A thread on teaching live lessons using @MicrosoftTeams Meet Now function where students follow their normal timetable except online - will go into more detail on every point in a blog post later. Have used Teams for live teaching have supported over 100 live lessons since March

1. If you are using the desktop app, check you have the latest version of Teams so that you should have Breakout rooms enabled. Check by clicking your profile picture, then About - I have version 1.3.00.28779. If you have 1.2..., click on check for updates to get the latest

2. Set your entry routine. I get my students to enter with their microphone muted - you can also not allow attendees to unmute by opening the participants list, clicking the ellipsis and selecting that option.

3. Make sure students arrive as attendees - some organisations have this set up to automatically happen that only meeting organizer is the presenter and others are attendees. Can change this in the manage permissions menu to only me if not already set (opens in a web browser).

4. Classroom routine and expectations - first lesson I share my screen and show the students the raise hand function for when they want to ask questions, how to access the chat function and how to react to questions as opposed to typing answers

@curaffairs The author doesn't know enough about search to have written that article and the reason he's having those problems is AI algos like Rank Brain and Google's attempts to use natural language processing nothing to do with SEOs.

1/x

YMYL is not evaluated at the site level, but the query level.

Again this is on Google, not SEOs because they want to surface better sites.

And those devaluations are part of Core Updates which SEOs like me recover sites from.

2/

Featured Snippets are not optimized for - you can use certain HTML to be pulled in one but there is no definite use case where Featured Snippets are shown or that your site's will show for it. Also doesn't always come from the #1 result.

& that's Google not the SEO.

3/

Also there are many times when an SEO doesn't want their site in the Featured Snippet cuz it doesn't result in a click to the website. But we have no control over what Google pulls as Feature Snippets except to put in a meta tag to exclude us from them

4/

And Neil Patel is not an SEO. Most senior level SEOs see him as nothing more than a scammer because reportedly he's ripped them off by stealing their content and articles and passing them off as his.

5/

Whatsapp will start forcing users to share personal data with Facebook which is it's parent company. It doesn't come as a surprise since all the major giants of Silicon valley; Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft etc are deeply integrated with US intelligence agencies.

THREAD

In 2013, Edward Snowden, an employee of National Security Agency, revealed that the US govt was running a vast Internet surveillance program and tapping every major Silicon Valley platform and company— Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon including mobile games like Angry Birds.

[1]

The most astonishing program revealed by Snowden’s disclosures is called PRISM, which involves a sophisticated on-demand data tap housed within the datacenters of the biggest and most respected names in Silicon Valley: Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.

[2]

These devices allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to extract whatever the agency requires, including emails, attachments, chats, address books, files, photographs, audio files, search activity, and mobile phone location history.

[3]

Edward Snowden also revealed the Mass Metadata Surveillance System of America's National Security Agency (NSA) in his documents. Let's suppose if NSA had found someone dialing number of an al Qaeda member, and assume that this person had phoned 100 other people over the...

[4]

1. (THREAD) So, it seems like the deplatforming debate is once again kicking off, so I thought I would introduce some of the earlier work that was done in this area back when ISIS was buck wild on social media. What have we learned over the last six years might be useful today:

2. One of the earliest studies that discussed the impact of suspensions of ISIS accounts was @intelwire and Morgan's piece: The ISIS Twitter Consensus.

They found that suspensions did have an impact on replies and retweets and overall dissemination.

3. After suspensions, the die-hard supporters dedicated themselves to creating new accounts, but others whittled away: “it appears the pace of account creation has lagged behind the pace of suspensions”

4. On the specific question of how suspensions impact the Twitter network, see this piece by @intelwire and @IntelGirl111, which explores how suspensions impact these groups, including major disruptions to dissemination and decline in follower count:

5. Another study by @Aud_Alexander similarly found that ISIS supporters were finding it hard to “gain traction” after Twitter took a harder stance on the group.

I was hacking a game and accidentally invented a word for when you think someone is trans and you're proud of them for coming out but then you find out they aren't

someone is excited to watch bill nye in science class

This happens because one of the ways I figure out which memory location needs to be modified is by memory-searching for all occurrences and changing the first letter of them

so like if I know the next line of dialog is "Die"
I change it to "Aie" "Bie" "Cie" "Eie" "Fie"

then I see which one shows up in the game

time to get back to "repairing" old computers

The funny thing about making the 8-bit-guy into a meme about "repairing" computers with powertools is that the obvious heightening joke would, like, the "8 rounds guy", who fixes computers with firearms

but that would also be him, given that he's also a big gun enthusiast.

so it's inherently hard to satirize the repairing-computers-with-dremels guy, since they're also the guns-guy.

you'd have to go up to like a mythbusters level of overkill.

