A few years ago, back when Matrix was originally implementing end-to-end encryption, we asked Moxie (the project lead for Signal) whether he’d ever consider connecting Signal (then TextSecure) to Matrix. After all, one of Matrix’s goals is to be an interoperability layer between other communication…

Playing with reality Rabbit Rabbit 26 min read· Sep 30, 2020 -- Written by Reed Berkowitz © 2019 Tony Webster “Ask Me Q — QAnon” — CC BY 2.0 I am a game designer with experience in a very small niche. I create and research games designed to be played in reality. I’ve worked in Alternate Reality…

In verschiedenen Beiträgen, auf Telegram und in anderen Sozialen Netzwerken werden Videos mit den umstrittenen Medizinern Wolfgang Wodarg und Sucharit Bhakdi geteilt, in denen diese behaupten, Covid-19-Impfstoffe könnten Frauen unfruchtbar machen. Dafür gibt es jedoch nach unseren Recherchen keine…

The 'megascale' structures that humans could one day build 14 January 2021 Anders SandbergFeatures correspondent Getty Images The Large Hadron Collider would have seemed incomprehensibly vast and complicated to our ancestors (Credit: Getty Images) What are the biggest, boldest things that humanity…

Kelsey Coolahan’s obsession began during her third year at Cooper Medical School, part of Rowan University in New Jersey. “I’m in the labor and delivery room, and I’m witnessing this whole miracle-of-birth thing, it’s amazing,” Coolahan remembered. “And then you have one lonely resident at the foot…

A week ago, Boston Dynamics posted a video of Atlas, Spot, and Handle dancing to “Do You Love Me.” It was, according to the video description, a way “to celebrate the start of what we hope will be a happier year.” As of today the video has been viewed nearly 24 million times, and the popularity is…

Supplies land on T-3 by parachute in June 1969. The murder occurred the following year. Dave Scoboria, USGS via Library of Congress Mario Escamilla was furious. A colleague of his, nicknamed Porky, had just stolen his jug of raisin wine. So the 33-year-old Escamilla grabbed a rifle and set out to…

As we start a new decade, it’s a good time to reflect on expectations for the next 10 years. Tyler thinks the Great Stagnation could be ending. Caleb sees cracks. Noah expresses techno-optimism. In this post, my aim is not to predict an end or non-end to stagnation. Rather, it is to think through…

Two unconnected events in the first week of 2021 have sped the adoption of decentralised real time communication. WhatsApp is being sucked dry by its data mining owner The first was an update to WhatsApp’s privacy policy. Rarely has a privacy policy managed to generate quite so much media coverage.…

We have finally reached the peak of the gravel/bikepacking/1x/touring bike builds. Well known Instagram user @bicyclepubes just posted his incredible build made in collaboration with custom bike builder Gustav Gullholm (@dangerholm). View this post on Instagram A post shared by Lamar Scrotum…

Social cooling refers to the idea that if “you feel you are being watched, you change your behavior.” And the massive amounts of data being collected, especially online, is exaggerating this effect. This may limit our desire to speak or think freely thus bringing about chilling effects on society—in…

The New Old Age An at-home test for colon cancer is as reliable as the traditional screening, health experts say, and more agreeable. Credit...Karlotta Freier By Published Jan. 11, 2021Updated July 5, 2021 Most Americans who are due for a colon cancer screening will receive a postcard or a call — or…

Die Schweiz präsen­tiert sich gerne als Forschungs- und Inno­va­ti­ons­na­tion. Und das mit gutem Grund: Kein Land produ­ziert pro Kopf mehr wissen­schaft­liche Publi­ka­tionen und auch bei der Zita­ti­ons­quote der Publi­ka­tionen liegt die Schweiz hinter den USA auf Platz zwei. Mit Abstand…

In the beginning of Terminator 2: Judgement Day, John Connor uses a laptop to crack the PIN of a stolen debit card. I don’t think I saw Terminator 2 in the theater. I probably watched it years later on LaserDisc but the scene left quite an impression on me. I had a similar reaction to the war dialer…

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that the Coasting-website (coasting.com) was not online anymore and that the landing page was Shimano’s corporate website, Shimano.com. Just before writing this, I googled it again and there is shimanocoasting.com again, on the bottom of the page, just behind the…

The number of researchers and peer-review publications is growing exponentially. It has been estimated that the number of researchers in the world doubles every 16 years and the number of research outputs is increasing even faster. If you accept that published research papers are an accurate measure…

By Winston Rowntree of Subnormality. "I think Homer gets stupider every year." — Professor Lawrence Pierce, The Simpsons, "The Simpsons 138th Episode Spectacular" The act of taking a single (often minor) action or trait of a character within a work and exaggerating it more and more over time until…

Almost every weekday for six years, Christie Smythe took the F train from Park Slope downtown to her desk at Brooklyn’s federal court, in a pressroom hidden on the far side of a snack bar. Smythe, who covered white-collar crime for Bloomberg News, wore mostly black and gray, and usually skipped…

This is a segment from Powderwhore's 2010 movie "TeleVision". You can get the entire movie at www.powderwhore.com Available to download or on DVD.

