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The company unroll.me that aims to rescue your email inbox from unwanted newsletters and promotional messages with an easy automated unsubscribe service. But they sell you out to advertisers and secures customer emails poorly.

Uber the global ride sharing corporation has devoted teams to so-called competitive intelligence, by purchasing data from an analytics service called Slice Intelligence. Using an email digest service it owns named Unroll.me

Over Christmas, I upgraded my main box to Slackware64-14.2. I put in a pair of new hard disks (Western Digital Blue 3TB) and noticed quite a speed improvement over the Green 2TB ones they replaced.

Slackware64-14.2 still comes with a broken version of vim (it was broken in 14.1 as well) so I rebuilt the vim-7.3 that comes with 14.0. The breakage is that it doesn't redraw the screen properly when run in a terminal window (xterm).

I've been using Firefox as my main web browser for many years, and I know that for a while it's been sub-optimal in a number of ways, technically and politically, but I've been too busy to try anything else. I did look at PaleMoon a few months back, but never went any further. Slackware64-14.2 comes with Firefox 52.x and it's painfully slow. Recent security updates have made it unusable. It's very sluggish when scrolling, and you can see it repainting. When it renders an image or a video, you can see a bright green box behind it! Forget trying to watch a video.

Perhaps I should upgrade my hardware? I've got an AMD Phenom II X6 1045T (2.7GHz, 6 physical cores) on an ASUS M4A 77D motherboard with 4GB of DDR2 RAM. It's five years since I bought the CPU.

In the mean time, I thought I'd try rebuilding firefox. Being very short of time nowadays, I decided to use the Slackware build scripts to do the build rather than trying to do it myself from scratch. I figured rebuilding on my own machine might result in slightly faster binaries if the gcc options were more machine-specific.

I set of a build without looking too much at the build script. The SlackBuild script has to run as root (yuck) which makes me nervous, but I went ahead. I made the mistake of firing up a web browser at the same time to do some googling about firefox performance issues at the same time.

Very soon, the machine was using over 2.5GB of swap. No web browser was usable. After taking several minutes for the browser windows to die, I looked at the build script. It was defaulting to doing seven jobs in parallel (-j7). Obviously, there's not much point in filling up your CPUs if you don't have enough RAM to keep them fed. And Firefox is written in C++ (don't get me started - we have 64GB machines at work that aren't big enough).

It turns out that lots of people are frustrated with the speed of newer versions of Firefox, so I decided to try to rebuild version 45.9.0esr that comes with 14.1 on 14.2. I carefully read the SlackBuild script first, and ensured that it only used a maximum of two cores in parallel. That was a success. In a little over 99 minutes I had a nice mozilla-firefox-45.9.0esr-x86_64-1_slack14.2.txz which installed and is running.

The question is, how much RAM do you need nowadays?

Back to the C++: one of my colleagues is working on a project that runs on 32-bit Linux, and when he was building his C++ which used a lot of template code, it used to run out of memory (address space).

It's amazing how much RAM and CPU cycles (and network bandwidth) you can eat up with C++, Java, Ant and eclipse. There are some particularly perverse ways you can abuse C++ and Ant should be burnt in an incinerator for biological warfare agents.

And who in their right mind designs a build system that depends on an IDE? Eclipse? Argh!

The anti-fungal drug Ciclopirox causes HIV-infected cells to commit suicide by jamming up the cells’ powerhouse, the mitochondria, according to a new study. And unlike current anti-HIV drugs, Ciclopirox completely eradicates infectious HIV from cell cultures, with no rebound of virus when the drug is stopped.

Research completed in 2008 shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6000 - 10 000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today.

Scientists at University of Bristol has reached a breakthrough that makes it possible to produce artificial blood in great amounts.

There have been methods for a long time to produce artificial blood but they
are extremely costly and only produce small quantities. With other methods known to date, each stem cell will only produce circa 50 000 red blood cells which isn't efficient enough to fill a blood bag of 450 milliliter that contains circa 1e9 blood cells.

This new method keeps the stem cells in their early stages of development and in that phase they are manipulated to begin production of red blood cells. In this stage the stem cells will divide themselves heavily and each cell can produce billions (1e9) of red blood cells. The scientists has already produced several liters of blood.

The technology is however new and it will take many years before mass production can start. Because the method makes it possible to produce all kinds of blood types. It's application will start with patients that have rare blood groups for which it's harder to find blood donors for.

This article in Nature were received on 2016-05-17 and published 2017-03-14.

