Wow. Amanda, get it together. Seriously.

Even though Bynes deleted the tweet within two minutes of posting it, Rihanna got wind of it anyway. Zing!

George Takei really sucks—and he's proud of it!

The Star Trek legend and Internet darling had the prefect response this week for a Facebook troll trying to bring him down.

He shared a screenshot of the exchange with the caption: "Sorry, couldn't help myself.‪ #‎Trollololollol‬"

BOOM!

Takei is known for his epic Internet takedowns, so mark this one down as another win for Sulu.

If this keep up I'll have no choice but to start calling dogs "goggies."

A teen in Canada may be the first person to catch an H5 bird flu virus within the country. Health officials are now working to confirm the diagnosis.

Prime Day sees some pretty tempting deals and discounts on science gifts, but is it worth waiting for Black Friday to potentially save even more?

Google said it discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the SQLite open-source database engine using its large language model (LLM) assisted framework called Big Sleep (formerly Project Naptime). The tech giant described the development as the "first real-world vulnerability" uncovered using the artificial intelligence (AI) agent. "We believe this is the first public example of an AI agent finding

As the holiday season approaches, retail businesses are gearing up for their annual surge in online (and in-store) traffic. Unfortunately, this increase in activity also attracts cybercriminals looking to exploit vulnerabilities for their gain.  Imperva, a Thales company, recently published its annual holiday shopping cybersecurity guide. Data from the Imperva Threat Research team’s

Over 1,500 Android devices have been infected by a new strain of Android banking malware called ToxicPanda that allows threat actors to conduct fraudulent banking transactions. "ToxicPanda's main goal is to initiate money transfers from compromised devices via account takeover (ATO) using a well-known technique called on-device fraud (ODF)," Cleafy researchers Michele Roviello, Alessandro Strino

Meta has been fined 21.62 billion won ($15.67 million) by South Korea's data privacy watchdog for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with advertisers without their consent. The country's Personal Information Protection Commission (PIPC) said Meta gathered information such as

Budget season is upon us, and everyone in your organization is vying for their slice of the pie. Every year, every department has a pet project that they present as absolutely essential to profitability, business continuity, and quite possibly the future of humanity itself. And no doubt that some of these actually may be mission critical. But as cybersecurity professionals, we understand that

The Canadian government on Wednesday ordered ByteDance-owned TikTok to dissolve its operations in the country, citing national security risks, but stopped short of instituting a ban on the popular video-sharing platform. "The decision was based on the information and evidence collected over the course of the review and on the advice of Canada's security and intelligence community and other

An ongoing phishing campaign is employing copyright infringement-related themes to trick victims into downloading a newer version of the Rhadamanthys information stealer since July 2024. Cybersecurity firm Check Point is tracking the large-scale campaign under the name CopyRh(ight)adamantys. Targeted regions include the United States, Europe, East Asia, and South America. "The campaign

A new campaign has targeted the npm package repository with malicious JavaScript libraries that are designed to infect Roblox users with open-source stealer malware such as Skuld and Blank-Grabber. "This incident highlights the alarming ease with which threat actors can launch supply chain attacks by exploiting trust and human error within the open source ecosystem, and using readily available

The Second Amendment Foundation has released a 22-minute video celebrating its fifty years of fighting for gun owners’ civil rights. Some of those who’ve been along for most or all of the ride, including founder Alan Gottlieb, give insight into how far we’ve come.  See it here:

This is Rylan. How (Not) To Buy A Puppy There’s a meme wandering around Twitter/Facebook at the moment:…

Social media users alleged bias against former President Donald Trump when a Google search on Election Day for “where to vote” returned an interactive map to find a person’s polling station when including the word “Harris” but not “Trump.” The reason is because “Harris” is a county in Texas, whereas “Trump” is not a location.

The post Google’s ‘Where to Vote’ Search Result Reflects Quirk of Candidate Surname, Not Bias appeared first on FactCheck.org.

The post Friday Girls From Russian Province appeared first on English Russia.

The post Pets Have Tough Days in Kiev Too appeared first on English Russia.

The post Soviet Life on the Photos of Vladimir Bogdanov appeared first on English Russia.

The post Bad Day For the Garbage Truck appeared first on English Russia.

The post One Day of a Flying Dog appeared first on English Russia.

Come one, come all! nycdevops does its first virtual meetup! All are invited!

• Speaker: Adarsh Shah
• Topic: "Continuous Delivery for Machine Learning"
• Time: Thursday, September 17, 2020, 5-630 PM
• Link: https://www.meetup.com/nycdevops/events/272914068/

Hope to see you there!

April Fools Day is coming up!

Time to order your coffee-table book of April Fools RFCs!

More info here: https://www.rfchumor.com

Makes a great gift for nerds that own coffee-tables!

