December 2020

Thursday, 31 December 2020

Adobe Flash Player EOL General Information Page

Adobe: “[…] Adobe will stop supporting Flash Player after December 31, 2020 […] To help secure users’ systems, Adobe will block Flash content from running in Flash Player beginning January 12, 2021.”

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Another new variant of COVID-19 is spreading rapidly in South Africa

CBS: “So what happened in South Africa, in the U.K., in the United States, or Brazil, is we have been leaving this virus circulating at relatively low or high level and trying to learn to live with the virus. But maybe the virus is beginning to outsmart us.”

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Saturday, 19 December 2020

Real’ Programming Is an Elitist Myth

Paul Ford: “… when you write a web page in HTML, you are creating a data model that will be interpreted by the browser[’s virtual machine]. […] Code is a story we tell about data.”

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Friday, 18 December 2020

Your Credit Score Should Be Based on Your Web History, IMF Says

Gizmodo: “But how would all this data be incorporated into credit ratings? Machine learning, of course. It’s black boxes all the way down.” History suggests the ML algorithms will give the black boxes lower credit scores for no justifiable reason.

See also: China ‘social credit’: Beijing sets up huge system

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Wednesday, 9 December 2020

We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time

David Wallace-Wells: “… at least some of the threefold decline in COVID-19 fatality rates observed over the spring and summer, […] can be attributed to doctors no longer trying so many experimental treatments and focusing instead on the basic, old-fashioned job of simply keeping patients alive.”

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Monday, 7 December 2020

An iOS zero-click radio proximity exploit odyssey

Ian Beer: “… it’s important to emphasize up front that the teams and companies supplying the global trade in cyberweapons like this one aren’t typically just individuals working alone. They’re well-resourced and focused teams of collaborating experts, each with their own specialization.”

Their budget is higher than your revenue. - Rob Rodgers

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Sunday, 6 December 2020

The West Gave Up On Wiping Out Covid — And That Was Its Big Mistake

Umair Haque: “In the West, social and political elites didn’t take the stance of wanting to eradicate Covid, to reduce cases to zero. And so what was there for the average person to cooperate with? The average person, who appears by now to the rest of the world to be a clueless, selfish dummy, was confused, baffled. What were the lockdowns for?”

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Wednesday, 2 December 2020

Scott Atlas will forever be the face of surrender to the coronavirus

Philip Bump: “Only one part of Atlas’s three-part approach to combating the pandemic was actually enacted. That, unfortunately, was the part where Atlas shrugged at the spread of the virus itself.”

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