h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

🆕 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

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/