Declarative Dragging

Joshua Horowitz, Andrew Blinn, Jeffrey Heer

https://declarative-dragging.github.io/

Best Paper Award #uist2026

#ux #programming

All these metals that we're spraying into the atmosphere on reentry burn are even worse than PFAS in the hydrosphere, in that unlike PFAS (which after 1000's of years do eventually decay) they are pretty much permanent, never cycled out of the atmosphere.

Space junk burn may prove to become our most indelible mark on this planet.

Somewhere in our skies will be a flash of light as the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory burns up on reentry.

And on that, an important note from local astronomer, Ian Griffin:

"We, in recent years, put enormous numbers of satellites up into the low earth orbit and they're now re-entering at a rate of about two a day. [...]
We're sort of changing the chemistry of our atmosphere in a great experiment at the moment, we really don't know where it's going to end up."

https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/science-and-technology/2329005/sad-day-for-astronomers-as-nasa-telescope-set-to-crash-back-to-earth

Fellow Citizens, I found the perfect palindrome for today:

Rise to vote, Sir!

Fellaria, Diptych (2025)

Two things of note here (same place, opposite directions):

1) A famous dam in the Italian Alps, constructed 1958-64 using pioneering techniques which led to the development of roller-compacted concrete for dam constructions worldwide.
2) A glimpse of the near future of hydropower reservoirs in the Alps, impacted by climate change, droughts and disappearing glaciers. The Fellaria glacier feeding this reservoir has been shrinking severely in recent years/decades...

(Ps. the glacier is just about visible near the top edge of the 2nd image, now roughly 800 elevation meters above the reservoir...)

#TextureTuesday #LandscapePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Glacier #ClimateChange #Abstract #Texture

RE: https://mainz.social/@javahippie/117537046745422336

The cherry on the top for me is that the client actually commissioned (and I assume also paid) for this report, likely expecting, with the usual over-confidence of a sloperator, they'd get a more glowing outcome which could be used for marketing etc. No such luck with the Kyle (@jepsen)!

(Ps. As they say: What's the most bitter tea of all? Reality...)

Seems Merz doesn't understand the difference between data-residency and data-sovereignty. Nor does he understand the scope of Trump's 2017 CLOUD act, which expressly states any data in any datacenter that is the property of a US corporation, regardless of where it physically resides in the world, can ultimately be accessed by US statecraft, on demand.

There is no 'data sovereignty' with GAFAM. Ever.

https://www.heise.de/en/news/Merz-Google-Cloud-is-sovereign-enough-for-intelligence-agencies-11508564.html

1/2

Update on the 9.8 CVSS TCP/IP RCE in the Linux kernel (CVE-2026-98432): we've detected what appears to be a threat actor activity scanning the entire internet for exposed affected systems. Our own scanning also suggests that the number of potential targets is high, therefore there is an increased likelihood of threat actors attempting to develop exploits for the vulnerability.

while CVE-2026-98432 is believed to require MPTCP to be enabled in the kernel, as well as a listening app/service which binds an MPTCP socket, which many have suggested should be rare, several kernels including Debian enable MPTCP by default.

Additionally, Go 1.24+ binds MPTCP sockets by default if the option is enabled in the kernel, so anything built on top of Go (including Caddy) will create the required MPTCP listener.

The mitigation of setting net.mptcp.enabled=0 disabled MPTCP, but does not apply to existing sockets, so any applications that have bound MPTCP sockets need to be restarted, otherwise the system remains exploitable.

You can check if your server is running any MPTCP listeners with the following command: sudo ss -Mlnp

On 2026-10-30 our preliminary internet-wide scan of port 443 confirmed that there are approximately 2,102,043 servers that are successfully reachable via an MPTCP connection. A deeper scan which attempts to connect to each endpoint on port 443 and negotiate a full TLS connection with MPTCP enabled returned about 762,774 systems.

Neither scan can confirm that these are unpatched kernels, just total exposure, but it's a lot more systems than expected. Since a valid HTTP connection is not required to exploit the vulnerability, the total attack surface is likely closer to the 2.1 million number than the 763k one.

As of today (2026-11-02), we've picked up several residential proxies and VPNs scanning the internet on port 443 using MPTCP-enabled connections. Since regular scanners do not negotiate MPTCP by default, and no data is being sent to the HTTP server over 443, we strongly suspect this activity is scanning for CVE-2026-98432 specifically. The use of residential proxies and RU-based VPN servers suggests that this is likely threat actor scanning, rather than security researchers.

Currently there are no known publicly available remote code execution exploits, but there are several denial of service proof-of-concepts floating around. This code gives threat actors a starting point to begin attempting to weaponize the vulnerability. Building exploits for the vulnerability is reported to be extremely difficult, but several state-sponsored threat actors likely have the resources required to succeed.

Happy Birthday to George Boole, founder of Boolean Logic, who was born on this day in 1815.

In 1854, George Boole published An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, which introduced a mathematical system for expressing logical relationships using algebra. This system allowed concepts to be represented as true or false, and then manipulated using operations like AND, OR, and NOT.

Today, Boolean logic remains fundamental to computing.

Happy 10th anniversary to this era-defining quote & prediction! 🎉

"Brexit means Brexit and we are going to make a Titanic success of it."
— Boris Johnson

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37858143

How time flies...

#Brexit #Anniversary #UKPol

Golden Space Pastoral (2026)

Sunrise back in August, after a couple of nights sitting in the open countryside, staring at the night sky, chatting, dreaming, watching and photographing the Perseids over Raisting Earth Station...

