📰 Owner of spyware used in alleged WhatsApp breach ends contract with Italy
More news on the Italian state-sponsored spyware case that’s been picked up by, like… zero mainstream Italian news outlets. Contract terminated by Paragon for “breach of the terms of service and ethical framework”.
My dad’s a GP and he’s been using the same mobile number for the last 25 years, so everyone knows it. Recently, he’s grown more and more exhausted and resentful towards people who, in a way, abuse his patience, especially out of office hours (there’s a severe shortage of GPs and HCPs in general in Italy, so relationships with thousands of patients of a private practice when you’re just one person can feel like being mauled and wrestled among ferocious jungle animals, I guess). We managed to persuade him to the idea of using a separate phone with a separate number, just for family and few selected people who… have the right to invade his private life, let’s put it that way.
I bought him a Pixel 8a and a brand new SIM card (reminder: we live in Italy), with a shiny-new number that’s also quite easy to remember. To an Italian ear, “320” is a relatively old-sounding mobile prefix, but this didn’t raise any flag for me when I read the number for the first time. All this happened over the last week. I finished most data migration, general setup of accounts and apps, the case arrived – one of those cases with a front flap that opens like a book; a type of case I hate, but he literally can’t hold his phone any other way, he holds it from the case like a book; he went caseless for about three months before destroying his old phone because it just slips out of his bearish grip, so…
Well, we’re supposed to give him this new phone today. Three people know his new phone number right now: me, my mom and my sister – not even he knows it! But apparently, his brand new, entirely unknown phone number isn’t exactly unknown.
Yeah. He doesn’t even have the phone yet, he doesn’t even know his number… yet this morning, I woke up to the first scam WhatsApp text. I guess that with his blind luck the phone company assigned him an old, previously deactivated phone number. As Chief Technology Officer of the family, I hope this won’t mean more problems to solve.
My dad’s a GP and he’s been using the same mobile number for the last 25 years, so everyone knows it. Recently, he’s grown more and more exhausted and resentful towards people who, in a way, abuse his patience, especially out of office hours (there’s a severe shortage of GPs and HCPs in general in Italy, so relationships with thousands of patients of a private practice when you’re just one person can feel like being mauled and wrestled among ferocious jungle animals, I guess). We managed to persuade him to the idea of using a separate phone with a separate number, just for family and few selected people who… have the right to invade his private life, let’s put it that way.
I bought him a Pixel 8a and a brand new SIM card (reminder: we live in Italy), with a shiny-new number that’s also quite easy to remember. To an Italian ear, “320” is a relatively old-sounding mobile prefix, but this didn’t raise any flag for me when I read the number for the first time. All this happened over the last week. I finished most data migration, general setup of accounts and apps, the case arrived – one of those cases with a front flap that opens like a book; a type of case I hate, but he literally can’t hold his phone any other way, he holds it from the case like a book; he went caseless for about three months before destroying his old phone because it just slips out of his bearish grip, so…
Well, we’re supposed to give him this new phone today. Three people know his new phone number right now: me, my mom and my sister – not even he knows it! But apparently, his brand new, entirely unknown phone number isn’t exactly unknown.
Hello, can I talk to you for a second?
Yeah. He doesn’t even have the phone yet, he doesn’t even know his number… yet this morning, I woke up to the first scam WhatsApp text. I guess that with his blind luck the phone company assigned him an old, previously deactivated phone number. As Chief Technology Officer of the family, I hope this won’t mean more problems to solve.
📺 Mussolini: Son of the Century
Based on the eponymous novel by Antonio Scurati. A prime, timely portrayal of the inner workings of a budding dictator in an exhausted, unequal nation dominated by an insipid oligarchy.
“I am a beast: I know when the season’s changing”, repeatedly says Luca Marinelli’s M. looking directly at the camera, with abyssal black, beastly eyes dominated by a single speck of reflected light. Yet, until the fatal moment when he finally comes to peace with the fact that “Fascism ought to be everything” – as his socialite mistress Margherita Sarfatti educated him, his every move is disloyal, unethical, cowardly and outshone by the strategies of the people at his side, who also crucially lack the charisma and the command of the language he masters. M. is an animal dominated by an instinctual lust for power despite everything, and Fascism becomes everything only when a torpid nation chooses to resign power, accountability and the right to brutally revolting violence. As the final episode of this first season suggests: when Fascism becomes everything, claiming self-accountability is having no accountability at all.
