Affidavit by former head of IT for large Italian defense contractor admitting he uploaded instructions through military satellite to Frankfurt to flip votes from Trump to Biden on election night under direction of US persons. Willing to testify.#ItalyDidIt

How to Remove Background Images

Photoshop is one of the best software for manipulating images (editing). This software made by the Adobe company has proven effective in producing new edited images that are different from the original. One of the most common types of photo editing in Photoshop is removing the.

I'm going to tell you a little bit how we work on features at GitHub. It's simple, but very powerful in my opinion. At GitHub we have a high performance culture.

We are deploying changes almost all the time while keeping the service running and the deployment failure ratio needs to be super low! We are constantly working on new medium/big features, we have frequent deploys and required peer reviews.

How do we know that big features are not conflicting with each other in functionality and in version control. How do we merge the work done in these non-trivial features? How do we do prevent peer reviews slow down our productivity?

With basically two things: split the work in small batches and feature flags. We don't have long-lived feature branches. We do very small changes all the time and deploy them.

We could split a feature in tens or hundreds of PRs, but until it is beta or GA, we don't expose it to users by using feature flags.

VOA has “leaked” the code of conduct for the intra Afghan talks. They have shared 1 page on their website but there 3. Offering details here from the 3 pages that I have seen, knowing that this is not in any way sabotaging the peace process that many of us wish to succeed.

Unofficial translation by me: The honor & Islamic identity of #Afghanistan depends on national unity. Our country will be saved from the direct or indirect interference of others when Islamic justice prevails. The Afghan negotiations that started on 12 Sept 2020 shall be based

on the following four principles:
A. The Doha agreement signed on 29 Feb 2020.
B. The desire of the people of Afghanistan for establishing sustainable peace.
C. The commitment of both sides of the negotiators to establishing sustainable/durable peace.

D. The expressed will of UN resolutions for establishing sustainable peace.

Parties to the negotiations agree on the following principles:

1. The first session will begin with the recitation of verses from the Holy Quran.
2. the other sessions will begin and end with prayer.

3. No subject against the sacred religion of Islam or the national high interests will be considered.
4. The negotiations will take place with the intention and faith of succeeding, with honesty and in good faith by both parties in a good/amicable atmosphere.

1/The next major problem set in #DeFi is #NFTLiquidity.

It has become very clear that, like fungibles, nonfungibles are their own financial asset class.

One path to see this is to envision the future of NFTs as “liquid

2/Some say that NFTs “shouldn’t be” liquid, yet the innovation process continues.

Just like photography has become much easier to create in the last 100 years, liquid NFTs will surely bring down price points of tokenized digital content but will also open expansive new markets.

3/The key observation is this: #NFTLiquidity is merely a technical problem for #DeFi, and the entire set of economic mechanisms is its solution space.

👉🏻 In particular, because of tokenization, *the NFT liquidity problem reduces to the NFT price discovery problem.*

4/In other words, if we could reliably price a set of NFTs, we could issue a token backed by their reliably priced future resale value.

This is a core mechanism that today is underutilized in the market, and one that — we will soon see — applies to all illiquid assets.

5/Today, NFT price discovery proceeds via three main mechanisms: sales, auctions, and ERC20 fractionalization.

And the fundamental problem with each of these mechanisms is capital efficiency: in each mechanism, participants need to spend *at least* $N to value something at $N.

Right, I did some reading and here’s what likely happened with Parler. Lots of crossed wires here.

First up: someone noticed that Parler uses sequential integers in the API endpoint to get content.

An API endpoint is just a URL with a value added onto the end that tells the system what you want to get back.

Using sequential integers means that a hacker can set up an automated script to start at 1 and count up, trying API calls over and over again, to get back content from Parler.

Parler apparently had no restrictions on this API endpoint, which frankly blows my mind as a web dev.

If you had a working URL, it just spat out whatever it had whether you were logged in or not.

It seems that EVERYTHING that had been uploaded - video, photos, text posts - was accessible whether it had been deleted or restricted in the app itself. Even uploaded photos of licenses etc etc.

I cannot describe how amateur hour this is, if true.

Years before Andy Grove was attributed with the phrase:

"Whatever can be done, will be done"

A lot of us technologists assumed this was the case anyway.

It's a truism.

What if we could track every person on the planet in real time?

Or at least everyone in a major city

🤔🔮

So, given someone has this idea.

Then the only question is can it be done.

Well, we're already installing all the tech to do this for autonomous vehicles, drones and smart city infrastructure.

It really wouldn't be a huge leap to do that for people.

But how might that be possible 🤔

Sure we can already do it with phones right, but not everyone has a phone and sometimes the batteries die blah blah.

Could we do it in a way that it was difficult to circumvent, and always active?

Well, maybe we could if we put our thinking caps on about the problem.

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Now I'm going to enter the wild world of wild speculative futurism, so take everything else with a pinch of salt 🧂

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Turns out cell phone towers pinpoint the location of your phone as part of how they work.

And then as you move around you switch from one tower to another.

I think most people get this.

