Atwood refused to accept the science fiction label for a very long time. Le Guin is much kinder to her friend than Atwood was in person to many folks about this (this is harder to cite because older convention and genre drama doesn’t really show up online, unlike modern). In recent years, Atwood has accepted speculative fiction (the umbrella term for lots of stuff including SF) because it’s convenient for her and helps sales. She was and imo still is a huge genre snob. Don’t get me wrong, Atwood writes great stuff. She just hates a lot of her audience.

Why do I care? Compare and contrast her to Vonnegut, whose agent wouldn’t let him use the science fiction label but actively attended conventions, telling fans he wanted to be SF but the money folks wouldn’t let him. Octavia Butler is equally fantastic as is Atwood’s dear friend Le Guin. Both love SF and are happy with the label.

I bring new software into my organization through two methods:

1. Someone has used it before
2. We are reasonably confident in our ability to use existing staff, possibly with a new expert hire or consultation

It’s pretty rare for a large org to do completely net new software. Training is usually a big deal if that happens. Massive layoffs are also a possibility (see enterprises being dumb about containers). Smaller orgs tend not to have this problem. If they do you can usually tell in an interview and just not go there. Devs are constantly experimenting with net new shit (current libs don’t do the thing; gotta find new libs). Again, smart leaders are open to this.

In general, staffing is a huge part of any of these decisions. You might not see the convo but it is most likely happening.

I think it’s a terrible decision because of this. The whole point of hubs is to get players together and interacting. Putting AH and mail around hubs requires many players together. Giving folks a mount means the hubs stop being hubs and contributes to the continued decay of the multiplayer aspect.

Take this with a grain of salt. When I last played hubs still mattered. If that isn’t currently the case this is just old fart complaints.

I have more important things to do than to lobby the government to send a tax bill.

Why would the CEO be dumb enough to say this in an interview? If your business model is fucking people, your CEO has to have a cool head when asked if he’s fucking people!

Did we read the same article? DNS-01 challenges require updates to DNS. This means you need an API for your DNS. This means you now have to worry about DNS permissions in your application cert workflow. We’ve just massively increased blast radius! Or you could do it manually but that’s already failed.

All of this is straightforward with infrastructure-as-code. While I don’t struggle with that, I’ve watched devs and sysadmins both stare blankly at this kind of thing for days at a time.

If you’re using any work-related anything to post “anonymously” or talk to journalists, don’t. That Blind redirection is chilling yet it’s well within the capabilities of employers. The right way to talk to journalists like 404 is to find their anonymous contact details eg Signal using your own internet connection and your own device. Work computers can be monitored. Traffic on work computers or work VPNs can be monitored. Company email usage can be monitored. Company phone usage can be monitored. You don’t need to be incredibly private with a VPN over tor and anonymous services; you just need to not use company resources. Whether or not this should be legal is a different story; you just gotta know you have fuck all for privacy on company resources.

I’ve only heard of Blind in passing; that corp email makes it too close to Glassdoor for comfort and it’s very clearly not private with that requirement.

Mullenweg is an original WP dev along with Mike Little. He’s fucking batshit and completely in the wrong but he did create the FOSS.

AWS makes this impossible in a few places such as a fair number of ACM use-cases.

I think your cert-per-session idea is interesting. We’d need significant throughput and processing boosts to make that happen, probably at least on the order of 10X computing speeds and 10X transmission speeds across the board minimum. These operations are computationally intense and add data to the wire so, for example, a simple Lemmy server with hundreds of users slows to a crawl and a larger site eg Mastodon goes to dialup speeds or worse. You can test at home by trying to generate an x509 self-signed cert before connecting to a website every time.

I read the Wires article for the first time just now to try and understand this article. I don’t really think it attacks SimpleX at all. I think it states the fact that nazis have moved to the platform, the fact that SimpleX is a very private platform, the fact that SimpleX claims to prevent extremist content and growth, the fact that extremist content is being spread and growing, and the fact that SimpleX is unaware of claims. As someone who has been following this discourse for decades, this is the kind of thing that gets published. There is a balance between privacy and extremism. Privacy-focused individuals like myself will always focus on the privacy provided there are tools to combat the extremism (where applicable).

I feel like SimpleX is being defensive because their claims are not panning out. Their response calls out all of the things I feel were said in support of them while ignoring the actual critiques of their system. Not adding a backdoor? Great! That’s law and smart! Supporting groups of over a thousand posting extremist content?

