Karl Austin @[email protected]

Whilst I like the idea of the ‘2 pizza team’ as originated by Amazon, at some point we are going to need more than just me on this.

we're currently working on setting up what is honestly quite a small tool to run on a NixOS server and uh

this is one of those open source tools with a company behind it, the documentation is honestly very professional

but the documentation completely does not speak to the concerns a sysadmin has AT ALL. it pushes very heavily to use Docker (in any of ten different ways) and the non-Docker explanation leans on Debian to have already done the hard parts.

there are certain software systems that are just disrespectful of the time people put into learning them

these are often the same ones that are motivated primarily by the corporate desire to treat workers as interchangeable parts

what we mean by disrespectful is that they introduce a lot of gratuitous stuff we need to know that has nothing to do with the underlying problem, but only with things the tool creator invented

and then they change it on a whim in the next version

It's #GlobalEncryptionDay!

Time to remind everyone that a backdoor "for the good guys only" is simply not possible.

By demanding encryption backdoors, politicians are not asking us to choose between security and privacy. They are asking us to choose no security. 👇

https://tutanota.com/blog/posts/why-a-backdoor-is-a-security-risk

Germany's federal anti-discrimination agency has pinned a departure notice on their X account.

"As a state institution, the anti-discrimination agency has a role model function. Therefore, staying on X is no longer justifiable for us. All ministries and other public bodies should ask themselves whether it is still acceptable to remain on a platform that has become a disinformation network and whose owner spreads anti-Semitic, racist and populist content."

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germanys-anti-discrimination-agency-quits-x-over-anti-minority-posts-2023-10-11/

I wish I could convey to you the psychological swoop of remembering that there is a whole section of the first Terminator movie where Kyle Reese is teaching Sarah Connor how to make pipe bombs and how differently that will land once you've read this.

(from https://mastodon.social/@stavvers@masto.ai/111181614978897879 )

This is absurd. A fake "foundation" stood up by the governments pushing for mass scanning in order to promote mass scanning proposals...

That "smart lighting" from Philips is about to spy on you in new ways you can't control -- naturally the company is claiming it's to protect you. This is Trump-level lying.

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2023/09/22/philips-hue-force-users-upload-data-to-cloud/

This is a briefing note on the legal rule that computers are presumed to be operating
correctly

Happy to hear from anyone with an informed view on this issue

https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10151259/1/briefing-presumption-that-computers-are-reliable.pdf

Musk protected Twitter user data by "big padlock" during a data center move. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/11/elon-musk-moved-twitter-servers-himself-in-the-night-new-biography-details-his-maniacal-sense-of-urgency.html

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...