Da qualche anno ho salutato Google come mio motore di ricerca principale e sono passato, armi e bagagli, a Duck Duck Go. Funziona molto bene e permette di utilizzare anche altri motori con un livello decrescente di privacy. Questo per dire che adesso quelli di DDG hanno lanciato anche il loro ad blocker con auditing dei siti che visitate. Visto che la mania del momento è nascondere miner di BitCoin dentro le pubblicità (adesso succede anche con quelle mostrate da YouTube) e che questa è una brutta sorpresa anche per chi usa Mac, anziché un antivirus o sistema di scanning/protezione inutile, costoso e potenzialmente pericoloso, un sano antitracker funziona meglio. Lo consiglio assieme a Ghostery e a Firefox Focus.

Money quote: "The vast majority of websites across the Internet contain hidden tracker networks, with Google trackers now lurking behind 76% of pages, Facebook’s trackers on 24% of pages, and countless others soaking up your personal information to follow you with ads around the Web, or worse. Our Privacy Protection will block all the hidden trackers we can find, exposing the major advertising networks tracking you over time, so that you can track who's trying to track you."

https://spreadprivacy.com/privacy-simplified/

Un bel ricordo della scrittrice di gialli Sue Grafton

Money quote: “Grafton belonged to a cluster of female authors who viewed the private-detective subgenre, previously dominated by Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Grafton’s own hero, Ross Macdonald, in desperate need of subverting. The new detectives created by writers like Maxine O’Callaghan, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, and Grafton were not, as some critics insisted, simply their male counterparts in skirts. They were capable, confident, commanding. They were damn good at their jobs even if their private lives suffered. They valued their friends, their causes, their communities. They emerged from the distinct combination of second-wave feminism and 1970s American paranoia, seeing the world around them with a stark lack of sentimentality, unlike the romantic nobility of their male counterparts”

http://www.vulture.com/2017/12/sue-grafton-was-a-master-at-subverting-the-detective-novel.html

Space Invaders compie quarant’anni - il mio articolo per La Stampa

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/01/30/tecnologia/giochi/space-invaders-compie-quarantanni-eX1lmT0lADyqkghmXYUPzN/pagina.html

Un viaggio piuttosto complesso, e a tratti quasi fuori-strada, sul tema del dolore e di come curarlo o mitigarlo. Ovvero, sul potere del tocco.

Money quote: "Research I recently conducted with my colleagues Haifa Irit Weissman-Fogel and Simone Shamay-Tsoory at the University of Haifa suggested that interpersonal touch is an effective way of reducing pain. We recruited 23 romantic, heterosexual couples to participate in the experiment. The women received pain stimuli under varying conditions. First, alone, without their partners, and then with their partners, but without physical contact. In the third condition, the women held hands with their partners while receiving pain and, in the fourth, they held hands with a stranger. This study showed that the third condition – partner’s touch – resulted in enhanced pain-reduction in comparison with others. Moreover, women with highly empathetic partners reported increased pain-reduction associated with that partner’s touch. It seems, then, that this study empirically supports the idea that touch can transfer a partner’s empathy, thereby decreasing pain. And it happens that this finding dovetails with previous research showing that a range of emotions from disgust to love to fear can be effectively communicated solely by means of touch."

https://aeon.co/ideas/what-is-the-physiological-basis-of-the-healing-touch

La più grande libreria olandese di storia dell'arte: un capolavoro anche architettonico.

Money quote: "The 19th-century library, which has recently been restored, has been collecting content since 1885. Its shelves are stocked with manunoscripts bound to entice any art history lover. While browsing its extensive collection, you’ll come across books, journals, and periodicals, as well as catalogues about art auctions, exhibitions, trades, and collections."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/cuypers-library

“Invading the Vintage”, il futurismo rétro di Franco Brambilla - una bella gallery di Fumettologica in preparazione alla mia intervista a Franco Brambilla

http://www.fumettologica.it/galleria/invading-the-vintage-franco-brambilla/

La fantastica storia di come la Pepsi Cola entrò nel mercato sovietico e di come si facesse pagare in natura (navi e altro).

