#web based reporting software

[seozelenka]

Industrial Alarm Management Application

[theonion]

Sad, pathetic local web developer and blogger Phillip Cathin, 34, told reporters today that he sees himself as “a brand.”

The pitiful man, who works in development and design at the Seattle-based software company Woot, told reporters he takes time out of every day to “promote and further [his] brand” and to extend his “social and online presence.”

Full Story

[kenyatta]

AkiraBot is a program that fills website comments sections and customer service chat bots with AI-generated spam messages. Its goal is simple: it wants you to sign up for an SEO scheme that costs about $30 a month. For that low price it swears it can enchant Google’s algorithms to get you on the frontpage. But it’s a scam. A new report from researchers at cybersecurity firm SentinelOne documented how scammers deployed AkiraBot, the tool’s use of OpenAI generated messages, and how it avoided multiple CAPTCHA systems and network detection techniques. According to the report, the bot targeted 420,000 unique domains and successfully spammed 80,000.

Whoever runs AkirBot operates their SEO company under a bunch of different names, but they all tend to use the words “Akira” or “ServiceWrap.” SentinelOne says the tool finds websites crafted by third party software like Wix or Squarespace and spams comments sections and automated chatbots with a promise to get the site on the frontpage of various search engines. If you have a small business that exists on the web or have run a WordPress-based website in the last 15 years, you’ve likely seen messages like those AkiraBot crafts. 

[britcision]

I’m pretty sure the people bitching about not giving money to tumblr are the same ones who complain when AO3 or wikipedia ask for donations, so I’m just gonna clarify something

Running a website is not free

Even if they made no changes and did only maintenance, they still need to pay for server costs, expert programmers for when something goes wrong, storage (although frankly storage is cheap as chips these days which is nice)

They need to keep up with the capabilities of new tech like improvements to web browsers, never mind their own apps keeping pace with old and new tech developments

Backwards compatibility (being able to run the updated app on old tech) is a massive problem for apps on a regular basis, because there are people out here using an iPod and refusing to update software

There’s a reason every few years apps like Animal Crossing will issue an update that breaks backwards compatibility and you can only play if your phone is running more recent software

This shit costs money even before you look into the costs of human moderation, which I’m not exactly convinced is a big part of their current budget but fucking should be if we want an actual fix for their issues with unscreened ads and reporting bigots

Ignoring that it’s apparently illegal for companies not to actively chase profits, running Tumblr is expensive

And advertisers know we fucking hate them here

They’re still running ads, which we know because they’re all over the damn place, but half the ads are for Tumblr and its store

Other ad companies know we are not a good market, so they’re not willing to put the money in

Tumblr runs at a $30 million deficit, every year, because hosting a site is expensive

They are trying to take money making ideas from other social medias because they’re not a charity; they need to make enough money to keep the site going

If you want tumblr to keep existing, never mind fixing its many issues that require human people to be paid to do jobs like moderation, they will need money

Crabs cost $3

One crab day a year can fix the deficit and hammer home for Tumblr that:

A) we do want to be here and want the site to keep going

And B) they do not need to do the normal social media money making strategies we all hate

They need a way to make money if you want the hellsite to exist, because we live in a capitalist hellscape and cannot all be AO3

If they think they can make enough to keep running without pulling all the tricks we hate, they have no reason to pull said tricks

But they need money

And a way to make money

And if we can show them we can do that, there is a significantly higher chance they will listen to us, the user base they need money from, than if we don’t

Tumblr isn’t perfect, or anywhere close. They need someone to actually screen the paid ads they put through, they need to take the transphobia, antisemitism, and bigotry seriously

These Are Jobs That Will Cost Money

People Need To Be Fucking Paid For Their Work

Tumblr Is Not Run By Volunteers For Free And Nor Should It Be

Paying People Is Good Actually

So if you wanna get all high and mighty over $3/year, by all means, go spend that hard earned cash elsewhere

Good luck finding a perfect and morally pure business to give it to though

Being a whiny negative asshole isn’t more appealing just because you’ve put yourself on a moral soapbox, it just means the asshole is a little higher up

For all the whining about “all the new updates are terrible this site is unusable”…. It’s one fuck of a lot more usable than it was in 2017, 2018, 2020

And yeah, it’s going back down and most of the newer ones have been fucking annoying and I would also like them to stop

But it got up somehow and that means it could do that again

Hope is more fun than edgy nihilism

August 1st is a good and exciting day to summon a crab army

[unwelcome-ozian]

Weaponizing violence. With alarming regularity, the nation continues to be subjected to spates of violence that terrorizes the public, destabilizes the country’s ecosystem, and gives the government greater justifications to crack down, lock down, and institute even more authoritarian policies for the so-called sake of national security without many objections from the citizenry.

Weaponizing surveillance, pre-crime and pre-thought campaigns. Surveillance, digital stalking and the data mining of the American people add up to a society in which there’s little room for indiscretions, imperfections, or acts of independence. When the government sees all and knows all and has an abundance of laws to render even the most seemingly upstanding citizen a criminal and lawbreaker, then the old adage that you’ve got nothing to worry about if you’ve got nothing to hide no longer applies. Add pre-crime programs into the mix with government agencies and corporations working in tandem to determine who is a potential danger and spin a sticky spider-web of threat assessments, behavioral sensing warnings, flagged “words,” and “suspicious” activity reports using automated eyes and ears, social media, behavior sensing software, and citizen spies, and you having the makings for a perfect dystopian nightmare. The government’s war on crime has now veered into the realm of social media and technological entrapment, with government agents adopting fake social media identities and AI-created profile pictures in order to surveil, target and capture potential suspects.

