climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
If it involves physics, math, computer science, electronics or has general geek cachet, this is the place for it.
This morning I was on “The Green Majority” on CUIT (89.5 FM in Toronto).
I was talking about Toronto 350.org and our two major ongoing campaigns: to oppose the reversal of the Enbridge Line 9 pipeline to carry oil sands bitumen and to encourage the University of Toronto to divest from fossil fuel companies.
In a slightly ominous development, GMail is now warning me that: “We believe that attackers backed by certain states may be attempting to compromise your account or computer” and urge me to: “Protect yourself now“.
This is probably just further fallout from the Stratfor hack. I wish it wasn’t happening while I am so completely occupied with urgent school assignments, climate work, and continuing efforts to do paid photographic work.
My photos from Friday’s festivities are now online.
Today was the first seminar of Jordan Peterson’s Self-Deception course, and it was quite something.
The man is a gifted speaker, and devoted most of the class to describing a process for writing well and the importance of doing so. The course assignment is unusual: three successive drafts on the same topic, first of three, then six, then nine pages. After each round, students are to be provided with comments.
Strictly speaking, I am not allowed to take the class (as a non-psychology student). My plan is to keep doing the readings and showing up, with the aim of writing the assignment as well. Grades and course credits don’t really matter for me at this point, so it won’t make much difference if I can ultimately convince him to let me into the course or not.
This video shows off some of the realistic attacks that can be performed against office-type landline telephones these days:
The presentation in this video was made by by by Ang Cui, a researcher from the Columbia University Intrusion Detection Systems Lab.
More information about the ‘symbiote’ protective software mentioned in the video is on their site. Weird that hacking your own phone to address failures in the firmware might be the best way of improving the security of your network…
I wonder if the Columbia researchers collaborate at all with U of T’s Citizen Lab…