Karl Austin @[email protected]

This is what a privatised health service looks like.

No vaccine if you are poor, no vaccination program for the common good, just private companies making money from those who can afford to pay.

Covid booster jabs to be approved for sale to UK public
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/17/covid-booster-jabs-approved-for-sale-to-uk-public?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

"Police urged to overlook early pub sales" [because of a sportsball match]

*sigh*

Politicians asking the police not to enforce Parliament's laws because it is politically popular to do so is problematic, IMHO.

And why this - a sports match - and not, say, asking the police not to arrest women congregating following a murder by a serving police officer?

Do it properly or not at all.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-66532694

One of my absolute favourite threads on UK cross-government Slack* (an informal thing run by volunteers) was the one on who’s ‘fault’ flooding was.

This was the Met Office rep making a pitch that the moment precipitation hit the ground the Environment Agency needed to step up. The EA, in turn, pointed out that it was only theirs until it became a problem (a flood) at which point it was the fire service’s 😂

* just found - this chat was many years ago

@pbx I'm not a huge fan of the aggressive removal of old ciphers from crypto libraries and browsers for this kind of reason.

Even when a cipher is weak/broken there are many valid use-cases for it, such as this.

Whatever comes next after crypto and LLMs will probably also require massive amounts of wasted electricity to power these big data centers these guys already bought.

Fun and heart warming #Linux #kernel contrib from 4-year old about "s" letter feeling sad and lonely at the end of line, missing header hilight as the all other letters have. ❤️

Copy from https://twitter.com/linux_deepin/status/1691396817039314945

Right now if you search for "country in Africa that starts with the letter K":

- DuckDuckGo will link to an alphabetical list of countries in Africa which includes Kenya.

- Google, as the first hit, links to a ChatGPT transcript where it claims that there are none, and summarizes to say the same.

This is because ChatGPT at some point ingested this popular joke:

"There are no countries in Africa that start with K."
"What about Kenya?"
"Kenya suck deez nuts?"

Google Search is over.

Another slow hand clap for the UK Gov, this time for failing to understand that:

A. Anyone distributing illegal content on the interwebs will proxy-up and carry on regardless of the Online Safety Bill.

B. Everyone else will lose a basic right to privacy.

C. It might be a moot point because if Apple, Signal, WhatsApp and co pull out of the UK, everyone including the UK Gov will no longer have any messaging platform available anyway.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-66304002

The #blessed really takes this terrible LinkedIn post over the top 😬

Awww yes, journalism...

Very clever — the German ad says "protect wildlife before it's too late."

HT WWF Germany

For those of you who wanted the full history of how Musk lost control of X during the X/Confinity merger, @every were kind enough to commission me to write it.

Come for the Microsoft vs Linux internal war. Stay for the boardroom coup launched during the Sydney Olympics... #technology #history https://every.to/p/twitter-s-future-is-a-return-to-elon-musk-s-past

Apparently I'm not a maintainer of #LXD anymore and neither is @stgraber. So it seems from now on it's Canonical employees only.

I'd like to point out that before Canonical moved LXD into github.com/canonical/lxd maintainership was completely independent of the company. If you went to work somewhere else you still were a maintainer. As it should be with any well-functioning OSS project.

Twitter took @x handle from longtime user and only offered him “some merch”

Gene Hwang wasn't paid for @x handle that Twitter now uses on official account.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/07/twitter-took-x-handle-from-longtime-user-and-only-offered-him-some-merch/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

Turns out that Web Environment Integrity proposal everybody is getting angry about (imo very legitimately) was effectively already shipped by Apple in Safari last year: https://httptoolkit.com/blog/apple-private-access-tokens-attestation/

That means if Chromium ships it too, we could quickly move to 90%+ of browser traffic being attested. Not good!

Let me tell you the secret of the "Everything App".

It's real, it's not called X, and it's about 33 years old. It's called a Web Browser.

Despite a decade of walled gardens trying hard to ruin it, you can still do pretty much any task you need on the web.

You can even make websites into apps with Progressive Web Apps (two clicks on WordPress).

The everything app is old, and under siege daily. But it works, it's resilient, and it's magical.

#x #Twitter #webdev #tech #web