h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

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

What would it sound like if the musicians parodied by "Weird Al" Yankovic sang *his* parodies instead? I jumped off the deep end into the world of A.I. voice cloning to find out, and the results are even worse than you imagine. https://waxy.org/2023/10/weird-ai-yankovic-voice-cloning/

Brewster goes to Washington (congressional hearing on the Copyright Office Modernization Committee)

"The key thing I would suggest is the role the Library of Congress plays of preservation and access.

I mean, fundamentally, it's the Library for Congress, and they're building this collection of mandatory deposits as well as copyright registrations and everything that goes into their collections to try to preserve and create a better democracy."

https://blog.archive.org/2023/09/28/brewster-goes-to-washington-sep-26-2023/

1/2

I can't work out if these new rechargeable batteries are great or really stupid

This might have slipped under the radar these past few days, but a 9.8 RCE in Exim (on many, many mail servers) that does not require authentication is bad bad bad.

https://www.zerodayinitiative.com/advisories/ZDI-23-1469/

Behind the fraud drama rocking academia

If the crowdfunding effort is anything to go by, there is huge sympathy for the data detectives Leif Nelson, Joe Simmons and Uri Simonsohn. The three men — professors of marketing, applied statistics and behavioural science, respectively — have carved out a reputation as defenders of sound scientific research methods. Now they face a lawsuit in the U

https://timharford.com/2023/09/behind-the-fraud-drama-rocking-academia/

#UndercoverEconomist