By @edent · Book Review science · 300 words
The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of Theranos, the multibillion-dollar biotech startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end, despite pressure from its charismatic CEO and threats by her lawyers.
Continue reading →By @edent · bugs Text Encoding unicode · 1 comment · 150 words
I received this weird bit of mojibake in an email. Here's the raw text view: ------=_NextPart_001_009E_01D4D8BF.D0737E10 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable =E6=8C=A8=E2=8E=92tml xmlns:v=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml" xmlns:o=3D"= urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" xmlns:w=3D"urn:schemas-microsoft-c= om:office:word" xmlns:m=3D"http://schemas.microsoft.com/office/2004/12/omml= " xmlns=3D"http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40"> What's going on? 挨 is a Chinese, Japanese, Korean (cjk) unified ideograph (U+6328) ⎒ is the passive-pull-up-output symbol (U+2392) That's somehow replaced: < - less-than […]
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review feminism · 250 words
Taking us on an eye-opening journey through science, Inferior challenges our preconceptions about men and women, investigating the ferocious gender wars that burn in biology, psychology and anthropology. Angela Saini revisits the landmark experiments that have informed our understanding, lays bare the problem of bias in research, and speaks to the scientists finally exploring the truth about the female sex.
Continue reading →By @edent · Book Review · 200 words
In 1843, at the age of sixteen, servant girl Grace Marks was convicted for her part in the vicious murders of her employer and his mistress. Some believe Grace is innocent; others think her evil or insane. Grace herself claims to have no memory of the murders.
Continue reading →By @edent · advertising spam twitter · 1 comment · 550 words · read ~1,238 times.
Twitter has a problem with scam advertising. Rather than having humans manually check adverts for acceptability and authenticity, they let almost anyone promote anything. Whatever meagre protections they build in are rapidly evaded by the scammers. Let's take a look at an example of a promoted crypto-scam about Singapore. I'd say it was obviously a […]
Continue reading →By @edent · 2fa passwords security usability · 7 comments · 650 words · read ~1,038 times.
Last week I wrote about how I had 800 passwords in my password manager. It was intended to highlight the ridiculous proliferation of online services, and how redecentralising identity comes with a manageability problem. I now want to talk about 2FA - Two-Factor Authentication - the random codes you have to type in every time […]
Continue reading →By @edent · emoji · 150 words · read ~824 times.
I'm a fan of the Little Alchemy series of games. Combine earth and fire to get lava. Combine fire and water to get steam. Steam and lava combined makes... You get the picture. I've been toying around with making a version which only uses emoji. Here's what me and my friends have come up with […]
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