The original paper about microplastics in the brain seems to have a serious methodological flaw that undermines the conclusion that our brains are swimming in microplastics.

“False positives of microplastics are common to almost all methods of detecting them,” Jones says. “This is quite a serious issue in microplastics work.”

Brain tissue contains a large amount of lipids, some of which have similar mass spectra as the plastic polyethylene, Wagner says. “Most of the presumed plastic they found is polyethylene, which to me really indicates that they didn’t really clean up their samples properly.” Jones says he shares these concerns.

This is from other microplastics researchers. See this article. So before we panic about this, let’s wait for some independent replication and more agreement in the scientific community.

Microplastics are a serious concern, and we need to deal with plastic pollution. Let’s just stick to high quality science while we do that.

I haven’t seen any evidence that this is solvable. You can feed in more training data, but that doesn’t mean generative AI technology is capable of using that in the way you describe.

Passkeys are a replacement for passwords. Passwords don’t solve the problem of a lost password, and passkeys don’t solve the problem of a lost passkey. How a site deals with lost credentials is up to them. It doesn’t need to be password + 2FA.

It tells when the user is online. This is useful for sending spam, because being on top of the inbox makes it more likely your message will be read.

To be fair, I doubt anyone’s implemented this specifically for ICMP. Instead I’d expect tracking that watches for any IP traffic whatsoever, and that happens to include ICMP.

ICMP reveals your IP address, which is easily correlated with other traffic…

Ahh, “Weev” is a four-letter version of “Weave” the same way “Chex” is a shortened “Checkerboard”, perhaps referring to the Ralston Purina checkerboard logo.

But what’s Weev?

And IntelliSync, so you could have the same contacts in your PC and your Palm Pilot.

I still wouldn’t trust it because of homograph attacks.

There’s a fatal flaw in the premise. It is impossible to fasten something to a cat.

Yeah. The huge legal distinctions between different ways of unlocking a device seem absurd. Comprehensive privacy legislation would help.

Authorities with a warrant can drill into a safe to get to its contents. That’s legally distinct from forcing someone to unlock the safe by entering the combination. It takes some mental effort to enter a combination, so it counts as “testimony”, and in the USA people can’t be forced to testify against themselves.

The parallel in US law is that people can be forced to unlock a phone using biometrics, but they can’t be forced to unlock a phone by entering a passcode. The absurd part here is that the actions have the same effect, but one of them can be compelled and the other cannot.

The downloadable shortcut described here also worked for me.

I assume you’re referring to Safari on iOS. I was able to select all on that Project Gutenberg page with a little-known scrolling trick:

1. Scroll to the bottom of the page. Yes, this part is a bit annoying but I was able to do that in 8 seconds with 25 full-screen flicks.
2. Long-press near the bottom of the page to start text selection.
3. Grab the bottom lollipop and drag it to the end of the page to select the last character.
4. Grab the top lollipop and drag it around a little to select more text. Don’t release it, and hold it still.
5. With a different finger, tap the status bar at the top of the screen. This is a shortcut for scrolling to the top of the page. Give it a couple seconds to finish scrolling. If you move the lollipop at all while it’s scrolling it will interrupt the scrolling, so keep that finger still until it’s done.
6. Now that you’re near the top of the page, drag the lollipop to the very top of the page and release it. The copy option should appear.

There’s no way to prove that something is secure. (It reduces to the halting problem.)

This is a terrible idea. It’s negligibly better than writing down the passwords, because it’s trivially easy to try every password represented on this card. Once someone has the card, your entropy is just two characters, which is the two characters you memorize for the site. In effect, you have a 2 character password.

I’d prefer a commander from Supreme Commander. It can raise an entire military by itself, and it’s much hardier than basic builders. It’s deadly up close. Even if you somehow defeat it, your reward is a nuclear explosion.