Screwdriver handles are sneakily well-designed for a variety of different uses.
I mean, who thinks about a screwdriver? But if you look at the handles, well, that’s a complicated shape. And it lets you do a lot. It’s comfortable to hold, but it won’t roll off your bench. And you can turn it one-handed or use both hands. And you get a couple of different grips. That’s a good design.
In this video, woodworker & tool enthusiast Rex Krueger walks us through the design history of the screwdriver and how it came to have such a distinctive and useful handle.
I grew up helping my dad out in the garage with all sorts of projects, mostly cars, and until watching this video, I had no idea that you could slip a standard wrench over the handle of a screwdriver as a cheater bar. 🤯 (via unsung)
Tags: design · Rex Krueger · video
Thursday afternoon, millions of students at thousands of universities and K-12 schools were locked out of Canvas, a piece of catch-all education technology software that has become the de facto core of many classes. ShinyHunters, a ransomware group, hacked Canvas’s parent company and apparently stole “billions” of messages and accessed more than 275 million individuals’ data, according to the hacking group. The group also locked students out of Canvas.
Later Thursday, Instructure, which makes Canvas, was able to mostly put Canvas back online; it is not clear if the company paid a ransom or not. The breach demonstrates the danger in centralizing the educational and personal data of millions of students in a single service. Canvas is essentially a portal where teachers post assignments and lectures, have discussion boards, and students can message with each other and their teachers and connect with other pieces of education tech software.
Instructure noted on an incident update page that the stolen data includes “certain personal information of users at affected organizations. That includes names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages among Canvas users.” Instructure also noted that it was breached twice—once on April 29 and again on Thursday.
Soon after the hack, I called up Ian Linkletter, a digital librarian specializing in emerging education tech, to talk about the implications of the breach. Linkletter has worked in education tech for 20 years and over the last few years has become known for exposing privacy concerns in Proctorio, a remote test proctoring software that rose to prominence during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. Linkletter was sued by Proctorio but eventually the case was dropped.
Linkletter told me the Canvas hack is “the biggest student data privacy disaster in history” in part because of its scale and the sensitive nature of what was stolen. This is my conversation with Linkletter, which has been lightly condensed.
404 Media: What do we know about the hack so far?
Linkletter: At about 1:20 PM [Pacific, Thursday], people started posting screenshots to Reddit of this breach message that they got. Some institutions were cautioning people to change their passwords if they were logged in, right now it just seems like people are in panic mode, some senior administration at schools are in meetings talking about whether they need to cancel finals next week. It’s just the implications are on everything because schools are reliant on this learning management system for everything—communications, grading, finals, everything.
In your email to me, you said you've worked in EdTech for 20 years and you said this is the biggest student data privacy disaster in history. I'm curious what sort of made you frame it that way.
I supported Blackboard [a similar piece of tech] way back in the day and I supported Canvas from about 2017 to 2022 when I worked at the University of British Columbia. And what I was there for when we switched to Canvas in 2017 was the shift from like these scrappy little self-hosted learning management system apps that would be on Canadian servers to this centralized, all eggs-in-one basket faith in a U.S. tech company. This idea that our data would be just as safe with them as it was when we had it. And because this move to the cloud happened so suddenly about 10 years ago, all of a sudden data got centralized. The only way that I can think of that this type of hack where everything went down, where so much was stolen would be if Instructure had access to everybody's data, which doesn't seem necessary. For it to be just so widespread across every customer is something that, like, [we’ve] never seen before.
Because the contents of messages got leaked, it’s really easy for phishing attacks to get customized. Like, Canvas got hacked [...] and continuing our conversation type of thing, you can get some really personal information from people. And that's also new.
I can also imagine messages between students and teachers to be pretty sensitive.
I supported instructors that used Canvas. And so I would hear these stories like, and they're on like the professor’s subreddit and stuff too, like students are telling you that people died [to explain absences]. There's personal circumstances, medical circumstances, accessibility accommodations, disputes, sexual assault allegations, like all sorts of stuff would be getting reported to the instructor using Canvas. If that information is out across hundreds of millions of people, there's a lot of harm that's going to happen.
What will you be kind of monitoring as this plays out?
My biggest concern right now is monitoring the institutional response. I feel very strongly that students should have been warned about this like days ago. And it just took this second hack where students got something in their face notifying them that really made schools respond. So I believe that students need to be warned or else they're going to get harmed. And the longer schools wait to tell students about what’s going on, even the little that they know, the more stress and chaos and potential risk to student privacy and safety is at stake.
About a dozen pavilions affected, while some artists backed strike by adding Palestine references to their work
A strike called in protest over the inclusion of Israel at the 2026 Venice Biennale meant several pavilions closed on the last day of the preview, some for a few hours while others – including the standout work from Austria – remained closed all day.
The strike was organised by the Art Not Genocide Alliance (Anga), which at one point said that more than 20 pavilions would shutter in order to support their calls for Israel to be barred from the event because of its war in Gaza.
Continue reading...Tumbler Ridge secondary school was site of February mass shooting in which nine were killed and dozens injured
The school that was the site of one of Canada’s deadliest mass shootings will be torn down, officials have announced.
The decision to demolish the Tumbler Ridge secondary school came after meetings between the school board and survivors, family and community members, said the British Columbia premier, David Eby.
Continue reading...
Vandaag heeft staatssecretaris Annet Bertram (Infrastructuur en Waterstaat) de Kamer geïnformeerd over de uitgangspunten van de nadeelcompensatie voor het vuurwerkverbod. Vorig jaar hebben beide Kamers ingestemd met de initiatiefwet veilige jaarwisseling van GroenLinks-PvdA en Partij voor de Dieren die een vuurwerkverbod voor consumenten regelt. Daaraan verbond de Tweede Kamer drie voorwaarden: lokale ontheffingen, een handhavingsplan en een nette en eerlijke nadeelcompensatie. Hiermee komt de invoering van het verbod weer een stap dichterbij.
Voor het eerst is officieel een wolf gespot in Zuid-Holland. Het dier is op vrijdag 17 april gezien in de omgeving van de Kilweg in Barendrecht. Volgens de Zoogdiervereniging gaat het vermoedelijk om een zwervende wolf die via het zuiden de provincie is binnengekomen en langs de A29 trok.
