Mahmoud

A few years ago, back when Matrix was originally implementing end-to-end encryption, we asked Moxie (the project lead for Signal) whether he’d ever consider connecting Signal (then TextSecure) to Matrix. After all, one of Matrix’s goals is to be an interoperability layer between other communication silos, and one of the reasons for us using Signal’s Double Ratchet Algorithm for Matrix’s encryption was to increase our chances of one day connecting with other apps using the same algorithm (Signal, WhatsApp, Google Allo, Skype, etc). Moxie politely declined, and then a few months later wrote “The ecosystem is moving” to elaborate his thoughts on why he feels he “no longer believes that it is possible to build a competitive federated messenger at all.”

At the time we didn’t respond via a blog post; instead we ended up talking it through a few times in person to see how misaligned we really were. The conclusion was that we agreed to disagree and Moxie said he’d be happy to be proved wrong, and wished us good luck. However, the subject has come up again thanks to Moxie’s talk on the same subject at 36C3 last week, and we keep getting asked to write a formal response on the Matrix side. So, here’s an attempt to do so. (Moxie didn’t want the 36C3 talk recorded, and I haven’t watched it, so this is responding to the original blog post).

From my perspective, the main points proposed in ‘The ecosystem is moving’ boil down to:

• Decentralised systems are harder to design and build than centralised ones, as coordination is harder if you don’t have a single authority to trust.

• Decentralised systems are harder and slower to evolve than centralised ones, as you can’t force participants to rapidly roll out (or even agree on) new features.

• Users in federated systems tend to coalesce around the best/biggest server that the bulk of people use - which means that server typically gets to see a disproportionate amount of communication metadata (who’s talking to who, and when), and has disproportionate power over the network, which could bully others away from running their own deployments.

• If users don’t trust their app provider, they can always go switch apps, which gives them freedom.

• Open systems are less secure because you have no control over the quality of the implementations - if anyone can bring their own client or server to the table, all it takes is one bad implementation to compromise everyone in the vicinity.

Now, all of these points are valid to some extent.

It’s absolutely true that decentralised systems are harder than centralised ones. Prior to Matrix we built centralised comms systems - we literally can do a side-by-side comparison for the same team to see how easily and fast we built our centralised comms system relative to Matrix. Empirically It took us around 6 times longer to get to the same feature-set with Matrix.

It’s also true that decentralised systems are harder to evolve than centralised ones - you can’t just push out a given feature with a single app update, but you have to agree and publish a public spec, support incremental migration, and build governance processes and community dynamics which encourage everyone to implement and upgrade. This is hard, but not impossible: we’ve spent loads of time and money on Matrix’s governance model and spec process to get it right. It’s still not perfect, but we haven’t seen much fragmentation so far, and when we’re pushing out a feature empirically we can and do go just as fast as the centralised alternatives. (E2E by default is a bit of a special case because we’ve had to go and reimplement many features users take for granted today in an E2E-capable manner, but we’re sprinting to get it done in the coming weeks). A bigger problem is that there are hundreds of spec change proposals which folks would like to see in the protocol, and finding a way to manage expectations and parallelise spec progress is hard - something we’re looking to improve in 2020 (although still figuring out how!)

It’s also fair that in a multi-server federated model, users naturally tend to sign up on the most prominent server(s) (e.g. the matrix.org homeserver in the case of Matrix). In practice, the matrix.org homeserver currently makes up about 35% of the visible Matrix network by active users. It’s also true that Matrix servers currently store metadata about who’s talking to who, and when, as a side-effect of storing and relaying messages on behalf of their users. And without an adequate protocol governance system in place, a large server could start pushing around smaller ones in terms of protocol behaviour. In practice, we’re looking into solving metadata protection in Matrix by experimenting with hybrid P2P / Client Server models - letting users store their metadata purely clientside if they so desire, and potentially obfuscating who’s talking to who via mixnets of blinded store & forward servers (more about this coming up at FOSDEM). Combined with nomadic accounts, this would let us eventually turn off the matrix.org server entirely and eliminate the pseudo-centralisation effect - the default ‘server’ would be the one running on your client.

