I try to make things break less. Sometimes, I succeed.
he/him/whatever
Another news item today, as seen a long time ago in “Halting State” by @cstross. After an attack on a server used by the police in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, a federal state in Germany, all special “patrol” mobile phones run via this server as well as the server itself have been shut down. Apparently, attackers were able to gain access to the server and the phones in a way that survives reboots.
https://www.heise.de/news/Polizei-Handys-seit-Cyberangriff-nicht-nutzbar-10456563.html
There’s a post going round where someone tried to get Google maps to fix a road in the map, failed, then made the edit in OSM, and lo, Google then made the same change.
Friend, this is what coincidences look like. There’s no conspiracy.
I’ve been trying to get Google maps to fix several roads near my parents’ house for years. It’s correct in OSM. It’s even correct in Apple maps. Google still steadfastly insists that the ground truth is the same as road blueprints from the 1980s.
hi there.
on 2016-11-07 i was inspired to create this pair of diagrams, and posted them to my then twitter account. the tweet is long gone, but they must have struck a chord with some people, because the diagrams have long outlived it! i guess they're as relevant today as they were then.
so let me repost them here, in never-before-published high resolution.
if you care about copyright, you can attribute these with:
© 2016 hikari_no_yume, CC BY 4.0 (International)
and ideally, please link to this post's canonical url (begins with social.noyu.me), but i don't care that much
@futurebird I see this sort of science-fictional "long-termism" as just a simple "no u" response to people complaining that hypercapitalist policy is eating our seed corn. "It is YOU who sees only the short-term; I care about humanity in the year 10,000!"
Sometimes they claim that a technological Singularity out of 1990s science fiction is coming soon and will sweep away the world we know, so it's actually not so long-term. Rapture of the Nerds.
I remember Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds pushing such ideas back in the 2000s. No, we don't need to limit carbon emissions, we need to go full throttle on production to hasten the Singularity that will fix everything with nanotechnology and the wisdom of superintelligent machines. Sure, Jan.
The libxml2 maintainer is no longer accepting embargoed security reports. They just get treated like regular issues.
This bit in a comment on the announcement really resonates with me:
> these companies make billions of profits and refuse to pay back their technical debt, either by switching to better solutions, developing their own or by trying to improve libxml2.
Too often a company will depend on some library, and then when there are issues with it, shame the maintainer into fixing them. "There's a problem with your project, it is your responsibility to fix it".
No.
You chose to build on top of this library, and with that took on all responsibility that comes with that choice. Any tech debt or bugs are now YOUR tech debt and bugs. What are you going to do about them?
Helge Wilker
Deborah Pickett
A Reptile Dysfunction 
Natasha Jay
Aral Balkan
Uncle Duke
hikari 🌟 (falling into the sky)
Matt McIrvin
Arne Brasseur