h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

Well, this is a transcendent level of evil: Facebook bought a VPN company and deployed it, in part, to spy on its users.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/03/26/facebook-secret-project-snooped-snapchat-user-traffic/

It's a reminder that VPNs have their own risks, beyond technical ones if operated incompetently -- namely, that you have to trust the VPN company itself.

Over 2,000 candidates have now declared their intention to stand in the next UK parliamentary general election.

Browse the full list:
https://whocanivotefor.co.uk/ppcs/

#ukpolitics #elections

Mythic Beasts is now certified by the Green Web Foundation. We've been this green for many years now - just finally done the work to get the certificate. https://www.mythic-beasts.com/blog/2024/03/25/green-hosting/

3 serious forks of #Redis to watch:

#KeyDB

Mutli-threaded fork of Redis based on Redis 6.
BSD 3 Clause license.
Owned by Snapchat.
https://github.com/Snapchat/KeyDB

#Redict

Recent fork by @drewdevault based on the last open source version of Redis 7.2.4.
On Codeberg.
LGPL 3.0 license.
https://codeberg.org/redict/redict

PlaceholderKV (searching for name)

Started by former Redis contributor(s) and AWS employees.
BSD 3 Clause license.
https://github.com/placeholderkv/placeholderkv

Boosts appreciated 🙏

#opensource #oss #foss #gpl

Who would know how to make a guess at the answer to this question: is internet traffic pretty much equal numbers of 1s and 0s, or is there noticeably more of one than the other?

For one week only, Muppet GIF of the Day is becoming Fraggle GIF of the Day to celebrate the release of #FraggleRockBackToTheRock Season Two! Keep an eye out starting today for an entire week of daily GIFs featuring the inhabitants of Fraggle Rock, both old and new!

Little announcement 📣

I’m now the Green Party’s parliamentary candidate for the Manchester Withington constituency. 💚🗳️

I’m here for climate justice, social justice, peace, trains, LTNs, digital rights, unionisation, trans rights, electoral reform, bins, and all that good stuff.

Author of “True Names”, arguably the first cyberspace story, Vernor Vinge, has passed.

https://file770.com/vernor-vinge-1944-2024/

“True Names” is on my short list of must read hacker fiction. If you haven’t read it you should.

#scifi #cyberpunk #cyberspace

🆕 blog! “What the UK Government gets wrong about QR codes”

One of my most memorable experiences in the Civil Service1 was discussing link shortening services with a very friendly2 person from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. I was trying to explain why link shortners like bit.ly and ow.ly weren't sensible for Government use. They didn't …

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2024/03/what-the-uk-government-gets-wrong-about-qr-codes/
⸻
#domains #gov.uk #privacy #QRCodes #security

Brendan Gregg: The Return of the Frame Pointers

#Linux

https://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2024-03-17/the-return-of-the-frame-pointers.html

How web bloat impacts users with slow devices:

https://danluu.com/slow-device/

The #mySociety local intelligence hub is interesting. I'm actually learning new things about my area (and others I've tried). Much more useful than these sort of things usually are.

Interesting to see that we're below average on supporting tidal energy, particularly given the mayor's continued tub-thumping for a massive tidal barrage across the Mersey.

https://www.localintelligencehub.com/

⚠️ Update: Live network data show today's telecoms disruption in #Africa has intensified; the incident has high impact to West Africa with significant reductions in connectivity evident across the continent; operators report multiple subsea cable failures 📉

Good news from the Voyager 1 spacecraft that has been stuck sending a 0101 pattern since Nov 2023.

The team has long suspected the root cause to be a corrupted area of memory in the FDS computer. On Mar 1, they sent some commands to make the FDS skip around sections of memory. The data stream rcvd 45 hours later looked different and was decoded to contain a read-out of the entire FDS memory!

Hopefully, they can now identify and fix the offending memory words.
🤞
https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/
14/n