It’s true that if a user doesn’t trust (say) Telegram, they are free to go switch to Signal or WhatsApp or whatever instead… at the massive expense of having to persuade all their friends to install yet another app, and fragmenting their conversation history across multiple apps.

Finally, it’s also true that because anyone can develop a Matrix client or server and connect to the global network, there’s a risk of bad quality implementations in the wild. There are many forks of Riot on the app stores - we simply can’t vouch for whether they are secure. Similarly there are Matrix clients whose E2E encryption is partial, missing, or unreviewed. And there are a wide range of different Matrix servers run by different people with different agendas in different locations, which may be more or less trustworthy.

HOWEVER: all of this completely ignores one critical thing - the value of freedom. Freedom to select which server to use. Freedom to run your own server (perhaps invisibly in your app, in a P2P world). Freedom to pick which country your server runs in. Freedom to select how much metadata and history to keep. Freedom to choose which apps to use - while still having the freedom to talk to anyone you like (without them necessarily installing yet another app). Freedom to connect your own functionality - bots, bridges, integrations etc. Freedom to select which identifiers (if any) to use to register your account. Freedom to extend the protocol. Freedom to write your own client, or build whole new as-yet-unimagined systems on top.

It’s true that if you’re writing a messaging app optimised for privacy at any cost, Moxie’s approach is one way to do it. However, this ends up being a perversely closed world - a closed network, where unofficial clients are banned, with no platform to build on, no open standards, and you end up thoroughly putting all your eggs in one basket, trusting past, present & future Signal to retain its values, stay up and somehow dodge compromise & censorship… despite probably being the single highest value attack target on the ‘net.

Quite simply, that isn’t a world I want to live in.

We owe the entire success of the Internet (let alone the Web) to openness, interoperability and decentralisation. To declare that openness, interoperability and decentralisation is ‘too hard’ and not worth the effort when building a messaging solution is to throw away all the potential of the vibrancy, creativity and innovation that comes from an open network. Sure, you may end up with a super-private messaging app - but one that starts to smell alarmingly like a walled garden like Facebook’s Internet.org initiative, or an AOL keyword, or Google’s AMP.

So, we continue to gladly take up Moxie’s challenge to prove him wrong - to show that it’s both possible and imperative to create an open decentralised messaging platform which (if you use reputable apps and servers) can be as secure and metadata-protecting as Signal… and indeed more so, given you can run your server off the grid, and don’t need to register with a phone number, and in future may not even need a server at all.

--Matthew

(Comments over at HN)

"Presentism": a term for trying to judge people in the past by the moral standards of today.

source: Moon of Alabama

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Read the full article on theworstthingsforsale.com.

Read the full article on theworstthingsforsale.com.

One of the most curious ongoing piracy cases in the world right now involves popular YouTuber Bill Omar Carrasquillo, aka OMI IN A HELLCAT.

In November 2019, the apparently mega-rich founder of pirate IPTV service Gears TV and Gears Reloaded took to YouTube to declare that he’d been raided by FBI and IRS agents who took pretty much everything he had.

A fleet of supercars and at least $5m in funds from his bank accounts were among the haul, he claimed, assertions that he later repeated in several YouTube videos and even a TV interview with CBS News.

But while most people involved in copyright and tax evasion matters tend to remain tight-lipped while their cases are ongoing, Carrasquillo is taking the opposite approach. For reasons best known to him, he’s talking about his problems and history every week, giving additional details that previously hadn’t been in the public eye.

An interview with fellow YouTube channel ‘Say Cheese TV‘ this week has only poured more fuel on the fire, with Carrasquillo revealing that he got into piracy after an unpleasant experience that ended his previously-rumored drug-dealing days.

