When I finally consented, two decades ago, to using the necessary phrase “passive aggressive,” I felt awful, and beaten, like I had fallen off the wagon.
But I am clean again! A dear friend employed the phrase defensive envenomater this fine afternoon to describe a snake that doesn’t seek to introduce sickening venom into its prey but nonethelesswill when forced into a particularly vulnerable posture.
Defensive envenomater is better than “passive aggressive person” for many reasons (I won’t be pedantic and spell them all out), though I know it replaces only some of the latter phrase’s meanings.
I also prefer the noun phrase to an adjective phrase; I like a person to blame.
Sometimes you have to read a story two or three times to make sure you’re reading it right. As in:
A PhD candidate is hoping the University of Alberta changes its practice on publishing theses after hers was rejected for spelling her [Urdu] name in Arabic script.
Sarah Shakil, a doctoral candidate in biological sciences and ecology, successfully defended her thesis in January — the culmination of years of hard work and the final hurdle for getting her PhD.The next step was to deposit the thesis through an online system, after which it would be published and forwarded to various Canadian theses collections.
But the document previously reviewed by her supervisor and multiple examiners was rejected for including her name in Arabic script on the title page, with her name in Roman script in a smaller font just below. …
Shakil petitioned administration to do so but was told the university needed to follow institutional policy and the title page as-is was divergent from formatting regulations.
Shakil told the CBC: “It suggests that everybody else who’s not a European identity is not welcome or they have to set aside their cultural background and conform to that university culture.”
This is what the name on the title page looked like:
Chester Wisniewski, longtime friend of this blog and principal research scientist at Sophos, has been studying Russian cyber aggression for a very long time. In a new piece he describes the kind of threats we can expect from Russia as that country looks to attack Ukraine: distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, digital defacement and spam, disinformation and isolation, the paralysis of power supplies, email hacking, false flags, supply chain attacks, and malware attacks on supply chains.
Information warfare is how the Kremlin can try to control the rest of the world’s response to actions in Ukraine or any other target of attack. …
The United States and United Kingdom are trying to preempt some of the misinformation campaigns, and this could limit their effectiveness. However, we shouldn’t assume the attackers will stop trying, so we need to remain prepared and vigilant. …
From a global perspective, we should expect a range of “patriotic” freelancers in Russia, by which I mean ransomware criminals, phish writers and botnet operators, to lash out with even more fervor than normal at targets perceived to be against the Motherland. …
While defense-in-depth security should be the normal thing to strive for at the best of times, it is especially important if we can expect an increase in the frequency and severity of attacks.
Esteemed recording engineerSteve Albini explains in a recent twitter thread that there’s “an important thread of continuity over time about the exploitation of bands by record labels that deserves a closer look, re the current Spotify debate.” It is a detailed, really instructive discussion. Please read the whole thread. Albini concludes:
It is egregious that these services pay so little [less than half a cent per stream], another manifestation of the greed of predicate labels and the practices of a corrupt industry that predates them.
It gives me peace thinking that the streaming model is unsustainable and will collapse eventually, but in the interim remember that the music business that fucked mainstream bands always had in parallel the contrasting independent scene which was more fair then and remains so.
Jacobin Magazine writer Charlie Bird argues that we need a “Socialist Spotify.”
The 2022 Social Media Map from Overdrive is here – this is a happy day! – and it includes live links to 675 sites, apps, and tools, broken down into 25 categories. Click on the image above to download the invaluable PDF. Have at it!
