Frederic Jacobs @fj@mastodon.social

Interesting article on the reliance from different tech companies on advertisement-related revenue https://www.barrons.com/articles/facebook-and-apple-embody-new-tech-divide-1524273880?mod=rss_barrons_cover_story

When you have startup culture glorifying quotes like "Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness" and printing them in massive fonts on walls, you don't have to be surprised there is a lot of apologizing ...

There probably is cryptography out there that is good enough for online voting. Problem is, everything else that’s necessary isn’t: software distribution (what election code is running), key distribution (who is entitled to vote) …
Democracies work when there is trust in the elections. If you need a CS + Crypto PhD to understand why something is secure; it’s easy to make people fearful of «election hacking». In contrast, most people have a good understanding of the threat model for paper ballots

iOS 12 comes with great security features. More in the iOS security white paper
https://www.apple.com/business/site/docs/iOS_Security_Guide.pdf

When someone wants to meet you to tell you about their new ICO/blockchain project

Studies found that in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, there is one kilogram of plankton for each six kilograms of plastic, causing fish to starve because they eat the plastic instead of the plankton.

Also, scientists studying the North Atlantic Garbage Patch found a high concentration of microbes capable of digesting plastics for energy.

Great article on plastics in the Ocean https://www.quantamagazine.org/on-waste-plastics-at-sea-maria-luiza-pedrotti-finds-unique-microbial-multitudes-20180913/

"our study has shown that most users are not taking advantage of the main privacy features of Zcash at all"

https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/kappos

"consumers are rightly worried just how the data tech companies are collecting about them are being used and abused. Yet Apple seems to be the only major tech company that had the foresight–and the will–to begin tackling these issues before they reached a crisis point." https://www.fastcompany.com/90236195/forget-the-new-iphones-apples-best-product-is-now-privacy

Don't drink from plastic bottles ...

"Beginning at 8 weeks, microplastic fragments and fibers were produced from strips of all three polymers"

https://setac.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/etc.3432

Before spending a lot of time solving a hard problem, ask yourself if that problem is worth solving.

Life is too short to waste time solving problems that are not the root cause of what you're trying to address.

This community should be able to relate :)

I took the task of filling this captcha really seriously today.

Because if I forget to click on a biker, that will probably lead to some biker getting run over by a Waymo car.

I forgot my wireless headphones at the gym the other day and now I'm going on a run with wired headphones, like a pre-historic walkman-carrying primate

Added Mastodon link on my homepage, I guess we're trying this again for a little while :)
https://www.fredericjacobs.com

My feed here is not really active. Any Mastodon follow recommendations?

Cédric Villani, fields medalist and a brilliant mind I've had the pleasure to work with in the Scientific Advisory mechanism to the European Commission, wrote a very good post on why the French should vote:

Cédric Villani : «S'abstenir, c'est donner la moitié de son vote à Marine Le Pen»
http://www.liberation.fr/debats/2017/05/01/cedric-villani-s-abstenir-c-est-donner-la-moitie-de-son-vote-a-marine-le-pen_1566507

Privacy-Enhancing Identity Federation is a very interesting problem. NIST has a call for collaborators to work on federated identity https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/12/09/2016-29482/national-cybersecurity-center-of-excellence-nccoe-privacy-enhancing-identity-federation-building