Something like the image below

I sympathize with mid-size companies seeking to acquire a premium domain name. Even if they stretch to make the maximum possible offer, it often still can't compete with what a larger company can offer. Their desired domain name remains always out of reach. /1

From the broker:

"The prospective buyer responded and explained that their absolute maximum amount they can spend is $100,000 USD. They are accountants and explained this is an extraordinary amount of money for them." /2

The distribution of how much a domain name is worth to a particular company may look approximately like the right half of a bell curve, with values increasing along the X-axis and the # of companies for which the domain name has that value on the y-axis. /3

Since each domain name is unique, a domain owner wishing to maximize the value of that asset will often wait for an offer in the (light green) rightmost tail of the distribution, from that small percentage of companies for whom the domain name will deliver the most value and /4

as a result can justify making the highest value offers for the domain name. But that means that the domain name will remain out of reach for the vast majority of companies that would benefit from owning the domain name. For even a company at the 80th percentile, in the /5

I first joined Facebook in 2007 to report a Facebook group called "Find Dirt on the New Pastor at Northbrook: Because Everyone Has Secrets," which began within about 7-8 months of me arriving.

It has maybe 450+ members, some of which were children of church members (and maybe some on the membership roles).
It contained pictures of me (one altered to add 666 to my necktie) and my family (one implying that I abused my youngest child).

I reported it to FB, after which the administrators dropped off it. So I contacted FB again, saying if they didn't remove it ithey would hear from my attorney about defamation of character. It was soon removed (though I may still have printouts of all group pages).

(Around the same time there was another Facebook group called "Take Back the Northbrook Youth Group," for which the cover pic was a former youth group member brandishing a handgun. Removed much more quickly when his mother learned of it!)

What I'm saying is this:

1. This is (one of several reasons) why I don't tolerate people misrepresenting me, making unwarranted accusations, or making threats...especially when they are "Christians."

2. Not much has changed on Facebook in 15 years.

I am seeing a ton of confusion about protecting yourself on the Internet. So as a retired bastard genius kid, I wanted to share my own experiences and knowledge in this.

DOXXING, PERSONAL CYBERSECURITY, ANONYMITY for the average revolutionary. A thread:

If you're a regular user of huge Internet services like Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc., as well as over the age of 18, it's wise to assume that your personally identifiable information IS attainable and IS out there. These services all collect and save info --

to varying degrees, and to varying levels of security. And this information is VALUABLE. Data breaches occur frequently, retroactively, and unknowingly, and the data from said breaches are circulated around and cached in all kinds of easy-to-access places online.

Why does this matter? A (simplified) hypothetical: while someone probably can't find your street address from just your Twitter bio, if your handle is the same as your e-mail, and that e-mail is in a publicly available data breach with a street address attached, you're screwed.

Usually when doxxing happens, a much more elaborate version of said case happens. Doxxing really comes down to investigating all of an individual's available info and digital footprints, and narrowing it down to a single identity.

@AWS hit @parler_app where it really hurts: in their backend.

This thread is to those claiming that this is a violation of the 1st Amendment and platforms shouldn't be taken down.

Free Speech has limits and it definitely ends with thousands of open calls for violence:
1/

Some gems from @MacConwell of @RarebreedVC in Clubhouse right now:

1) VCs are looking for startups that can get to $100m / yr in rev by yr 7-10.

VCs need this kind of return in order to produce great funds.

2) And so many companies won't get to this level - and that's not a bad thing - but then it means you should be thinking about trying to get going w company revenue since you can't count on VC backing.

3) someone asked about age and fundraising & do accelerators help?

Age doesn't matter. But just make sure no one is taking advantage of you. And as such, accelerators can help sometimes w that guidance.

4) Someone got a rejection because he had a teddy bear in his room (side note: what investor says that?!?)

Mac says he's been there and has heard that saltiness. But you're going to get a lot of nos. And you gain more leverage w more progress and traction. So just keeping going.

Facebook is a newstand. But no one can see which news Facebook is pushing to the top.

So we built an app for that called #CitizenBrowser. Our first finding: the sharp impact of Facebook’s political ad ban reversal in the Georgia Senate elections.
https://t.co/GZNdwZOlHW /1

This is the first report from our #CitizenBrowser project. There will be many more to come. But first, I want to tell you a bit about how we did it because it’s the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done @themarkup – and we do a lot of ambitious projects. /2

#CitizenBrowser grew out of conversations @suryamattu and I had about how to audit Facebook. We had both worked on browser extensions to collect data from Facebook, but FB always threatened to shut those down, just like their recent threats against the NYU AdObservatory. /3

But the bigger problem is that browser extensions don’t capture most FB activity. Most people use FB on mobile and browser extensions only work on desktop or laptop computers.

So one night, late at the WeWork, @suryamattu said to me: “We’ll have to build our own browser.” /4

“No way,” I said. “That’s insane.” But slowly, I came around. Here’s why: browsers are good at running in the background. Users could log into FB once through the browser and never use it again.

Then we wouldn’t be monitoring users. We would only be monitoring their feed. /5

New from me, & my final piece of 2020:

In 2020, a false message board conspiracy theory harmed the pandemic response, significantly impacted our political process, & destroyed lives & families.

A deep dive into how QAnon's breakout year harmed us all:

As the United States deals with insurgent forces at home, security professionals should look to the Middle East for insight on how this threat may evolve:



There are a lot of parallels between right-wing US extremism, and post-colonial Islamic extremism.

The most prominent, I feel, is the one between the @newtgingrich era GOP and the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood, like most early Islamic terrorism, was a reaction to European colonialism in the Middle East.

What starts as a political movement interested in social change becomes an insurgent group engaged in violent extremism.



The same radicalization factors can be identified. It’s disenfranchisement and cultural erosion all the way down.

Both groups want a return to “tradition” to strengthen a culture they feel they’ve lost because of modernity. Both groups feel they’ve been economically and culturally disenfranchised by a foreign oppressor. You can see roots of this same problem in the Confederacy.

In our case at home, this is because of the inherent cultural divide between conservatives and liberals. Many conservatives do not feel that liberals are real Americans. This is an important factor for later.