Order it today!

This isn't directly sysadmin-related, but it made me think of how a really good outage retrospective can teach others how to prevent problems in the future.

"On the 15th anniversary of the incident, the U.S. Chemical Safety Board is announcing a forthcoming interactive training application based on one of the worst industrial disasters in recent U.S. history--the March 23, 2005, explosion at the BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, which killed 15 workers, injured 180 others, and caused billions of dollars in economic losses. This updated animation will be included in the training, which will focus on OSHA's Process Safety Management standard. Look for it soon at CSB.gov."

Content warning: Death

https://softwareengineeringdaily.com/2021/07/22/stack-overflow-for-teams-a-centralized-knowledge-sharing-and-collaboration-platform-with-tom-limoncelli/

If you've ever googled a CS or programming question, you likely found an answer (or many) on Stack Overflow. Founded in 2008 and named after a common computing error, Stack Overflow empowers the world to develop technology through collective knowledge. More than 100 million people visit Stack Overflow every month making it one of the 50 most-visited websites in the world. Stack Overflow's products include its market-leading knowledge sharing and collaboration platform, Stack Overflow for Teams, in addition to Stack Overflow Reach & Relevance, which is focused on advertising.

Stack Overflow for Teams is a knowledge sharing and collaboration solution that developers and managers already know and trust. It's for companies who need to increase productivity, decrease cycle times, accelerate time to market, and protect institutional knowledge. In this episode we talk with Tom Limoncelli, a manager at Stack Overflow, author, and tech advocate.

Listen to the podcast by clicking here!

A Princeton-led team of astrophysicists has measured a surprising value for the “clumpiness” of the universe’s dark matter.

In the Class of 2028, 71.5% of students qualify for financial aid and 21.7% of the class are lower-income students eligible for federal Pell grants.

Princeton University will present the honors at Alumni Day, scheduled for Feb. 22, 2025.

The conference has been scheduled for Oct. 9-11, 2025. All Princeton alumni are invited back to campus for the gathering. 

The Martin A. Dale '53 Fellowship provides grants for Princeton seniors to spend the year after graduation on "an independent project of extraordinary merit." Juliette Carbonnier and Collin Riggins are the latest recipients.

Jordan will also receive the American Historical Society's Award for Scholarly Distinction in January.

The 9 a.m. service on Monday, Nov. 11, will also be livestreamed.

Let the velvet-voiced Dr. Puca explains how the festival of Samhain gained its present form — and remember, Samhain is a season, a -“tide.”

Throughout the year, the OTW Finance team has continued its work of ensuring that the organization's bills are paid, tax returns filed, and all standard accounting guidelines and financial compliance requirements met. Preparation for the audit of 2023 financial statements continues!

The team has also been diligently working on the 2024 budget update and are happy to present it here: (access the 2024 budget spreadsheet for more detailed information):

2024 Expenses

Archive of Our Own (AO3)

• US$250,381.02 spent so far out of US$416,441.01 total this year, as of September 30, 2024.
• 55.1% of the OTW's expenses go towards maintaining the AO3. This includes the bulk of our server expenses—both new purchases and ongoing colocation and maintenance—website performance monitoring tools, and various systems-related licenses, as well as costs highlighted below (access all program expenses).
• This year's projected AO3 expenses also include US$120,000 to purchase new servers, as well as US$15,000 in additional server related equipment to increase the capacity of existing servers to handle expected site traffic growth through the year.

Open Doors

• US$6,899.70 spent so far out of US$9,344.33 total this year, as of September 30, 2024.
• Open Doors' expenses consist of hosting, backup, and domain costs for imported fanwork archives, as well as an allocated share of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Transformative Works and Cultures

• US$3,488.74 spent so far out of US$5,444.70 total this year, as of September 30, 2024.
• Transformative Works and Cultures' expenses are the journal's website hosting, publishing, and storage fees, as well as an allocated share of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).
• Additionally, the University of Amsterdam provided £1,000 (US$1,061) to Transformative Works and Cultures in 2023, which will be used to help fund the Fans of Color Research Prize.

Fanlore

• US$13,986.47 spent so far out of US$24,160.27 total this year, as of September 30, 2024.
• Fanlore's expenses are its share of allocated server hardware, maintenance and colocation costs, as well as its portion of various OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Legal Advocacy

• US$304.50 spent so far out of US$2,892.15 total this year, as of September 30, 2024.
• Legal's expenses consist of registration fees for conferences and hearings and funds set aside for legal filings if necessary, as well as an allocated share of OTW-wide productivity tools (access all program expenses).