Weaponizing digital currencies, social media scores and censorship. Tech giants, working with the government, have been meting out their own version of social justice by way of digital tyranny and corporate censorship, muzzling whomever they want, whenever they want, on whatever pretext they want in the absence of any real due process, review or appeal. Unfortunately, digital censorship is just the beginning. Digital currencies (which can be used as “a tool for government surveillance of citizens and control over their financial transactions”), combined with social media scores and surveillance capitalism create a litmus test to determine who is worthy enough to be part of society and punish individuals for moral lapses and social transgressions (and reward them for adhering to government-sanctioned behavior). In China, millions of individuals and businesses, blacklisted as “unworthy” based on social media credit scores that grade them based on whether they are “good” citizens, have been banned from accessing financial markets, buying real estate or travelling by air or train.

Weaponizing compliance. Even the most well-intentioned government law or program can be—and has been—perverted, corrupted and used to advance illegitimate purposes once profit and power are added to the equation. The war on terror, the war on drugs, the war on COVID-19, the war on illegal immigration, asset forfeiture schemes, road safety schemes, school safety schemes, eminent domain: all of these programs started out as legitimate responses to pressing concerns and have since become weapons of compliance and control in the police state’s hands.

Weaponizing entertainment. For the past century, the Department of Defense’s Entertainment Media Office has provided Hollywood with equipment, personnel and technical expertise at taxpayer expense. In exchange, the military industrial complex has gotten a starring role in such blockbusters as Top Gun and its rebooted sequel Top Gun: Maverick, which translates to free advertising for the war hawks, recruitment of foot soldiers for the military empire, patriotic fervor by the taxpayers who have to foot the bill for the nation’s endless wars, and Hollywood visionaries working to churn out dystopian thrillers that make the war machine appear relevant, heroic and necessary. As Elmer Davis, a CBS broadcaster who was appointed the head of the Office of War Information, observed, “The easiest way to inject a propaganda idea into most people’s minds is to let it go through the medium of an entertainment picture when they do not realize that they are being propagandized.”

Weaponizing behavioral science and nudging. Apart from the overt dangers posed by a government that feels justified and empowered to spy on its people and use its ever-expanding arsenal of weapons and technology to monitor and control them, there’s also the covert dangers associated with a government empowered to use these same technologies to influence behaviors en masse and control the populace. In fact, it was President Obama who issued an executive order directing federal agencies to use “behavioral science” methods to minimize bureaucracy and influence the way people respond to government programs. It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

Weaponizing desensitization campaigns aimed at lulling us into a false sense of security. The events of recent years—the invasive surveillance, the extremism reports, the civil unrest, the protests, the shootings, the bombings, the military exercises and active shooter drills, the lockdowns, the color-coded alerts and threat assessments, the fusion centers, the transformation of local police into extensions of the military, the distribution of military equipment and weapons to local police forces, the government databases containing the names of dissidents and potential troublemakers—have conspired to acclimate the populace to accept a police state willingly, even gratefully.

Weaponizing fear and paranoia. The language of fear is spoken effectively by politicians on both sides of the aisle, shouted by media pundits from their cable TV pulpits, marketed by corporations, and codified into bureaucratic laws that do little to make our lives safer or more secure. Fear, as history shows, is the method most often used by politicians to increase the power of government and control a populace, dividing the people into factions, and persuading them to see each other as the enemy. This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being manipulated into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. Instead, fueled with fear and loathing for phantom opponents, they agree to pour millions of dollars and resources into political elections, militarized police, spy technology and endless wars, hoping for a guarantee of safety that never comes. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward, and “we the suckers” get saddled with the tax bills and subjected to pat downs, police raids and round-the-clock surveillance.

Weaponizing genetics. Not only does fear grease the wheels of the transition to fascism by cultivating fearful, controlled, pacified, cowed citizens, but it also embeds itself in our very DNA so that we pass on our fear and compliance to our offspring. It’s called epigenetic inheritance, the transmission through DNA of traumatic experiences. For example, neuroscientists observed that fear can travel through generations of mice DNA. As The Washington Post reports, “Studies on humans suggest that children and grandchildren may have felt the epigenetic impact of such traumatic events such as famine, the Holocaust and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.”

Weaponizing the future. With greater frequency, the government has been issuing warnings about the dire need to prepare for the dystopian future that awaits us. For instance, the Pentagon training video, “Megacities: Urban Future, the Emerging Complexity,” predicts that by 2030 (coincidentally, the same year that society begins to achieve singularity with the metaverse) the military would be called on to use armed forces to solve future domestic political and social problems. What they’re really talking about is martial law, packaged as a well-meaning and overriding concern for the nation’s security. The chilling five-minute training video paints an ominous picture of the future bedeviled by “criminal networks,” “substandard infrastructure,” “religious and ethnic tensions,” “impoverishment, slums,” “open landfills, over-burdened sewers,” a “growing mass of unemployed,” and an urban landscape in which the prosperous economic elite must be protected from the impoverishment of the have nots. “We the people” are the have-nots.

The end goal of these mind control campaigns—packaged in the guise of the greater good—is to see how far the American people will allow the government to go in re-shaping the country in the image of a totalitarian police state.

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk will be pleased that his surprise jaunt to China on Sunday garnered many glowing headlines. The trip was undoubtedly equally a surprise to Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, who had been scheduled to offer Musk the red carpet on a long-arranged visit.

The billionaire blew off India at the last minute, citing “very heavy Tesla obligations.” Indeed, Tesla has had a tumultuous couple of weeks, with federal regulator slap-downs, halved profits, and price-cut rollouts. Yet, in a very public snub that Modi won’t quickly forget, the company CEO made time for Chinese premier Li Qiang. And well Musk might. Tesla needs China more than China needs Tesla. After the US, China is Tesla’s second biggest market. And ominously, in the first quarter of the year, Tesla’s sales in China slipped by 4 percent in a domestic EV market that has expanded by more than 15 percent. That’s enough of a hit for any CEO to jump in a Gulfstream and fly across the Pacific for an impromptu meeting with a Chinese premier. Globally, Tesla has lost nearly a third of its value since January, and earlier this month, Tesla’s worldwide vehicle deliveries in the first quarter fell for the first time in almost four years. As they are wont to do, Tesla investors continue to complain over repeated delays to the company’s rollout of cars with genuine driverless capabilities.

