h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

I did my first ride home from the gym in the dark tonight. The fairy lights made a group of runners laugh and I noticed pedestrians pointing.
It's so silly, but I really like that it makes people smile. Hopefully it spreads a bit of positivity 😁
#BikeTooter #Cycling #ActiveTravel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knXWMjIA59c - If you like computing history and revere Alan Turing but don't know the names of people like Tommy Flowers, maybe give this video a quick watch. It's roughly 8mins long. #Collossus #History #Codebreaking

New rules for people making, importing, or distributing Internet-connected or connectable products (Part 1)

This blogpost is an introduction to the UK's Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act 2022, and the associated regulations.

The focus here is on the "product security" aspect and, in particular, what products fall in scope.

This post is particularly for people who make #IoT and other "connectable" stuff.

#lawfedi

🆕 blog! “Book Review: The Cuckoo's Egg - Clifford Stoll”
★★★★★

This book is outstanding. It's the mid 1980s, you're administrating a nascent fleet of UNIX boxen, and you are tasked with accounting for a 75¢ billing discrepancy. Naturally that eventually leads into an international conspiracy involving the FBI, NSA, and an excellent recipe for chocolate chip cookies. It is…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2023/10/book-review-the-cuckoos-egg-clifford-stoll/
⸻
#BookReview #hacking

A week in and out the shop:

* The staining of Deflinen goes as bad as feared
* I find some surprises in an old guitar
* I have fun giving a talk at the local makerspace on 3D-printing and guitar design.

https://electricflapjack.com/blog/2023/11/08/a-week-in-and-out-the-shop/

#weeknotes #guitar #luthier #maker

Today is update curl day which is installed on almost all of our managed customer servers. Fortunately the vulnerability affects those using a SOCKS proxy which makes exploitation harder in the pre-update window.

Can I interest you in half of a thieves' cant dictionary from 1690, scribbled on the back of some particulars

"The US library system, once the best in the world, faces death by a thousand cuts

In addition to political censorship and budget cuts, libraries are being undermined by rapacious digital licensing agreements" op-ed by me:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/09/us-library-system-attack-digital-licensing

More about a stroke after COVID...

https://www.revk.uk/2023/10/stroke.html

(P.S. That is an old MRI. I have emailed data controller to try and get a copy of my stroke MRI. It should be interesting. They have replied asking for ID, so I may get it.)

#Stroke #COVID

One of the most prominent arguments against rapid solar deployment: land!

Yes, there are tradeoffs. Of course, there are. That's especially true, say, if most of your land is confined to one big island, as in the #UK.

And yes, by calling out "golf courses" here we're squarely in "OMG culture war!" territory.

Still, the numbers couldn't be clearer.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-is-solar-power-a-threat-to-uk-farmland/
#climate #solar #Sunak

NEW SUBSTACK

"Computer says guilty" - an introduction to the evidential presumption that computers are operating correctly

The first in a seres of posts on the Post Office Horizon prosecutions scandal

https://emptycity.substack.com/p/computer-says-guilty-an-introduction

#fileformat Friday! Forking QuickTime. #digipres
https://preservation.tylerthorsted.com/2023/10/06/quicktime-moov/

Katalin Karikó won a Nobel Prize for her work on the COVID mRNA vaccines. Yet just 10 years earlier, UPenn kicked her out of academia.

"They told me that they’d had a meeting and concluded that I was not of faculty quality. When I told them I was leaving, they laughed at me and said, ‘BioNTech doesn’t even have a website.'"

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/mrna-coronavirus-vaccine-pfizer-biontech

Python 3.12 released https://lwn.net/Articles/946189/ #LWN