AngelaScholder

h3artbl33d , 21 days ago to random

LastPass had an outage of nearly twelve hours yesterday, where users couldn't login to access their password vault.

This is one of the (many) reasons why you shouldn't use essential tools that are either cloud-first or cloud-bound. There are decent alternatives, like KeePassXC or Bitwarden with the selfhosted server (Vaultwarden).

dangillmor , 1 month ago to random

I've been using the Chromium browser for certain websites, and that's about to end.

Google's greed-fueled moves -- this time to disable vital extensions that provide better privacy and security -- are unacceptable to me.

The stakes here are quite high. If Google succeeds what it's attempting to do -- forcing us to use only Google-approved privacy and security choices -- we're in trouble.

Firefox looks like the best way forward at this point.

EU_Commission , 1 month ago to random

Happy #EuropeDay! 🇪🇺

Today, on 9 May, we celebrate our unity and solidarity.

A month ahead of the #EUelections2024 (6-9 June), it is the perfect day to share your wishes for Europe and reflect on which EU you want in the future.

It's time to get involved! → https://europa.eu/!8jtNqP

rbreich , 2 months ago to random

Reminder: If we allow ourselves to fall into fatalism, or wallow in disappointment, or become resigned to what is rather than what should be, we will lose the long game.

The greatest enemy of positive social change is cynicism about what can be changed.

futurebird , 4 months ago to random

Should an earth-shrouding network of low orbit satellites be something that can be privately owned? How many people would be as blithe about the sky & light pollution if it were owned by IDK antifa or Iran or whatever seems scary to you?

I feel like we failed to have a required conversation. The sky belongs to everyone. No one asked me if I wanted this, no one asked you.

Speaking of moving fast, breaking things … how hard would it be to shoot them down? If it is illegal to do so, why?

ajsadauskas , 4 months ago (edited 4 months ago) to Technology

My real worry with Google's voyage into enshittification (thanks to Cory Doctorow @pluralistic the term) is YouTube.

Through YT, for the past 15 years, the world has basically entrusted Google to be the custodian of pretty much our entire global video archive.

There's countless hours of archived footage — news reports, political speeches, historical events, documentaries, indie films, academic lectures, conference presentations, rare recordings, concert footage, obscure music — where the best or only copy is now held by Google through YouTube.

So what happens if maintaining that archival footage becomes unprofitable?

#tech #technology #Google #enshittification #youtube #video @technology #capitalism #film #television #cinema #art #arts #SocialMedia #business #economics

breadandcircuses , 5 months ago to random

Most people like seafood. But if they knew about the huge environmental cost in obtaining their servings of shrimp, scallops, cod, or sole, they might not enjoy it so much...

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More than a quarter of the wild seafood that the world eats comes from the seafloor, scooped up in huge nets. These nets, called bottom trawls, catch millions of tons of fish worth billions of dollars each year. But they also damage coral, sponges, starfish, worms, and other sand-dwellers as the nets scrape against the ocean bed. Environmentalists sometimes liken the practice to strip-mining or clear-cutting forests.

According to a new study in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science, bottom trawling may be even worse than many people thought. Dragging nets through the sand isn’t just a threat to marine life. The study found that stirring up carbon-rich sediment on the seafloor releases some 370 million metric tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide every year, roughly the same as running 100 coal-fired power plants.

“I was pretty surprised,” said Trisha Atwood, a watershed scientist at Utah State University and the paper’s lead author. The findings, Atwood added, suggest that restricting bottom trawling could have “almost instantaneous benefits” for the climate.

The paper follows a study by some of the same scientists published in the journal Nature in 2021 – one that drew a lot of media attention as well as criticism from other researchers who thought its results were way off. In 2021, Atwood’s team found that bottom trawling unlocks more carbon from the seafloor than all of the world’s airplanes emit each year. But they couldn’t say how much of that carbon ended up in the atmosphere heating the earth and how much of it stayed in the water.

So that’s what they set out to do in the latest study. The team used fishing vessel data to map regions where trawlers have disturbed the seabed — like the North Sea off the coast of Europe — and applied ocean circulation models to estimate how much carbon dioxide flows from the sea into the air. They found that more than half of the carbon set loose by trawling makes its way into the atmosphere — and does so relatively quickly, within less than a decade.

“The most important finding here is that these emissions are not negligible,” said Juan Mayorgas, a marine data scientist at the National Geographic Society and co-author of the paper. “They are not small. They cannot be ignored.”

The world’s oceans are sponge-like in their ability to absorb carbon, soaking up a quarter of all the carbon dioxide that humans spew into the air. In fact, a lot more carbon is stored in the sea than in all the soil and plants on Earth. But until recently, little attention had been given to how much the oceans emit. “We know the oceans aren’t a closed system,” Mayorgas said. “At the same time the ocean is absorbing CO2, it’s emitting it.”

Most climate goals and policies don’t take emissions from sea-based activities like trawling into account. Atwood and Mayorgas said their study could help change that. “Now,” Mayorgas said, “countries can put all the information on the table and say, ‘Here’s how many jobs trawling produces, here’s how much food it produces, here’s how much carbon it’s emitting.'”

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FULL ARTICLE -- https://grist.org/food/bottom-trawling-damages-seafloor-source-carbon-emissions/

#Science #Environment #Climate #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #ClimateEmergency