Based on the vague description they gave, I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a simple IDOR attack—it was my first guess before I even read the article. IDOR is something so basic that it’s something moderately interested tech savvy people figure out intuitively without ever trying to learn about hacking…literally day 1 of security class shit. Hope we’ll get a more detailed exploit write-up at some point.
Gonna keep track of my progress here (🔄 = in progress). Unless otherwise noted, I’ll be opting to read rather than listen to audiobooks.
mfw I can’t even read the introduction to the post where you clearly explain that it’s reading time and not listening time
Chat, am I cooked?
In all seriousness, I think I ought to read these rather than listen to them, anyway. I enjoy listening to audiobooks as a way to keep my mind occupied while I’m doing other tasks and learn things while I’m at it, but my retention of them is terrible. It’s fine if I’m just listening for pure pleasure or to get a general sense of familiarity, but if I actually want to internalize the information to improve my understanding of socialism that ain’t gonna cut it. I’ve heard that Blackshirts and Reds is quite digestible, and I didn’t realize it was so short, so it seems like a natural place to start.
If I really stick with getting through this, maybe I’ll have trained my long-atrophied reading muscle enough to actually keep up with the Capital reading group next year (I washed out on week 2…forgive me, sensei). For what it’s worth, I did find the tiny morsel of Capital that I made it through really interesting and enlightening by itself, so I can only imagine what it’ll be like to read a whole volume!
Think you’ve got a typo there on the duration of the Blackshirts and Reds audiobook—should be 5 hr 29 min. I only wish the audiobook could have been read by Parenti with his beautiful Eyetalian accent and righteous anger 
But nevertheless, I shall read it!
Thanks for your hard work in creating and refining this list. Seeing it all laid out makes it a lot more manageable, since there’s such an incredible volume of literature out there that even deciding what to read can be overwhelming to the point that it becomes a barrier to actually reading anything.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/1999/aug/24/spaceexploration
The late astronomer and author Carl Sagan was a secret but avid marijuana smoker, crediting it with inspiring essays and scientific insight, according to Sagan’s biographer.
Using the pseudonym ‘Mr. X’, Sagan wrote about his pot smoking in an essay published in the 1971 book Reconsidering Marijuana. The book’s editor, Lester Grinspoon, recently disclosed the secret to Sagan’s biographer, Keay Davidson.
Davidson, a writer for the San Francisco Examiner, revealed the marijuana use in an article published in the newspaper’s magazine Sunday. Carl Sagan: A Life is due out in October.
“I find that today a single joint is enough to get me high… in one movie theater recently I found I could get high just by inhaling the cannabis smoke which permeated the theatre,” wrote Sagan, who authored popular science books such as Cosmos, Contact, and The Dragons of Eden.
In the essay, Sagan said marijuana inspired some of his intellectual work.
“I can remember one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidities of racism in terms of gaussian distribution curves,” wrote the former Cornell University professor. “I wrote the curves in soap on the shower wall, and went to write the idea down.”
Sagan also wrote that pot enhanced his experience of food, particularly potatoes, as well as music and sex.
Grinspoon, Sagan’s closest friend for 30 years, said Sagan’s marijuana use is evidence against the notion that marijuana makes people less ambitious.
“He was certainly highly motivated to work, to contribute,” said Grinspoon, a psychiatry professor at Harvard University.
Grinspoon is an advocate of decriminalizing marijuana.
Ann Druyan, Sagan’s former wife, is a director of the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws. The nonprofit group promotes legalization of marijuana.
Sagan died of pneumonia in 1996. He was 62.
ur moms the largest array of atoms 
THEY’RE COMING FOR YOU NEXT YOU DUMB MOTHERFUCKERS. AAAAAAAAAAAGH
From 2008 to 2011, Li made CRACK99 a reliable black-market marketplace, one that netted an estimated $100 million in sales. His inventory, investigators later said, was valued at over $1 billion.
Since it’s not clear from this write-up, those eye-popping figures (the ones concocted by the Department of Justice) are derived from the prices that the licenses were being sold for by the original companies, so it’s not $100 million in sales but $100 million in “value” (the idea of calculating a $1 billion valuation for the digital “inventory” is even more ridiculous). If you look on the actual crack99 website, you’ll see that most of the cracked software was being sold for anywhere from twenty bucks to maybe a few hundred dollars—this guy was not making millions from this. The government’s sentencing memorandum has the details; this includes the absurd figure of $3,812,241.57 for a single software license of some CAD software called “Catia VR520”, which Li sold to at least one other customer for the princely sum of $100.
Full text
China has switched on a world-first solar thermal power station in the Gobi Desert that is said to be a cheaper and more efficient use of the technology with potential to be scaled up.
Built by the China Three Gorges Corporation, the plant in Guazhou county in northwestern Gansu province uses two towers feeding a single turbine system – the first time this has been done.
Nearly 27,000 mirrors have been installed to focus sunlight onto the 200-metre (656 feet) towers, which are about 1km (0.62 miles) apart.
This produces concentrated heat that melts and stores salt at up to 570 degrees Celsius (1,058 degrees Fahrenheit). That in turn creates steam to drive the turbines and keep the power flowing, even after sunset or on cloudy days.
The dual towers allow the east tower to capture morning sun, while the west tower takes over in the afternoon, state broadcaster CCTV reported last week.
That makes them about 25 per cent more effective than a single-tower design, the report said. And with the two mirror fields partly overlapping, fewer mirrors are needed – a key saving since they account for most of the construction costs.
The design – and potentially multi-tower systems in the future – breaks the capacity limits of single-tower plants and opens a new path for scaling up solar thermal power in China, according to CCTV.
Unlike many earlier solar thermal projects in Europe and the United States that operated as stand-alone plants, the Chinese facility is part of a larger clean energy hub. Combined with vast solar and wind farms already in the area, the hub is expected to supply electricity for about half a million households each year.
Solar thermal power has one major advantage over solar panels: it can keep generating electricity after dark.
The technology boomed more than a decade ago in Spain and the US under generous government subsidies, but lost ground as photovoltaic, or PV, costs plunged. With utility-scale PV prices dropping by over 80 per cent, many solar thermal plants struggled financially or went bankrupt.
In China, it was a different story. The country first built vast amounts of low-cost PV and wind capacity, especially across its sunny, windy western regions such as Gansu, Xinjiang and Qinghai. That created a new challenge since the sources are intermittent and cannot match demand at night or on calm, cloudy days.
That was when solar thermal power emerged – not to compete with PV, but to complement it by filling the gaps, said Wang Zhifeng, a leading researcher at the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Wang – whose team tested a new-generation solar thermal facility last year that uses ceramic receivers and supercritical carbon dioxide turbines – said cost remained the biggest challenge.
About 60 per cent of the cost came from the mirror system since it must be precisely curved, polished and able to track the sun with high accuracy, Wang said during a science outreach event in 2022.
His team has experimented with a special “metamaterial” – a flat surface patterned at the microscopic level to bend and focus sunlight without curved mirrors. Wang said that method could make flat panels concentrate sunlight like a curved mirror, potentially cutting mirror costs by up to 60 per cent.
According to CCTV, China has already built 21 commercial solar thermal power plants with a combined capacity of 1.57 million kilowatts. Another 30 projects under construction will add 3.1 million kilowatts.
Globally, the largest operating solar thermal complex is the 700-megawatt Noor Energy 1 project in the United Arab Emirates. China has also contributed to major plants such as Morocco’s Noor complex and Chile’s Cerro Dominador, where solar thermal power remains part of national clean energy strategies.