> This is not to say that this type of ad hoc, spontaneous Romanization of Cantonese has not already existed for some time. Indeed, young people have been using it extensively for texting, on social media, etc. for years. What’s new is that it is now consciously being employed to out fake protesters who do not know Hong Kong Cantonese and its informal writing system.

> So began an unusual stay at the first luxury hotel to grow out of a cultish New York gym. Soon to follow would be other health-enhancing treats, including a deep-tissue massage with CBD oil and a flash freeze in a cryotherapy chamber at minus 100C (minus 150C, if you include wind-chill).

Unusual.

> The site’s now characteristic tone of performative erudition—hyperrational, dispassionate, contrarian, authoritative—often masks a deeper recklessness. Ill-advised citations proliferate; thought experiments abound; humane arguments are dismissed as emotional or irrational. Logic, applied narrowly, is used to justify broad moral positions. The most admired arguments are made with data, but the origins, veracity, and malleability of those data tend to be ancillary concerns. The message-board intellectualism that might once have impressed V.C. observers like Graham has developed into an intellectual style all its own. Hacker News readers who visit the site to learn how engineers and entrepreneurs talk, and what they talk about, can find themselves immersed in conversations that resemble the output of duelling Markov bots trained on libertarian economics blogs, “The Tim Ferriss Show,” and the work of Yuval Noah Harari.

This is a pretty fun read I think, even for people who don’t like HN. Or perhaps especially so. Some great, and dismal, quotes. Even ngate makes an appearance.

source: HN

> Mawson’s experience distills the Victorian age of Antarctic exploration to its essence, combining an unbelievable personal fortitude with the overall pointlessness of the endeavor. Even by Antarctic standards, George V Land was unexciting. The best thing you can say about it today is that sometimes a meteorite lands there.

> But Mawson left behind a hut, and by the iron laws of Antarctic nostalgia that apply to any human structure below the 70th parallel, that hut is now an object of veneration, and must be visited.

> In 2011, the Australian climate scientist Chris Turney heard the call of the Antarctic. As readers of this blog know, that can be an expensive call to hear. But the approaching centenary of Mawson’s expedition gave Turney a unique fundraising hook.

And then things went a bit sideways.

> We have a lot of fun, don’t we, when we talk about how people argue that the medieval period was the Dark Ages based on the fact that the feel some type of way about it? Now, can I call people who think this ridiculously incredulous and basic? Yes. And I do. Thanks for asking. Having said that, the general ignorance of the medieval period is not from nothing.

I feel like every mention of the dark ages comes with the disclaimer that they weren’t that dark so I’m not sure how widespread the misperception still is. But there’s also some neat historical facts here.

> This ended up completely changing fashion in England. Anne is the girl who introduced those sweet horned headdresses you think of when you think of medieval ladies, riding side-saddle, and the word “coach” to England, (from the Hungairan Kocs, where the cart she arrived at court the first time came from). Sweetening her transition to English life was the fact that she didn’t have to pay a dowry to get married. Instead, the English were allowed to trade freely with Bohemia and the Holy Roman Empire and allowed to be around a Czech lady. That was reward enough as far as the Empire was concerned. That’s how much England was not a thing.

source: grugq

> However, the idea that the photo is placeless is, to be blunt, nonsense. As others have pointed out before me, the setting is instantly recognizable as Breezewood and only Breezewood. Far from being “Every Town, U.S.A.,” Breezewood is a weird, improbable blip of a place. It’s what an architect might call a unique urban condition—a churning mini-city where the population nearly turns over every hour. (For this reason, and for the place’s sheer, unembarrassed honky-tonk, I’m a Breezewood fan.)

source: HN

> Alan Contessa (left) worked on the lunar module. Frances ‘Poppy’ Northcutt was a ‘computress’ for TRW Systems. Morgan Watson was a NASA engineer, John Wolfram (right) a Navy SEAL.

> Over the next eight years, success depended upon people like Morgan Watson, a black man from the segregated schoolhouses of rural Louisiana; Frances “Poppy” Northcutt, a high-school valedictorian and onetime beauty contestant from the Texas oil patch; Alan Contessa, a working-class kid from New York City’s outer boroughs; and John Wolfram, a rebel with a patriotic streak from the Wisconsin countryside.

> The New York passport office. Wow. Where to begin?

> The late 1990s was a simpler time for Google. The nascent company was merely a search engine, and Gmail, Android and YouTube were but glimmers in the startup’s eye. Google’s first privacy policy reflected that simplicity. It was short and earnest, a quaint artifact of a different time in Silicon Valley, when Google offered 600 words to explain how it was collecting and using personal information.

> That version of the internet (and Google) is gone. Over the past 20 years, that same privacy policy has been rewritten into a sprawling 4,000-word explanation of the company’s data practices.

> This evolution, across two decades and 30 versions, is the story of the internet’s transformation through the eyes of one of its most crucial entities. The web is now terribly complex, and Google has a privacy policy to match.

source: HN

This may be equal parts hilarious and infuriating.

source: ML

> Chestnut, a Northern Californian with a placid demeanor, also stars in “The Good, the Bad, the Hungry,” a new ESPN documentary about his surprisingly complex relationship with longtime rival Takeru Kobayashi. And the ESPN marketing machine had gone into overdrive to burnish the hot-dog champion’s image. They arranged to have Chestnut arrive at Citi Field with his sausage posse to throw out the first pitch and later hand out hot dogs — presumably the nonhuman kind.