Directed by Joe Wright (Darkest hour, Atonement, Cyrano). Written by Stefano Bises (Gomorrah, The New Pope, ZeroZeroZero, Speravo de morì prima) and Davide Serino (1992, 1993, Il Re – The king, Exterior Night). Soundtrack by Tom Rowlands.
The series will debut on 4th February 2025 exclusively on Sky Atlantic and streaming only on NOW in the UK. US release date yet to be set.
⚠️ Content warning: sexual assault, gratuitous violence, blood, death, flashing lights.
Just saw the clip of a certain gaming website founder turned anglican priest throwing a Nazi-fascist salute. The way these techbros do the salute is so delicate it makes me laugh. As an Italian: real fascism would rip these guys to shreds… and they would embrace it. How cute of them.
Dear PM, I think you should ask someone else to translate 32k highly-specialised words in 10 days, especially considering I’m just one person, k? Bye!
This wasn’t the tone I used of course, but it might as well have been. QoL and having time for family isn’t worth feeling enslaved for pennies.
Surgery for this pretty girl was today. They found a small, vaginal soft tissue sarcoma, so they removed ovaries and uterus (to reduce the chance of recurrence due to hormonal changes) and they cleaned the margins where the mass was. Hoping the biopsy for a possible mammary tumor turns out fine. 🐶
As a professional translator and a Mac user, I’m quite familiar with Parallels Desktop and running a Windows virtual machine just to have access to the biggest, industry-standard computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools, like Trados Studio and memoQ. I could spend hours moaning about the woes they cause me, but here I want to talk very briefly about the most recent problem that occurred to me.
After a few weeks of jobs that required web-based translation tools (like XTM, Smartling and Phrase, previously known as Memsource), I received a project to be completed in Trados. I turned on my VM, opened Trados 2021, set up the project and discovered, to my great annoyance, that the main Confirm keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Enter) wasn’t working anymore. Since the Enter key and copy-pasting shortcuts (Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V) worked correctly, I assumed it was a problem with Trados. After resetting the keyboard shortcuts – which didn’t work – I hastily blamed the software on Mastodon, created a different shortcut (Alt, or Option on Mac, + Plus key, which on an Italian keyboard layout is right next to the Enter key) and set to work.
This week I received another job that required a Windows-based software, in this case memoQ. I checked-out the job from the server, translated the first segment, pressed Ctrl+Enter and… nothing happened. “What the hell…?”.
This time though, right as I was setting up another memoQ shortcut, I remembered that when I tried to solve the problem that occurred in Trados about a month earlier I googled something like “trados ctrl key stopped working”. This time though it wasn’t working in memoQ, so it could only mean that the problem was somewhere else, between Windows and Parallels Desktop.
After a brief Google search, I found a topic on the Parallels forums reporting that a certain Windows update broke some Ctrl key shortcuts, which was corroborated by multiple users. As it happens, the solution is temporary but simple.
From the Parallels Desktop preferences, go to the Hardware tab, then Mouse & Keyboard and click Open Shortcut Preferences. Here, click on the + button and manually enter the MacOS shortcut and the equivalent Windows one.
The software is in Italian, but it’s quite self-explanatory.
Top: the keys that you press on your Mac keyboard. Bottom: the keyboard shortcut that should be mapped in Windows.
Apparently, only some installations run into this problem and fresh Windows installs are immune as well. Though this is a workaround and not a final fix, it’s good to know that for once it’s not Trados' fault. So… sorry Trados, you have many many problems and even pressing Ctrl+Enter twice too fast breaks you to pieces, but I’ll give you a pass this time.
See this blog’s domain? I own the .com version as well, its registrar was Hetzner. I transferred it to another registrar today after almost a week from the first request only because I had to contact Hetzner myself to get them to manually unlock the domain. Weird, first time I had to do that.
How’s the international community on Micro.blog? English is the primary language and that’s quite clear, but I wonder if it’s just the Discover section that’s “biased” towards English or if other languages are just in such a small minority that they rarely pop up.
Valluanino