"Crypto art" is literally just "numbered prints, but each time I sign my name I also promise to burn down a local park." In case you are fortunate enough to have not heard about this latest con: Someone has convinced a bunch of innumerate artists that Dunning-Krugerrands are not a planet-incinerating Ponzi scheme. I've had to start blocking them on the Twits to avoid hearing about it, even ...| www.jwz.org
Their argument is, "Bitcoin is 'green' because this oil well was just going to vent all that methane into the atmosphere anyway" -- or -- "It was on fire when I got here." 'Absurd' video of bitcoin mine hooked to an oil well sparks outrage: In states like Texas, where energy regulations are laxer, natural gas by-product can be vented, intentionally releasing gases, predominately potent ...| www.jwz.org
Looking at you, Internet Archive. jackdanger: As the price goes up it's worth it for miners to spend more to mine a coin. Even if it costs them enormously in energy costs. Will they? Guaranteed. As long as someone who wants to better their finances can make a fortune destroying a common good at least one psychopath will do that. [...] What can we do? Treat Bitcoin like we (should) treat the ...| www.jwz.org
The best comment on the Signal Iran thing is from N-Gate: "A chat app based on a protocol that supports federation wants to borrow your computer instead of allowing federation."| www.jwz.org
Latacora: Stop Using Encrypted Email: Most email encryption on the Internet is performative, done as a status signal or show of solidarity. Ordinary people don't exchange email messages that any powerful adversary would bother to read, and for those people, encrypted email is LARP security. It doesn't matter whether or not these emails are safe, which is why they're encrypted so shoddily. ...| www.jwz.org
Facebook Launching Its Own Cryptocurrency: The company is "recruiting dozens of financial firms and online merchants to help launch a cryptocurrency-based payments system on the back of its gigantic social network." And the Journal suggests that the project "threatens to upend the traditional, lucrative plumbing of e-commerce and would likely be the most mainstream application yet of ...| www.jwz.org
Every now and then the Internet Archive posts some hype imploring people to donate to them in Bitcoin. Now, the Archive is a great organization, and one to whom I regularly donate actual cash money, but this is horrible and I wish they would stop. The Archive, and their Siamese twin The Long Now Foundation, are putatively about long-term thinking, but there is little in the modern world more ...| www.jwz.org
Drew DeVault: I don't trust Signal: I expect a tool which claims to be secure to actually be secure. I don't view "but that makes it harder for the average person" as an acceptable excuse. If Edward Snowden and Bruce Schneier are going to spout the virtues of the app, I expect it to actually be secure when it matters - when vulnerable people using it to encrypt sensitive communications are ...| www.jwz.org
When you install Signal, it asks for access to your contacts, and says very proudly, "we don't upload your contacts, it all stays on your phone." And then it spams all of your contacts who have Signal installed, without asking your first. And it shares your phone number with everyone in your contacts who has Signal installed. And then when you scream ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME and delete your| www.jwz.org
You may have heard that a number of local venues have decided to close down for a few weeks because of Omicron. That cannot have been an easy decision for them, especially over New Year's Eve, and I commend them on it.However, DNA Lounge will be open on New Year's Eve, featuring both Bootie and Megalodon. And if you're going out clubbing right now, DNA Lounge is probably the safest place you can go. The "if" in that sentence is admittedly doing a lot of heavy lifting. But, we have consistentl...| www.jwz.org
Not only is Signal a sketchy-as-fuck privacy-violating social network wearing "security" cosplay, now it also has a climate-incinerating Ponzi scheme bundled in. Cool, cool. Stephen Diehl: Do they think we don't see through the thinly veiled pump and dump scheme that's proposed? It's an old scam with a new face. Allegedly the controlling entity prints 250 million units of some artificially ...| www.jwz.org
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Newgrounds, a gaming forum, has some clever ways for non-intrusively complying with the shambling disaster that is the "UK Online Safety Act". For years, I've been doing something similar to this when generating internal reports on DNA Lounge demographics: e.g., if someone bought a ticket for an 18+ event 5 years ago, they must be at least 23 years old now. Newgrounds: Here is our current ...| www.jwz.org
What we need is this one simple trick: A site that scrapes, collates, and de-dups your friends' posts on every social media site, and then shows you the union of all of those posts as one feed. This is the only way to break Facebook's back: to allow your friends' transition from one social network's data silo to another to be so gradual and effortless that you don't even notice it happening. ...| www.jwz.org
Top Facebook executive defended data collection, and warned that Facebook could get people killed: So we connect more people. That can be bad if they make it negative. Maybe it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies. Maybe someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools. And still we connect people. [...] That's why all the work we do in growth is justified. All the ...| www.jwz.org
I hadn't been paying much attention to the Google "Real Names" clusterfuck, because it was so obvious to me that they were going to lose this one in the press that it would all be over soon. But it's still not over, and the Google brass appear to be digging in their heels, despite the universally bad press they're getting over it. And then the other night I had dinner with a friend which ...| www.jwz.org
Normally I just ignore navel-gazing tech-industry articles like this, but people keep sending it to me, so I guess this guy is famous or something. Michael Arrington posted this article, "Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining" which quotes extensively from my 1994 diary. He's trying to make the point that the only path to success in the software industry is to ...| www.jwz.org
As you look around for a new social media platform, I implore you, only use one that is a part of the World Wide Web. tl;dr avoid Hive and Post. If posts in a social media app do not have URLs that can be linked to and viewed in an unauthenticated browser, or if there is no way to make a new post from a browser, then that program is not a part of the World Wide Web in any meaningful way. ...| www.jwz.org