“I got into this little altercation where I got robbed. That’s the last time I ever sold drugs, on July 4, 2014. I and I said ‘you know what, fuck this’, I ain’t never gonna sell drugs again,” he said.

After this experience, OMI said he went through a few weeks of depression but then a couple of months later a thought popped into his head as a way to make money – Firestick.

“Once that Firestick popped in my head I was like, ‘You know what, I was broke before and I sold DVDs’,” he said.

Noting that the plastic discs are now more or less obsolete, he says he wanted to find a way to deliver content to people digitally – while making some money of course.

“I gotta find a way to put digital movies onto a stick and that’s how it started. Back when Kodi was poppin’ I was one of the first ones doing Kodi sticks and that’s how I started making a lot of money. Buying these boxes from Amazon already pre-loaded and just re-selling them for more money. I’d buy them for $50 and sell them for $120-$150 and that’s how it started,” he told Say Cheese.

At the time OMI says he had 10-15 ‘bands’ ($10-$15,000) put aside in savings but the Firestick business gained traction and quickly brought in a lot more money.

“I first called my brother I said, ‘You know, I’m making five bands [$5,000] a week. And he said, ‘You ain’t making no five bands a week’. I said ‘I swear to God, off these Firestick things’.”

Then according to Carrasquillo, the business began to skyrocket.

“Two months later I’m making $15,000, then a month later – three months later, I’m making $30,000 a week, then $40,000 a week, then $100,000 a week. Damn, $200,000 a week, $300,000 a week, $400,000 a week. I thought, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?”

After just 12 months the big milestone was reached.

“I became a millionaire after a year,” OMI said. “I did good, made a couple of million. But 2017 to 2018? My God.”

What’s important to note here is that OMI says he didn’t get rich by selling Firesticks to individuals, one by one, piece by piece. The business of selling pre-loaded sticks was only a prelude to his major cash generator – the launch of his own pirate IPTV service.

“What happened was I made these apps, I made an app called Gears TV. If you ever watched anything with a Gears TV app on it, that was mine. The app sold for about a year and a half, two years ago,” he said.

“So I’m living my regular life. Now I’m making a couple of hundred ‘bands’ [$200k] every day, every other day. I don’t want to get into specific details about how much money I’m making because I’m still fighting this case. But I’m seeing [millions]. Like too many millions.”

The key is that OMI wasn’t making millions simply from selling an app. He doesn’t go into huge detail during his interviews but it’s clear that the users of the Gears app also required a recurring subscription, which meant that money was coming in all the time through resellers of the service.

“They’re buying but these people that I sold the app to still have to pay me my bread. So everything they’re making off that app, they got to fork it over. Cos I was selling the app for 40 ‘M’s….to a couple of people….to a group.”

By any standard, the amounts being discussed here are considerable, especially in the light of a supposed ongoing copyright infringement and tax evasion investigation. But of course, there will still be people out there thinking they’d like a piece of that action, a point not lost on Say Cheese who asked if Carrasquillo had any tips for fans thinking of starting up a similar service.

“Listen, what I did – it takes hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars of infrastructure to do what I did. I started with the slow grind and I got to where I got to. But trust me, where we was at in 2014, 2015, 2016, you would never get to that point now,” he responded.

“The Feds are trying to cut down every streaming app – and streaming ain’t illegal. Illegal was the movies. You can’t host movies, that’s the illegal part. That’s why I think they’re having such a hard time with this case, it’s because I wasn’t fucking with movies. It was a straight streaming app, I wasn’t stealing channels, I was paying for my cable boxes, I was paying for my cable service.

“And that’s why I’m so comfortable talking about it. They know. They took all the cable boxes out of all my houses that they hit, they took all the video encoders. Encoders are like capture cards. I basically made a Twitch network, private, with all channels for $10-$15 per month. I had a ton of subscribers, I don’t want to talk about how many subscribers I had, it’s up to them [the FBI/IRS] to figure it out.”