Special thanks to Jennings Anderson who looked over an early draft of this post and helped me refine it. Also, as usual, the views expressed herein do not represent those of my parents, my wife, my dentist, or my employer. Photo by Ryoji Iwata on Unsplash The first time I spoke with Jennings…

Sea beast: The only Soviet-era Lun-class ekranoplan ever completed has been left to rust for 30 years, but now this remarkable flying machine is on the move. Musa Salgereyev/TASS/Getty Images On the beach: The ekranoplan has been moved to a beach near Derbent in the Dagestan region where it'll form…

(Cross-posted from my blog) The other day I made an advice thread based on Jacobian’s from last year! If you know a source for one of these, shout and I’ll edit it in. Possessions 1. If you want to find out about people’s opinions on a product, google reddit. You’ll get real people arguing, as…

The man who posted himself to Australia Published 6 March 2015 Share page About sharing Image source, AP ByJason CaffreyBBC World Service In the mid-1960s, Australian athlete Reg Spiers found himself stranded in London with no money to buy a plane ticket home. Desperate to get back to Australia in…

Data Science Datalore Python Research We Downloaded 10,000,000 Jupyter Notebooks From Github – This Is What We Learned Here’s how we used the hundreds of thousands of publicly accessible repos on GitHub to learn more about the current state of data science. Inspired by research carried out 2 years…

2020 has been a lousy year. Time magazine’s cover story declared it the “worst year ever” (or at least “in living memory for most Americans”). And it is finishing on a miserable note, with coronavirus deaths reaching horrifying new heights — worse than a 9/11 every single day — while public health…

E s ist der 22. Januar 2020, und ich sitze auf der Beerdigung meines Opas. Draußen reihen sich Gräber aneinander, ein Friedhof, wie es ihn tausendfach in Deutschland gibt, drinnen, in der Trauerhalle, kann ich meinen eigenen Atem sehen, während ich auf den glänzenden Sarg blicke. Ich friere. Aus den…

Do you consider yourself to be a disabled person? Yes: ☐ No: ☐ Prefer not to say: ☐ Yes. Because forms like this – and questions like this – always throw me into confusion, and sometimes into complete mind-stoppage. You appear to be asking a closed question, but ‘consider’ is a word I would use to…

Hi. This post is written by a friend of Margins, who happens to be a product executive at a public tech company. He wrote this initially in September 2020, but we were hesitant to publish it anonymously. Nevertheless, our friend turned out to be very insightful and we thought it’d be a shame (hah!)…

Join Free News Catch up on the latest news and original reporting produced by The Hustle team. News Briefs Bite-size stories from our daily newsletter Hustle Originals Original reporting from our Sunday newsletter Past Newsletters The Hustle newsletter archive Videos Browse our collection of…

Die Frau mit der Clownsnase zweifelt. Bei der Kundgebung von Corona-Leugner:innen auf dem Kölner Neumarkt kämpft sie sich durch die Menge, bis sie Ralf Ludwig erreicht. Von ihm erhofft sie sich Antworten. Vor der Corona-Pandemie war Ludwig nur ein kaum bekannter Anwalt aus Leipzig, seither…

I spent a large part of 2019 working with the distributed and decentralized web, especially IPFS, also known as the “Inter-Planetary File System”. I’ve written a few articles on the topic, on how you can host a web app on IPFS, one of which even ended up on the front page of HackerNews. For about a…

«Es ist absolut haltlos, zu sagen, dass die SVP rassistisch ist», sagte SVP-National­­rätin Andrea Geissbühler im Juni in der SRF-«Arena» mit dem Titel «Jetzt reden wir Schwarzen». SP-Nationalrätin Samira Marti hatte der Partei vorgeworfen, strukturellen Rassismus zu befördern, und wir waren sehr…

Am 4. September 2014 wird bei den NSU-Prozessen in München ein unge­wöhn­li­ches Beweis­mittel ange­führt: eine 216-seitige Novelle, die mit über 200 rassi­stisch-moti­vierten Morden welt­weit in Verbin­dung gebracht werden kann. Trotzdem bieten Schweizer Online­buch­hand­lungen die „Turner Diaries”…

The last time I spoke to Michael J Fox, in 2013, in his office in New York, he was 90% optimistic and 10% pragmatic. The former I expected; the latter was a shock. Ever since 1998, when Fox went public with his diagnosis of early-onset Parkinson’s disease, he has made optimism his defining public…

Office Space How personal productivity transformed work—and failed to. November 17, 2020 As the obligations of knowledge work have grown increasingly frenetic, workers have flocked to productivity tools and techniques.Illustration by Timo Lenzen In the early two-thousands, Merlin Mann, a Web…

I’ve been reading Garfield comics with my son this week. He’s too young to really follow the narratives — after every strip he pauses, asks what happened, and then says, slowly and calmly, “Why” — but he’s already very fond of the drawings and characters. We’ve been reading specifically late-80’s…

Im Spiegel – Obdachlose beim Coiffeur Obdachlose Menschen wagen den Blick in den Spiegel. Im mobilen Coiffeursalon von Anna Tschannen begegnen sie ihren eigenen Geschichten – geprägt vom Leben auf der Strasse. In intimen Aufnahmen begleitet die Kamera die Protagonistinnen und Protagonisten durch die…

The surprising downsides of empathy 2 October 2020 Richard FisherFeatures correspondent Getty Images Empathy for our fellow human beings can have a dark side (Credit: Getty Images) There’s a dark side to feeling the emotions of other people. In some cases, it can even lead to cruelty, aggression,…