Tags: web-review, facebook, tech, biology, amazon, monitoring, pandas, security, surveillance, authoritarianism, zoom, medecine, nginx, gdpr, google, sociology, data-science, gafam, linux, privacy, vaccines, activism, india, statistics, rust, ecology
Let’s go for my web review for the week 2021-09.
Tags: india, surveillance, authoritarianism, gafam, zoom, activism, ecology
The usual suspects from Silicon Valley silently complying (again…) with the demands of a government becoming more and more authoritarian… This time to crackdown on labor and climate activists in India. Those companies really lack any form of moral centre, as long as there’s money to be made from surveillance and public influence.
https://theintercept.com/2021/02/27/india-climate-activists-twitter-google-facebook/
Tags: tech, nginx, security
A nice list of easy mistakes one can make in their Nginx configuration opening the door to security issues.
https://blog.detectify.com/2020/11/10/common-nginx-misconfigurations/
Tags: tech, linux, monitoring
A neat little catalogue of monitoring tools on Linux. Learned a couple of them I didn’t know of.
https://www.linode.com/docs/guides/linux-system-monitoring-fundamentals/
Tags: tech, amazon, security, gdpr
Sitting on a massive trove of data, prioritizing growth over all else and driven by hubris… What could possibly go wrong? Well not knowing what data you really have and risks of breaches. Nothing much. ;-)
https://www.politico.eu/article/data-at-risk-amazon-security-threat/
Tags: tech, rust, pandas, data-science
Interesting comparison even though the conclusion is slightly unsurprising: Pandas is slower but more convenient, Rust is fast, consumes less memory but more work is involved. At least this gives a few indications on what type of APIs could be added to Rust to ease some things. It also indicates that Pandas can be great to develop the pipeline with then a switch to Rust when this needs to be optimized for higher volumes of data.
https://able.bio/haixuanTao/data-manipulation-pandas-vs-rust–1d70e7fc
Tags: tech, privacy, google, surveillance
Now this is kind of a surprising move… At least that shows that when some strong regulation comes around even behemoths need to move with it. I guess now let’s wait and see for an actual implementation, the devil is often in the details. I mean, in the end it doesn’t mark the end of profiling just maybe reduction of the ability to identify a particular person. And we know the root cause of most current problems is the profiling and the impact on personal behavior which goes with it. This is unlikely to go away.
https://blog.google/products/ads-commerce/a-more-privacy-first-web/
Tags: tech, privacy, google, surveillance
So talking about the devil being in the details… That confirms profiling is still very much in the picture (unsurprisingly) but more disturbing:
And of course that’s to be added to the fact that targeted advertising is very much not going away. FLoC or third party cookies… pick your poison I guess?
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/03/googles-floc-terrible-idea
Tags: tech, sociology, facebook, statistics, vaccines
Fascinating account on mental models and then statistical power
It starts with how a flawed mental model (coming from Facebook’s founder) about identity and social role became imposed on others.
Then it continues on the mental model we tend to apply to vaccines. That shows again how bad we are at intuitively grasping statistics and their application. They do require an effort even when you’re trained at them.
https://zeynep.substack.com/p/vaccine-efficacy-statistical-power
Tags: vaccines, medecine, biology
The wonderful world of RNA vaccines, it really opens the door to curing really problematic diseases… In this case malaria which I’ve been hoping we’d address for the past 15 years. Let’s hope they’ll make sure it’s affordable for everyone.
And to think that the research on RNA based vaccines was chronically under funded…
Bye for now!