OMI also revealed that during a recent flight back from the Dominican Republic, the Feds were actually on the plane with him. He said he was joking around but in one of his videos there was an agent sitting next to him “the whole time.”

But despite having “pretty much everything” taken from him in November, Carrasquillo can be seen ‘buying’ yet more new cars in his latest YouTube videos. This, he says, is a result of the revenue he’s generating from his YouTube content, which he claims is currently around $50,000 per month – with a potential for more.

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Not a metaphor.

More than 200 lawyers wielding sticks stormed Lahore's Punjab Institute of Cardiology at midday on Wednesday. Hospital officials said the lawyers forced their way past security and split into groups, attacking various departments and wards. [...]

There has been simmering anger among young lawyers since 20 November when half a dozen of them accompanied a colleague to the hospital for the treatment of his sick mother, says the BBC's M Ilyas Khan in Islamabad. There they got into an argument with hospital staff and a doctor on duty, leading to a fierce fist fight in which the lawyers were outnumbered by the hospital staff. Both sides filed police complaints against each other but no arrests were made.

The lawyers said they were avenging an attack in November by doctors and staff of the hospital, after the lawyers demanded preferential treatment.

Some of the lawyers involved in Wednesday's attack said they were moved to act by a viral video by one of the doctors, who mocked and ridiculed them through reciting poetry and belittling remarks. [...] "Look at the sea of lawyers, doctor," the lawyer said in a bombastic tone. "Today, we will insert stents in the doctors." [...]

In recent years, lawyers in Pakistan have not shied from resorting to violence and taking the law into their hands. Lawyers have attacked judges over disagreements during court hearings. Clashes with police are frequent.

Previously, previously, previously.

We deployed a team of activists wearing jumpsuits with phone strapped to their heads conducting live facial recognition surveillance in the halls of Congress, to show why this tech should be banned.

Using Amazon's commercially available Rekognition software -- running on smartphones strapped to our heads -- our team ran 13,732 biometric face scans in Washington, DC. By comparing live footage against a database we had assembled, the system successfully identified a member of Congress in real time: Representative Mark DeSaulnier of California.

Amazon's facial recognition software also thought that it had identified 7 journalists and 25 Amazon lobbyists that we had pre-loaded into the database. But all of those matches turned out to be incorrect. The software even thought that it spotted singer Roy Orbison who of course has been deceased since 1988 (RIP).

This underscores our message: facial recognition is invasive and dangerous when it works, but it's also dangerous when it doesn't work. In our case, it's easy to laugh when the software thinks a member of our team is an Amazon lobbyist, or when it thinks a random staffer is a prominent journalist. But law enforcement agencies are using flawed facial recognition software right now -- and the potential harm of a mismatch is staggering. It could land an innocent person in prison, or worse. And current facial recognition algorithms exhibit systemic racial bias, exacerbating existing forms of discrimination in our criminal justice system. [...]

After several hours of scanning thousands of faces, our team of activists were approached by Capitol Hill police and threatened with arrest if they did not leave the Capitol grounds. They were thrown out not because they were using facial recognition surveillance -- that's perfectly legal until Congress gets off their butts and passes laws to ban it -- but because police claimed they were violating a law against blocking passageways. Of course, they weren't blocking passageways and we have the whole thing on video to prove it. It seems that Congress thinks facial recognition surveillance is just fine as long as its used on all of us but not them.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Funny:  I’m publishing this on December 18th, the same date I posted about the first few months of my new life in San Francisco.  I indeed made it to Laguna Seca and Infineon (now Sonoma Raceway);  CA-35 and CA-84 are still my second home.  The fact that Caltrain is still - still – diesel and not electric still bothers me.  The IKEA furniture I bought at the start of the decade is still with me.  I’m still in SoMa not far from Townsend Street.

I’m about to move on from the last part.  2020 will take me to a new address and it won’t be in San Francisco.

