The Death of the Mind

At the International TeX Users Group Conference 2023 (TUG23) in Bonn, Germany, I presented a talk about using Metafont (and its extension Metapost) to develop traditional orthography Malayalam fonts, on behalf of C.V. Radhakrishnan and K.H. Hussain, who were the co-developers and authors. And I forgot to post about it afterwards — as always, life gets in between. In early 2022, CVR started toying with Metafont to create a few complicated letters of Malayalam script and he showed us a wonderful demonstration that piqued many of our interest. With the same code base, by adjusting the parameters, different variations of the glyphs can be generated, as seen in a screenshot of that demonstration: 16 variations…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://rajeeshknambiar.wordpress.com/2024/11/14/metafont-metapost-and-malayalam-font/

Mastercard has set its sights on transforming the online shopping experience by 2030, envisioning a checkout process where passwords and physical card numbers are no longer required. The company aims to replace traditional authentication methods with on-device biometrics for users to authenticate purchases across devices without exposing personal data online. Mastercard plans to phase out manual card entry and static passwords by 2030, using a combination of tokenization – introduced a decade ago to safeguard sensitive payment information – and biometric authentication to enable secure checkouts. Tokenization, first rolled out a decade ago to protect sensitive payment data, now plays a key role in the company’s goal to improve security and convenience in e-commerce. The…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.biometricupdate.com/202411/mastercard-says-biometrics-tokenization-only-for-online-checkout-by-2030

This is tentatively welcome news. I mean, it can’t result in anything worse than the original decision the Fourth Circuit handed down in the Chatrie case, which said there’s nothing constitutionally wrong with searching every Google user’s location info in hopes of finding the suspect law enforcement is actually looking for. (via FourthAmendment.com)
The Appeals Court took the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision that created a warrant requirement for obtaining cell site location info over a long period of time and took that to mean that the location info law enforcement eventually obtained in the Chatrie case wasn’t worthy of Fourth Amendment protections.

[W]e find that the government did not conduct a Fourth Amendment search when it obtained two…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/06/fourth-circuit-appeals-court-announces-its-going-to-rethink-its-geofence-warrant-decision/

You stroll into your favorite food-jobber, looking to pick up a few things on your way home from work. Lots of people are on their way home from work. There are lines at every register and someone is in the self-checkout with $600-worth of groceries, beginning what will eventually become a 30-minute stop-start process that could have been handled in a five minutes by even the most incompetent cashier.
That’s when you start considering your options. Do you take the slightly shorter line manned by yet another interchangeable teen who is only working a register because the manager scrambled help to the front — one who would otherwise just be at the back of the store milking…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2024/11/06/facial-recognition-firm-announces-way-to-punish-retail-workers-shoppers-for-forming-relationships/

This year, Georgia and Ohio ballots have presidential candidates on them, for whom votes will not be counted. This has never happened before in any state in the United States. In Georgia, after the ballots were printed, the State Supreme Court said the petitions for Claudia De la Cruz and Cornel West were invalid. In Ohio, after the ballots were printed, the Secretary of State said Jill Stein had accidentally withdrawn. So, in both states, voters will see names on the ballot but if they vote for those names, their vote won’t be counted.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2024/11/04/2024-is-first-presidential-election-in-history-in-which-ballot-listed-candidates-cant-have-votes-tallied/

Far from a “grassroots” operation, the “Uncommitted” trap was controlled and financed from the beginning by party operatives seeking to divert mass anger over the genocide in Gaza back into the Democratic Party.

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2024/11/05/eyid-n05.html

Since WFDF changed their ultimate rules web site
to be less-than-ideal (in the name of putting everything into WordPress…),
I made my own, at urules.org. It was a fun
journey; I’ve never fiddled with PWAs
before, and I was a bit surprised how low-level it all was. I assumed that
since my page is just a bunch of HTML files and ~100 lines of JS, I could
just bundle that up—but no, that is something they expect a framework to do
for you. The only primitive you get is seemingly that you can fire up your own
background service worker (JS running in its own, locked-down context)
and that gets to peek at every HTTP request done and possibly intercept it.
So you can use…

External feed Read More at the Source: http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2024-11-03-11-48_ultimate_rules_as_a_service.html

Back in the mists of prehistory, by which I mean 2014, I bought a Timbuk2 messenger bag and spent the next six or seven years loving it into the ground. When it finally fell part Timbuk2 had lost their way as a company, turning into a lifestyle brand at the expense of their product quality, and they didn’t have a meaningful replacement to offer me so it was time to look around.
To review, my requirements were, and are:

Waterproof for real.
Holds a large laptop plus the usual extra nerd shit and two days’ clothing.
Replaceable straps. The straps can’t be sewn in to the bag.
Quick-adjust straps, to cinch it down and step out of it easily.
Side pockets I…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://exple.tive.org/blarg/2024/11/02/papas-got-a-brand-new-bag/

External feed Read More at the Source: https://catandgirl.com/night-of-the-job-hunter/