Money quote: "The U.S.S.R. was Kendall’s land of opportunity, and his goal was to open it to Pepsi. In 1972, he succeeded, negotiating a cola monopoly and locking out Coca-Cola until 1985. Cola syrup began flowing through the Soviet Union, where it was bottled locally. It was a coup: As the New York Times put it, the soda was “the first capitalistic product” available in the U.S.S.R. Pepsi had become a pioneer. But there was one issue: money."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/soviet-union-pepsi-ships

“Racconti di un futuro imperfetto”, un classico della fantascienza di Alfonso Font - il mio articolo per Fumettologica

http://www.fumettologica.it/2018/01/racconti-futuro-imperfetto-alfonso-font-mondadori/

Il discorso integrale, lo State of the Union Address di Donald Trump di ieri sera.

Money quote: “Over the last year, we have made incredible progress and achieved extraordinary success. We have faced challenges we expected, and others we could never have imagined. We have shared in the heights of victory and the pains of hardship. We endured floods and fires and storms. But through it all, we have seen the beauty of America’s soul, and the steel in America’s spine”

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/trannoscript-trumps-state-of-the-union-address/551864/

Storia di uno dei più pazzeschi, folli, straordinari comici della televisione americana

Money quote: "The one-liners were impeccable, unimprovable. Dangerfield spent years on them; he once told an interviewer that it took him three months to work up six minutes of material for a talk-show appearance. If there’s art about life and art about art, Dangerfield’s comedy was the latter — he was the supreme formalist. Lacking inborn ability, he studied the moving parts of a joke with an engineer’s rigor. And so Dangerfield, who told audiences that as a child he was so ugly that his mother fed him with a slingshot, became the leading semiotician of postwar American comedy. How someone can watch him with anything short of wonder is beyond me."

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/01/26/magazine/letter-of-recommendation-rodney-dangerfield.html

L'ipnotica storia della macchina fotografica - una Leica M2 - appartenuta a Sean Flynn, il figlio di Errol Flynn, e della sua scomparsa tra Viet-nam e Cambogia durante la guerra che stava documentando. Era un foto-reporter scavezzacollo, membro di un gruppetto di foto-reporter scavezzacolli.

Money quote: "Sean Flynn was the only child of the famed actor Errol Flynn & Lili Damita and was well known for his work as a photojournalist covering the Vietnam war. Flynn worked closely with special units in Vietnam and Cambodia, capturing incredible images of the war. Many of his images would be considered to be the raw view of an especially brutal war."

https://www.japancamerahunter.com/2018/01/camera-historica-the-sean-flynn-leica-m2/

Solo l’intelligenza artificiale ci potrà difendere da attacchi hacker e malware - il mio articolo per la Stampa

Money quote: "«Quella della sicurezza è una guerra che possiamo vincere solo se lasciamo che a combatterla al posto nostro siano le macchine» dice Gil Shwed, il fondatore dell’israeliana Check Point"

http://www.lastampa.it/2018/01/31/tecnologia/idee/solo-lintelligenza-artificiale-ci-potr-difendere-da-attacchi-hacker-e-malware-qpTQjUkLEEIPPyVVIMUxHN/pagina.html

Perché le cinture di sicurezza degli aeroplani per i passeggeri sono fatte come sono fatte? Risposta breve: perché costano molto poco. Però la risposta lunga è più interessante...

Money quote: "Seat belts became common in airplanes by the 1930s and 1940s, though even in 1947 there was pushback from the airline industry. (They often insisted that a tight belt could cause internal damage upon a crash. This is very rarely true and also pales in comparison to the number of injuries, internal and external, that are caused when a passenger doesn’t wear a seatbelt.) The Federal Aviation Act of 1958, spurred by several airplane crashes, began the move towards better safety requirements; these were codified in 1972 and have been occasionally updated ever since."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-are-airplane-seatbelts-so-weird

Fuji vuole comprare Xerox, nascerà un colosso da 18 miliardi di dollari - il mio articolo per Macity

https://www.macitynet.it/fuji-vuole-comprare-xerox-nascera-un-colosso-18-miliardi/

Ok, se provate il desiderio di sperimentare, potete fare molte cose: una di queste è usare Atom come se fosse VIm. Insomma, più o meno

Money quote: "My work is greatly owing to former achievements of the original vim-mode developers and many of its contributors.
As you can see in the commit history, this project was originally started by forking official vim-mode.
The great design to achieve Vim operation by composing operator with target (motion, text-object) on top of operationStack still lives in vim-mode-plus now.
I don't think I can find this idea by myself from nothing.
Sincerely, I feel I couldn't do anything without the original vim-mode."

https://github.com/t9md/atom-vim-mode-plus

La storia dei mulini a vento statunitensi: uno degli elementi paesaggistici più famosi di quel Paese, che in realtà sono anche uno degli strumenti più importanti per la conquista e l'industrializzazione della Frontiera americana. C'è anche un museo a loro dedicato, nello stato dell'Indiana.

