Medtronic's 20-year-old PB840 ventilators are workhorses, but the company has used DRM to prevent repairs by third parties. Controlling repair gives medtechs monopolist two benefits:
1. They can charge higher-than-market rates for repairs and extract "certification fees"; and
2. They can declare some units irreparable, forcing customers to junk and replace them.
1/
"This is your problem, not reality's, and the sooner you realize the happier you will be."
How the Drug War Broke Policing https://www.cato.org/blog/how-drug-war-broke-policing
An older acquaintance asked me to help her use a nonprofit website. The front page was readable to her, but any search for our local area returns results in a language she can't read.
The search algorithm thinks "a" is a suffix. It removed it, changing all searches for "Indiana" into "Indian". She was getting results from India.
I dropped their webmaster a note. PSA: please don't roll your own search algorithm if you don't have cause to.
Many Google services on Android devices and iPhones store your location data even if you’ve used a privacy setting that says it will prevent Google from doing so. Unacceptable. https://apnews.com/828aefab64d4411bac257a07c1af0ecb
I popped back onto social media after a long break, needing to touch base with some folks after my phone broke.
I learned that:
* Twitter is way too full of rage-fairy-ism. I wasn't imagining it.
* Ostatus is better, but not perfect, in this regard.
* I have too many communications channels. I forgot where to find some people, and some of mine were so disused that people started ignoring them.
* My phone is annoyingly central to my getting things done. Not entirely a SPOF, but close.
@KindlyFire Have you a favorite Nextcloud client for Android? The official is bugging out on properly modern SSL :(
Oh come on, i a tech-savvy group of people talking about cybersecurity, can we *PLEASE* stop using the words "hack", "hacked", and "hacker" to mean "compromise", "broken-into", "cybercriminal"?
It conflates government-paid professional malicious actors with a kid in a basement somewhere building a digital clock. Doesn't seem fair to the kid.
Pretty please?
https://www.wired.com/2017/08/robots-will-not-take-your-job/?imm_mid=0f58ee&cmp=em-business-na-na-newsltr_econ_20170818 is an unusually well-thought-out piece from James Surowiecki about why the robots aren't replacing us just yet.
Today I'm doing an experiment. I'm pointing out to people when they are engaged in behavior so crass and childish that I am unfollowing them. I have many people in my feed whose opinions I disagree with: this is an interesting learning exercise.
I'm done with toxic, childish people, of any ideology, who resort to name-calling, dominance games, or who denounce and insult people who probably love them and aren't here to defend themselves. I'm done with nominally-adult people having tantrums.
@HedgeMage Tell your kid he's fucking great. The not-having-to-replant thing really speaks to the lazy bum in me and i'd hate to see bees go extinct…
PSA from my awesome teenager, to anyone getting ready for fall planting in the US or Europe right now: early-blooming bulb flowers help #bees multiply and split off new hives. Read more at https://bloomingtonbees.com/2017/08/13/bee-gardens
#Hacker, #SAR geek, #martialarts practitioner. More at http://security.engineering