"this hard drive from 1986 won't spin up. We tried freezing it, tapping it with a rubber hammer, and opening the case to lower the friction... there's only one option left: GET OUT THE C4 EXPLOSIVES!"

(1) Let’s get one thing straight right now;

I was a mod on r/watchpeopledie.

Ive taken part in uncovering evidence of p3d0’s to reveal to LEO.

I have seen some *dark* sh*t in my day.

Unless you are used to it; you will NOT be able to handle “seeing the truth”. I promise ➡️

Today WhatsApp wished it's users good morning. Accept the updated terms and conditions or say goodbye. (Thread 1/n) It is effective from Feb 8, 2021.

There are seperate hyperlinks for terms and privacy policies. Both these hyperlinks lead to multiple pages of contracts written in a very jargonised language. A few things I noted :

The information 'we' provide to #WhatsApp include our messages. Also WhatsApp claims that it is end to end encrypted BUT,

BUT if your friend / enemy / boyfriend / family or anyone is offline and your message sent to him cannot be delivered #immediately, it will be saved on #WhatsApp servers for 30 days.

Also: When you forward media msg in #WhatsApp that media is stored temporarily in encrypted form on it's servers to aid in more efficient delivery of additional forwards. Tada! (Consider a thousand times before sending any images; news anchors can officially read your chats.)

Chess may be a good analogy for explaining the difference between a descriptive model of reality and a generative model of reality.

A descriptive model of chess will describe the rules (i.e. initial setup, allowed moves, points per piece, objectives). This tells you how a chessboard might evolve and also narrows the combinations of realistic chess positions.

In contrast, a generative model involves the actual gameplay between competing players that follow the rules. It generates new styles and patterns. It establishes new strategies and tactics. It generates new openings, middle gameplay, and end game tactics.

A generative model is an evolutionary model that leads to emergent behavior. As a consequence, a master of chess is able to recall the layout of chess positions in a real game in an instant, yet is unable to remember pieces placed in random positions.

That is because causality is present in the movements of pieces in a chessboard. An intuitive system like the human mind is able to capture that causality as a means to understanding and recall.

This interview from @OSchiffey has great quotes that directly refute the nonsense that many privacy advocates spout about how the death of cross-site tracking will help ad-supported publishers on the open web. https://t.co/bj1gWPKOei 1/

The interview is with a senior leader at a major global ad agency. Someone who actually knows what advertisers are talking about, where they are directing their spending, and what the future trends will be. Not a privacy advocate who knows nothing about the advertising market 2/

First, privacy advocates spread misinformation and bad research data that ITP hasn't hurt publisher revenue and/or hasn't affected advertiser spending. And yet here is an unequivocal answer as to the impact of ITP on advertiser spending. 3/

The agency exec also clearly shares the opinion that the end of 3PC will push money away from the open web, exactly what privacy advocates claim won't happen. 4/

She also talks about how context matters, but so does audience. Audience targeting is effectively dead without 3PC and non-Chrome browsers are doing nothing to change this. 5/

One of my purposes for 2021 is to simplify Docker for beginners.

Let's start with some definitions:

🏠Docker host
⚙️Docker engine
❓ Docker client
📝Dockerfile
📑Docker Image
🐳Docker Container
🐙Docker Compose
🪣 Docker Registry
🐳🐳🐳Docker Swarm

Definitions Below 👇

🏠Docker (Active) Host

A computer with Docker installed and the daemon running.

It can process Docker and non-Docker workloads.

⚙️Docker Engine

A Client-Server application. It has 3 components:

- "daemon process": A server that is a type of long-running program.

- "Rest API": to specify interfaces that programs can use to talk and interact with the daemon.

- "CLI": A command-line interface client

❓Docker Client

It sends commands to dockerd, using the Docker API.
It can communicate with multiple daemons.

📝Dockerfile

It's a text document that contains all the commands a user could call on the command line to assemble an image.

I'm going to tell you a little bit how we work on features at GitHub. It's simple, but very powerful in my opinion. At GitHub we have a high performance culture.

We are deploying changes almost all the time while keeping the service running and the deployment failure ratio needs to be super low! We are constantly working on new medium/big features, we have frequent deploys and required peer reviews.