Fundraising and Development

• US$107,433.57 spent so far out of US$152,399.47 total this year, as of September 30, 2024.
• Our fundraising and development expenses consist of transaction fees charged by our third-party payment processors for each donation, thank-you gift purchases and shipping, outreach work by volunteers at various fan conventions, and the tools used to host the OTW's membership database and track communications with donors and potential donors, as well as an allocated share of OTW-wide productivity tools (access fundraising expenses).

Administration

• US$111,698.97 spent so far out of US$147,099.75 total this year, as of September 30, 2024.
• The OTW’s administrative expenses include hosting for our website, trademarks, domains, insurance, tax filing, and annual financial statement audits, as well as productivity, management, and accounting tools (access all admin expenses).

2024 Revenue

• The OTW is entirely supported by your donations—thank you for your generosity!
• We receive a significant portion of our donations each year in the April and October fundraising drives, which together will account for about 33.8% of our income in 2024. We also receive donations via employer matching programs, royalties, and PayPal Giving Fund, which administers donations from programs like Humble Bundle and eBay for Charity. If you'd like to support us while making purchases on those websites, please select the Organization for Transformative Works as your charity of choice!
• Thanks to your generosity in previous years, we have a healthy amount of money in our reserves, which we can use to pay for larger than usual purchases and keep on hand for legal contingencies. As mentioned previously, we plan to continue to upgrade the capacity of the Archive's servers, which significantly increases server equipment and server hosting expenses. As the Archive and other projects of the OTW grow, we also spend more on tools and technology to support our volunteers, such as the tools used by various committees to communicate with and aid users and to track internal projects, further increasing expenses.
• US$651,741.98 received so far (as of September 30, 2024) and US$762,433.91 projected to be received by the end of the year.

Got questions?

If you have any questions about the budget or the OTW's finances, please contact the Finance committee. We'll get back to you as soon as possible!

To download the OTW's 2024 budget update in spreadsheet format, please follow this link.

In order to make AO3's rules clearer to our users, we intend to update the AO3 Terms of Service (TOS) in mid-November 2024. Once this occurs, all users will need to agree to the updated TOS to continue using AO3. The full text has been posted for public review, as well as a detailed explanation of what has (and hasn't) changed:

• AO3 Terms of Service: 2024 Update Guide
• AO3 Terms of Service: 2024 Draft
• AO3 Terms of Service FAQ: 2024 Draft

Summary of changes

As part of reorganizing the TOS for better clarity, the new TOS is structured differently than the old one. A detailed explanation of what was changed and why is available in the update guide. These are the highlights:

• We've clarified the Content Policy, but we haven't changed what works are or are not allowed. If your fanwork was allowed on AO3 before, then it is still allowed.
• The TOS has been split into three pages (General Principles, Content Policy, and Privacy Policy). This should make it easier to find what you're looking for when you want to know about a specific part of the TOS.
• We've simplified the language throughout the TOS and removed redundant or overly specific phrases and passages. When longer explanations would help to provide clarity, we've added new questions to the TOS FAQ instead.
• We've updated the descriptions of how we and our subprocessors collect and process user information (including personal information) in the Privacy Policy.
• The Abuse Policy has been generalized to provide the AO3 Policy & Abuse committee with greater flexibility to determine how to address TOS violations, while still providing protections for fanworks in accordance with AO3's mission.
• The "Underage" Archive Warning, which is used for works that depict or describe underage sex, is being renamed to "Underage Sex". This does not change the meaning of this warning or how it is enforced. When the TOS update occurs, all works with the "Underage" Archive Warning will be recategorized automatically to display the new "Underage Sex" Archive Warning label instead. If you have a work that carries the "Underage" warning and you don't want it to display the "Underage Sex" label, you can replace it with the "Creator Chose Not to Use Archive Warnings" label at any time.

You can read the proposed changes and comment here on this news post with any questions, suggestions, or feedback you might have about the new TOS or TOS FAQ. Comments will remain open until November 18th, 2024. After comments close, the Board of Directors for the OTW (the Organization for Transformative Works, which is AO3's parent organization) will vote on the proposed changes to the Terms of Service. If the Board votes in favor, the Terms of Service will be updated and all users will be required to agree to the new TOS to continue using AO3.

To make your opinion heard prior to the Board vote, make sure to submit your comments here before November 18th.

ETA: We appreciate that all of you have many ideas, but please keep in mind that the Policy & Abuse committee handles AO3 rules, not AO3 features. If you have ideas for a feature (for example, improvements you want to see to Search and Filtering), please contact the Support committee about them instead. We won't be responding to feature requests on this news post.

Kitty Sorgen, quilter extraordinaire, and Jenny Bowker, the pattern developer, are to blame for this madness! Shimmering Triangles Jenny calls it, and shimmer it does. In fact, it can be over done to the point where it's difficult to look at. But not Kitty's... Kitty, a member of our local guild and the best colorist I know, brought her shimmer quilt to Wednesday night quilting a few months ago, and