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diff --git a/content/entry/autism-and-memory.md b/content/entry/autism-and-memory.md index 65a9d7f..41994f8 100644 --- a/content/entry/autism-and-memory.md +++ b/content/entry/autism-and-memory.md @@ -61,7 +61,7 @@ I think the lower tendency for bias in autistic people gives us an increased cap My strongest memory strength is anything related to my special interests. If I'm interested enough in something, I don't forget it and if I do, it takes minimal priming to recover it. I have an interest in computer security and I'm able to recall very long passphrases even after months of not entering them. I'm never worried about forgetting them, because my long-term memory with regards to special interests is intact. ## Front of the Class -There's a [movie](https://libremdb.herokuapp.com/title/tt1292594/) and a [book](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/788452.Front_of_the_Class) about neurological differences which I'd like to share. It's based on the true story of a teacher with Tourette Syndrome named Brad Cohen. The movie and book are titled "Front of the Class". The movie does a good job of depicting how education leads to empathy, but it also does a good job of showing that not everyone is open to being educated. Many people are ignorant and content in their ignorance. That adversity is something all neurodiverse people have to learn to deal with. +There's a [movie](https://libremdb.iket.me/title/tt1292594) and a [book](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/788452.Front_of_the_Class) about neurological differences which I'd like to share. It's based on the true story of a teacher with Tourette Syndrome named Brad Cohen. The movie and book are titled "Front of the Class". The movie does a good job of depicting how education leads to empathy, but it also does a good job of showing that not everyone is open to being educated. Many people are ignorant and content in their ignorance. That adversity is something all neurodiverse people have to learn to deal with. ## Reflecting In many ways, my story is similar to Cohen's. I got called weirdo in school. I struggled to make any real friends. I struggled with employment thanks in part to employers not accepting my differences. Although Cohen and I have very different neurological conditions, the lessons from his life are transferable to mine. There will always be people ready to point out my deficits, whether it's memory related or something else. No matter how well I explain my autism, some of them will never accept it. It's a waste of time trying to gain the approval of those people. diff --git a/content/entry/on-the-intellectual-dark-web.md b/content/entry/on-the-intellectual-dark-web.md index ce1f76f..5304826 100644 --- a/content/entry/on-the-intellectual-dark-web.md +++ b/content/entry/on-the-intellectual-dark-web.md @@ -26,7 +26,7 @@ The reason I bring this up is because politics has become so polarized that as s If you wanna talk politics with me, let's put the labels aside and stick to specific issues. Don't assume I hold all these beliefs I never espoused. Just treat me like an individual, like an independent, thinking person and I'll treat you with the same respect. Then, just maybe, we'll get somewhere. # The Intellectual Dark Web -Interestingly, there's a growing number of people that feel the way I do, who have lost patience with the blind, rank partisanship of all the major news networks on every issue, the uncivil shouting matches, and the lost art of civil discussion. They make up what's now called the "[intellectual dark web](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web)" (IDW). I include people like [Anthony Magnabosco](https://anthonymagnabosco.com/) in the IDW, people who are having civil, fascinating discussions and showing others how to have them. +Interestingly, there's a growing number of people that feel the way I do, who have lost patience with the blind, rank partisanship of all the major news networks on every issue, the uncivil shouting matches, and the lost art of civil discussion. They make up what's now called the "[intellectual dark web](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_dark_web)" (IDW). I include people like [Anthony Magnabosco](https://yewtu.be/channel/UCocP40a_UvRkUAPLD5ezLIQ?dark_mode=true) in the IDW, people who are having civil, fascinating discussions and showing others how to have them. When you finish reading this, maybe go watch a few of Anthony's Street Epistemology (SE) videos. I plan on making a follow up journal entry dedicated to SE, but I think introducing new techniques like SE into discussions is key. There are people in politics like [Andrew Yang](https://www.andrewyang.com/), who are promoting new ideas for moving forward. The most popular podcaster in the entire world who interviews people from all walks of life, [Joe Rogan](https://www.joerogan.com/), seems, to my eye, absolutely dedicated to having civil discussions. IDWers like [Sam Harris](https://samharris.org/) go on major news networks and almost never lose composure. People like Sam are the very definition of nonreactive and they're nigh-impossible to drag into shouting matches because they're just so damn reasonable. diff --git a/content/entry/siue-eid-creation-and-maintenance-problems.md b/content/entry/siue-eid-creation-and-maintenance-problems.md