Internet Salmagundi

The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America.

Sophie Zhang, a former data scientist at Facebook, revealed that it enables global political manipulation and has done little to stop it.

The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem. [Not because he doesn’t want to, but because he is not allowed to as it would get in the way of profits.]

One of the biggest sources of climate uncertainty is how clouds will behave. Caltech physicist Tapio Schneider is trying to give us some answers.

Although this seems like a very tedious prolonged process, we know that it takes less than seconds for a web page to render after we hit enter on our keyboard. All of these steps happen within milliseconds before we could even notice.

Maybe you’re in the camp of people who worry that these companies have too much access to our purchases, our movements, our social networks—and perhaps even our thoughts. Maybe you’re disturbed by the concentration of so much economic power in a handful of companies built on the West Coast’s fault lines. Or maybe you want them to have less insight into your life so they have less sway over our society. But how? How do you reduce their power? Is it even possible?
The common retort to these concerns is that you should “just stop using their services.” So I decided to try.

China has increasingly relied on contractors for its hacking, which opens the door to all kinds of criminal behavior.

The full extent of the SolarWinds hack and Hafnium’s attack on Microsoft Exchange Server may never be known.

A single group appears to have infiltrated tens of thousands of Microsoft Exchange servers in an ongoing onslaught.

The hackers posed as recruiters, journalists, and hospitality workers to lure their victims.

This paper provides Microsoft’s recommendations for password management based on current research and lessons from our own experience as one of the largest Identity Providers (IdPs) in the world. It covers recommendations for end users and identity administrators.

As the Signal protocol becomes the industry standard, it’s worth understanding what sets it apart from other forms of end-to-end encrypted messaging.

F.B. Purity is a browser extension / add-on that lets you clean up and customise Facebook. It filters out the junk you don’t want to see, leaving behind the stories and page elements you do wish to see. The list of story types that FBP hides is customizable to your taste.

At WPBeginner, our main goal is to provide cutting-edge helpful WordPress tutorials that are easy to understand for small businesses, bloggers, and non-techy WordPress website owners.

The Firefox 70 Accessibility Inspector is an auditing facility to help identify and fix many common mistakes and practices to help improve site accessibility.

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet. It was launched in 2001 by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, California, United States.

Automation is putting process into code. A bullet list in a process document is code if it is treated that way.

Nielsen Norman Group, January 17, 2016
Writing for the Web
By Hoa Loranger

“Summary: The right words can make or break trust; they affect your tone of voice and how people perceive your site.”

It’s time to reverse a century of fire-management policy. That will require sweeping regulatory reforms, and tons of money.

It is now normal for each Summer to in one way or another be hotter than the one prior. As a result there will be remarkable occurrences a few of which I’m cataloguing here.

A large number of fires were started by lightning strikes in California over the weekend of August 15-16, 2020. They resulted from a storm system that moved along the coast of California and produced copious amounts of dry lightning through primarily northern California around the greater San Fransisco Bay area. I’m including a number of articles, imagery and videos to document the resulting series of fires and the impact the resulting smoke has had on the upper western United States.

Big and Little Cottonwood Canyon roads carve between steep mountains that are prone to avalanches in the winter. In fact, 57% of the 9-mile Little Cottonwood Canyon Road is in an avalanche runout zone. Still, recreationalists, residents, and canyon employees need to transport themselves up and down these canyons regularly and as safely as possible.

“Originally, we looked at social media very much as another way of disseminating the forecast,” said Ethan Greene, director of the CAIC. “We still do that, but have been using it more to engage people and try to get out information about current conditions as well as broader education out to people. It’s been a good way for people to ask questions, and we’ve done our best to address those questions.”

Residents in the Tennessee Valley are cleaning up after a long-lived line of thunderstorms, known as a derecho, brought severe wind gusts on Sunday. The intense storms caused straight-line wind damage along a path that stretched for more than 600 miles.

Mural Fest celebrates urban beautification and artistic talent using the powerful tool of public art. The visual impact of bold, creative designs embodies the energy of the innovative businesses and creative communities in the Creative Industries Zone.

In the style of Banksy.