Daily Tech News 11 October 2023

• If I save a post with the Twitter X in it on my own blog, the post will vanish without a trace, and without an error.
  
  Don't ask me how I discovered this.
  
  
  
• EU fires urgent warning at Elon Musk's X over illegal content and disinformation following Hamas attacks. (Tech Crunch)
  
  That tangled and breathless headline is the original, not mine.
  
  What happened is that Europe's Bookburner General, Thierry Breton, whined impotently on Twitter today that people were saying unapproved things.
  
  Elon Musk responded to ask what unapproved things?
  
  Breton's response did not in fact contain a list of unapproved speech, but rather more impotent threats.
  
  Quelle fucking surprise.
  
  In other surprises, Tech Crunch, a card-carrying member of Journalists for Censorship, is harshly critical of Musk and Glenn Greenwald's (obviously correct) position that the EU is in no place to determine what is and is not "disinformation".
  
  
  

• A tale of two websites:
  
  Sam Bankman-Fried was a terrible boyfriend. (The Verge)

  I've got some shitty ex-boyfriends, but none of them made me the CEO of their sin-eater hedge fund while refusing to give me equity and bragging about how there was a 5 percent chance they'd become the President of the United States, you know? Absolutely counting my blessings after Caroline Ellison's first day on the stand. I wonder how many of the nine women on the jury are doing the same.

  That's how the Teen Vogue of the tech world sees the story.
  
  The fraud was in the code. (Molly White)

  Much of the conversation revolved around the allow_negative flag that was introduced to the FTX codebase on August 1, 2019. Wang testified that Sam Bankman-Fried had asked him and Nishad Singh (former FTX engineering director, who has also pleaded guilty) to add the flag. Github screenshots show Singh making a code change to add the column in the database, and adding logic to exempt accounts with the flag from checks that would otherwise determine if they had sufficient funds to withdraw.

  Same story, except actually covering the story and showing the precise code that allowed Caroline Ellison to withdraw infinite amounts of money from customer funds.
  
  Less of the former, more of the latter, s'il vous plait.
  
  
  
• An 18th century Unicode. (Public Domain Review)
  
  Pantographia, published the same year the Rosetta Stone was discovered, was an attempt to collect all the world's written languages - 164 alphabets in all.
  
  And since that was more than two hundred years ago, there's a link on that page to download it as a PDF.
  
  Very, very slowly for some reason, but there is a link.
  
  
  
• A multifault earthquake threat for the Seattle metropolitan region revealed by mass tree mortality. (Science)

  Here, we use dendrochronological dating and a cosmogenic radiation pulse to constrain the death dates of earthquake-killed trees along two adjacent fault zones near Seattle, Washington to within a 6-month period between the 923 and 924 CE growing seasons. Our narrow constraints conclusively show linked rupturing that occurred either as a single composite earthquake of estimated magnitude 7.8 or as a closely spaced double earthquake sequence with estimated magnitudes of 7.5 and 7.3.

  Pretty neat. The article discusses how they cross-linked tree cores in the Seattle area with precisely dated samples from other regions to narrow down a catastrophic event a thousand years ago to within six months.
  
  And rather less neatly notes that Seattle is simply not built to withstand an earthquake of magnitude 7.8, and if one hit today the city would basically cease to exist.

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:00 AM

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