When Ashley wrote about her year in New York, I felt like ten years in San Francisco probably deserves some words. On the other hand, “Why I’m Leaving San Francisco” posts are already in vast oversupply. I don’t have anything unique to add there. Instead, I’m trying to think of this as “Not Why I’m Leaving San Francisco.” So, take a look.

It’s Not Money

I’m lucky that I get to choose to live pretty much wherever I want. I have no rent control, but I’m okay spending money to live in a place I like. My rent doubled since I moved here, but I am fortunate to have few obligations in my life – no kids being the operative one in this situation, but also no debt and no need to work in an office every day. Not everyone is so lucky, and I wish the city could be more affordable to the folks who have families to take care of or debts to pay, among other obligations, if they want to live here.

It’s Not The Streets

I don’t see any reason to re-hash what’s happening on the sidewalks. It’s a complete failure of politics at several levels. That’s maybe the only exception to the next topic:

It’s Not The Politics

I have long since learned that I can’t agree with everyone around me on everything. It’s hard because I naturally seek consensus. I hate to watch the city shoot itself in the foot at every available opportunity, but I also am at peace with the fact that I have done what I can.

okay so what is it then kiel

It’s The Scarcity – Real and Manufactured

I thought about saying “it’s the people.” Considering how many friends I’ve made here, I was shocked by this conclusion and eventually walked it back. The language here betrays the meaning: it’s _some_ of the people. Just as it only takes a small number of toxic people to bring down a team in sports, or at work, or in anything, it only takes a few truly repugnant folks to ruin a city.

I can’t find any one persona that sums it up, either, which is maybe why it’s so hard to deal with. The common thread is instead an attribute found – pretty randomly distributed, to my perception – across a plethora of San Francisco archetypes: scarcity.

And that attribute can be related back to each of the typical reasons folks are bailing out: money, the condition of the streets, the voraciousness and ultimate ineptitude of the politics. The way people act when the things they need are scarce is very different and very unpleasant.

All of that leads to a lot of selfishness. It’s sort of amazing that a place that prides itself on being the origin, and to some the ongoing home, of counterculture can manage to distill and concentrate the attribute that makes our nation, and perhaps mankind, a bit of a disappointment.

Competition can be sporting and make us all better. But when the winner takes all, competition can show that darkness is inside all of us. So, then, that seems to be what I’m after: a healthy balance of competition and cooperation that highlights the best in people.

I’m not sure where I’ll find that, but I’m going to start looking.

One More Thing

I would, in the light of all evidence that this place is less than moldable, encourage everyone to remember that Good Things Can Happen In Other Places too. There’s no reason, to my eyes, that requires all other cities to fail in order for San Francisco to succeed, and the same goes for the reverse.

San Francisco Will Be Fine

I know a lot of folks are leaving.  I don’t see that as a permanent problem.  This is not a cataclysm. Certainly, it feels like this iteration has peaked. Some dark clouds will move in. It will be probably get tough for a while. Summer has come and gone; winter is coming. But rest assured, this will be the sixth time we have rebuilt San Francisco, and we have become exceedingly efficient at it.

What I Thank This City (well, its people) For

• My first job out of college: Eventbrite. Ten years well-spent.
• Caring about preserving great things
• Showing me that there’s more than one right way to do just about everything
• Letting me be your guest for a decade

Harvesting the Blood of America's Poor

Blood now makes up well over 2 percent of total U.S. exports by value. To put that in perspective, Americans' blood is now worth more than all exported corn or soy products that cover vast areas of the country's heartland. The U.S. supplies fully 70 percent of the world's plasma, mainly because most other countries have banned the practice on ethical and medical grounds. [...]

"The people who show up are a mix of disabled, working poor, homeless, single parents, and college students. With the exception of the college students who are looking for booze money, this is probably the easiest and most reliable income they have. Your job may fire you at any time when you're on this level of society, but you always have blood. And selling your blood doesn't count as a job or income when it comes to determining disability benefits, food stamps, or unemployment eligibility so it's a source of money for the people who have absolutely nothing else." [...]

