The Minnesota shooter apparently used data broker websites to find the home addresses of the people he shot and murdered.

Congress has had years to do something about data brokers and they've sided with the tech lobby over and over again.

Their inaction is deadly.

By Evan Greer

Hello! I'm a new maintainer of a fairly popular niche project called GraphFrames (GitHub link). The project was in "maintenance mode" for a couple of years, and now I'm excited to help bring it back to life. However, I'm currently facing a serious issue with Sonatype and could use some advice on how to proceed.

Historically, GraphFrames' JARs were published in the Spark Packages repository (link), which was automatically synchronized with Maven Repository (link). The project uses the org.graphframes namespace internally. Unfortunately, the Spark Packages project is now semi-defunct, and the synchronization to Maven is broken.

There is strong demand from GraphFrames users and contributors to resume publishing the project in Maven Central. However, the problem is that the "graphframes.org" domain is not available (whois link). I reached out to Sonatype Support to request permission to register and verify the org.graphframes namespace in Maven Central, but their response was clear: it is not possible.

Here is their response:

Hello Sem,
I am sorry to inform you that it is not possible to register a namespace for a domain that you do not control for Central Portal.

I tried to argue that GraphFrames has a large community, 1k stars on GitHub, nearly 10 years of publishing under the org.graphframes namespace, and numerous existing tutorials and blog posts, but this did not change their decision.

One option is to migrate the project from org.graphframes to io.github.graphframes, but this would be a major disruption for users and dependent projects. It would also render all existing videos, tutorials, and blog posts about GraphFrames outdated.

What else can I do in this situation? DNS, domains, and Sonatype are new topics for me, as I have primarily focused on coding in the past. I would greatly appreciate any advice or guidance on how to handle this issue effectively.

Thanks in advance!

Abstract of the paper: Despite the dramatic rise of surveillance in our societies, only limited research has examined its effects on humans. While most research has focused on voluntary behaviour, no study has examined the effects of surveillance on more fundamental and automatic aspects of human perceptual awareness and cognition. Here, we show that being watched on CCTV markedly impacts a hardwired and involuntary function of human sensory perception—the ability to consciously detect faces. Using the method of continuous flash suppression (CFS), we show that when people are surveilled (N = 24), they are quicker than controls (N = 30) to detect faces. An independent control experiment (N = 42) ruled out an explanation based on demand characteristics and social desirability biases. These findings show that being watched impacts not only consciously controlled behaviours but also unconscious, involuntary visual processing. Our results have implications concerning the impacts of surveillance on basic human cognition as well as public mental health.

My own commentary: to the privacy concerns about CCTVs we can now add also concerns about mental health of people under CCTVs.

After reading such news I have an obvious question. Does anyone know a PayPal-like service, that allows to hide the destination of my transactions from Mastercard / bank, but with a good privacy policy? Or how else can I restrict the usage of my financial data by mastercard or bank?

Let me share my post with a detailed step by step guide how an exisiting Spark scala library may be adopted to work with recently introduced Spark Connect. As an example I have chosen a pupular open source data quality tool AWS Deequ. I made all the necessary protobuf messages and a Spark Connect Plugin. I tested it from PySpark Connect 3.5.1 and it works. Of course, all the code is public in git.

I have my personal blog, made with Hugo and hosted on GitHub pages. Initially I did not turn on any kind of web tracking / web analytics, because I do not like tracking at all. But I want to make my blog better and to achieve it, I need a feedback loop about traffic. For example, what are the most popular publications, or how many people view my blog from mobile devices, etc.

So, my question is, what is the most appropriate (ot the less evil) way to track a web traffic?

An answer "there is no good way to do it without breaking user's privacy" is acceptable too, I did not decide yet turning on the analytics. Instead I'm interested in an opinion of the community.

Thanks in advance!

tldr: Green transition, like switching to electric vehicles and use renewable energy sources, requires a huge amount of minerals. One of the main sources of these minerals is African continent. Researchers found big overlapp of that mining with areas of big apes. Almost 200.000 of apes are in a risk area, based on the estimation:

We estimated that more than one-third of the entire great ape population in Africa—nearly 180,000 individuals—could be directly or indirectly threatened by mining now and in the near future. Apes in West Africa could be most severely affected, where up to 82% of the population currently overlaps with operational and preoperational mining locations and their 50-km buffers

Another problem is that mining companies working there are not pay attention to ecological consequences of their business:

only 5% of the 400 assessed companies had carried out science-based nature and biodiversity impact assessments of their operations and business models

In the Russian region of Astrakhan, near the Caspian Sea, the regional government has approved spending 224 million rubles (~2.5 million EUR) to kill stray dogs. According to the new law, dogs caught on the streets will be placed in temporary shelters for only 15 days and then killed. When the same government rejected the proposal of the program to catch dogs for permanent placement in shelters, they argued that there was not enough money in the regional budget. But now, when the new program to kill dogs was approved, money was immediately found. Many local volunteers say that the regional government is in tight connection with the interests of the company that won the tender to kill the dogs. And they sabotaged all other options, for example, in 2019 they failed to spend even 70% of the money for the sterilization program. In 2022 all the money was sent to the private company, which did almost nothing. Some managers of this company were sentenced to prison, but the money was gone and the beneficiaries escaped punishment. This is how corruption and human greed kill innocent dogs.

A link the the same text in Telegram channel of one of Russian non commercial fund helping animals Givers of the Hope "Дарящие надежду"

Apple donated to community their own implementation of native physical execution of Apache Spark plan with Data Fusion.