I'm not (for the moment at least) going to go on about the UK election results, but I would just like to urge anyone who thought it was in any way appropriate to vote Reform to have a quiet sit down and think very hard about what you've done.

No.

Harder than that.

#UKPolitics #UKPol

💡 One cool takeaway from #DACHsec :
Dr. Kraemer (knowbe4) mentioned that a good security policy doesn't just prohibit, it offers alternatives.

If you ban personal AI accounts, give people an alternative (e.g. enterprise LLM).

I think more generally, the hard truth is: we in #infosec are much better at saying "don't do this" than "do this instead."

Saying NO is easy. Taking responsibility for a YES is uncomfortable.

This bias isn't talked about enough 🧠

#CyberSecurity

My therapist said I need to find things to keep me busy, so I created the @cdnspace Artemis II dashboard.

I reverse-engineered the Unity Engine powering the NASA AROW visualization and found an absolute treasure trove of data to display.

Little did I expect that it's now being seen by anywhere from 200 to 600 people at any given time with 130,000 people having looked at it in the last 24 hours. People are even building projects around my API.

Yesterday, I received a message on LinkedIn from someone working in Mission Control in Houston... and they're using my dashboard! He even sent me a photo, but I can't share it until after the crew has splashed down.

Mind blown, and an absolute pick-me-up. The best part? It's being served from my basement.

https://artemis.cdnspace.ca/

#artemis #artemis2 #artemisII #nasa #csa

This one might be interesting to anyone interested in computer gaming history.

https://dec10.uknet.net

I spent the last couple of weeks finally finishing a project I started for Bletchley Park about 20 years ago. Recreating the original MUD and MIST on a mirror of the original Essex University system that finally closed in 1991.

Roy Trubshaw and Richard Bartle wrote the first online multi-user game (MUD) on Essex University's DECSystem-10 in 1978 and it ran till I closed it in 1991. I diligently backed everything up so I could potentially recover it one day, but as far as I can see, all the DECSystem-10's went to the great scrapyard in the sky, my backups were mostly stolen when my first museum was stolen, and I had huge issues recovering the Essex BCPL compiler to compile what I had left when I finally got a decent TOPS-10 emulator running on a VAX for Bletchley Park.

One good thing about being an unemployable whistleblower is free time, so I finally hunkered down to some 90 hour weeks and built a software replica of the Essex system I think reflects it well. It's running on a KS10 not a KL10 but I had to let some things slip.

I put the latest known versions of MUD and MIST on it, and miraculously found ROCK too.

So, to meander to the point, if you want to see and relive exactly what online multi user gaming was like from 1978 to 1991, you can go to:

https://dec10.uknet.net

Or:

telnet telnet.dec10.uknet.net

(Port 2653 is available for ISPs that block 23)

And then follow the terse instructions from there.

In those days, you were generally faced with a "." prompt and left mostly alone, so for authenticity, I will leave it at that.

I should note that although they were, in their day, wildly popular games with a relatively huge community, this is a museum peice in snapshot-form at the moment. But I will leave them up and running to see what happens and as a useful reference. I wasn't going to, but Richard seemed happy to have MUD running, and former MIST players wanted it back, so...

Pop this a share if you know folks who might be interested.

** Update: New web client that works better.

** Another update - I added a telnet client.

Historically, the telnet connection is much more true to the traditional experience, where you were connecting to a working machine that didn't care about the MUD Guests, so there were no pointers at all. Just rumour and hearsay :)

If any of you Unix/Security people notice I messed up something, please tell me. I left "^], !sh" open on the telnet link for about 2 minutes and nearly had a heart-attack once I spotted it :D

#history #digital #retrogaming #retrocomputing #games #mud #muds #mist #rock #computers #emulation #emulators #vms #tops10 #museum #history #bletchleypark #simh #essex #uk #computinghistory #36bit #engineering #Linux #Security

(don't try this on a phone!)