Every single time a big Silicon Valley company updates their Terms of Service, there is somebody who mis-interprets the change as an attempt to landgrab, or take ownership of the things being uploaded to the service.

This time it affects github.

Their new TOS has a section on User-Generated Content , which in github’s case is all the repositories, snippets and other stuff they are hosting. In order to do the stuff they are doing on their users behalf, they need a lot of legal permissions on the stuff you are sending to them.

The Engineer Wizard

Paul Armstead is a fat, old man with no life. Helping a stranger in a snow storm, he gets a mystery box, which contains a Genie. Helping the Genie, he’s being transformed into a wizard, a being which can affect reality in an acausal way. For the last 400 years, no new wizards have been created on earth, and the remaining 300 or so wizards and witches are ossified. Being an engineer, Armstead invents new ways to deploy magic and create magic effects, combining science and magic.

We are Legion

Somebody pointed me to We are Legion (We are Bob) , but somehow I can’t find that post any more. Anyway, following that hint, I picked up the book and read it. It’s awesome.

Bob Johannson made it big: Sold his software company to his greatest competitor, took the money, got a cryopreservation contract on his head and went to a SciFi convention, partying. Where he is run over crossing the street and dies.

Coaching, Beratung und Gehirn

The authors are Gerhard Roth (a biologist and neurologist) and Alica Ryba (a coach, student of Roth). Roth describes the neurobiology as we know it today, and Ryba and he connect it to the various theories of psychotherapy that are relevant today in clinical practice and in coaching, discussing what can and can’t possibly work.

For what can work, they establish the limits of change. Also, they try to differentiate clinical psychotherapy from (the psychotherapeutic parts of) coaching in method, foundation and goals.

Explorations: First Contact

Explorations: First Contact is a great concept well executed: This is a writing prompt anthology. So there is a base story - in this case, humanity sends a probe to the back side of the moon, finds an anomaly which turns out to be a dying alien spaceship that manages to upload the secrets of it’s drive and a partial database of other alien civilisations it once visited into the minds of the astronauts that make the contact.

Galactic Exploration

One of the very first things I read on Kindle has been Anomaly by Peter Cawdron - his first publication. My review in German Language is here . Turns out, Cawdron is a quite productive author, and active and responsive on Goodreads . Seeing my review there, he pointed me to his other works, and to his mailing list . Through that I found Galactic Exploration and other works by him.

The Culture Map

Erin Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, an international business school based in Paris. She’s specialized in cross-cultural communication and facilitation, and in her book explains the dimensions and differences between different cultures in the world, and how they can shape or interfere with exchanges in a multi-cultural environment.

The book introduces eight different cultural scales or spectra, and where the various national cultures position themselves on these scales.

In the 2016 South Australia Blackout , a storm lead to a cascading failure, with in turn left 1/6 of the continent without electricity. Fortunately, this is not a densely populated area even for australian circumstances, so it affected some 1.5 mio people (out of 20 mio total for all of Australia) - still quite a lot of people. The news of a 73-year-old Tesla Powerwall owner powering through this outage without even noticing made the headlines in the aftermath, and in consequence demand for PV + Battery combination surged. In total, more than 50GWh have been installed in 2016 alone, and demand is climbing.

It is helpful to remember that containers are just normal Unix processes with two special tricks.

Normal Unix Processes

Unix starts processes by performing a fork() system call to create a new child process.

The child process still contains the same program as the parent process, so the parent processes program still has control over the child. It usually performs a number of operations within the context of the new child, preparing the environment for the new program, from within.

Dark Reading is scared: All new malware is “zero-day”, for an interesting and wrong definition of zero-day, because then the article reads much more impressive.

The actual definition of a Zero Day is a previously unknown exploit that is being used by some party to compromise a machine. In the article, the term is used differently, meaning a file that is a known malware, but has changed itself so that it has a checksum that is not in currently distributed signature catalogs of known malware. That is of course neither correct, nor new.