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ravenreyamidala asked: i saw a tweet about not connecting smart tvs to wifi and i’m trying to google to figure out what this is bad but why is it bad? the best answer i’ve gotten so far is that there are like, identity fraud issues?

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

ms-demeanor:

ms-demeanor:

I don’t know much about smart tvs but generally Ethernet is preferred for connected devices just because it’s *faster* but also with everything you should make sure you’re not using the default username/password and also i’m not sure what kind of encryption standard smart tvs use these days so there’s a possibility of snooping traffic?

I can think of about eight reasons I wouldn’t want a smart tv on wifi and most of them honestly just have to do with functionality – streaming is going to be MUCH slower and flakier over a wifi connection than a wired connection – and if you’re bringing a smart tv into your house in the first place i kind of feel like you’re already accepting all of the security risks that entails (tv manufacturers aren’t known for their frequent security patches or user accessibility or ease of configuration).

Because there’s some commentary in the notes let me clarify:

if you’re bringing a smart tv into your house in the first place i kind of feel like you’re already accepting all of the security risks that entails

aside from a lack of user accessibility and a high likelihood of vulnerabilities due to manufacturers not patching and using default passwords IT IS A GIVEN that your smart TV is going to collect data on you and if you purchase a smart TV and put it into your home that’s something that you’re accepting. You’re accepting that the manufacturer can collect data from you, you’re accepting that whatever service you connect to it is going to track your viewing habits, you’re accepting that this is a device that is watching you more than you are watching it.

So my position personally is “smart TVs and smart fridges and smart appliances generally are not a good thing and if you are going to have them it’s better if they’re not connected to the internet and they should be able to function without being connected to the internet.”

ASIDE from all of that if you’re going to have a smart device that streams video it’s going to be much faster over ethernet than over wifi. And, hell, maybe the initial tweet was warning about the smart TV spying on what other devices were connected to the wifi.

But also in the comments it says “it’s better to get a standard tv and hook it up to a chromecast because better the devil you know (google, etc.)” and I would like to emphatically state for the record that nearly any other option is better than bringing Google into more parts of your life.

Our “smart TV” is composed of the following:

* A dumb TV

* An eleven-year-old third-hand ThinkPad running Linux Lite

* A couple of adapters to pipe the A/V output of the laptop into the TV

* A wireless mouse

* A wireless keyboard

Non-megacorp, patchable, modular, and also when somebody’s laptop is waiting on repairs they can commandeer the TV’s prosthetic brain to use in the meantime! Three out of four family members have now used this device as a daily-driver laptop at one time or another!

(Note: our setup is on Wi-Fi, but our TV is a couple decades old and has a correspondingly low pixel count, so it’s not like we’re looking to stream very high-quality video.)

Tags:

#recs #reply via reblog #fun with loopholes #adventures in human capitalism

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

maryellencarter:

thoughts on Justice League Animated, part two of god knows what:

* The Brave and the Bold: Story by Paul Dini, script by Dwayne McDuffie, who are both fucking great, but this one doesn’t really stand up for me. It’s the one where Gorilla Grodd, a telepathic talking gorilla mad scientist supervillain, attempts to nuke Gorilla City, the hidden African city of hyperintelligent talking gorillas. I think part of my distaste for this episode – it’s not strong enough to be dislike, it’s just not one of the ones I bother with – is just the fact that, you know, over in Marvel the hidden hyper-advanced society in Africa is Wakanda, home of never-conquered black people, and here it’s fucking *gorillas* and that has a very racist smell to me.

* Fury: In which an adopted Amazon tries to kill all the men on Earth with a biowarfare deal. Somehow this works on Superman and J’onn also, despite alien physiology stuff. Also literally no one including Batman wears any PPE despite a worldwide pandemic raging, which hits different these days for sure. Script is again by Dwayne McDuffie, who was one of the greats, and it tries to point out that excluding men completely is not so very far from getting rid of the men, but it also tries to pull the #notallmen thing where one man’s good action in the past is supposed to redeem the whole category, and it’s just… many kinds of not great. One redeeming feature is that at least it does make Hawkgirl the one to set foot on Themiscyra, while in the previous Themiscyra episode Hawkgirl was *completely absent* so the heroes Wonder Woman brought to help were *all* male (for which she got banished).

Now I apparently have a therapy appointment, so more later.

>>Also literally no one including Batman wears any PPE despite a worldwide pandemic raging, which hits different these days for sure.

