Notices by John Mark Ockerbloom (jmarkockerbloom@mastodon.social)

Nearly 1000 Yale faculty so far have signed a letter to the university's administration urging it to stand firm against "extraordinary attacks that threaten the bedrock principles of a democratic society, including rights of free expression, association, and academic freedom". The last of the 6 actions urged in the letter is to "work purposefully and proactively with other colleges and universities in collective defense". https://sites.google.com/view/yalefacultyletter2025/home #HigherEd #USPol

Our library has access to a book published by Springer, _Advanced Nanovaccines for Cancer Immunotherapy: Harnessing Nanotechnology for Anti-Cancer Immunity_. Credited to Nanasaheb Thorat, it sells for $160 in hardcover: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-86185-7

From page 25: "It is important to note that as an AI language model, I can provide a general perspective, but you should consult with medical professionals for personalized advice..."

None of this book can be considered trustworthy.

(h/t @peterpur )

The first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau, was established on March 22, 1933, just under 2 months after Hitler was named chancellor. It had an initial capacity of 5000 prisoners. Historians estimate that at least 40,000 people died there by the end of World War II: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/dachau.

9 days after inauguration, Trump announced intentions to send as many as 30,000 prisoners to Guantanamo Bay, which has previously never imprisoned more than 1000: https://apnews.com/article/guantanamo-bay-detention-migrants-what-to-know-trump-d027c5c24b523f31a62271dcbe7c010e

One reason we avoided the "connected cars" when we had to replace ours recently: Subaru's Starlink had a huge ineffectively secured backdoor that let anyone with a license plate and last name of a Subaru owner remotely unlock and start the car (and also get various personal information, including everywhere the car had been driven to in the past year). Here's a report from someone who found and reported the vulnerability (which has now been closed): https://samcurry.net/hacking-subaru

@inthehands Not only is email not technically designed for E2E, it's not really socially designed for it. Given that email addresses get shared with various people and organizations, and they're common vectors for spam, phishing, and the like, I'd assume most email users *want* their ISP to be able to scan and filter that stuff out, rather than try to do it themselves. But that means it can't be E2E, and the users have to have a certain level of trust in their ISP.

@photomatt Speking as one person who's been a paying wordpress.com customer for years, I've never had any confusion knowing WP Engine is distinct from Wordpress.com and Wordpress the open source software. I *am* now concerned about the viability and reliability of the platform that your company maintains and that I pay for. However, my concerns are based not on their actions, but on yours.

@publicdomainrev @pdimagearchive Looks very cool! I'm curious about the underlying software you're using for the platform. Is it something you've acquired, or something you've developed?

@pbinkley Thanks for this! This article is in the public domain (in the US at least). Here's a link to a non-paywalled scan: https://archive.org/details/sim_american-library-assoc-ala-bulletin_1936-06_30_6/page/495/mode/1up

@ntnsndr Stallman didn't create Emacs; there were already a number of versions of it when he started the GNU version. The most prominent predecessor was written primarily by James Gosling at CMU. (The Emacs editors grew out of an earlier line-oriented editor called Teco, which a number of people including Stallman had created macro packages for. Vim is the product of a different evolutionary line of editors that grew out of the line editor "ed".) More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs.

@LordCaramac That may depend on how you get active. I'm also a white nerd, and do some editing of articles that are of interest to me, but I also try to keep an eye out for what's going on with topics not on my usual beat and editors who don't resemble me, and try to make the Wikipedia environment more amenable to them.

(E.g., there are ways to watch for articles in danger of deletion because the usual demographics don't know much about them, and are more likely to consider them "non-notable".)

More than funds, what Wikipedia really needs is more good editors. The number of people who regularly edit articles in English Wikipedia hasn't grown substantially in years, while the number of articles has, and editor demographics remains skewed. The foundation itself largely stays away from editing, leaving it to volunteers. While articles that get a lot of attention are often good, it's not hard to find ones with biased and promotional content in less-visited topics, and in other languages.

@ryanc At least as stated, couldn't they use "that commentary violates our Guidelines" to sanction a harasser under their rules? There's nothing in the statement that says the commentary has to be on Bluesky itself.

While the book publishers' suit against the Internet Archive has ended, the record labels' suit against them continues. Some recent docs remain paywalled on PACER, but from opened filings we learn:

- mediation in September didn't result in an agreement
- defendants are opposing discovery requests for all their recordings, Brewster Kahle's and George Blood's personal finances, and all statements IA folks have made on copyright
- a jury trial is scheduled for July 2026

https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/68101636/umg-recordings-inc-v-internet-archive/?filed_after=&filed_before=&entry_gte=&entry_lte=&order_by=desc

I've been overdue in splitting off my personal email from my work email, in part due to dithering over what privacy-respecting paid provider to go with. But I recall Proton and Fastmail looking appealing last time I looked.

Proton seems to now be wandering off into dubious LLM and crypto schemes, so I'm leaning towards Fastmail. If you use it, how's your experience been? Does it work well with Thunderbird and IMAP? Custom domains? How well does it deal with spam? What else should I know?

One writer's experience with AI summarizers: "ChatGPT isn’t summarising at all, it only looks like it. What it does is something else and that something else only becomes summarising in very specific circumstances." (Depending on the text, the training sets, and parameters, the writer notes it condensing the text without regard to its most salient points, recycling others' summaries of the same or similar texts, or fabricating details when asked for more information.) https://ea.rna.nl/2024/05/27/when-chatgpt-summarises-it-actually-does-nothing-of-the-kind/

@ntnsndr Going with the elected holder of the office already designated as the replacement for an incumbent president?

@inthehands Last I recall, Delta at least would try to seat minor children with their parents, even if they didn't pay to select seats. (I'm not sure if they still do this-- our kids are no longer minors-- or if other airlines also do this, since for the destinations for our all-family visits Delta was the only practical airline to take.)

@dangillmor This just crossed my timeline just before I saw your post. Might fit the bill: https://werd.io/2024/share-openly

@ntnsndr Glad to see (and also glad that the full run of Zygon back to 1966 is free to read online! I cataloged it a few weeks ago.)

"In relaunching Communications of the ACM as an open access publication, all legacy and future CACM articles will be freely available to and accessible by everyone on the CACM website and in the ACM Digital Library." https://www.acm.org/media-center/2024/march/cacm-relaunch Here's the full issue archive: https://dl.acm.org/loi/cacm