See here for some more of my images of this place with its interesting history:
https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/tagged/RaistingEarthStation

#MorningWalk #LandscapePhotography #Sunrise #Radio #Fog #RaistingEarthStation

RE: https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117547560394396725

Yeah this - the kleptocrats your drunk uncles elected are making the whole world a much much much more difficult and dangerous place to live (yes there is a world outside your borders, and not just countries you occasionally bomb to prop up your economy). We love you - but FFS turn up and get it done!

The Election Lies Are Already Starting on X. No one is ready for what Musk’s platform could look like on Tuesday.

NewsGuard: 93% of false midterm claims on X got no Community Note, even with AI note writers on board.

And it's not just misinformation. One of the world's richest men controls a key channel of political communication while openly taking sides.

How long will democracies tolerate this?

W. Oremus in The Atlantic:
https://archive.is/zpzWZ

#LeaveX #USPol #Democracy #Disinformation

Dear US Americans,

please vote tomorrow, if you haven't done so already!

This is not a drill and this isn't just about your state or country, as exceptional as you may think it all is. Instead, please act as a citizen of the world. Whilst it still matters, your decision has far wider implications and maybe will have to be full of personal compromise, but your country and the world urgently needs different, actual leaders who still believe in a peaceful and fair future for everyone.

With great power comes great responsibility, but the latter was abdicated and is outright denied now. None of us, globally, can afford more of this self-centered, hyper-corrupt, racist and sexist abuser cult, drunk on overdosed high-T power trips, bullying/coercing everyone around, ripping apart relationships (from families to international alliances), destroying livelihoods, health, science, education and the environment at home and elsewhere, demolishing and ignoring hard-won rights/laws, undoing diversity and equality, spreading daily disinformation, openly meddling in elections (at home and in other countries), killing and helping to kill hundreds of thousands of people, starting conflicts whilst throwing temper tantrums about not receiving peace prizes, personally enriching themselves with every move, treating every interaction as a loyalty test and transaction, as opportunity to demand fealty, reducing the entire world to a zero-sum game...

The list goes on. None of it a proud achievement, only primal drives, divisions, pain & suffering. A meaningless quest for power without any other purpose than itself, to dominate, oppress and to demean. Acknowledge that we're all living in a highly connected social environment with strong dependencies on each other. Reflect on how the past two years have been a traumatic omnidirectional wrecking ball at global scale, one from which a vanishingly small number of people have benefited astronomically at everyone else's cost!

The only "good" thing coming out from all this is the clear demonstration of how fragile and easily corrupted political, supposedly democratic systems/structures actually are, how the same playbook is being applied everywhere, not just in your part of the world... For all the layers of bureaucracy and language which have been weaponized to execute & justify some of these assaults, this situation has also shown the severe biases, fault lines and shortcomings (intended or not) of these encoded rules & structures, and how they're plainly insufficient to stop bad faith actors, esp. those acting from within the system... A democracy relying on the power of courts as a last resort is an utterly broken system.

Understand that this struggle of yours is not local, but about a livable future everywhere! Your vote has to be about preserving & strengthening democracy, not giving up on it or succumbing to greed and oligarchic takeover! Your immigrant neighbors are not the enemy, neither are trans people, the disabled, the homeless or other powerless minorities. So many people are having to pay the ultimate price (at home and elsewhere) because of your current administration, who then publicly jokes and brags about the damages caused. It's sickening and it's inhuman!

You are better than that!

One way or another, your combined votes will be symbolic for your desire to change course, to resist, a small token to help (re)building a livable future for all (y)our children. It will also be a signal if your country can be trusted again in the future.

Everyone is watching! So please, come together, do this one job and vote to stop this! Vote strategically & tactically! Billions of other voiceless people are standing behind and rooting for you, requiring you to use your voice... 🙏

(Ps. Heck, maybe your vote will even encourage politicians elsewhere to grow a spine and stop bending over backwards to appease/please oligarchic/authoritarian demands/lobbying and actually start representing the needs of their populace instead...)

#USpol #Midterms #Vote

Leaving Bernina (2026)

(One of many "penultimate" looks back[1] to where we came down from on our most recent tour[2] in this mountain range. The path comes through the steep rocky cliffs and brown slopes above the moraine on the very right...)

[1] Just one more look... suitable German phrase: "sich nicht sattsehen können", i.e. "can't see/get enough of it"...

[2] https://mastodon.thi.ng/@toxi/117540071404625944

#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Forest #Glacier #Autumn

#FrankZappa ‘86

“I’m nog going to give you a civic lesson”…

🤣 He was not just delivering a lecture, but explaining to a couple of political pundits on CNN’s Crossfire, in almost painstaking detail, what was going to happen and why. 🫶

This is FASCINATING. Researchers were able to pin down the cause of measurable global 60 second power spikes to software that does regular tasks on the minute mark. They found large scale battery installations as one major cause, but obviously this is true for any other computerized system that does cron jobs and has a synchronized clock. As weird as it sounds, adding random 0-59.999s delays to cron jobs in Linux distributions and other software would actually help the power grid.

https://www.fz-juelich.de/en/news/archive/press-release/2026/mystery-of-60-second-fluctuations-in-power-grids-solved

Autumn In The Bernina Range (2026)

(On our most recent repeat pilgrimage in this truly humbling group of mountains. These trees and bushes are growing near the sharp edge of a large glacial side moraine, just behind, the valley is dropping down almost vertically several hundred meters to the remaining parts of the glacier...)

#SilentSunday #LandscapePhotography #NaturePhotography #Alps #Mountains #Forest #Glacier #Autumn

Kiwi photographer captures images of hundreds of satellites in the night sky | Stuff

@sundogplanets

https://www.stuff.co.nz/culture/361053243/kiwi-photographer-captures-images-hundreds-satellites-night-sky