I watch CinemaSins videos while I’m jogging, because they’re reasonably entertaining and they have subtitles (I can’t hear the video very clearly over the sound of the treadmill). A few weeks ago I saw the one they did on The Happening.

I don’t think he even sinned it (the video was done in the 2010s), but it struck *me*, watching these clips, that I didn’t see *anybody* attempting any kind of air filtration in the face of this incredibly-deadly probably-airborne poison.

Nobody had a surgical mask. The Crazy Prepper People™ getting out their guns didn’t have respirators. Nobody so much as tied a fucking bandana around their face on the grounds that they had nothing to lose by trying.

It’s all-too-realistic, it seems, that *most* people wouldn’t. But there would be exceptions! And the thing is, you could write some really good, really horrifying horror about the exceptions!

Consider this alternate backbone plot for The Happening:

There’s a family. They live far enough from the epicentre to hear about the Happening before it reaches them, but near enough to be in acute danger.

They have one child. Let’s say she’s twelve. Old enough to comprehend the situation about as well as the adults do, old enough to wear PPE sized for adults, young enough to ping people’s Bad Things That Happen to Children Are Extra Bad wiring.

The dad’s a construction worker. He owns a respirator for work. As they’re preparing to evacuate, he gives it to his daughter. He figures, they say whatever this thing is seems to be airborne, maybe the respirator will protect her.

It *does* protect her. But the family only had one.

She watches her parents die by their own hands. She has to find a way to evacuate on her own, without being overwhelmed by the incredibly traumatic experience she just went through, while knowing that if she takes her respirator (Dad’s respirator) off for any reason–eating, drinking, blowing her nose after crying–she’ll die just like they did.

She takes a breath, acutely aware that two inches ago the air she’s breathing in was deadly. The filtered air is like a desert. The clock on dying of thirst is ticking.

Tags:

#I don’t like horror but I also don’t like missed opportunities #The Happening #reply via reblog #reactionblogging #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #illness tw #poison cw #death tw #suicide cw #covid19 #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #sexism cw #racism cw? #Justice League

The Gate

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

alarajrogers:

alarawriting:

When I was a child
I found a gate.

I was a bullied child, and solitary.
(Isn’t that always the way?)
It was a winter day, impossibly bright
As only winter days can be.
I was out behind the school.
(It was Saturday. That was why, really.
No other kid would be there to bother me.
On weekdays there might be other kids here
Who would bully me
If I tried to play here.)

There was snow on the ground.
The puddles of slush on the parking lot
Looked like deep, cavernous lakes of ice.
There was a mulberry bush
I called a blackberry bush
That gave up sweet fruit in the late spring
And a rock
As tall as I was
That we made believe was a mountain.

Between them there were trees
And bushes
A woods too small to be called a forest.
And today
Unlike yesterday
The bushes bent into an arch
And the arch stretched into a tunnel of branches.

Through the arch I smelled spring.
Flowers, and grass.
Anything really – in the cold you can’t smell.
Warm air wafted on my face
And I knew what this was.

Keep reading

I was reading the latest one of Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children series, and I got to the point where the child goes through the gate, and I realized… that could never have been me.

My mother really was disabled – she had fainting spells, and then she had hypoglycemia, and then she had diabetes – and I’d felt it was my responsibility to take care of her since I was four and she was crying because my grandfather was in the hospital. She also probably suffered from anxiety and was known to flip out from terror because I got on the wrong train.

For obvious reasons, no one tells the story of the child who doesn’t have the adventure because they have responsibilities at home. So I decided to. It’s a lot shorter than the story of the child who had the adventure.

It’s interesting that the protagonist assumes the portal is something *good*.

I went down a path once. Like yours, it wasn’t *quite* a forest, but the path was lined with trees and smaller plants. At the end of the paved path, what looked like a desire-path bike trail stretched off into the distant fields, leading who-knows-where.

It was…*peaceful*. Incredibly so. The trees shook in the breeze, and the leaves fluttered across my vision with different shades of green on each side, and the sound of their rustling brushed against my mind.

There was power there. It hummed in my bones, resonated through my soul.

I did linger. I let the power flow through me. Once.

And then I left, and I swore never to return. Because I know how that story ends, and it ends with me getting kidnapped by the Fair Folk. I’d walk out onto that narrow path, called by some ineffable compulsion, and never be seen again.

That’s not how I want my story to go.