How do we know that big features are not conflicting with each other in functionality and in version control. How do we merge the work done in these non-trivial features? How do we do prevent peer reviews slow down our productivity?

With basically two things: split the work in small batches and feature flags. We don't have long-lived feature branches. We do very small changes all the time and deploy them.

We could split a feature in tens or hundreds of PRs, but until it is beta or GA, we don't expose it to users by using feature flags.

Dear journalists, venture capitalists, TikTok teens and other ThinkFluencers: before hot-taking on how to regulate online speech, please consider reading some of the foundational work in this area.

Start with @Klonick's groundbreaking

Follow with @daphnehk on the overall regulatory structure of online

Read @jkosseff's book before ever typing 2-3-0 on your

Read @evelyndouek on the risks of coordinated

Pre-order @jilliancyork to understand the global human-rights

Affidavit by former head of IT for large Italian defense contractor admitting he uploaded instructions through military satellite to Frankfurt to flip votes from Trump to Biden on election night under direction of US persons. Willing to testify.#ItalyDidIt

THREAD: Now that @Amazon @awscloud has announced they will no longer host @parler_app, many have speculated that they will just “find another host.”

Here is why that’s not so simple and what it will likely mean for the app’s future. First, let’s look at where things are...

2/ Google and Apple have removed the app from their app stores, effectively terminating growth on mobile devices. People can still access the (not good) web UI until Amazon terminates them today. CEO Matze has said they may be down “up to a week” while they find new hosting.

3/ Translated to English, that’s code for “we have no idea what’s going to happen next.” No US cloud provider (Microsoft, Google, IBM, Digital Ocean) is likely to touch this, as it could be seen as providing material support for sedition. No CEO or counsel wants to get near this.

4/ They could potentially “roll their own” data center by buying servers and putting them in a co-location facility. But that’s a single point of failure, and many colo providers would be just as likely to decline their business. It would be hard and risky to pursue this.

5/ Imagine, after they sweated like pigs to get this hardware all setup, if they get told their colo provider is booting them. That’s a lot of metal to then move somewhere else. Meanwhile, the user base is deteriorating because chaos and dying apps. They will go to other venues.

Transgenderism resembles a mass psychogenic illness that has spread thanks to the internet. If there were no Tumblr identity fluidity nonsense, and if Reddit and YouTube had never existed, most “trans” people would not have landed on “gender” as the source of their ills.
1.

It is handed to them in the same way religion is handed to children. Thoughts and ideas are set before them, and they have brought these thoughts and ideas to live in themselves. Without the Internet, their feelings of dis-ease would have found a different explanation.
2.

These ideas became a framework for self-understanding, a map that instructs their actions, a vocabulary that programs their tongue. The pursuit of identity was the task, the online bubble its surrogate. They were commanded by it, and it gave their lives purpose and meaning.
3.

It had benefits. It catered to vanity. Social adulation arrived with each new step. This is why they so fiercely cling to it, since any conceptual breakdown would shatter the world they’ve built, which has been buttressed and fortified through these concepts – these errors.
4.

Its appeal first came as an escapist fantasy for the dysmorphic and disenchanted. Unbound from the meanings thrust upon them by others, they could instead become self-creators. They imbibed the dogma that suggested only two paths lay before them: – transition or suicide.
5.

I am seeing a ton of confusion about protecting yourself on the Internet. So as a retired bastard genius kid, I wanted to share my own experiences and knowledge in this.

DOXXING, PERSONAL CYBERSECURITY, ANONYMITY for the average revolutionary. A thread:

If you're a regular user of huge Internet services like Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, etc., as well as over the age of 18, it's wise to assume that your personally identifiable information IS attainable and IS out there. These services all collect and save info --

to varying degrees, and to varying levels of security. And this information is VALUABLE. Data breaches occur frequently, retroactively, and unknowingly, and the data from said breaches are circulated around and cached in all kinds of easy-to-access places online.

Why does this matter? A (simplified) hypothetical: while someone probably can't find your street address from just your Twitter bio, if your handle is the same as your e-mail, and that e-mail is in a publicly available data breach with a street address attached, you're screwed.

Usually when doxxing happens, a much more elaborate version of said case happens. Doxxing really comes down to investigating all of an individual's available info and digital footprints, and narrowing it down to a single identity.

Prepping for today's thread, the story of the CURRENT CYBERWAR is clearly overwhelming. J.E. Dyer @OptimisticCon links us to this story. Just one quote to