One of Tesla’s stop-gap technologies—a now heavily-discounted $8,000 add-on—is marketed as Full Self-Driving, or FSD. But, like the similarly confusingly named Autopilot feature, it still requires driver attention, and may yet still prove to be risky. Among the deals said to have been unveiled at Sunday’s meeting with Li Qiang was a partnership granting Tesla access to a mapping license for data collection on China’s public roads by web search company Baidu. This was a “watershed moment,” Wedbush Securities senior analyst Dan Ives said in an interview with Bloomberg Television. However, Tesla has been using Baidu for in-car mapping and navigation in China since 2020. The revised deal, in which Baidu will now also provide Tesla with its lane-level navigation system, clears one more regulatory hurdle for Tesla’s FSD in China. It does not enable Tesla to introduce driverless cars in China or anywhere else, as some media outlets have reported. Press reports have also claimed that Musk has secured permission to transfer data collected by Tesla cars in China out of China. This is improbable, noted JL Warren Capital CEO and head of research Junheng Li, who wrote on X: “[Baidu] owns all data, and shares filtered data with Tesla. Just imagine if [Tesla] has access to real-time road data such as who went to which country’s embassy at what time for how long.” That, she stressed, would be “super national security!” According to Reuters, Musk is still seeking final approval for the FSD software rollout in China, and Tesla still needs permission to transfer data overseas. Li added that a rollout of even a “supervised,” data-lite version of FSD in China is “extremely unlikely.” She pointed to challenges for Tesla to support local operation of the software. Tesla still “has no [direct] access to map data in China as a foreign entity,” she wrote. Instead, Tesla is likely using the deal extension with Baidu as an FSD workaround, with the data collected in China very much staying in China. Despite this, Tesla shares have jumped following news of the expanded Baidu collaboration. Furthermore, Li said there’s “no strategic value” for Beijing to favor FSD when there are several more advanced Chinese alternatives. (We’ve tested them.)

“Chinese EVs are simply evolving at a far faster pace than Tesla,” agrees Shanghai-based automotive journalist and WIRED contributor Mark Andrews, who tested the driver assistance tech available on the roads in China. The US-listed trio of Xpeng, Nio, and Li Auto offer better-than-Tesla “driving assistance features” that rely heavily on lidar sensors, a technology that Musk previously dismissed, but which Tesla is now said to be testing. Although dated in shape and lacking in the latest tech, a Tesla car is nevertheless more expensive in China than most of its rivals. Tesla recently slashed prices in China to arrest falling sales. Musk’s flying visit to China smacked of “desperation,” says Mark Rainford, owner of the Inside China Auto channel. “[Tesla] sales are down in China—the competition has weathered the price cuts so far and [the Tesla competitors have] a seemingly endless conveyor belt of talented and beautiful products.” Rainford further warns that the “golden period for Tesla in China” is “at great risk of collapsing.” Tesla opened its first gigafactory in Shanghai five years ago, and it is now the firm’s largest—but the automaker has been playing tech catchup in China for some time. In addition to Xpeng, Nio, and Li, there are other Chinese car companies competing with Tesla on autonomous driving, as Musk will see if he visits the Beijing Motor Show, which runs through this week.

Beijing is now arguably the world’s preeminent automotive expo, but Tesla is not exhibiting—a sign that it has little new to offer famously tech-hungry Chinese autobuyers. Pointedly, the Cybertruck is not road-legal in China, although that hasn’t stopped Tesla from displaying the rust-prone electric pickup in some of its Chinese showrooms. Likewise, Tesla has just announced plans for a European Cybertruck tour. But, just like in China, the EV pickup cannot be sold in the EU, either—and according to Tesla's lead on vehicle engineering, it likely never will be.

Speaking on tighter pedestrian safety regulations in the EU compared to the US, Tesla’s vice president of vehicle engineering, Lars Moravy, told Top Gear that “European regulations call for a 3.2-mm external radius on external projections. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to make a 3.2-mm radius on a 1.4-mm sheet of stainless steel.”

The “Cybertruck Odyssey” tour—as Tesla’s European X account calls it—may titillate Tesla fans, but it could prove to be about as useful as shooting a Roadster into space.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

#20yrsago Forever War with better sex, Starship Troopers without the lectures: Old Man’s War https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/12/forever-war-with-better-sex-starship-troopers-without-the-lectures-old-mans-war/

#20yrsago Cable companies will expire your Six Feet Under recordings after 2-4 weeks https://memex.craphound.com/2004/12/12/cable-companies-will-expire-your-six-feet-under-recordings-after-2-4-weeks/

#15yrsago FDIC sends a big F-U: completely blacked out documents in response to WaMu takeover freedom of information requests https://web.archive.org/web/20100114010713if_/https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/2009/12/the_fight_for_wamu_documents.html

#10yrsago IBM’s banking security software demands the right to spy on you https://yro.slashdot.org/story/14/12/11/2233234/bank-security-software-eula-allows-spying-on-users

#10yrsago US Christian terrorism: the other white meat https://web.archive.org/web/20141205144046/https://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/12/04/3599271/austin-shooter-christian-extremism/

#10yrsago Senate IP address vandalizes Wikipedia to scrub “torture” from CIA torture report https://mashable.com/archive/senate-wikipedia-torture-report

#5yrsago Teespring removes Techdirt’s “Copying is Not Theft” tees for copyright infringement, and won’t discuss the matter any further https://www.techdirt.com/2019/12/12/teespring-takes-down-our-copying-is-not-theft-gear-refuses-to-say-why/

#5yrsago The three biggest Chinese business scams that target foreign firms https://web.archive.org/web/20200107202820/https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/12/china-scams-our-annual-holiday-edition.html">https://web.archive.org/web/20200107202820/https://www.chinalawblog.com/2019/12/china-scams-our-annual-holiday-edition.html

#5yrsago A Wechat-based “mobile court” presided over by a chatbot has handled 3m legal procedures since March https://web.archive.org/web/20191207192051/https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2019/12/07/asia-pacific/crime-legal-asia-pacific/ai-judges-verdicts-via-chat-app-brave-new-world-chinas-digital-courts/#.Xev7n2bP1qY