Tags:

#*knocks on wood* #in which Brin tries not to become an erotic-horror protagonist #(…I never quite make that explicit up there in the main post‚ do I) #(I guess I can’t think of a good way of doing it) #(probably an important part of the context though) #reply via reblog #storytime #fae #sexuality and lack thereof #abuse cw #kidnapping cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #[epistemic status: Pascal’s Wager]

~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

aa49d59ecd971a3ba9bdd142e45b94af69c121f2

derinthescarletpescatarian:

juliainfinland:

twitblr:

Definitely masking up post-COVID (x) {{the original link didn’t actually lead anywhere; I have replaced it with a genuine source link}}

Also, let’s keep having soap and disinfectant dispensers everywhere.

By contrast, I’ve been getting the same number of sniffles that I do every year even though there’s no one to catch them from, which is how I learned this year that I’m not prone to minor colds; I’m prone to hayfever.

Huh, you’re still getting hayfever with a mask? I started wearing a mask in 2017 *specifically* to avoid pollen, and it’s been working wonderfully for me.

Have you been keeping the mask on outside, and when near front doors that people are opening a lot? Does it have a well-fitted nosepiece?

—

I also had no colds in the calendar year 2020. It used to be fairly normal for me to go entire years without getting sick (after I adjusted to my current microbial milieu, that is; I got sick a *lot* the first couple years I lived in Canada), but then I started working a customer-facing job where nobody else ever took sick leave and staff members were forbidden from wearing masks, and I went from a cold every 1 – 2 years to a cold every few months. Getting rid of that damned fast-food cold rate wasn’t worth what it’s cost, but it’s a very nice silver lining.

(for anyone who finds my rate of colds bogglingly low: I’m guessing the two big components are “trained myself out of touching my face in public when I was a pre-teen, and always wash my hands upon returning home” and “rarely travel”, in that order)

I didn’t even used to do any anti-airborne measures†, just anti-fomite. I plan to start wearing a mask in indoor public spaces from October – March or so each year and on public transit year-round, and it’ll be very interesting to see what that does to my baseline cold rate.

(also, on a broader scale, it will be interesting to see if COVID-19 vaccines grant any cross-protection against cold-type coronaviruses)

—

†Except in extreme situations like “on an airplane two seats away from a coughing dude”. Guess who didn’t get sick until an incubation period *after* the rest of her family? (unfortunately there’s only so much you can isolate from people you’re sharing a hotel room with)

Tags:

#reblogging from this link of the reblog chain partly because I didn’t like the later bits #and partly because Have You Heard the Good News of Our Lord and Savior Pollen Masks #reply via reblog #illness tw #covid19 #allergies

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~ Brin ~ 1 Comment

maryellencarter:

4b51025d79f39f30f9e021e5513e5b55b1f06902

@rustingbridges The bacon pretty much dissolved, just added some flavor. Onion might be a good idea but I absolutely loathe trying to chop the damn things. Do they sell pre-chopped onion?

Sausage might be a good mix-in. Maybe just thaw and chop some breakfast links and toss them in. That might be a good plan.

Onion powder?

—

For my dad’s kidney beans we use hot sauce, Worcestershire sauce, chopped green bell pepper, salt, black pepper, onion, and garlic. When I make hummus I pretty much just embrace the bland, apart from some garlic and salt.

Tags:

#I like bland food #reply via reblog #food #bluespace

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~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

moral-autism:

plain-dealing-villain:

nerviovago:

47facfe8121044b63780f6bb0d3be91421af9f79

Homeland Security will probably notice that you have a dryer and also a frequently-used clothesline. They will definitely notice if you have two dryers.

(For that matter, so will people who went to Cal Tech, because they’ve seen this trick before in their dorms.)

I’ve definitely seen people with a dryer who never use it and only ever use clotheslines and laundry racks.

Put the real dryer inside the underground bedroom!

Tags:

#reply via reblog #fun with loopholes #(sort of) #this probably deserves some warning tag but I am not sure what

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

andmaybegayer:

I’ve taken to grinding my salt extremely fine with a mortar and pestle before I put it on popcorn or chips and this is very good because it means you don’t end up with loose salt at the bottom of the bowl, but, it also turns your salt into an aerosolised chemical weapon if you move it at all.

I like to grind up a bunch at once and keep it in a shaker bottle.

As for how to pour the popcorn salt into a shaker bottle without aerosolised-chemical-weaponing oneself: masks are a solution to many of life’s problems.

