Interesting Links for 18-05-2023

[andrewducker]

1. Why did the Southern States secede?

(tags:USA history civilwar slavery )

2. When a Far Right Shitposter Runs a Social Media Platform

(tags:USA politics fraud disinformation socialmedia ElonMusk Twitter )

3. The Dangers of Google’s .zip TLD. Can you quickly tell which of the URLs is fraudulent?

(tags:hacking security web )

4. Alastair Campbell seems to have come around on fixing the voting system

(tags:politics voting reform labour )

5. Titanic: First ever full-sized scans reveal wreck as never seen before

(tags:titanic 3d scanning )

6. Why did the UK do so badly at Eurovision?

(tags:eurovision music UK )

7. Meet the people who carry out virtual relationships for money - two minutes at a time

(tags:relationships fraud business )

8. 94% of people don't want to be tracked online - why are sites still asking for consent to do so?

(tags:cookies surveillance web )

9. Post-Brexit India deal could cut thousands of jobs in Leave-voting areas, and hike food prices

(tags:uk europe india trade rice )

10. Edinburgh's Water of Leith nature project sees floating habitats placed to support wildlife

(tags:edinburgh rivers nature )

11. The EU's new Cyber Resilience Act is about to tell us how to code

(tags:europe security software )

Comments

[liv]

6: I definitely had exactly that question. I thought the UK's entry was really solid (and I don't automatically love our usual shit songs just out of patriotism). I didn't think Muller deserved to win but I don't think she deserved to come last either. But the article is helpful in pointing out that the voting system means that you can be heavily penalized for being pretty good but not great.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, with so many songs, if you're in a niche with many better songs of the same type then you're going to do badly. So you either have to be the best, or in a smaller niche some people love.

I hadn't thought of it before either!

[simont]

#8: I see that their questionnaire doesn't contain my answer to question 5, "When I click Accept on a cookie prompt it's because..."

My solution to this general annoyance is to set Firefox's option to delete all¹ cookies whenever the browser closes – and to actually close the browser frequently. So on the one hand I do click "Accept" to a lot of cookie prompts which are the quickest way to make the site stop complaining at me in the moment; but on the other hand I'm not actually keeping the cookies they send me – the next time I visit, they're gone. The site can track me across the handful of pages I viewed in a single visit, but they could do that much anyway by referrers or simple IP address + timestamp correlation.

Some of them even say things like "By { clicking Accept / using this site at all } you agree to our use of cookies." And I think "I don't, you know."

¹ ok, all cookies except a small number of sites I passlisted. DW is one, and my work browser trusts a bunch of internal work sites too.

[andrewducker]

I'm delighted that Firefox now blocks all third party cookies by default. I've not found a good reason to block all first-party cookies as well.

[zz]

amongst other things, i use the extension that puts every site into a new temporary container (unless i specify otherwise), so even if i let them set cookies, they disappear once i close the tab.

[simont]

That sounds like a good way to extend my approach to people who don't have my habit of closing the browser all the time. But how does it handle multiple tabs on a single site?

If I visit a shopping site, open 12 tabs on things I might want to buy, look through them, and end up clicking "add to basket" in three of them, that's definitely a case where I want the cookies to tie all those tabs together so that I can find my way to a basket containing the three things I wanted.

eta: oh, wait, you said every site in its own container, not every tab. So multiple tabs on the same site still get to stay together. But presumably when the last tab on that site closes, the cookies are deleted?

[zz]

yeah, you can set it to consider everything in a domain the same site, and control whether navigating from that container spawns a new container, etc. for sites that i want to keep cookies for, i put them into a specific container, and Temporary Containers doesn't kick in.

And Containerise lets me specify wildcard subdomain mappings to permanent containers, as opposed to the default exact site matching.

It's a bit of a faff to set up initially, but now i only touch it when there's a new site i'll want to revisit with cookies/auth/etc, which is rare.
Where it usually breaks stuff is sites that do auth/ordering by redirecting through completely different domain, but often the 3rd-party cookie blocking breaks those anyway.

[calimac]

1) Whenever anybody says that the South's motive for seceding was states' rights, I reply, "States' rights to do what?" They didn't secede to protect their rights to, say, set different minimum ages for marriage than their neighbors. The right they were motivated to protect was slavery.

[haggis]

I am not an expect on US political history but I believe that the Southern States had been significantly infringing on the Northern States rights through things like the Fugitive Slave Act so my sympathy with that argument is *extremely* limited

[calimac]

Another extremely excellent point. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which was something the South insisted on getting in return for losing co-equal control of the Senate, was federal supremacy over states' rights if there ever was any.

The South's defense against that charge was that the right to pursue fugitive slaves to other states was written in the Constitution, but the draconian enforcement requirements of the 1850 act went far beyond anything previously enacted, and were specifically designed to prevent free states from balking at full cooperation.

[danieldwilliam]

I completely agree with you.

My observation as an electoral reform and democracy campaigner is that ordinary folks are not hugely interested in the mechanics of how different voting systems change the way power is allocated until and unless you get them talking about the power to do X. I doubt Southrons in the mid-19th century are any different than Brits i the early 21st.

On the Fugitive Slave Act, if I recall correctly, the Southern legislators had so strangled Congress that it was a criminal offense to campaign or even speak against the Act in Congress by Members of Congress. Southrons could come to your house, knock your down down, seize your guest and drag them away and if you objected you were now a criminal and if your elected represenative complained they were censured in Congress.

If that's not trampling over Northern States' Rights I don't know what is.

[calimac]

I hadn't read about breaking people's doors down to arrest dissenters - to look for fugitive slaves, yeah, then they'd do it - but yes, for some years there was in Congress a "gag rule" that prohibited reading or even acknowledging petitions against slavery - even against extending it to territories - despite a clear statement in the Constitution that the people have the right to petition. Mind, there's no requirement that Congress do anything about the petitions, but even their being there was too much for the South. And this was before the Act of 1850.

The Congressman who spoke loudest and longest against this brutal nonsense was John Quincy Adams, former US President.

[movingfinger]

Yeah. They seceded because they wanted to own other human beings and "states' rights" is another name for "right to own slaves." It just sounds highfalutin and legitimate.

[wildeabandon]

9. I am extremely sceptical of the claim that eliminating tariffs will increase food prices. I can see that it would likely lead to jobs moving from the UK to India, but that's not actually the same as jobs being cut.

[poshmerchant]

6. Why did the UK do so badly at Eurovision?

I haven't see anyone point it out, but "So I wrote a song" is a breakup song about how the other party is wrong from the UK, the country that broke up with the EU and spent most of a decade insisting the rest of the EU were the ones in the wrong. Solid song, but it's not a sentiment that would land well with the audience

[channelpenguin]

GREAT point!

[andrewducker]

That makes a lot of sense!