#5yrsago Facebook promised to provide academics data to study disinformation, but their foot-dragging has endangered the whole project https://socialscience.one/blog/public-statement-european-advisory-committee-social-science-one

#5yrsago DJ Riko is back with the 18th annual Merry Mixmas mashup album! http://djriko.com/mixmases.htm

#5yrsago Family puts Ring camera in children’s room, discovers that hacker is watching their kids 24/7, taunting them through the speaker https://www.vice.com/en/article/how-hackers-are-breaking-into-ring-cameras/

#5yrsago 2019 was the year of voice assistant privacy dumpster fires https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-12-11/silicon-valley-got-millions-to-let-siri-and-alexa-listen-in

#1yrago An Epic antitrust loss for Google https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/12/im-feeling-lucky/#hugger-mugger

[idkhowtopickausername]

Hi!! Hope you are doing well! I was wondering if you had any tips or resources that you used when you made the sasuke amv? I want to learn how to make amvs, but it's so intimidating...

Hi! Oh that so exciting that you’re thinking of making an AMV! (This got kind of long so I’m putting it under a read more)

There’s a number of different ways you can do it—I ended up using DaVinci Resolve as a video editing software which is free although I have had a couple different issues with getting the audio to work in the past but mostly it works well. So I used that for video editing and I watched some tutorial videos on YouTube to learn how to use it for making AMVs, I think this one was one that I found helpful: https://youtu.be/FMyyfMByq18?si=oTKZPwaPOOYs5Fwb

Usually I first listen to the song and put markers where I plan to change between different clips and then upload the episodes. Then I unlink the episode video from its audio, delete the audio and cut out the parts of the episodes that I know I won’t use clips of and delete them from the timeline and then start making clips of the scenes I plan to include and try to fit the clips into the sections of music and adjust them to the right length/add other short clips in if I need to to fill space. But I sort of end up doing it a bit out of order based on whatever part I feel like working on and it probably makes more sense in the video tutorials than it does when I try to describe it.

For getting the clips I ended up learning to torrent which someone on here taught me (not sure if you know how or if that’s something you want to do, I could walk you through it if you want though, personally I think it’s an easy and convenient way to do it and I find it reassuring that I can check the comments to make sure no one has reported any issues with the file they downloaded), and I torrented mkv files of the episodes from 1337x .to so I didn’t have to worry about subtitles being included because they’re an optional part of that file format. For the audio I looked up a list of YouTube to mp3 converter websites and I ended up using dirpy .com which just lets you put in the YouTube link and then download the audio.

There’s other options for video editors and places to download the episodes though—I know that there are websites where people get raws (videos with no subtitles, although downloads of dubbed versions would work too) of anime episodes for AMVs although I never really figured out how it works or found what I was looking for that way, but you could look into that and maybe figure it out if you want an alternative to torrenting. I also know that there’s some generic piracy websites that let you download stuff and maybe if you find Reddit pages or recommendations from elsewhere on the web you can find sites with downloads that you trust enough based on other people vouching for them and you could maybe use an antivirus software (there are some free ones, I use Kaspersky) to scan the files after downloading them?

I had someone send me an ask back when I was going to make the AMV that had a link to download a pirated version of Adobe Premier Pro for video editing and that also linked a website where you could download anime episodes although I don’t know if the urls are still reliable because I know that piracy websites tend to change domains a lot (the urls they sent me at the time were gogoanime .llc for anime downloads although I’m pretty sure that one’s changed since and getinto .pc for downloading Premier Pro), you could look the names up and maybe see if there’s info about current urls on Reddit or something? I don’t think Premier Pro works with mkv files though based on what I’ve read but if you end up using a different video file format it would work.

If anyone reading this has advice or resources that they want to offer in the replies go ahead! I’ve only made one AMV so far lol so I’m sure there’s people with more experience and knowledge.

[merge-conflict]

some questions for writers

tagged by @luvwich, tagging @corpocyborg, @seraphfighter, @pvthfinder

Last book I read: I've read the first 10 pages of so many books in the past 6 months but I don't think those count? So probably Ancillary Mercy

Greatest literary inspirations:  Ann Leckie, Laurie Marks, N. K. Jemisin

Things in my current fandom I want to read but I don't want to write: Nothing in particular? If I really want something it's because I want to write it, usually (although I do enjoy seeing other takes on stuff). I never know what's good until I stumble on it. Reading has been difficult for me lately in general. (symptoms disease)

Things in my current fandoms I want to write but I think nobody would be interested in them but me: Speculating on the internal systems and operations and infrastructure tech at Arasaka Tower could be my Paris sewers moment, ngl.

You can recognise my writing by: I use action tags a lot (Leckian influence). Repetition is a big one for me, the rule of threes, like it is, it is, and it isn't. Inserting common tech experiences into my writing (dealing with hardware. having a stupid mistake fixed by rubber duckying) Limited POV narration with narrators that are usually unreliable mostly through omission. Probably a bunch of other stuff that I'm too lost in the sauce to notice about my own predilections.

My most controversial take (current fandom): Lots of strong opinions about the depiction and use of tech within cyberpunk which is less rule of cool and more my brain is so warped by continuous application of threat analysis that I cannot simply Let it Go. I could talk about it forever but my audience is limited to a handful of people unless I can get my irl friend and coworker into cyberpunk and simply infodump straight to him.

More direct in scope, I think the eldritch killer AI trope is missing the forest for the trees in cyberpunk themes where the real horror is what people do to each other and the systems and societies they create that make it possible.

