đź”— Articles: Saturday 06.Apr.2024
The Atlantic: Gary Shteyngart: Crying Myself to Sleep on the Icon of the Seas
My first glimpse of Royal Caribbean’s Icon of the Seas, from the window of an approaching Miami cab, brings on a feeling of vertigo, nausea, amazement, and distress. I shut my eyes in defense, as my brain tells my optical nerve to try again.
The ship makes no sense, vertically or horizontally. It makes no sense on sea, or on land, or in outer space. It looks like a hodgepodge of domes and minarets, tubes and canopies, like Istanbul had it been designed by idiots. Vibrant, oversignifying colors are stacked upon other such colors, decks perched over still more decks; the only comfort is a row of lifeboats ringing its perimeter. There is no imposed order, no cogent thought, and, for those who do not harbor a totalitarian sense of gigantomania, no visual mercy. This is the biggest cruise ship ever built, and I have been tasked with witnessing its inaugural voyage.
According to the Cambridge dictionary, “pendejo” has multiple meanings, none of them complimentary. Less-contemptuous ones are “snotty-nosed kid” or “wastrel”.
Guardian: One engineer’s curiosity may have saved us from a devastating cyber-attack
On Good Friday, a Microsoft engineer named Andres Freund noticed something peculiar. He was using a software tool called SSH for securely logging into remote computers on the internet, but the interactions with the distant machines were significantly slower than usual. So he did some digging and found malicious code embedded in a software package called XZ Utils that was running on his machine. This is a critical utility for compressing (and decompressing) data running on the Linux operating system, the OS that powers the vast majority of publicly accessible internet servers across the world. Which means that every such machine is running XZ Utils.
Freund’s digging revealed that the malicious code had arrived in his machine via two recent updates to XZ Utils, and he alerted the Open Source Security list to reveal that those updates were the result of someone intentionally planting a backdoor in the compression software. It was what is called a “supply-chain attack” (like the catastrophic SolarWinds one of 2020) — where malicious software is not directly injected into targeted machines, but distributed by infecting the regular software updates to which all computer users are wearily accustomed. If you want to get malware out there, infecting the supply chain is the smart way to do it.
Molly White (YouTube): Become a Wikipedian in 30 minutes
Have you ever wanted to learn to edit Wikipedia, but got overwhelmed? This video will help you get started contributing to one of the best projects on the web.
â–ş Create an account: en.wikipedia.org/w/index.p…
â–ş Reliable sources guideline: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki…
â–ş Perennial sources: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki…
â–ş Task center: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki…
â–ş Introduction pages: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Help…
â–ş Teahouse: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki…Molly White is a researcher, software engineer, and long-time Wikipedia editor. She is best known for her website, Web3 is Going Just Great, and for her Citation Needed newsletter.
Wojciech Domski Blog: On-screen Display with Raspberry Pi Pico
For quite some time, I was curious about the on-screen displays (OSDs). It is a piece of equipment which enables you to put some text or graphics directly on a video stream. I am going to present you my solution for this device and, most importantly, why it is useful. The project was based on the RP2040 microcontroller which can be found on a very popular platform, Raspberry Pi Pico.
Though not a crime scene, the situation was grim. The bedside table littered with supplements and pharmaceuticals, tea-stained yet unread books and several half-drunk cups of tea. A chest of drawers, with little in them, covered by knick-knacks: tiny sculptures, favourite pebbles, pointless bowls – all somehow sentimental but sitting under layers of dust. A second chest of drawers doing nothing to quell the mountain of clothing that permanently resides on the floor. Getting to the uninhabited square metre of space that is, in theory, a bed, requires some quite specific gymnastics – physical and mental.
Last Updated: 06.Apr.2024 23:59 EDT