Desperate Americans are allowed to donate twice per week. But losing that much plasma could have serious health consequences, most of which have not been studied [...] Around 70 percent of donors experience health complications. Donors have a lower protein count in their blood, putting them at greater risk of infections and liver and kidney disorders. Many regulars suffer from near-permanent fatigue and are borderline anemic. All this for an average of $30 per visit.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Twitter is advertising for "a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media" with the goal of becoming "a client of that standard."

It's a pretty seismic move, albeit one that's short on details and binding promises. Twitter was originally designed to be part of a federated network, but over the years, the company has tightened controls over its APIs and other elements in such a way as to make it progressively harder to create federated or third-party tools to interact with Twitter users. Sometimes, this was undertaken in the name of privacy or security (and indeed, there were some privacy and security gains through those moves) and sometimes it was just presented as a fait accompli, and either way, it's transformed Twitter into another centralized platform -- albeit one that is more generous about linking and embedding that its primary rival, the walled gardens of Facebook and its subsidiaries, whose goal is to enclose and snuff out the open internet.

Twitter CEO @Jack explains:

First, we’re facing entirely new challenges centralized solutions are struggling to meet. For instance, centralized enforcement of global policy to address abuse and misleading information is unlikely to scale over the long-term without placing far too much burden on people.

Second, the value of social media is shifting away from content hosting and removal, and towards recommendation algorithms directing one’s attention. Unfortunately, these algorithms are typically proprietary, and one can’t choose or build alternatives. Yet.

Third, existing social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health.

Finally, new technologies have emerged to make a decentralized approach more viable. Blockchain points to a series of decentralized solutions for open and durable hosting, governance, and even monetization. Much work to be done, but the fundamentals are there.

Twitter Makes A Bet On Protocols Over Platforms [Mike Masnick/Techdirt]

Thought I'd take a Sunday afternoon to reflect on, oh I don't know, a decade.

Been a long ten years, but it's flown past. This particular decade happens to coincide with my first years of full-time professional software engineering.

The Quantity

I can't possibly summarize it all, and if I tried, it'd still be colored by what's on my mind right now. But I can point to the artifacts I tried to leave along the way:

• Twitter FWIW¹ (2008+)
• ~20 Open-Source Projects (2012+)
• ~15 Hatnote Projects (2013+, follow us)
• ~25 entries on this blog (2015+)
• +7 here (2014-2016)
• Not including pythondoeswhat.com or blog.hatnote.com
• (or other posts on the blogs only real heads know)
• ~10 Talks (2016+)
• Lest I forget: O'Reilly's Enterprise Software with Python (2016)
• And several podcast/media appearances
• calver.org (2016) and 0ver.org (2018) (Versioning is a fun pastime)
• Pyninsula (2017+) - YouTube, Meetup, Email Announce

Taking a chronological look at each of the above, I'm relieved to see obvious growth.

If I were to highlight one resource, it would probably be the talks. Despite the stress of preparation and delivery, I'm least concerned with having a massive miscommunication when we're all in the room and I can see the points hitting home. It's impossible to pick a favorite, but Ask the Ecosystem (2019), the Restructuring Data lightning talk (2018), and The Packaging Gradient (2017) seem like audience faves from where I'm sitting.

The Quality

Each project, post, and talk had its own reward, but I guess I've got more than just those to show for the decade.

On the more profit-driven side, I built tools and teams at PayPal, but once I could manage the risk, I got to dip into startups for the last few years. Lucky for me, it wasn't a total bust, and the wife and I bought a place in my favorite neighborhood (in the USA). Not a millionaire, but I'm hoping and working for a world where no one has to be.

