Autism Awareness Month: At the Sankalp headquarters in Kolappancheri, architect Benny Kuriakose has experimented with natural lighting, curved pathways and verandahs as buffer zones

After a test drive, we share our verdict on the bike’s cut, design and mileage

This new colourway for the R15 dresses the bike up almost entirely in black, sprinkled with gold highlights for the Yamaha and R15 logos and golden alloy wheels.

The KTM 200 Duke sports the same design as the larger Dukes, with a central spine running top-to-bottom, splitting the headlight elements.

The restaurant has a tropical-inspired ambience and plush velvet-clad sofas, serving dishes from the coastal regions of Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh

This biryani tour began at 8 a.m. To celebrate Madras Day, The Hindu organised a day-long curated trail to highlight the unique varieties of this city favourite’s dish. For those of you who could not join us, here’s the list

The Ambur Canteen serves a variety of flavours that its founders grew up on, including recipes from their mothers, grandmothers and cooks

Cloud kitchen K Noms, the brainchild of former weightlifter Abirami S Shakthivel, aims to provide nutritionally balanced food for the calorie-conscious in Tiruchi

Brewers have taken exception to the draft notification on it and demanded its withdrawal

1. Live coverage: SpaceX to launch 20 Starlink satellites on Falcon 9 rocket from California  Spaceflight Now
2. SpaceX morning rocket launch in Cape Canaveral: What time is liftoff of Starlink satellites?  Florida Today
3. SpaceX rocket launches Koreasat-6A satellite, lands Falcon 9 booster on record-tying 23rd flight (video)  Space.com
4. Launch Roundup: Falcon 9 launches customer payloads, China to fly resupply mission to Tiangong  NASASpaceflight.com
5. SpaceX launches and lands Falcon 9 rocket deploying 24 Starlink satellites  KTLA Los Angeles

Hi there! As we light up our homes and hearts to welcome the joyous festival of Diwali, we want to extend our heartfelt wishes to you and your family for a season filled with health, happiness, and prosperity. ????✨ In … Continue reading →

The Electronic Records Policy Working Group is inviting interested persons to provide their written views on issues relating to implementing section 207(e)(1)(A) of the E-Government Act of 2002. That section calls for ``the adoption by agencies of policies and procedures...

Summary: The overhead of performing even simple tasks online is getting larger and larger. I question the security of almost all these supposedly "secure" messaging systems. And I'm tired of the 'Utopia of Rules' mindset pervasive in every organization. It's exhausting how they expect customers to constantly adapt to their needs.

I don't know if you recall the game Kerplunk. It's a classic children's game that has been around for decades. I remember playing it with my sister. The basic setup involves a transparent plastic tube, a number of sticks, and marbles. The sticks are threaded through the tube to form a web or nest at the bottom on which the marbles rest. We'd take turns removing a stick at a time, trying not to let any marbles fall through the web and out of the tube. At some point, the remaining sticks can't hold the marbles and everything falls down.

The modern web reminds me more and more of a big Kerplunk game and I think the marbles are about to fall. What started out as an easier way to do things like shop, bank, and get health care information has become increasingly complex over time. More and more of the email I receive seems to be simply directing me to log into some bespoke system to retrieve a message or engage in some workflow. And even with a password manager, the act of logging in is often a chore with different user interfaces, custom MFA requirements, and weird rules for passwords. Once you're on the system, session time-outs induce their own form of anxiety since stepping away for a few minutes to attend to something else might require going through the whole Kafkaesque process all over again. The modern web has turned into a dystopian theater of the absurd where even reading a simple appointment reminder from your doctor requires several minutes of stress-inducing interaction with baroque systems and processes.

And it's not just doctors, of course, banks, government agencies, hospitals, ecommerce sites, and customer service systems all adopt these special purpose messaging systems. If you ask these organizations why they use bespoke messaging systems, they'll list things like "timely and improved communication," "convenience," and "privacy and security." But the real reason is that it's more convenient for them because these systems are integrated with their backends and make their processes more manageable. There's certainly nothing about them that's more convenient, timely, or better than email for their customers¹.

I also question the privacy and security premise. Email can be insecure. And your email provider can see the contents of your emails. But the messaging system run by your doctor or bank is likely less secure than the email systems run by Apple, Google, and the others. And achieving privacy by making everything incompatible so that you have to use a different system for each correspondent is like chopping off your finger to prevent hangnails.

How did we get here? Bureaucracy. Not just government bureaucracy, but bureaucracy of all kinds. In Utopia of Rules², David Graeber talks about how power imbalances force the less powerful group to perform what he calls interpretive labor, the work of understanding and implementing what's better or more convenient for the more powerful partner. People are not equal participants in online interactions. We don't have the tools to be fully embodied online³. Because of this we are forced to play by the rules organizations online who are digitally embodied with servers, identity systems, customer management systems, and so on. And part of that is being forced to use their inconvenient and anemic messaging systems.

What's the answer? People need tools. I think digital wallets (a bad name for an important tool), autonomic (peer) identifiers with strong cryptography, and verifiable credentials are a huge step forward. These tools provide the means for people to be peers online rather that mere ghosts in someone else's machine. That's why I insist on using the term self-sovereign rather than decentralized to describe these systems. Cogito Ergo Sum.

Notes

1. For a deeper dive into why one-off messaging systems are never as good as email, see Rich Sharing and Personal Channels. Email and other useful messaging systems exhibit a property called rich sharing that makes them much more robust that the simple idea of "sharing a message" would bring to mind.
2. If you're interested in power imbalances and how they come about, I can't recommend Graeber's book highly enough. He had such a keen understanding of this problem and wrote about it in a way that's both informative and entertaining.
3. I talk about this in more detail in Chapter 17 of Learning Digital Identity when I discuss authentic digital relationships.