Top three favourite tropes: reluctant allies to lovers, that little smidge of hilarity in the midst of absolute horror and grief, the exploration of what it means to be human (or just a person)

What’s your current writing mood (10 – super motivated and churning out words like crazy, 0 – in a complete rut): 0.5 - The spirit is willing but the mind is a rotting moldy spud

Share a random frustration: The reporting system I've been using heavily for work the past few days is web-based (hisssssss) and if I type some words and then switch desktops too quickly away from my browser and back then it just deletes the last few sentences I wrote because they didn't get to auto-saved somehow. I have not flown into a homicidal rage about this yet but it's been touch and go. My desire to kill all software that does not function locally on my host only grows by the hour, but also I'm sort of sleepy now so whatever.

[radhikakanojiya]

How GIS Is Improving Traffic Management and Road Safety

The Growing Urban Traffic Crisis

Traffic congestion and road safety have become major urban issues in cities worldwide. With more vehicles on the road each year, traditional approaches to traffic planning often lag behind the realities on the ground. Poorly timed signals, accident-prone intersections, and missing data on high-risk zones contribute to delays and danger for drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians alike. Addressing these challenges requires more than just street-side observations—this is where Geographic Information Systems (GIS) come into play.

Visualizing Risk with GIS Tools

GIS is transforming the way cities approach traffic safety by turning raw data into spatial intelligence. By layering different types of information—road networks, traffic volume, crash reports, and population density—GIS allows urban planners to see beyond static maps. With tools like Buffer Tool and  Vector Files , it’s now possible to identify high-risk zones with pinpoint accuracy.

In my own traffic mapping project, I used vector files to highlight major accident zones across several key intersections. By applying buffer analysis, I could define impact areas surrounding those hotspots and understand how nearby roads, pedestrian paths, and intersections were affected. These layers helped create a visual story of risk that was far more effective than any spreadsheet or report could convey.

Why It Matters: From Data to Safer Streets

The insights gained from GIS analysis aren’t just theoretical—they directly inform real-world actions. Transportation departments use this data to prioritize intersection redesigns, add traffic-calming measures, or optimize signal timing. Public safety officials use GIS to plan for emergency response routes, while urban designers rely on it to avoid placing new schools, hospitals, or bus stops near high-incident zones.

By identifying accident clusters through GIS, resources can be allocated more efficiently. Instead of reacting after the fact, cities can anticipate and prevent problems. It’s proactive planning instead of reactive patchwork.

Who Uses GIS for Road Safety?

Government traffic departments, city planners, and transportation engineers are leading the charge in using GIS for safer roads. But the reach goes beyond institutions. Community groups, researchers, and even independent analysts can use web-based GIS tools to advocate for safety improvements in their neighborhoods. Clear spatial visualizations help communicate traffic issues more effectively to decision-makers.

Smarter Mapping Through Accessible Platforms

What’s exciting is how accessible GIS has become. Web-based platforms now allow users to upload GIS data, overlay Vector Files, and perform spatial analysis directly in the browser—no specialized software or technical background required. Platforms like MAPOG, for example, offer these capabilities in a user-friendly interface that makes it easy to visualize accident hotspots, create buffer zones, and explore traffic flow scenarios. These tools are especially helpful for projects where quick, visual insights are needed.

Conclusion: From Congestion to Clarity

Cities can’t afford to keep guessing when it comes to traffic management and road safety. GIS offers a smarter, clearer, and more data-driven way to understand and solve traffic challenges. By mapping accident trends, simulating traffic changes, and visualizing risk zones, GIS helps create safer roads for everyone.

Whether you're working with a city planning team, leading a research project, or simply curious about local traffic patterns, modern mapping tools—like those offered by platforms such as  MAPOG—make it easier than ever to turn spatial data into safer streets.

Have you explored your local traffic data? Try visualizing it with a GIS platform that supports buffer analysis and vector mapping—you might just uncover insights that could prevent the next accident.

[soon-palestine]

Workers said Project Nimbus is the kind of lucrative contract that neglects ethical guardrails that outspoken members of Google’s workforce have demanded in recent years. “I am very worried that Google has no scruples if they’re going to work with the Israeli government,” said Joshua Marxen, a Google Cloud software engineer who helped to organize the protest. “Google has given us no reason to trust them.” The Tuesday protest represents continuing tension between Google’s workforce and its senior management over how the company’s technology is used. In recent years Google workers have objected to military contracts, challenging Google’s work with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and its role in a defense program building artificial intelligence tools used to refine drone strikes. Workers have alleged that the company has cracked down on information-sharing, siloed controversial projects and enforced a workplace culture that increasingly punishes them for speaking out.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Tuesday protest and workers’ concerns over Project Nimbus. The Israeli Finance Ministry announced its contract with Google and Amazon in April 2021 as a project “intended to provide the government, the defense establishment and others with an all-encompassing cloud solution.” Google has largely refused to release details of the contract, the specific capabilities Israel will receive, or how they will be used. In July 2022, the Intercept reported that training documents for Israeli government personnel indicate Google is providing software that the company claims can recognize people, gauge emotional states from facial expressions and track objects in video footage. Google Cloud spokesperson Atle Erlingsson told Wired in September 2022 that the company proudly supports Israel’s government and said critics had misrepresented Project Nimbus. “Our work is not directed at highly sensitive or classified military workloads,” he told Wired. Erlingsson, however, acknowledged that the contract will provide Israel’s military access to Google technology. Former Google worker Ariel Koren, who has long been publicly critical of Project Nimbus, said “it adds insult to injury for Palestinian activists and Palestinians generally” that Google Cloud’s profitability milestone coincides with the 75th anniversary of the Nakba — which refers to the mass displacement and dispossession of Palestinians following creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

In March 2022, The Times reported allegations by Koren — at the time a product marketing manager at Google for Education — that Google had retaliated against her for criticizing the contract, issuing a directive that she move to São Paulo, Brazil, within 17 business days or lose her job. Google told The Times that it investigated the incident and found no evidence of retaliation. When Koren resigned from Google in August 2022 she published a memo explaining reasons for her departure, writing that “Google systematically silences Palestinian, Jewish, Arab and Muslim voices concerned about Google’s complicity in violations of Palestinian human rights.” Koren said Google’s apathy makes her and others believe more vigorous protest actions are justified. “This is a concrete disruption that is sending a clear message to Google: We won’t allow for business as usual, so long as you continue to profit off of a nefarious contract that expands Israeli apartheid.” Mohammad Khatami, a YouTube software engineer based in New York, participated in a small protest of Project Nimbus at a July Amazon Web Services conference in Manhattan. Khatami said major layoffs at Google announced in January pushed him to get more involved in the Alphabet Workers Union, which provides resources to Khatami and other union members in an anti-military working group — though the union has not taken a formal stance on Project Nimbus. “Greed and corporate interests were being put ahead of workers and I think the layoffs just illustrated that for me very clearly,” Khatami said.