index c008e30..2f3ce85 100644 --- a/content/entry/siue-eid-creation-and-maintenance-problems.md +++ b/content/entry/siue-eid-creation-and-maintenance-problems.md @@ -40,7 +40,7 @@ I'm going to lump the last 4 together because the only thing I have to add is th ## 60 Day Reset -Every 60 days, you are required to [reset your password](https://www.siue.edu/its/eid_faq.shtml#expired). The NIST password policy guidelines say users shouldn't be required to change their passwords regularly or arbitrarily. If an account is compromised, then it makes sense. But otherwise, you'll just be making everyone increment the last digit in their password every time. Almost no one will create a completely different password when they can just change one character. +Every 60 days, you are required to [reset your password](https://web.archive.org/web/20201026122131/https://www.siue.edu/its/eid_faq.shtml#expired). The NIST password policy guidelines say users shouldn't be required to change their passwords regularly or arbitrarily. If an account is compromised, then it makes sense. But otherwise, you'll just be making everyone increment the last digit in their password every time. Almost no one will create a completely different password when they can just change one character. Furthermore, all these password rules make it much more difficult to analyze the number of possible passwords. To do that, you would need every e-ID and every word in "the dictionary". Who knows what words are included even. I'm certain that even the administrators have no idea how big the password space is, but it's definitely insufficient. This brings me to my next point. diff --git a/content/entry/the-meaning-of-life.md b/content/entry/the-meaning-of-life.md index 2f2e1a5..7eab70f 100644 --- a/content/entry/the-meaning-of-life.md +++ b/content/entry/the-meaning-of-life.md @@ -4,7 +4,7 @@ date: 2021-03-04T00:00:00 draft: false --- # Disclaimer -I said in a [previous post](/2021/01/17/on-spirituality) that posts tagged spirituality aren't to be interpreted as [truth-apt](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth-apt) and that I wanted to be clearer about how to interpret these posts. Well this post is an exception. Do interpret it as making truth claims. I'm going to be more rigorous than I normally am in spiritual posts and try not to make any false claims. So let's get started. +I said in a [previous post](/2021/01/17/on-spirituality) that posts tagged spirituality aren't to be interpreted as [truth-apt](https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803105953845) and that I wanted to be clearer about how to interpret these posts. Well this post is an exception. Do interpret it as making truth claims. I'm going to be more rigorous than I normally am in spiritual posts and try not to make any false claims. So let's get started. # The Meaning of Life It's 42, obviously. diff --git a/content/entry/the-nonlinearity-of-intelligence.md b/content/entry/the-nonlinearity-of-intelligence.md index 606d830..d47fe01 100644 --- a/content/entry/the-nonlinearity-of-intelligence.md +++ b/content/entry/the-nonlinearity-of-intelligence.md @@ -8,7 +8,7 @@ The word "sports" covers a wide variety of activities. It's so broad that its us In the same way, you can talk about "intelligence" in a general sense. But when you're just talking about intelligence, it's hard to say much. So instead, to make it more interesting, you can differentiate between mathematical intelligence, social intelligence, historical intelligence, philosophical intelligence, etc. For many people, talking about intelligence in a linear or binary way doesn't accurately describe their situation. Let's look at a few case studies. ## Case Study #1: Kim Peek -[Laurence Kim Peek](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek) is the perfect example of the abstraction of general intelligence breaking down. Kim is the inspiration for the movie [Rain Man](https://libremdb.herokuapp.com/title/tt0095953/). According to Kim's father Francis, Kim learned to read before age 2. Kim read the left page with his left eye and right page with his right eye. He was able to read 1 page per second remembering nearly all of it years later. He was a human encyclopedia. +[Laurence Kim Peek](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Peek) is the perfect example of the abstraction of general intelligence breaking down. Kim is the inspiration for the movie [Rain Man](https://libremdb.iket.me/title/tt0095953). According to Kim's father Francis, Kim learned to read before age 2. Kim read the left page with his left eye and right page with his right eye. He was able to read 1 page per second remembering nearly all of it years later. He was a human encyclopedia. Kim also didn't learn to walk until age 4. He was diagnosed severely mentally retarded and had an 87 IQ. He couldn't button up his shirt and had great difficulty socializing and performing basic motor tasks. diff --git a/content/entry/the-tipping-point-rejecting-windows-zoom-lockdown-browser-and-the-lockdown-monitor.md b/content/entry/the-tipping-point-rejecting-windows-zoom-lockdown-browser-and-the-lockdown-monitor.md index 37e5c3f..c6ed0eb 100644 --- a/content/entry/the-tipping-point-rejecting-windows-zoom-lockdown-browser-and-the-lockdown-monitor.md +++ b/content/entry/the-tipping-point-rejecting-windows-zoom-lockdown-browser-and-the-lockdown-monitor.md @@ -18,7 +18,7 @@ Back in class after the assignment was graded, Professor X announced that studen ## Zoom After the corona virus lockdown was declared in Illinois and the university shut down all classes on campus, the lectures needed a way to continue. Professor X went for [Zoom](https://zoom.us/). Zoom is proprietary crapware. You can download Zoom on your computer or use it through the browser which probably requires proprietary JavaScript and camera and microphone access. I emailed Professor X if there was another way I could watch the lectures. To accommodate me, he began recording the meetings and emailing them to everyone. However, he said he was still taking attendance with Zoom unfortunately. So I found out it's possible to use [SIP](https://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Session_Initiation_Protocol). I attempted to set up an SIP account so I could use Zoom, but then I quickly gave up on that and decided on just using the recordings. I felt that I shouldn't have to do extra legwork to avoid using proprietary software. If professors are going to suggest proprietary software to students, which they shouldn't, then they should at least offer a free software alternative that works equally well. Of course, Zoom in the long run is turning out to be a disaster as proprietary software often does. -I want to elaborate a bit on how Zoom is turning out to be a disaster. Zoom is a privacy nightmare. It actually has an attention tracking feature documented in the [knowledge base](https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115000538083-Attendee-attention-tracking) which creepily allowed hosts of a Zoom meeting to track if the participants were paying attention or not. The CEO addressed [multiple issues](https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/). One issue was uninvited participants joining and crashing conferences. Another was that the iOS client contained the Facebook SDK. Facebook is a surveillance monster, so of course that was an absolute privacy disaster and it had to be removed. Zoom video and audio doesn't even have end-to-end encryption according to [this article](https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/). Hackers quickly found a way to exploit Zoom to expose Windows passwords and showed a screenshot of it on [Twitter](https://nitter.net/hackerfantastic/status/1245133371262619654). Some Zoom calls may have been routed through China, where geofencing should have prevented this. [The CEO didn't say how many users could have been effected](https://www.businessinsider.com/china-zoom-data-2020-4). China does not enforce laws about personal data privacy so who knows if the calls got collected, stored, or analyzed. +I want to elaborate a bit on how Zoom is turning out to be a disaster. Zoom is a privacy nightmare. It actually has an attention tracking feature documented in the [knowledge base](https://web.archive.org/web/20200310192605/https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us/articles/115000538083-Attendee-attention-tracking) which creepily allowed hosts of a Zoom meeting to track if the participants were paying attention or not. The CEO addressed [multiple issues](https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-users/). One issue was uninvited participants joining and crashing conferences. Another was that the iOS client contained the Facebook SDK. Facebook is a surveillance monster, so of course that was an absolute privacy disaster and it had to be removed. Zoom video and audio doesn't even have end-to-end encryption according to [this article](https://theintercept.com/2020/03/31/zoom-meeting-encryption/). Hackers quickly found a way to exploit Zoom to expose Windows passwords and showed a screenshot of it on [Twitter](https://nitter.net/hackerfantastic/status/1245133371262619654). Some Zoom calls may have been routed through China, where geofencing should have prevented this. [The CEO didn't say how many users could have been effected](https://www.businessinsider.com/china-zoom-data-2020-4). China does not enforce laws about personal data privacy so who knows if the calls got collected, stored, or analyzed. So now some universities are rushing over to Microsoft Teams, which will also be a privacy and security disaster forced upon students yet again. They are just going from one proprietary privacy disaster to the next when the best solution is to just use free software. Teams is proprietary and the Teams website requires proprietary JavaScript and perhaps worse a Microsoft account where you must agree to their insane terms of service. So at this point you may be wondering, what free software is out there that would be reasonable for schools to use that would be better? [Jitsi](https://jitsi.org/jitsi-meet/) seems like a very viable alternative. It allows video calling, voice calling, meetings between an unlimited number of participants, and no sign up or account required. I'm not sure about the encryption and data privacy it has, but at least you know it doesn't come with the Facebook SDK. Besides, there is also [Matrix](https://matrix.org/) which is cross-platform and has multiple clients. There are free software options available that universities should be looking into rather than all jumping onboard the Zoom train, then jumping onto the Teams train after Zoom derailed. |