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Why do Russians support the war against Ukraine?
https://meduza.io/en/feature/2022/05/03/feeling-around-for-something-human, posted 16 Jul by peter in fascism propaganda russia toread ukraine
For many decades, everyone had been asking if Germans in 1939 really didn’t understand what was going on. We’ve wondered how an entire nation, all of those regular people, decided to go along with total insanity. It occurred to me that today, we’re in a position to answer this question.
My friend Alisa, a sociologist whose name has been changed, and I started walking around Moscow and asking random people how they felt about the war in Ukraine. We thought that what was going on was so insane, everyone must have questions about it. Half of the people we asked refused to talk to us. The other half were usually open to fairly in-depth conversations. Later, I talked to people in the Kaluga and Kostroma regions. We conducted over 50 interviews in total. They are not intended to be representative. We just wanted to get some sense of what was going through people’s heads. To enter into the darkness and feel around for something human.
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OWASP ZAP
https://www.zaproxy.org/, posted 7 Jul by peter in development free opensource security software toread
The world’s most widely used web app scanner. Free and open source. Actively maintained by a dedicated international team of volunteers.
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Almost 1,000 Companies Have Curtailed Operations in Russia—But Some Remain
https://som.yale.edu/story/2022/almost-1000-companies-have-curtailed-operations-russia-some-remain, posted 25 May by peter in activism business list russia search toread war
The list below is updated continuously by Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and his team of experts, research fellows, and students at the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute to reflect new announcements from companies in as close to real time as possible.
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Melrose, a language to program and play music
ernestmicklei.com/melrose/introduction_melrose/, posted 21 Mar by peter in free music software toread
Melrose is both a language and a tool to create and listen to music interactively, The language uses musical primitives (note, sequence, chord) and many functions (map, group, transpose) that can be used to create more complex patterns, loops and tracks. Melrose uses MIDI output to produce sound by any (hard or software) device attached. Melrose can also react on MIDI inputs to start, record and stop playing musical objects. A plugin is available for Microsoft Visual Studio for the best usage experience. For a quickstart, without any installation, you can use the Melrose playground.
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Damn Cool Algorithms: Levenshtein Automata
blog.notdot.net/2010/07/Damn-Cool-Algorithms-Levenshtein-Automata, posted 7 Mar by peter in development nlp reference text toread
The basic insight behind Levenshtein automata is that it's possible to construct a Finite state automaton that recognizes exactly the set of strings within a given Levenshtein distance of a target word. We can then feed in any word, and the automaton will accept or reject it based on whether the Levenshtein distance to the target word is at most the distance specified when we constructed the automaton. Further, due to the nature of FSAs, it will do so in O(n) time with the length of the string being tested. Compare this to the standard Dynamic Programming Levenshtein algorithm, which takes O(mn) time, where m and n are the lengths of the two input words! It's thus immediately apparrent that Levenshtein automaton provide, at a minimum, a faster way for us to check many words against a single target word and maximum distance - not a bad improvement to start with!
Of course, if that were the only benefit of Levenshtein automata, this would be a short article. There's much more to come, but first let's see what a Levenshtein automaton looks like, and how we can build one.
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woob smtp
https://woob.tech/applications/smtp, posted Jan '22 by peter in communication email free opensource software toread
Daemon application able to fetch messages from supported websites and send them by mail. It can also be used to send a reply to a message (on a module which supports this feature), by piping an email to it.
Looks like it should be possible to read (perhaps even write) private messages on Reddit without having to deal with Reddit's own, pretty terrible, web interface. Worth looking into.
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Using Let's Encrypt for internal servers
https://blog.heckel.io/2018/08/05/issuing-lets-encrypt-certificates-for-65000-internal-servers/, posted Dec '21 by peter in development howto networking security toread
But while there are many tools to automatically renew certificates for publicly available webservers (certbot, simp_le, I wrote about how to do that 3 years back), it's hard to find any useful information about how to issue certificates for internal non Internet facing servers and/or devices with Let's Encrypt.
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Learning Containers From The Bottom Up
https://iximiuz.com/en/posts/container-learning-path/, posted Dec '21 by peter in deployment development learning linux toread virtualization
This article is not an attempt to explain containers in one go. Instead, it's a front-page for my multi-year study of the domain. It outlines the said learning path and then walks you through it, pointing to more in-depth write-ups on this same blog.
Mastering containers is no simple task, so take your time, and don't skip the hands-on parts!
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The Nazis as occult masters? It's a good story but not history
https://aeon.co/ideas/the-nazis-as-occult-masters-its-a-good-story-but-not-history, posted Aug '21 by peter in history religion toread war
The problem with this alluring image is not just that it is false. The myth of Nazi occultism is more than an amusing curiosity, a testament to the power of cinematic suggestion. It actively detracts from a historical understanding of the very themes it highlights. It yields a distorted view of Nazism and a distorted view of occultism. But it also offers an occasion for critical reflection, a chance to see how we might make better sense of the tangled history of occultism in the Nazi era. It might even help us to understand Nazi evil and the not-so-hidden forces behind it.
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Australia is becoming a surveillance state
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2021/australia-is-becoming-a-surveillance-state.html, posted Aug '21 by peter in fascism law opinion politics privacy terrorism toread
The government's approach to technological surveillance is leading us down a dark path, experts warn, as it prepares to give law enforcement agencies new hacking powers.
Currently before parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, the Surveillance Legislation Amendment (Identify and Disrupt) Bill 2020 is the government's latest attempt to gain a watchful eye over cyber space.
Once the bill passes, it will dish out extra power to the Australian Federal Police (AFP) and the Australian Criminal Intelligence Commission (ACIC), giving the agencies access to new warrants that will let them modify and delete data, collect intelligence from online communities, and even take over the online accounts of supposed criminals.