Tags:

#reply via reblog #food #recs #illness mention

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

moral-autism:

PSA: Many stores have a wide range of frozen vegetables, often sold pre-cut. The greens are more compact than their refrigerated counterparts. Produce frozen right after harvest can taste fresher than produce picked before full ripeness and shipped unfrozen. In cooked applications, frozen vegetables are often hard to distinguish from unfrozen. And they don’t go bad quickly.

Co-signed.

(We’ve been using peas, corn, and green beans for ages, and we recently discovered frozen broccoli. Frozen bell pepper slices–another recent one, though I think they only just started making them recently–seem to be a bit wetter than ideal, but close enough to be worth the shelf-life and convenience benefits.)

—

I was thinking of making a post about the following, but it seems closely related enough that I’ll add it to this comment instead:

I just tried canned sardine fillets and they’re amazing. They taste almost exactly like (slightly overcooked) Atlantic salmon, while being somewhat cheaper, requiring no preparation, and keeping safe stored at room temperature for approximately one eternity [link]. Highly recommended.

(Note that canned salmon itself, not being Atlantic, is IMO much less tasty.)

Tags:

#food #recs #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #reply via reblog

We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time

~ Brin ~ Leave a comment

{{Title link: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/moderna-covid-19-vaccine-design.html }}

collapsedsquid:

None of the scientists I spoke to for this story were at all surprised by either outcome — all said they expected the vaccines were safe and effective all along. Which has made a number of them wonder whether, in the future, at least, we might find a way to do things differently — without even thinking in terms of trade-offs. Rethinking our approach to vaccine development, they told me, could mean moving faster without moving any more recklessly. A layperson might look at the 2020 timelines and question whether, in the case of an onrushing pandemic, a lengthy Phase III trial — which tests for efficacy — is necessary. But the scientists I spoke to about the way this pandemic may reshape future vaccine development were more focused on how to accelerate or skip Phase I, which tests for safety. More precisely, they thought it would be possible to do all the research, development, preclinical testing, and Phase I trials for new viral pandemics before those new viruses had even emerged — to have those vaccines sitting on the shelf and ready to go when they did. They also thought it was possible to do this for nearly the entire universe of potential future viral pandemics — at least 90 percent of them, one of them told me, and likely more.

As Hotez explained to me, the major reason this vaccine timeline has shrunk is that much of the research and preclinical animal testing was done in the aftermath of the 2003 SARS pandemic (that is, for instance, how we knew to target the spike protein). This would be the model. Scientists have a very clear sense of which virus families have pandemic potential, and given the resemblance of those viruses, can develop not only vaccines for all of them but also ones that could easily be tweaked to respond to new variants within those families.

[…]

According to Florian Krammer, a vaccine scientist at Mount Sinai, you could do all of this at a cost of about $20 million to $30 million per vaccine and, ideally, would do so for between 50 and 100 different viruses — enough, he says, to functionally cover all the phylogenies that could give rise to pandemic strains in the future. (“It’s extremely unlikely that there is something out there that doesn’t belong to one of the known families, that would have been flying under the radar,” he says. “I wouldn’t be worried about that.”) In total, he estimates, the research and clinical trials necessary to do this would cost between $1 billion and $3 billion. So far this year, the U.S. government has spent more than $4 trillion on pandemic relief. Functionally, it’s a drop in the bucket, though Krammer predicts our attention, and the funding, will move on once this pandemic is behind us, leaving us no more prepared for the next one. When he compares the cost of such a project to the Pentagon’s F-35 — you could build vaccines for five potential pandemics for the cost of a single plane, and vaccines for all of them for roughly the cost of that fighter-jet program as a whole — he isn’t signaling confidence it will happen, but the opposite.

[…]

If we do all that, he says, the entire timeline could be compressed to as few as three months. The production and distribution of a vaccine adds considerable cost, bureaucracy, and even some chaos, as we’re likely about to see. But three months from the design of the Moderna vaccine was April 13. The second and third surges, the return to school and the long-dreaded fall, 225,000 more deaths and 50 million more infections — all of that still lay ahead. Shave another month off somehow and you’re at March 13, the day the very first person in New York City died.

The “Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot“ authorized $1.8 billion over seven years for cancer research in 2016, don’t know what he’s planning on doing as president but this would be an excellent use of research money,  Wouldn’t say no to both though.

Where can I contribute to the Kickstarter?

(don’t say “give it to CEPI”: they don’t take small-scale donations)

Tags:

#reply via reblog #covid19 #vaccines #illness tw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #also if I could throw money at the people trying to develop a 100-valent rhinovirus vaccine that’d be great too