i might have my criticisms of mastodon, but the founder of post is out here pretending “net worth” is a protected category to signal you can’t make fun of billionaires on his a16z-funded twitter alternative

I sat by an election denier on the airplane and he started poking me in the arm to be emphatic about his views on people stealing ballots secretly and the airplane was full and I couldn’t move anywhere so I started explaining the yellow fever in very great detail, all the way down to telling him about the bloody vomit that looks like coffee grounds and it worked. He stopped talking to me. The moral of this story is you can’t out-weird an academic; our toolset is too vast. #vastearlyamerica

This is an old project, but by some miracle it's still working and I woke up this morning wanting to celebrate the things I love more.

This Inkplate e-ink screen shows Conway's Game of Life, seeded from tarpits I have on the Internet. The tarpits are programs on my computer that superficially look like insecure Telnet and Remote Desktop services, but actually exist to respond super slowly and make bots scanning the Internet 'get stuck'.

When a bot connects to the tarpit, the data it sends gets squished into a 5x5 grid and 'stamped' onto a Game of Life board. Data from a bot at the IP address 1.1.x.x will get stamped on the top left corner, data from a bot at 254.254.x.x will get stamped on the bottom right corner.

Conway's Game of Life, a set of simple rules that govern whether cells should turn on or off, updates the display once per second. The result is that bot attacks end up appearing as distinct 'creatures', that get bigger and more angry looking over time (as their centre is updated with new data). After the attack finishes, the 'creature' eventually burns itself out.

Despite that description, it's a really chill piece of art that doesn't draw too much attention but I can happily watch for a long time.

Credit for the idea goes to @_mattata, I had been wanting to make a real-life version of XKCD #350 for years before seeing his Botnet Fishbowl project.

#projects #inkplate #esp32 #eink #infosec #tarpit

"No Mr. Die, I expect you to Bond"

Not here to fuck spiders, Ron and Humphrey's #RageABC playlist is one epic troll until about 4.15am
https://www.abc.net.au/rage/playlist/saturday-night-19-november-2022-on-abc-tv/101671816