[rachellaurengray]

AI & Tech-Related Jobs Anyone Could Do

Here’s a list of 40 jobs or tasks related to AI and technology that almost anyone could potentially do, especially with basic training or the right resources:

Data Labeling/Annotation

AI Model Training Assistant

Chatbot Content Writer

AI Testing Assistant

Basic Data Entry for AI Models

AI Customer Service Representative

Social Media Content Curation (using AI tools)

Voice Assistant Testing

AI-Generated Content Editor

Image Captioning for AI Models

Transcription Services for AI Audio

Survey Creation for AI Training

Review and Reporting of AI Output

Content Moderator for AI Systems

Training Data Curator

Video and Image Data Tagging

Personal Assistant for AI Research Teams

AI Platform Support (user-facing)

Keyword Research for AI Algorithms

Marketing Campaign Optimization (AI tools)

AI Chatbot Script Tester

Simple Data Cleansing Tasks

Assisting with AI User Experience Research

Uploading Training Data to Cloud Platforms

Data Backup and Organization for AI Projects

Online Survey Administration for AI Data

Virtual Assistant (AI-powered tools)

Basic App Testing for AI Features

Content Creation for AI-based Tools

AI-Generated Design Testing (web design, logos)

Product Review and Feedback for AI Products

Organizing AI Training Sessions for Users

Data Privacy and Compliance Assistant

AI-Powered E-commerce Support (product recommendations)

AI Algorithm Performance Monitoring (basic tasks)

AI Project Documentation Assistant

Simple Customer Feedback Analysis (AI tools)

Video Subtitling for AI Translation Systems

AI-Enhanced SEO Optimization

Basic Tech Support for AI Tools

These roles or tasks could be done with minimal technical expertise, though many would benefit from basic training in AI tools or specific software used in these jobs. Some tasks might also involve working with AI platforms that automate parts of the process, making it easier for non-experts to participate.

[askagamedev]

How much paperwork does a game designer or other “trench level” game developers deal with? Does the amount of paperwork increase the higher up the chain you go?

We all tend to do a lot of "paperwork" but it's all digital - a lot of web-based forms. In order to keep track of all of the tasks that need doing, we use task-tracking software like Jira, Trello, Hansoft, and the like in order to keep the project management up to date. Producers and leads create these tasks, assign them priorities, and then dole them out to the appropriate developers to complete.

Larger tasks like "Build the Ice Dungeon level" are assigned to the Ice Dungeon level owner. Obviously, the Ice Dungeon is too big for a single task, so we break it down into smaller sub-tasks like "Build the boss fight for the Ice Dungeon", "Build the layout for the Ice Dungeon", "Build the regular encounters for the Ice Dungeon", and so on. These sub-tasks are assigned to the relevant stakeholders and those sub-tasks can be broken down further into smaller and smaller subtasks. Each task is its own bundle of work that needs doing, with its own priority and state of progress. We do the work, we complete the task, we mark it as done, and move on to the next. QA validates the tasks as complete, then production closes them out and everyone moves on to their next respective task.

Team leads and producers collectively spend a lot of their time creating, assigning, tracking, and closing out these tasks. They spend a lot of their time in meetings figuring out what the tasks that are still needed, which tasks are more important, what the task requirements are, who will get assigned those tasks, what potential task blockers and dependencies might be, and tracking the speed at which the tasks are being completed (in order to figure out whether we're on target to hit our deadlines).

Besides the leads, some specific disciplines tend to do more paperwork - QA spends a huge amount of time filling out bug reports, designers have to write design documents, and production have to create most/all of the non-bug tasks to be tracked.

[Join us on Discord] and/or [Support us on Patreon]

Got a burning question you want answered?

Short questions: Ask a Game Dev on Twitter

Long questions: Ask a Game Dev on Tumblr

Frequent Questions: The FAQ

[mariacallous]

For years, a mysterious figure who goes by the handle Stern led the Trickbot ransomware gang and evaded identification—even as other members of the group were outed in leaks and unmasked. This week German authorities revealed, without much fanfare, who they believe that enigmatic hacker kingpin to be: Vi­ta­ly Ni­ko­lae­vich Kovalev, a 36-year-old Russian man who remains at large in his home country.

Closer to home, WIRED revealed that Customs and Border Protection has mouth-swabbed 133,000 migrant children and teenagers to collect their DNA and uploaded their genetic data into a national criminal database used by local, state, and federal law enforcement. As the Trump administration’s migrant crackdown continues, often justified through invocations of crime and terrorism, WIRED also uncovered evidence that ties a Swedish far-right mixed-martial-arts tournament to an American neo-Nazi “fight club” based in California.

For those seeking to evade the US government surveillance, we offered tips about more private alternatives to US-based web browsing, email, and search tools. And we assembled a more general guide to protecting yourself from surveillance and hacking, based on questions our senior writer Matt Burgess received in a Reddit Ask Me Anything.

But that's not all. Each week, we round up the security and privacy news we didn't cover in depth ourselves. Click the headlines to read the full stories. And stay safe out there.

A Hacker May Have Deepfaked Trump’s Chief of Staff in a Phishing Campaign

The FBI is investigating who impersonated Susie Wiles, the Trump White House’s chief of staff and one of the president’s closest advisers, in a series of fraudulent messages and calls to high-profile Republican political figures and business executives, The Wall Street Journal reported. Government officials and authorities involved in the probe say the spear-phishing messages and calls appear to have targeted individuals on Wiles’ contact list, and Wiles has reportedly told colleagues that her personal phone was hacked to gain access to those contacts.

