h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Very enlightening post on the "seven bins" thing from Tom Forth (who I don't think is on the fediverse yet?). Worth a read! https://tomforth.co.uk/sevenbins/

"The length of #motorways in #Europe grew 60% between 1995 and 2020 while #railways shrank 6.5%. For every €1 governments spent building railways, they spent €1.6 building roads.

In the public and political debate, small investments into #BikeLanes and railways were heavily scrutinised while investments in roads were taken for granted. “This absolutely needs to change if we are to meet #climate mitigation targets in the #TransportSector.” "

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/sep/19/european-governments-railways-road-building-report-motorways-funding-rail
from the Guardian

When people say "government needs to get better at regulating tech", the related "government needs to get better at tech to regulate" is just as true, and this inflation/price fixing in Austria is a fantastic example:

https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@badlogic/111071396799790275

If you like listening to podcasts where people are set ingenious puzzles and have to reason things out live, you can now listen to one with me in! I'm in the latest episode of #Lateral with Tom Scott: https://audioboom.com/posts/8362443-completely-inedible-eggs

Every now and then I come across some old ancient webpage left over from the 1990s full of valuable an interesting information. And I’m like oh I need to save this to the Internet archive and then I check and no one has ever save that page ever before! WTF?! These pages aren’t going to Archive themselves people!

Since I've seen a lot of chatter about people switching to #Firefox as Google ramps up the enshitification of #Chrome, let me tell you about a killer feature for people who (a) need multiple accounts on the same websites (eg. devs) or specifically (b) have to use multiple Google accounts.

Firefox has an official addon called Multi Account Containers that lets you trivially set up color coded tabs that have separate sets of cookies. Log into your dev account in one, and your test account in another. Log into your personal #gmail in one and have another tab next to it with your work Gmail. I'm actually not signed in to any Google accounts in most my tabs, I just have containers for the specific tasks I do on Google products.

It'll take you 30 seconds to set up.

Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/

Mozilla's explanation: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

Small scoop here: In November 2022, the password manager service LastPass disclosed a breach in which hackers stole password vaults containing both encrypted and plaintext data for more than 25 million users. Since then, a steady trickle of six-figure cryptocurrency heists targeting security-conscious people throughout the tech industry has led some security experts to conclude that crooks likely have succeeded at cracking open some of the stolen LastPass vaults.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/09/experts-fear-crooks-are-cracking-keys-stolen-in-lastpass-breach/

From the story:

"...the researchers learned the attackers frequently grouped together victims by sending their cryptocurrencies to the same destination crypto wallet.

By identifying points of overlap in these destination addresses, the researchers were then able to track down and interview new victims. For example, the researchers said their methodology identified a recent multi-million dollar crypto heist victim as an employee at Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm that works closely with law enforcement agencies to help track down cybercriminals and money launderers.

Chainalysis confirmed that the employee had suffered a high-dollar cryptocurrency heist late last month, but otherwise declined to comment for this story."

@CatherineFlick A colleague once asked me why I knew how much it costs to care for the Tower of London ravens, and when I described a group of us that "recreationally file Freedom of Information requests" they looked at me like I had four heads