h2g2bob @h2g2bob@mastodon.dbatley.com

“Everyone knows your location: tracking myself down through in-app ads” - a very interesting hands-on blog post about contemporary location data flows and sales https://timsh.org/tracking-myself-down-through-in-app-ads/

TIL

"The globally unique identifier (GUID) for the BIOS boot partition in the GPT scheme is 21686148-6449-6E6F-744E-65656445464916 (which, when written to a GPT in the required little endian fields, forms the ASCII string “Hah!IdontNeedEFI”)."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIOS_boot_partition#Overview

Genuary 2025, day 31: Pixel sorting.

#genuary #genuary2025 #genuary31

“We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all. As if linen were the same thing as flax — as if paper, ink, wheels, knives, clocks, chairs, aspirin pills, were natural objects, born with us like our teeth and fingers — as if steel saucepans with copper bottoms… grew on trees and we just picked them..”
https://hcommons.social/@ryancordell/113892573732579576

UK folks who want to have a direct impact on the quality of life in your community: Citizens Advice is hiring for a senior data engineer, 70k hybrid, UK locations

https://www.jobtrain.co.uk/citizensadvice/Home/Job

[$] The state of Vim

The death of Bram Moolenaar, Vim founder and benevolent dictator for life (BDFL), in 2023 sent a shock through the community, and raised concern about the future of the project. At [...]

https://lwn.net/Articles/1002342/ #LWN

A positive outlook for global food production: The world is on track to produce more wheat, rice, and soybean than ever before. Yields of staple crops, including corn, are holding steady. Total coffee production is up. And more. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/food-production-2024

Did you know we make XML dumps of all our wikis' data publicly available[0], including some which go back to 2001 (the UseModWiki era!)[1]

---

[0] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Data_dumps

[1] - https://dumps.wikimedia.org/archive/

VLC in WebAssembly

https://videolabs.io/communication/vlcjs-demo/vlc.html

Very neat
"The inspection paradox is a statistical illusion you’ve probably never heard of. It’s a common source of confusion, an occasional cause of error, and an opportunity for clever experimental design.

And once you know about it, you see it everywhere."

https://towardsdatascience.com/the-inspection-paradox-is-everywhere-2ef1c2e9d709

Residents across the United States are being inundated with text messages purporting to come from toll road operators like E-ZPass, warning that recipients face fines if a delinquent toll fee remains unpaid. Researchers say the surge in SMS spam coincides with new features added to a popular commercial phishing kit sold in China that makes it simple to set up convincing lures spoofing toll road operators in multiple U.S. states.

"The ultimate goal of these kits, he said, is to phish enough information from victims that their payment cards can be added to mobile wallets and used to buy goods at physical stores, online, or to launder money through shell companies."

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2025/01/chinese-innovations-spawn-wave-of-toll-phishing-via-sms/

New blog post: "CMYK support in Inkscape could be a game-changer for professional print designers "
https://www.davidrevoy.com/article1061/cmyk-support-in-inkscape-could-be-a-game-changer-for-professional-print-designers

#inkscape

@neil one more for your list https://discuss.haiku-os.org/t/notice-georestriction-of-the-uk/16267

I just wanted to toot my horn for Patrick Grant and the good people of Community Clothing. I go here (and to some other UK manufacturers) for my clothing.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Grant_(designer)
(https://communityclothing.co.uk/)

Why some DVLA digital services don't work at night

https://dafyddvaughan.uk/blog/2025/why-some-dvla-digital-services-dont-work-at-night/

Things I regret: Looking at github issues for the open-source self-driving car conversion kit.

Thousands of people use these things on public roads.

https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/issues/34346

Insider war story on time-smearing and fooling NTP to get around a leap second: https://rachelbythebay.com/w/2025/01/09/lag/

Fun stuff!

After @lapcatsoftware's "Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15", I took a deep dive into the tech that apparently makes it private.

I tried to write it in simple english, something apple apparently could not:

https://boehs.org/node/homomorphic-encryption

We originally had a different topic planned for this week's #geoweirdness thread, but the global discussion has turned to Greenland 🇬🇱, so let's go with it.

Join us as we consider the geographic oddities of the world's northernmost territory.

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