Money quote: "You have probably seen windmills like these before, if not in person, then in pictures or on television. Sometimes known as “windpumps” or “wind engines,” they power a mechanical apparatus that draws water out of the ground. They share a general silhouette—reinforced tower, slatted fan wheel, rudder-like tail—and most are around forty feet high. They have names like Butler Oilmatic; Dempster 12A; Baker Direct Stroke; Southern Cross; The Whizz; Fairbury No. 33; Aermotor 602. In 2018, these windmills have a quaint, decorative sort of feel, like something you would find at an antique mall. But they are in fact technically profound pieces of equipment with a history of powering American expansion."

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/windmills-water-pumping-museum-indiana

L'articolo purtroppo è a pagamento, ma solo l'incipit pubblico vale la pena: gli uccelli a quanto pare hanno scoperto il fuoco prima degli esseri umani. Ci sono predatori volanti che sono anche piromani: spargono il fuoco sulla foresta per stanare le loro prede. Almeno, in Australia.

Money quote: "Some birds of prey have learned to control fire, a skill previously thought to be unique to humans. The birds appear to deliberately spread wildfires in order to flush out prey. The finding suggests that birds may have beaten us to the use of fire."

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2157887-arsonist-falcons-suggest-birds-discovered-fire-before-humans-did/

Storia di Margit Wennmachers, la donna che ha creato l'immagine di uno dei più grandi venture capitalist della Silicon Valley e ridefinito l'idea che abbiamo dei genietti della tecnologia che abitano in California

Money quote: "The best communicators, by definition, go unnoticed. They’re the invisible third person in every interview. It was Wennmachers who coaxed a reticent Andreessen into participating in Friend’s story because she believed it would be good for the firm. It was Wennmachers who set up most of Friend’s interviews at Andreessen Horowitz and had a colleague staff them. When Friend felt he needed to see more of Andreessen, Wennmachers hit upon the idea of a TV-watching dinner date, correctly suspecting the scene would be just weird enough to guarantee inclusion and that Andreessen would come off exactly as she hoped: a relatable visionary who identifies with oddball hackers and who, when he is not predicting the future of computers, is watching TV shows about people who predict the future of computers."

https://www.wired.com/story/margit-wennmachers-is-andreessen-horowitzs-secret-weapon/

La Cina comincia a non poterne più dei Bitcoin

Money quote: ““Currently, there are some so-called ‘mining’ enterprises that produce ‘virtual currencies.’ They have consumed huge amounts of resources and stoked speculation of ‘virtual currencies,’” according to the document dated Jan. 2.”

https://qz.com/1174091/china-wants-an-orderly-exit-from-bitcoin-mining/

La famiglia Rockefellers è diventata leggendariamente ricca grazie al petrolio di una azienda che si chiama Exxon. Oggi la Exxon cerca di difendersi dai Rockefeller perché si sente attaccata dalla famiglia diventata con il tempo sempre più ricca ma anche sempre più ambientalista. Interessante.

Money quote: “All of which is how ExxonMobil found itself in federal court this past November arguing that the Rockefellers were funding a conspiracy against it. Judge Valerie Caproni of the Southern District of New York was hearing the latest arguments in a legal battle that had begun more than two years prior, when members of the Rockefeller clan, in their latest attempt to pressure the erstwhile family business to deal with climate change, funded journalists who uncovered documents showing Exxon had known about the dangers of burning fossil fuels for decades while publicly denying it was much of a problem at all. The Rockefeller-backed reports had inspired multiple state attorneys general to investigate whether Exxon might be liable like tobacco companies that lied about the cancer risks of smoking had been”

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/the-rockefellers-vs-exxon.html

In memoria di Fred Bass, il proprietario della libreria Strand a Manhattan.

Money quote: “In between a formal request for Senator Wyden to replace Chuck Schumer and a plea for Paul Krugman to explain Bitcoin, Fran lauded Fred, whom she had known since she was twenty. “Young people say to me, Fran, where’d you get those vintage glasses?” she said. “And I say, They’re not vintage; I just still have them. I felt the same way about Fred. Fred’s such an old-school guy, they’d say. Well, Fred’s not an old-school guy, I’d say. We just still have him.””

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/02/01/raising-glass-fred-bass-strands-iconic-owner/