Comment: Seems really useful but it reminds me of the HeLa cell line which is also immortal, because it's a cancer cell. When cells have divided a finite amount of times they are supposed to self destruct to avoid the chance of cancer. If this mechanism is disabled one is in uncharted territory so to say. And besides that issue alone. Cell division is the phase where the likely hood of something going wrong is the greatest, ie cancer.

A court in the Netherlands just ruled that making fan subtitles or translations is unprotected by the law. From the article:

A Dutch group called the Free Subtitles Foundation took anti-piracy group BREIN to court over "fansubbing." BREIN has previously been active in taking fan subtitles and translations offline, and the Foundation was hoping a Dutch court would come down on the side of fair use. The court didn't quite see it that way. It ruled that making subtitles without permission from the property owners amounted to copyright infringement. BREIN wasn't unsympathetic, but said it couldn't allow fansubbers to continue doing what they're doing.

Which also means that if the original subtitling is missing or complete crap. Then you are open to persecution from various copyright monsters if you do something about it. I suspect that virtual bay of high seas ships will be even more popular.

LinkedIn apologize for trying to sneak in a new update that informed some iPhone users that their "app" would begin sharing their data with nearby users without further explanation.

The update prompted outrage on Twitter after cybersecurity expert Rik Ferguson received a strange alert when he opened the resume app to read a new message: “LinkedIn would like to make data available to nearby Bluetooth devices even when you’re not using the app.”
That gave Ferguson, vice president of research at the cybersecurity firm Trend Micro, a handful of concerns, he told Vocativ. Among them: “the lack of specificity, which data, when, under what conditions, to which devices, why does it need to happen when I’m not using the app, what are the benefits to me, where is the feature announcement and explanation, why wasn’t it listed in the app update details.”
A mobile app asking for additional permissions isn’t a novel occurrence, but broad requests are often met with skepticism from privacy advocates and security researchers. Many shopping apps, for instance, leave a user’s bluetooth connection turned on, allowing marketers to track you as you enter a store and linger near certain products.
Reached for comment, LinkedIn said it’s a mistake — that some iPhone users were accidentally subject to undeveloped test feature the company is still working on.

My take on how it would work is that whenever you come into the range of another computerphone with bluetooth active. Which for class 2 is 10 meters (33 ft). And then the LinkedIn app would pop up a quick summary of each others resume.

Perfect for those times when you visit a big meeting with people A and their LinkedIn app show you just recently had a gig with corporation B that they really hate. As for apologizing, do remember that large corporations only retreat if the alternative hurts economically. For background information it might be good to know that LinkedIn was bought by Microsoft in 2016 which happens to be very in on the phone-home theme. Now if Tinder would auto-share in the same manner the various habits with any nearby phone during family gatherings, that would be a real hilarious circus starter.

Trump voters don't believe he has played more golf than Obama in first 3 months

During his first three months in office, Trump spent 19 days at a golf course and played golf on at least 13 occasions, according to The New York Times.

The Times found that Obama spent no days at a golf course during his first three months. Presidents George W. Bush and Bill Clinton also spent either no time or very little time golfing during their first 90 days — Bush made no trips to a golf course, while Clinton spent three days at courses.

A smattering of hypocritical quotes from Trump:

The 26 times Donald Trump tweeted about Barack Obama playing golf too much

Had a look at Google IPv6 adoption. And a quick estimate from the look at the curve is that it's logarithmic. And using 2017 at 16% and 2015.5 at 8% as a starting point. I came up with these formulas:

How many percent IPv6 for a specific year:
8*1.587401**(year-2015.5)

year 2020 64%
year 2021 102%

When it's 100%:
2015.5+log(100/8)/log(1.587401)

Thus year 2020.965785 100% will use IPv6 ie mid November 2020. It's probably quite far off but a rough estimate.

So perhaps it's a good idea to be IPv6 ready by not later than year 2020 then?
If only those embedded boxes had IPv6 supporting firmware. And thus a very good reason move them into opensource with force.

A exoplanet has been discovered that is called "LHS 1140b" and it's deemed a super earth. It lies in the Goldilocks zone where water is in a accessible fluid phase however the atmosphere also plays a critical role, as can be demonstrated with the planet Venus. Seven exoplanets has been found two months ago but LHS 1140b is deemed exceptional. Jason Dittmann, astronomer at Harvard University that lead the research group says it's the most interesting exoplanet he has seen in many decades.

The planet is circa 5*10^9 years old, 500*10^6 years older than Earth. The diameter is 40% larger, the mass 6.6 times that or Earth and the orbit around the star is 10 times closer. Gravity is 3.4 times that of Earth.

The first exoplanet was discovered in 1995 and since then 2000 has been discovered.