Hasnain says:

“Alka Pradhan, one of his lawyers said: “If the CIA had not hidden their own conclusions about the illegality of Omar’s torture for this long, the US government would not have been able to bring charges against Ammar because we now know that the torture inflicted on Ammar led to lasting brain damage in the form of a traumatic brain injury and other debilitating illnesses that cannot be treated at Guantánamo Bay.””

Hasnain says:

“Bourgeon started her research at the Bluefish Caves believing that people weren’t in North America during the last ice age, but quickly realized that Cinq-Mars was right. Though she met him only a few times, and wishes she’d had more opportunities to speak with him before he passed, Bourgeon is glad he lived to see her efforts confirm his research.”

Hasnain says:

I’m glad I see more and more awareness of the fact that burnout is systemic.

“Burnout is rarely framed in this way because fixing these problems takes systemic work, and one-off solutions aren't going to cut it. To actually defeat burnout, you have to understand the work process, and you have to be willing to make hard calls about personnel who may be making frontline employees miserable. Managers you think are on top of things may actually be micromanagers who nag people about work they don't understand. Managers you think are funny may actually make others feel uncomfortable or upset in the workplace. Managers you think are hard workers may actually be presenting other people's work as their own, draining their colleagues of enthusiasm and initiative. “

Hasnain says:

Uh oh.

“Foxconn is the world’s biggest contract manufacturer of electronics, and the most important supplier to companies including Apple and Samsung. Many Chinese tech giants like Huawei, Tencent, and Oppo are headquartered in Shenzhen, which is situated near the border with Hong Kong. Foxconn says it’s stopping production at its Longhua and Guanlan factories until further notice, Nikkei reports; the Shenzhen base is Foxconn’s second largest in the country.”

Hasnain says:

I had never heard about the software or the character before this, so this was quite fascinating to read.

“The team behind Seeking Mavis Beacon has asked for any leads and tips about L’Esperance or any of the other models who later incarnated Mavis. “We don’t know what we’re going to find,” Jones told Mashable. “And we hope that it is a triumphant story in which Renee L’Esperance is just chilling, and is like, ‘Why did you bother me? I’m living great.’” The documentarians are also interested in hearing from people with strong memories associated with the character and the typing software. A website has been set up, as well as a hotline for people looking to share information.”

Hasnain says:

I liked this post a lot. It’s not like the usual blogpost announcing *what* a bug is - rather, it goes into how the bug was found and the exploit was built. And explains some of the thought process so others can replicate it.

“This was a really fun bug to discover and work on. From start to end, it took just under a week to find, triage the bug, figure out how to hit it, and build the exploit. While not novel, the OOB write primitive we get with it is also pretty interesting, and makes for quite a clean exploit as we’ve seen.”

Hasnain says:

Hard hitting journalism right here. An inside look into some of the most influential and unethical people in journalism in recent history.

“In his wake, Zucker leaves a media landscape more fractured than ever, with public distrust of journalists at an all-time high. And why not, when a peek behind the curtain reveals secret dealings between his news outlets and the politicians they’re supposed to hold to account, coverage dictated not by the issues but by whatever sensational dreck would keep eyes glued to the screen, and newsrooms where alleged predators roamed freely? Zucker may not have invented the culture of powerful men exploiting the women around them, but he incubated it for the modern media age, empowering people who were supposed to hold the public’s trust — but couldn’t even be trusted to keep their hands off of their subordinates. Perhaps most damning, he leaves a political landscape warped by a man he was all too proud to use for ratings throughout his career.”

Hasnain says:

Technical tutorial mixed with instructions on how to annoy spammers.

“I've had a bunch of PRs between live-tweeting earlier today and pushing this blog post just now. Thank you! I'd really like to get this more intelligent; maybe there should be different "paths" for password criteria to mix it up a bit? Maybe it should differ based on the day or time? Maybe based on the requestor's country (which you can easily access via the inbound request)? The optimal approach should be one that keeps the victim trying to get the password right for as long as possible whilst simultaneously infuriating them and burning their time. Either submit your own PRs or leave comments below, I'd love to hear your ideas.”

Hasnain says:

“At the same time, it also leaves mathematicians with a new question to solve, this time about sets in which it’s not possible to find a sum of unit fractions that equals 1. The primes are one example — there’s no subset of primes whose reciprocals sum to 1 — but this property can also hold true for other infinite sets that are “larger,” in the sense that the sum of their reciprocals approaches infinity even more quickly than the reciprocals of the primes do. Just how quicky can those sums grow before hidden structure reemerges and some of their reciprocals inevitably add to 1?”

Hasnain says:

Great retrospective.

“And so, two years on, we still don’t have good public insight around airborne transmission, or the vital importance of ventilation. But things are changing — and this band of outsiders is determined to provoke a shift in standards in ventilation requirements in line with the transformation in the 1800s, when cities started organising clean water supplies and centralising sewage systems.

That means contending with a legacy of buildings worldwide that don’t just have inadequate ventilation, but fail to meet basic building standards. Then there are others that have been built to conserve energy and prioritise comfort over ventilation, and the hope is that the experience of this pandemic could pave the way for investments in schools, workplaces and homes to improve air quality by revamping the built environment.

“I would love to see the same action on ventilation and environment as we’ve seen on pharmaceutical interventions [such as vaccines and drugs],” says Noakes.”