More recently, the Python Software Foundation made me a Fellow. This isn't something I can be nonchalant about, and I'm not going to understate how much this means, to me, working in a field like software, where concrete symbols of progress are alternatingly elusive and vanishing. Plus it's Python, and reciprocated love is nice. I have hundreds of people to thank for helping me reach this point, and I have to thank the PSF for dedicating the time to ramping up these awards. They've convinced me more than ever that we need more institutions to build this sort of advancement.

To all of you, thank you.

The Struggle

I like to think I managed to do all of the above while staying away from industry hype, on the principle that massive speculative capital influx isn't where real value is added to society, and doesn't generate the kind of innovation that excites me.

I may have been naïve, but I came to Silicon Valley with an idea about the transformative power of software. Changing times may illustrate a grittier interpretation than the one I had and have, but I continue to hold dear software's potential for positive impact. If you've felt that vision waver, let me tell you, you're not alone.

In the past decade, I've seen too many engineers sucked in by new technologies and ventures, only to find themselves alienated from their work. Episodes ranging from an afternoon lost to debugging Docker/k8s clusters, to years of work disappearing at the end of a VC runway. Nothing has been harder to watch than those bedraggled-but-persistent idealists regroup, each time a bit more cynical than the last.

Even if its seeming intractibility has taken it from the center stage, the burnout conversation continues to smolder, because there's no issue realer. I know; I released more ceramics than software back in 2014.

Some problems can be solved by paying the maintainers, but I think the vastly bigger issue is around losing the human connection between the real effort software takes and the real benefits it brings, combined with FOSS's dearth of collaborators in supporting roles (QA, product/project/release management).

That's why I'm incredibly thankful for the Wikimedia community for always being there, patient with schedules and issues, as long as the software got the job done. It can be a challenge to juggle projects, but I tell every budding engineer: find that direct connection to people who will appreciate your work, and avoid cynicism at all costs.

There are some interesting prospects in the works, but I'm keeping this post retro. Besides, if 2029 rolls around and all I did was break even with 2009-19, I don't see how I can be disappointed.

Thanks again for everything in 201X, and for sticking with me in 202X.

---

Nick Corasaniti has a good news, bad news story in the New York Times on ballot security. The bad news:

Vote totals in a Northampton County judge’s race showed one candidate, Abe Kassis, a Democrat, had just 164 votes out of 55,000 ballots across more than 100 precincts. Some machines reported zero votes for him. In a county with the ability to vote for a straight-party ticket, one candidate’s zero votes was a near statistical impossibility. Something had gone quite wrong.

The worse news:

The machines that broke in Northampton County are called the ExpressVoteXL and are made by Election Systems & Software, a major manufacturer of election machines used across the country. The ExpressVoteXL is among their newest and most high-end machines, a luxury “one-stop” voting system that combines a 32-inch touch screen and a paper ballot printer.

The good news was that the chairwoman of the county Republicans realized the numbers made no sense and promptly initiated an investigation. When officials counted the paper backup ballots generated by the same machines, they realized Kassis had narrowly won.

It is still unknown what caused the problem since the machines "are locked away for 20 days after an election according to state law." However, suspicions include a bug in the software, as well as a fundamentally flawed design.

Hejibits #227 - Self Love

I’m sorry for making this comic.

Click here to go see the bonus panel!

Hovertext:
They're planning to become evil after they get emeritus status, but by then they'll be too tired.

Today's News:

Between 2010 and 2017, public transit ridership increased by 11% in the US while car use only increased by 6%. What is more interesting--and perhaps shocking--is that San Jose's use of public transit shot up by 46.7%. This was the largest increase in the country during this time period.

Now 46.7% of a small number is still a small number. San Jose didn't rank in the top 10 cities for actual public transportation trips even though we are the 10th largest city in the US. In fact, much smaller cities like Portland, Baltimore, and Boston pushed us to 13th place when it comes to actual usage. That being said, the growth rate is reassuring that things are headed in the right direction and one day we will have more options of getting from Point A to Point B.

BART may finally open in December and that will definitely help our standings. Traffic is getting out of hand, a robust transit system will benefit everyone including those that still want to drive.