> For much of the last three months, the most popular Joseph R. Biden Jr. website has been a slick little piece of disinformation that is designed to look like the former vice president’s official campaign page, yet is most definitely not pro-Biden.

> The website’s success was not accidental. Mr. Mauldin put it up well before Mr. Biden’s official website and aggressively pushed it out on Reddit, getting clicks and links and exposure. It had a big boost in May when a handful of media outlets — The Daily Caller and CNET, among others — wrote stories about the fake page beating Mr. Biden’s and linked to it. Links from established media websites are weighted heavily by search engines.

Hey everybody, look at this thing we don’t want people to see!

source: grugq

> The bunker and the secrecy around it were the obsession of Daniel Beckwitt, a then-26-year-old day trader and computer hacker who lived alone upstairs, worried North Korean missiles could soon be on the way.

> “You have what we call intellectual arrogance, okay?” Montgomery County Circuit Judge Margaret Schweitzer told him in court on June 17, only minutes before she handed him a nine-year prison sentence.

> I spoke to Metsavas under the auspices of KAPO, which gave The Atlantic virtually unrestricted access to him, but not to his friends or family. Notably, I was not allowed to speak with his wife, his mother, or his father, the last of whom played an integral role in his son’s ordeal. The rules of engagement were simple: I could ask my subject anything I liked, but he had been instructed beforehand not to divulge information that might compromise KAPO’s counterintelligence investigation, particularly any details that would telegraph to the Russians what the Estonians knew about their tradecraft and the secrets they had stolen. “They don’t deserve it,” Toots said.

> For KAPO, the interview was an opportunity to publicize its already legendary reputation of catching Russian spies. For me, it was an unmissable chance to speak to a contemporary spy and raise the curtain on the inner workings of a Russian intelligence agency whose century-long history of skulduggery—from election tampering to dirty wars, from attempted coups to assassination plots—shows no sign of abating. And for Metsavas, it was a chance to atone for his high crimes against his country, his comrades in the army, his friends and family. I believe he had little apparent incentive to lie: Everything he said would be within earshot of at least one KAPO case officer, tasked with ensuring that he didn’t speak out of turn, or embellish or misrepresent his autobiography. I got the impression that Metsavas, as much as the men who had unmasked him, took such matters earnestly. In general, there was a strange camaraderie between Metsavas and the KAPO case officers who flitted in and out of the interrogation room as our interview wore on. All interacted with him not as an enemy of the state, but as an old acquaintance, with an intimacy born of close proximity and repetition. I asked Metsavas whether he felt compelled in any way to talk to me. He said he didn’t and insisted that this whole thing was his idea in the first place. I eventually saw why.

source: K

In today’s edition of edit a URL and go to jail...

> KPMG sent participants in training programs a hyperlink that directed them to the applicable exams. Embedded in the hyperlink was an instruction to the server that specified the score necessary to pass the exam. Thus, the characters “MasteryScore=70” meant participants were required to answer at least 70 percent of the answers accurately to pass the exam. By changing the number in the hyperlink, audit professionals could change the score required to pass.

> 58. For a period of time up to November 2015, certain audit professionals, including one partner, altered the URLs for their exams to lower the scores required to pass. Twenty-eight of these auditors did so on four or more occasions. Certain audit professionals lowered the required score to the point of passing exams while answering less than 25 percent of the questions correctly.

Also: 25%??? Come on guys, that’s worse than random chance!

source: ML

> English is, unsurprisingly, the most commonly spoken language across the US, and Spanish is second most common in 46 states and the District of Columbia. So we excluded those two languages in the above map.

> Are there any overlaps between the physical and cyber security fields? Are there certain corners of cyber security that can best be reached by physical security experts, and vice versa? Can the two fields benefit from more cross-pollination and professional cooperation?

Plus some more comments: https://medium.com/@thegrugq/security-turns-out-its-hard-e678c5350bc7

source: grugq

> While high-profile figures like Mark Zuckerberg are known for making stealthy real-estate buys, some of the most extreme secrecy measures are demanded by people you’ve never heard of. “Sometimes I want to say, ‘Nobody cares!’” said Compass real-estate agent Cindy Scholz, of New York.

> The client wouldn’t send his financial documents because of Mr. Swierczewski’s laptop software. “He hated Windows,” said Mr. Swierczewski, who agreed to install a Linux operating system. It took two days to get it work, forcing Mr. Swierczewski to cancel appointments. “I almost threw my computer at the wall,” he said.

> Warning! These historical wartime images are sexually explicit.

> Would it surprise you to know that all the major combatants involved in World War II used pornography as part of their psychological operations (PSYOP) strategy?

source: grugq

> Since learning how to master the process of matching content with its best-fitting subreddit, I have gained more than 8 million karma. Of the 250 million or so users on the site, my account is ranked 13th, and I plan to crack the top 10 very soon. According to one statistical model shared in a data subreddit earlier in 2018, my posts that year reached the front page more times than any other user on the site. “The top poster, /u/dickfromaccounting, represents about 1% of all posts that reached the front page,” that analysis said.