Sun spots

Right now there’s a giant sun spot crossing the sun. How big? Eight times the size of the Earth!

I’ve still got the eclipse glasses I bought in 2012 so I thought I’d check it out – we were able to see it without any magnification!

DEF CON 31 – An Audacious Plan to Halt the Internet’s Enshittification – Cory Doctorow – YouTube

The enshittification of the internet follows a predictable trajectory: first, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Enshittification occurs when companies gobble each other up in an orgy of mergers and acquisitions, reducing the internet to “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four” (credit to Tom Eastman!), which lets them endlessly tweak their back-ends to continue to shift value from users and business-customers to themselves. The government gets in on the act by banning tweaking by users – reverse-engineering, scraping, bots and other user-side self-help measures – leaving users helpless before the march of enshittification.

We don’t have to accept this! Disenshittifying the internet will require antitrust, limits on corporate tweaking – through privacy laws and other protections – and aggressive self-help measures from alternative app stores to ad blockers and beyond!
— Read on m.youtube.com/watch

One Life

In 1938, a British stockbroker visits Czechoslovakia and forms a plan to assist in the rescue of Jewish children before the onset of World War II, in an operation that came to be known as the Kindertransport.

Wracked by guilt for five decades for those he couldn’t save, in 1988 he gets to meet the children he saved – now adults.

The story of Nicholas Winton is now a major film starring Sir Anthony Hopkins.

The real incident featured in the film can be seen on YouTube.