For more info and stats, hit the link below.

Source: STORAGECafe

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Live Science: Scientists have finally found traces of the axion, an elusive particle that rarely interacts with normal matter. The axion was first predicted over 40 years ago but has never been seen until now. Scientists have suggested that dark matter, the invisible matter that permeates our universe, may be made of axions. But rather than finding a dark matter axion deep in outer space, researchers have discovered mathematical signatures of an axion in an exotic material here on Earth. The newly discovered axion isn't quite a particle as we normally think of it: It acts as a wave of electrons in a supercooled material known as a semimetal. But the discovery could be the first step in addressing one of the major unsolved problems in particle physics. The research team worked with a Weyl semimetal, a special and strange material in which electrons behave as if they have no mass, don't interact with each other and are split into two types: right-handed and left-handed. The property of being either right- or left-handed is called chirality; chirality in Weyl semimetals is conserved, meaning there are equal numbers of right- and left-handed electrons. Cooling the semimetal to 12 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 11 degrees Celsius) allowed the electrons to interact and to condense themselves into a crystal of their own. Waves of vibrations traveling through crystals are called phonons. Since the strange laws of quantum mechanics dictate that particles can also behave as waves, there are certain phonons that have the same properties as common quantum particles, such as electrons and photons. [Study co-author Johannes Gooth, a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Physics of Solids in GermanyGooth] and his colleagues observed phonons in the electron crystal that responded to electric and magnetic fields exactly like axions are predicted to. These quasiparticles also did not have equal numbers of right- and left-handed particles. (Physicists also predicted that axions would break conservation of chirality.) "It's encouraging that these equations [describing the axion] are so natural and compelling that they are realized in nature in at least one circumstance," said MIT theoretical physicist and Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek, who originally named the axion in 1977. "If we know that there are some materials that host axions, well, maybe the material we call space also houses axions." The research was published in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Everything is Amazing, But Nothing is Ours

The skull of a Medieval Scot was unearthed during the construction of an Aberdeen art gallery in 2015, along with the remains of 60 others. AOC Archaeology Group recreated the face of the man that the skull belonged t0. He was a 47-year old with bad teeth and who stood 5'3" tall.

From Sky News:

Dr Paula Milburn, from the archaeology group, said: "SK 125 has provided us with a first fascinating glimpse of one of the people buried on the site of Aberdeen Art Gallery over 600 years ago. "The ongoing post-excavation work is examining the remains in detail and will provide us with amazing information on the kind of people buried here, including their ages, gender, health and lifestyles."

Dozens of other full skeletons were also found at the site, but have not been reconstructed like SK 125.

Image: AOC

Kevin DeMattia, co-owner of the Emperor Norton's Boozeland, bought the note from an Oregon man who contacted the Norton-themed bar via Facebook and offered to sell it.

"I decided to buy it sight unseen and sans authentication," laughed DeMattia who collects Norton memorabilia to display in the bar.

The currency, which the self-proclaimed emperor printed and issued by the thousands during his reign as the city's most eclectic citizen in the 1800s, has become the holy grail for Norton collectors -- with genuine, hand-signed and dated notes fetching more than $10,000.

"They were printed by the thousands, but then the great fire came through and burned everything, so they went from everyone had one to no one had one," DeMattia said. "Now it's one of the rarest currencies." [...]

[Vintage currency expert Don] Kagin said the note, hand-numbered 2573, is the fortieth of known notes that survived Norton's time. The note promises to repay the recipient 50 cents in 1880 -- with interest of five cents. Norton himself died on January 8th, 1880 escaping the note's due date. The promissory bonds, which he had printed by San Francisco printers were often honored by the restaurants, shopkeepers and individuals he encountered during his daily excursions through the city.

Previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously, previously.

Have you heard of awesome lists? They are well, pretty awesome! Gathering up the most loved libraries and packages for a given topic.