Photo Credit: Playing Kerplunk from DALL-E (public domain) Prompt: Draw a picture of a boy and girl playing kerplunk that's 1200x500 pixels

Tags: web identity authentication authorization verifiable+credentials

Governor Olene Walker has announced that the Utah State Advisory Council on Science and Technology is accepting nominations for the 2004 annual Governor's Medal for Science and Technology Award. The awards recognize individuals who have made a significant impact and contribution to science and technology in the State of Utah.

Read to the end for a tiny yet extremely majestic lion. In today’s edition: The truth behind the classic “average person eats 3 spiders per year” factoid. Tips that’ll make organizing your taxonomies a little less, uh… taxing. America’s finest news source, The Onion, is now powered by our old friend WP. Hot Off The […]

They Hyundai IONIQ 5 and Hyundai IONIQ 6 are two of my favorite electric vehicles. The IONIQ 9 is a coming much larger EV from Hyundai for those who need more space, or at least feel like they need more space. The problem: we don’t really know what the IONIQ ... [continued]

The post Hyundai IONIQ 9 Interior Teased (Slightly) appeared first on CleanTechnica.

If you want to build mobile applications with use of extensive HTML5 then DHTMLX Touch is a JavaScript library mobile framework that can help you achieve this. So next time when you plan to develop a HTML based mobile web app then do not forget to consider this free open source DHTMLX Touch JavaScript framework …

DHTMLX Touch – Best Mobile Framework for all Touch Screen Devices Read More »

Everybody loves to enjoy the look and feel of the Lightbox JavaScript Effects and since the time of innovation of the Lightbox Script there have been several Lightbox clones that are generated for the famous JavaScript Libraries. Lightbox is a jQuery and Ajax solution for showcasing the images and other content on the web page …

Add WOW-SOME Lightbox Effects with jQuery and Ajax Lightbox Plugins Read More »

HTML5 is a technology that is all the rage in the web world with a great potential to considerably ease the process of video playback, enhance the web application user interface and boost the offline or online synchronization of web applications. video plug-ins. You can find so many websites over the World Wide Web that …

7 best html5 jquery video plug-ins Read More »

The Debian project has announced its latest point release for Debian Linux 12, codenamed “bookworm,” marking the eighth update to this stable distribution. This 12.8 update primarily addresses security issues and fixes various critical bugs, enhancing the reliability and security of the system. Importantly, this release is not a new version but an update to existing packages within Debian 12. Users who routinely update via security.debian.org will notice only minimal changes, as most updates are rolled into this point release. There is no need to replace existing installation media for bookworm; a simple upgrade through an up-to-date Debian mirror suffices… [Continue Reading]

EMO: Sensational Deepfake Tech From China Shows Just How Insane Things Are Right Now in the world of deepfake and A.I.

The post EMO: Sensational Deepfake Tech From China Shows Just How Insane Things Are Right Now appeared first on The Red Ferret Journal.

Everything Electric Show, London Highlights 2024

The post Everything Electric Show, London Highlights 2024 appeared first on The Red Ferret Journal.

Welcome back to another episode of the Niche Pursuits News Podcast! This week Jared and guest host Morgan Overholt take on the latest SEO news and break it down for listeners. They also share the side hustles they've been working…

The post Google Offers New Insights in Lengthy Interview? appeared first on Niche Pursuits.

Father Stephen Freeman argues that the near-unchanging shape of the Liturgy is part of the "givenness" of our lives. Like many other things in the Orthodox faith, it imparts a stability. Learning to embrace this is important.

Fr. Stephen Freeman speaks from his own experience about depression, anxiety, and a 40-year battle with panic attacks. He sets these within the wisdom of the tradition and offers a way of understanding as well as some helpful ways of moving forward.

Fr. Stephen looks at morality and virtue, particularly as understood during the so-called "Age of Enlightenment," and compares it with an Orthodox understanding of right actions in the life of a Christian.

Fr. Stephen talks about eight different ways that the divided, "two-storey" universe, a world divided between sacred and secular, affect us as Christians, and offers reflections on how we should see and cope with each of them. This is the largest summary of his work to date.

The Triumph of Orthodoxy is also a triumph of the wholeness of God.

Fr. Stephen Freeman examines in some depth why success and progress are not the right measures of the spiritual life.

Get an annual BJ's Wholesale Club membership for 63% off right now to save on groceries, gas, household items, and more.

Access Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook, along with 1TB of OneDrive cloud storage, for 42% off -- the lowest price we've seen.

Try or gift Xbox Game Pass for three months for nearly one-third off and play over 100 games including Starfield, Forza Motorsport, and Football Manager 2024 on your Xbox, PC, or mobile device.

Frederica interviews Joe Canby, an auto mechanic who doubles as a funeral director, about bringing funerals back into the Church.

In this week's podcast, Frederica shares, "Akathist to Jesus: Light to Those in Darkness," written by Fr. Lawrence Farley.

Will September 11, 2001, become just another date that children have to memorize? If so, does it really matter?

Frederica discusses the subject of same-sex attraction, explaining that whether or not it's genetic is beside the point.

Having received much feedback on her November 9, 2011, episode, Frederica reflects again on the subject of gay rights.

This week as we think about the Transfiguration of our Lord, Frederica has some interesting reflections on a particular icon of the Transfiguration from the apse of St. Catherine's Monastery in Sinai. To view the icon, click HERE for a large image, and HERE for a smaller one.

Frederica shares a reply on the subject of doubt to a visitor to her website.