h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

🗳️ We're tracking Prospective Parliamentary Candidates for the next UK general election.

📝 The next election will take place no later than January 2025, and parties are selecting candidates for each constituency.

🔢 Our volunteers have already identified over a thousand candidates.

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

#ukpolitics #elections #democracy

@politicalscience @elections

Sharing how I use RSS to track weak signals of what my local council (and other local public bodies) is up to (and/or what my fellow citizens care about w.r.t. them)

After a random lunchtime conversation with @zarino here in @DoESLiverpool

http://www.mcqn.net/mcfilter/archives/liverpool/weak_signals_of_local_civic_democracy.html

#weeknotes #CivicTech #FreedomOfInfromation #mySociety

This should be required reading for anyone developing auth systems.

https://cohost.org/mononcqc/post/3647311-paper-you-want-my-p

Policy Lessons from the Official Monster Raving Loony Party

Not long ago, I heard a Tory grandee giving a speech in support of a political rookie. As the occasion demanded, he offered some advice. Life in politics would be hard, he warned, but success was possible: just look at Screaming Lord Sutch and the Official Monster Raving Loony party.

You might think that th

https://timharford.com/2023/11/policy-lessons-from-the-official-monster-raving-loony-party/

#UndercoverEconomist

What an elegant, clear way to look at the trends of the top 60 power producing countries' changing energy mix. A toggle lets you see the total amounts. Beautiful presentation, troubling trends. By Nadja Popovich https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/11/20/climate/global-power-electricity-fossil-fuels-coal.html

A bit of an unofficial post-mortem on #Optus #outage yesterday (please BOOST for visibility!) I have no insider knowledge, all I can do is look at what Optus's networking gear told the rest of the world through #BGP, and make some informed guesses based on that.

The problem yesterday started at about 4am, when Optus told the world 'I no longer have any internet connectivity', and 'Do not send any internet traffic to me, at all'. The technical description is that they withdrew ALL of their routes from the #DFZ (Which is "The Internet", as seen by all the core routers that ACTUALLY control the internet).

However, as a precursor at about 3am there was a hint that things weren't perfect, as there was a flurry of changes from Optus to the outside world saying, roughly, 'Something has changed inside my network, but you can still keep sending me stuff'.

Now, as two final bits of possibly relevant information, the default for maximum-prefix on #Cisco #ASR9000 is 1048576 (this number is 'the number of routes that can be accepted by this router'), and MOST IMPORTANTLY the DFZ ("the internet") has about 980,000 routes in it at the moment. That's only 90k odd routes LESS than the default maximum.

I'd be amazed if Optus has less than 100k internal routes that aren't visible to the internet, but are visible internally.

So here's what I think happened. The at 3am, the first core #router was upgraded, and a new config was put in place. This did not join the network correctly, and things were half broken. What SHOULD have happened is that all the changes should have stopped, and either rolled back, or waited for further investigation (the cause being that more than 1mil routes were visible, causing it to shut down)

However, someone decided 'Well, maybe if we upgrade the SECOND one, that'll fix the first one' at 4am. That broke the SECOND one, and took Optus completely off the internet.

(Continued, see next for why this is far worse than it should have been)

More pressure on UK ISPs and telcos: a proposal to compel PECS providers to notify the ICO of suspected unlawful direct marketing

#surveillance #dataprotection #spam #privacy #telecoms #Internet

Google announced that starting in June 2024, ad blockers such as uBlock Origin #uBO will be disabled in Chrome 127 and later with the rollout of Manifest V3 (#Mv3).

The new #Chrome manifest will prevent using custom filters and stops on demand updates of blocklist. Only #Google authorized updates to browser extension will be allowed in the future, which mean an automatic win for Google in their battle to stop YouTube #AdBlockers .

#ManifestV3 is deceitful and threatening to your privacy, and now is a good time to switch to #Firefox (@mozilla) and/or #TorBrowser (@torproject) if you haven't done so already!

EFF (@eff) on Google’s Manifest V3:

⚠️⁠https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/chrome-users-beware-manifest-v3-deceitful-and-threatening
⚠️⁠https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/12/googles-manifest-v3-still-hurts-privacy-security-innovation

Chrome Manifest V3 Transition Timeline (2023-11-16)

🚩⁠https://developer.chrome.com/blog/resuming-the-transition-to-mv3/

EDIT for clarification: MV3 in Chrome will still allow some ad blocking extensions, but will severely limit their blocking ability and even restricts pre-set filters to 50 MAX.

The #HalfLife 25th anniversary update is awesome!
- HL: Uplink included
- HL: Further Data content
- new MP Maps
- restored beta models
- Steam Networking/rich presence support
- native Linux support (+steam deck verified)
- original menu
- bugfixes and modernisation

And there is a 1h documentary about the development made by the team behind noclip.
https://www.half-life.com/en/halflife25

Latest Covid situation in UK is out now on my substack

https://open.substack.com/pub/christinapagel/p/latest-covid-situation-17-november?r=8zv6v&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

TLDR: admissions falling, vaccine uptake plateauing, lots of cold virus around, no flu yet.

Signal is a nonprofit. But what does this mean in practice? Today we do something most tech co’s avoid: talk money. What does it cost for Signal to play in a lane dominated by billion $ corporations, while rejecting the surveillance business model?

https://signal.org/blog/signal-is-expensive/

#Wireshark 4.2.0 has been released. Enjoy.

https://www.wireshark.org/docs/relnotes/wireshark-4.2.0.html

For the first time in AGES I actually had time to do some proper transport journalism again. Which was lovely.

Here's me over on @lonrec talking about ORR data, passenger numbers UK-wide, and what it all says about the value of investing in rail. #transport #london #rail

https://www.londonreconnections.com/2023/the-state-of-rail-breaking-down-the-numbers/

This "texture healing" technique is really impressive. It uses OpenType’s contextual alternate glyphs, usually seen in stylistic embellishments such as swash caps or ligatures. With Monaspace, they dynamically adjust the widths of characters in a MONOSPACED face, while still respecting the monospace grid. It's pretty wild. The website has a neat interactive step-by-step visualization on how it works. Also, comes in 5 faces!
https://monaspace.githubnext.com

via @idan & @rileycran
#Typography #FontDesign

Starting the week like