Despite Wiles’ reported claim of having her device hacked, it remains unconfirmed whether this was actually how attackers identified Wiles’ associates. It would also be possible to assemble such a target list from a combination of publicly available information and data sold by gray-market brokers.

“It's an embarrassing level of security awareness. You cannot convince me they actually did their security trainings,” says Jake Williams, a former NSA hacker and vice president of research and development at Hunter Strategy. “This is the type of garden-variety social engineering that everyone can end up dealing with these days, and certainly top government officials should be expecting it.”

In some cases, the targets received not just text messages but phone calls that impersonated Wiles’ voice, and some government officials believe the calls may have used artificial intelligence tools to fake Wiles’ voice. If so, that would make the incident one of the most significant cases yet of so-called deepfake software being used in a phishing attempt.

It’s not yet clear how Wiles’ phone might have been hacked, but the FBI has ruled out involvement by a foreign nation in the impersonation campaign, the bureau reportedly told White House officials. In fact, while some of the impersonation attempts appeared to have political goals—a member of Congress, for instance, was asked to assemble a list of people Trump might pardon—in at least one other case the impersonator tried to trick a target into setting up a cash transfer. That attempt at a money grab suggests that the spoofing campaign may be less of an espionage operation than a run-of-the-mill cybercriminal fraud scheme, albeit one with a very high-level target.

“There’s an argument here for using something like Signal—yes, the irony—or another messaging platform that offers an independent form of authentication if users want to validate who they’re talking to,” Hunter Strategy's Williams says. “The key thing as always is for government officials to be using vetted tools and following all federally mandated protocols rather than just winging it on their own devices.”

Iranian Man Behind Baltimore Ransomware Attack Pleads Guilty

The 2019 ransomware attack against the city government of Baltimore represents one of the worst municipal cybersecurity disasters on record, paralyzing city services for months and costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars. Now the Department of Justice has unexpectedly revealed that it arrested one of the hackers behind that attack, 37-year-old Sina Gholinejad, in North Carolina last January, and that he has pleaded guilty in court. Gholinejad has admitted to being involved in the larger Robbinhood ransomware campaign that hit other targets, including the cities of Greenville, North Carolina, and Yonkers, New York. It’s still far from clear how Gholinejad was identified or why he traveled from Iran to the US, given that most ransomware criminals are careful to remain in countries that don’t have extradition agreements with the US government and are thus beyond US law enforcement’s reach. Indeed, the indictment against him names several unnamed co-conspirators who may be still at large in Iran.

Russia’s Nuclear Blueprints Exposed in Huge Document Leak

More than 2 million documents left exposed in a public database have revealed Russia’s nuclear weapons facilities in unprecedented levels of detail, according to reporting this week by Danish media outlet Danwatch and Germany’s Der Spiegel. Reporters examined the huge trove of documents relating to Russian military procurement—as Russian authorities slowly restricted access—and found blueprints for nuclear facilities across the country. Experts called the leak an unparalleled breach of Russia’s nuclear security, with the data potentially being incredibly useful for foreign governments and intelligence services.

The documents show how Russia’s nuclear facilities have been rebuilt in recent years, where new facilities have been created, detailed site plans including the locations of barracks and watchtowers, and the locations of underground tunnels connecting buildings. There are descriptions of IT systems and security systems, including information on surveillance cameras, electric fences being used, and the alarm systems in place. “It’s written explicitly where the control rooms are located, and which buildings are connected to each other via underground tunnels,” Danwatch reports.

Cops Used License Plate Recognition Cameras in Search for Woman Who Got an Abortion

License-plate-recognition cameras are creating huge databases of people’s movements across America—capturing where and when cars are traveling. For years there have been concerns that the cameras could be weaponized by law enforcement officials or private investigators and turned against those seeking abortions or providing abortion-related care. Officials from Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas—where nearly all abortions are illegal—searched 83,000 Flock license-plate reader cameras at the start of this month while looking for a woman they claim had a self-administered abortion, 404 Media reported this week.

Sheriff Adam King said that the officials weren’t trying to “block her from leaving the state” and were searching for the woman as her family was concerned about her safety. However, experts say that conducting a search across the entire United States shows the sprawling dragnet of license-plate-reader cameras and highlights how those seeking abortions can be tracked. “The idea that the police are actively tracking the location of women they believe have had self-administered abortions under the guise of ‘safety’ does not make me feel any better about this kind of surveillance,” Eva Galperin, director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told 404 Media.

Investment Scam Company Linked to $200 Million in Losses Sanctioned by US Government

Philippines-based company Funnull Technology and its boss, Liu Lizhi, have been sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control for their links to investment and romance scams, which are often referred to as “pig-butchering” scams. “Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in US victim-reported losses,” OFAC said in a statement announcing the sanctions. The company purchases IP addresses from major cloud service providers and then sells them to cybercriminals who could use them to host scam websites—OFAC says Funnull is “linked to the majority” of investment scam websites reported to the FBI. In January independent cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs detailed how Funnull was abusing Amazon’s and Microsoft’s cloud services.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

This day in history

On July 14, I'm giving the closing keynote for the fifteenth HACKERS ON PLANET EARTH, in QUEENS, NY. Happy Bastille Day! On July 20, I'm appearing in CHICAGO at Exile in Bookville.