We never designed groups to be usable for more than 50 users and we’ve been really surprised to see them growing to the current sizes despite limited usability and performance

SimpleX will remove such content if it is discovered. Much of the content that these terrorist groups have shared on Telegram—and are already resharing on SimpleX—has been deemed illegal in the UK, Canada, and Europe.

This is the stuff that needs response, not the privacy stuff Gilbert is arguably a fan of.

Anyone in tech who knowingly works for Google supports these things in the same way that anyone that works in tech who knowingly works for Meta support genocide and the erosion of the democratic process. I give the caveat “in tech” because there are some roles like content moderation or executive assistant where you really don’t have the luxury of a huge market working almost anywhere else that doesn’t support genocide and I don’t fault those faults for taking a job that has better benefits. My engineering peers? I judge them for it.

This is actually true. Essentially a big drug manufacturer took down a scientist through a serious harassment campaign and blew him the fuck up when he finally snapped. In no large part to this coordinated glowup, published literature in the US agrees with the chemical manufacturer while it’s been banned in the EU for 20 years. The EPA might disagree with me that it’s true; the EPA and others funded in no small part by Syngenta refuse to look at things by Dr Hayes because he lost his cool a few times. Unfortunately Alex Jones further eroded the credibility of Dr Hayes but, imo, only because Syngenta actively deplatformed his research. Also Jones said some crazy shit about it.

The Security Online article only cites Margitelli’s post on the matter. My assumption has been the article used the post as its single source. On one hand, watching MS fuck shit up for years, I want to believe Margitelli. On the other hand, researchers using weird tools and uninterested in reality are why curl is now a CNA.

I’m personally frustrated with Margitelli’s post because it’s all about abandoning responsible disclosure globally rather than naming and shaming (Canonical? Red Hat? Both? Others? If it affects all GNU/Linux I’d expect every single distro maintainer to be named and shamed). Responsible disclosure is our best solution to make sure innocent bystanders don’t get caught in the crossfire. When specific entities don’t abide by responsible disclosure we lambast those specific entities not the entire process built to keep users safe.

Nice! That second one is just a repost of your first.

I wonder where the sources for this are? The hidden Margaritelli Twitter post?

Canonical and Red Hat have not only confirmed the vulnerability’s high severity but are also actively working on assessing its impact and developing patches.

The Twitter account has been privated and there are no news stories about it. Other communities where this has been shared are reasonably suspicious.

It could also be manipulated by someone who reports the dark patterns are inaccurate. If it were run by a single org or person, it could get sold to a company interested in gaming the ratings or used to bash things the owner doesn’t like. I’m not entirely sure what your point is. Every way to set this up is subject to bad actors. There are some checks and balances present in the website. Why are they inadequate and why should we not trust this site? Are you, perhaps, an industry dark pattern plant trying to get us to avoid something that could deter dark pattern usage?

That’s a huge misrepresentation of what Mitnick did and how the government mischarged him. He did a bunch of dumb stuff that was illegal. He was overcharged in very bad ways supporting ridiculous lies from the companies he broke into.

In another post you’re actively looking at purchasing GPS systems. The satellites you’re sending info to are not available to dissect and I highly doubt the firmware of the devices you’re looking at is publicly available much less libre. Your trolling is not internally consistent so it’s clear you don’t have any clue what you’re on about. Good luck with that.

The claim is that audio and video are E2EE. I’m not sure how you’re unable to disprove that using the linked code, audit report, and COTS debugging tools. Can you expand on that? I see a lot of FUD without anything more than “they’re not libre” which, again, doesn’t do a great job of selling your point.

Interesting. I was able to access the linked whitepaper and repositories without trouble and the 3rd party stuff too. Do you have local config preventing you from downloading the source code to review?

While I can respect your distaste for non-libre software, you’ll need to back up the malware claim. There are real security concerns out there in common non-libre; labeling things that are not libre as malware solely because they are not libre muddies the waters and makes your message much less palatable.

The most frustrating thing about this article is that it completely ignores that good movies targeted at kids still have to be good. Personal complaints aside, the new Mario movie was reasonably good for adults and great for kids. Pixar keeps churning out things that are fantastic on many levels. Bluey is an amazing show that can resonate with kids and parents. I don’t for a minute buy the elitist bullshit of “well you’re not a kid so you can’t comment.” Muppet Treasure Island holds the fuck up as an adult so this writer can fuck right off.