Weekly Web Harvest for 2022-01-09

  • John Schreiber on Twitter: “Keep hearing of train burglaries in LA on the scanner so went to #LincolnHeights to see it all. And… there’s looted packages as far as the eye can see. Amazon packages, @UPS boxes, unused Covid tests, fishing lures, epi pen
    This whole thing is crazy . . . including the Twitter customer service stuff that ends up getting intermixed.
  • Why your internet habits are not as clean as you think – BBC Future
    Rabih Bashroush, a researcher at the University of East London and lead scientist at the European Commission-funded Eureca project, calculated that five billion plays clocked up by just one music video – the hit 2017 song Despacito – consumed as much electricity as Chad, Guinea-Bissau, Somalia, Sierra Leone and the Central African Republic put together in a single year.
  • So Loud That it Hurts – Why You Need to Try Data Sonification
    The second reason to use sonification is accessibility. There are plenty of people in the world who can’t clearly see the thing you want them to look at. For some of them, that problem is permanent – they might be blind or partially sighted. For some it’s temporary – they might be recovering from an eye infection, or outdoors on a sunny day with a phone screen that doesn’t cope well in daylight. For some it’s momentary – they might be distracted by something, or just not looking in the right direction. All of these people would benefit from an experience that engages more of your senses than sight alone.

    Even for those who are paying full attention and can see your work clearly, adding an extra auditory layer of data encoding deepens the likelihood that they’ll understand what you want them to understand.

  • Moxie Marlinspike >> Blog >> My first impressions of web3
    Instead of storing the data on-chain, NFTs instead contain a URL that points to the data. What surprised me about the standards was that there’s no hash commitment for the data located at the URL. Looking at many of the NFTs on popular marketplaces being sold for tens, hundreds, or millions of dollars, that URL often just points to some VPS running Apache somewhere. Anyone with access to that machine, anyone who buys that domain name in the future, or anyone who compromises that machine can change the image, title, description, etc for the NFT to whatever they’d like at any time (regardless of whether or not they “own” the token). There’s nothing in the NFT spec that tells you what the image “should” be, or even allows you to confirm whether something is the “correct” image.

    So as an experiment, I made an NFT that changes based on who is looking at it, since the web server that serves the image can choose to serve different images based on the IP or User Agent of the requester. For example, it looked one way on OpenSea, another way on Rarible, but when you buy it and view it from your crypto wallet, it will always display as a large ? emoji. What you bid on isn’t what you get. There’s nothing unusual about this NFT, it’s how the NFT specifications are built. Many of the highest priced NFTs could turn into ? emoji at any time; I just made it explicit.

  • ASCII Generator
    use the _all fonts with your text_ option and set the width to something wider than 80
  • Norton 360 Now Comes With a Cryptominer – Krebs on Security
    According to the FAQ posted on its site, “Norton Crypto” will mine Ethereum (ETH) cryptocurrency while the customer’s computer is idle. The FAQ also says Norton Crypto will only run on systems that meet certain hardware and software requirements (such as an NVIDIA graphics card with at least 6 GB of memory).

  • Offsetting Bitcoin’s carbon footprint would require planting 300 million new trees | Fortune
    Bitcoin deploys an incredible 707 kWh of electricity per transaction, 11 times as much as Ethereum, and emits 1,061 pounds, or half a ton, of CO2 every time you tap the app to buy a latte or zap a fraction to a buddy who beat you on a golf bet. Ethereum sends less than one-tenth of that carbon skyward for each purchase or transfer it processes.