#15yrsago Myths about Canadian healthcare https://www.denverpost.com/2009/06/04/debunking-canadian-health-care-myths/

#15yrsago Abstinence doesn’t work for IT or for teens https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/jun/16/computer-security-abstinence

#15yrsago Scam artists con Apple into killing app that tells you when the bus is due in San Francisco https://web.archive.org/web/20090627161346/http://sfappeal.com/news/2009/06/who-owns-sfmta-arrival-data.php

#10yrsago US inches towards decriminalizing phone unlocking https://www.techdirt.com/2014/06/25/year-half-later-unlocking-your-phone-one-step-closer-to-being-legal/

#10yrsago North Korea threatens “merciless” war against the US over Seth Rogen movie https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-28014069

#10yrsago Copyfraud, uncertainty and doubt: the vanishing online public domain https://medium.com/@xor/houston-we-have-a-public-domain-problem-bd971c57dfdc

#10yrsago Charlie Stross on the stop/go nature of technological change https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/06/yapcna-2014-keynote-programmin.html

#10yrsago Lurking inside Obama’s secret drone law: another secret drone law https://www.techdirt.com/2014/06/25/enough-secret-law-newly-released-doj-drone-killing-justification-memo-points-to-another-secret-drone-memo/

#10yrsago Kleargear must pay $306,750 for trashing a complaining customer’s credit https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/06/kleargear-must-pay-306750-to-couple-that-left-negative-review/

#5yrsago Podcast number 300: “Adversarial Interoperability: Reviving an Elegant Weapon From a More Civilized Age to Slay Today’s Monopolies” https://ia903004.us.archive.org/11/items/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_300/Cory_Doctorow_Podcast_300_-_Adversarial_Interoperability.mp3

#5yrsago How China ingests and adapts western culture https://aeon.co/essays/how-china-remakes-its-cultural-imports-from-the-west

#5yrsago Prosecutors and federal judges collaborate with corporations to seal evidence of public safety risks, sentencing hundreds of thousands of Americans to death https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-courts-secrecy-judges/

#5yrsago EU expert panel calls for a ban on AI-based risk-scoring and limits on mass surveillance https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/26/18759447/eu-ai-ethical-policy-recommendations-ban-mass-scoring-surveillance

#5yrsago You treasure what you measure: how KPIs make software dystopias https://web.archive.org/web/20190622092434/https://datascience.columbia.edu/ethical-principles-okrs-and-kpis-what-youtube-and-facebook-could-learn-tukey#.XRMxf5DB5eg.twitter

#5yrsato Dieselgate 2.0: 42,000 Mercedes diesels recalled for “illegal software” https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/06/german-regulator-says-it-discovered-new-illegal-software-on-daimler-diesels/

#5yrsago Insulin: why the price of a 100-year-old drug has tripled in a decade https://prospect.org/health/insulin-racket/

Support me this summer on the Clarion Write-A-Thon and help raise money for the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop!

[luizsiqueiraneto]

The Limbo of Advanced Users and Amateur Developers in Microsoft 365

Microsoft 365, the successor to the iconic Office suite, has transformed how millions of people work, collaborate, and manage their daily tasks. However, this transformation has not been equal for everyone. While businesses and corporations have access to a myriad of powerful tools through robust subscriptions, advanced users — those enthusiasts who have historically driven innovation through customization and automation — are left in limbo. This article argues that Microsoft, by prioritizing service-based and enterprise-focused models, has abandoned beginner developers and advanced users, once the cornerstone of its tools’ success.

The Golden Age of Customization

In the past, Microsoft Office allowed rich customization and automation through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and integration with technologies like COM (Component Object Model). These features enabled individuals, even without corporate tools, to create scripts to automate tasks, customize interfaces, and connect applications in innovative ways. With VBA, a user could generate automated reports in Excel or build macros to streamline repetitive processes in Word. This turned Office into not only a productivity tool but also a learning platform for budding developers.

However, with the migration to Microsoft 365, this flexibility has been significantly reduced. VBA remains available in a limited capacity, but its usage is increasingly marginalized, and many new features of Microsoft 365 are inaccessible through it. Furthermore, VBA has no support in the web environment, which is becoming increasingly central to modern workflows.

A Service, Not a Tool

Microsoft 365 represents a fundamental shift: from locally installed software to a cloud-based service. While this approach offers benefits like real-time collaboration and automatic updates, it has severely limited advanced users. Local automation has taken a back seat, and the focus has shifted to tools like Power Automate — a powerful platform, but largely inaccessible to personal users.

Power Automate is clearly designed for the corporate environment. Many of its most compelling features are locked behind business-specific subscriptions, leaving individual users without practical alternatives. For users seeking advanced and customized solutions, Microsoft 365 is no longer a viable option.

Apple’s Counterpoint

While Microsoft appears to be moving away from advanced users, Apple is taking the opposite direction. Tools like Shortcuts, AppleScript, and Automator make Apple’s applications highly customizable, even for personal users. Tasks can be automated in Pages, Numbers, Reminders, and Calendar without relying on corporate services. This approach not only empowers users but also fosters curiosity and learning among new developers.

This contrast highlights the central issue: Apple values tech enthusiasts and amateur developers, while Microsoft seems to have relegated them to a secondary role, if not excluded them entirely.

The Impact on the Future of Technology

Microsoft’s abandonment of advanced users has broader implications beyond daily workflows. For many developers, tools like VBA served as an entry point to programming. Removing these opportunities makes practical learning more difficult and stifles grassroots innovation. At a time when the market needs more developers and creative thinkers, this decision is particularly troubling.

Moreover, this exclusion risks alienating a community that has historically been crucial to Office’s success. Advanced users are often technology “evangelists” within their circles, promoting tools and influencing purchasing decisions. Ignoring them poses a significant strategic risk for Microsoft.

Conclusion: What Should Microsoft Do?

If Microsoft wants to regain the trust and engagement of advanced users, several actions are essential:

1. Revitalize VBA and Similar Technologies: Ensure that local automations are not only supported but encouraged, including integration with new Microsoft 365 features.

2. Expand Access to Power Automate: Offer more platform functionalities to individual users without requiring corporate subscriptions.

3. Acknowledge the Value of Advanced Users: Develop tools and initiatives aimed at educating and empowering amateur developers and tech enthusiasts.

In a world increasingly dominated by cloud-based services, striking a balance between innovation and accessibility is crucial. Microsoft has an opportunity to correct its course and reaffirm its commitment to the community that helped it succeed. If it fails to do so, it risks losing a vital segment of its user base to more inclusive alternatives.