrets or personal information. That prospect has galvanized cryptographers. At a meeting this week in Santa Barbara, California, they will discuss nearly two dozen schemes for encrypting messages in ways that even quantum computers cannot crack.

The workshop is part of a push by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to set standards for so-called postquantum cryptography. The multiyear effort may sound premature and a bit paranoid, as such a quantum computer may never exist. But cryptographers say now is the time to prepare, especially because anybody could record sensitive communications now and decipher them later. “If you wait until we have a quantum computer it’s too late,” says Tanja Lange, a cryptographer at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. “Every day that we don’t have postquantum cryptography is a day the data is leaked.”

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a tip of the hat to Sukie

 

user privacy and apple

An EFF piece on Apple's new WedKit  privacy policy.  

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Ever since mid-2017, Apple has been tackling web tracking in a big way. Various iterations of its Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) technology have been introduced over the past few years in WebKit, the browser engine for Safari. ITP already protects users from tracking in various ways, but it left open a number of questions about the guidelines it uses to determine just who Apple considers a tracker, and what behavior is indicative of tracking. Last week, Apple answered these questions with its WebKit Tracking Prevention Policy, which also includes an extraordinary and newsworthy clause:

We treat circumvention of shipping anti-tracking measures with the same seriousness as exploitation of security vulnerabilities.

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