Sentient flower. Has root permissions. Memory unsafe IRL.
Occasional absurdist humor with varying degrees of self-filtering.
Rust programmer. Arch user. European. Interested in consumer rights, cybersecurity, FOSS, systems, and our right to decide what our computers do.
I try to keep a good signal-to-noise ratio.
Follow requests for vibe checking. I won't bite.
Unless you kinda like it.
Straight and cis most of the time. Any pronoun is fine.
Did you know we added the ability to end tasks directly from the taskbar in Windows 11?
So you don't need to open task manager - when enabled you can just right click an app and end it from that menu
I once read a story about the people writing the software for the NASA Apollo missions. There was a functionary in charge of weight accounting, who came to them and asked how much the software would weigh.
They told him it weighted nothing, but the functionary had heard *that* one before and insisted—everything had to be accounted down to the last ounce. He demanded to see it.
They showed him a stack of punched cards, and he was triumphant. “You see,” he said smugly, “it doesn't weigh only ‘nothing’!”
“No, you misunderstand,” they replied. “The cards aren't going on the spacecraft. Only the holes.”
the UNIX v4 tape reminded me of this story by Ali Akurgal about Turkish bureaucracy:
Do you know what the unit of software is? A meter! Do you know why? In 1992, we did our first software export at Netaş. We wrote the software, pressed a button, and via the satellite dish on the roof, at the incredible speed of 128 kb/s, we sent it to England. We sent the invoice by postal mail. $2M arrived at the bank. 3-4 months passed, and tax inspectors came. They said, “You sent an invoice for $2M?” “Yes,” we said. “This money has been paid?” they asked. “Yes,” we said. “But there is no goods export; this is fictitious export,” they said! So we took the tax inspectors to R&D and sat them in front of a computer. “Would you press this ‘Enter’ key?” we asked. One of them pressed it, then asked, “What happened?” “You just made a $300k export, and we’ll send its invoice too, and that will be paid as well,” we said. The man felt terrible because he had become an accomplice! Then we explained how software is written, what a satellite connection is, and how much this is worth. They said, “We understand, but there has to be a physical goods export; that’s what the regulations require.” So we said: “Let’s record this software onto tape (there were no CDs back then—nor cassettes; we used ½-inch tapes) and send that.” Happy to have found a solution, they said, “Okay, record it and send it.” The software filled two reels, which were handed to a customs broker, who took them to customs and started the export procedure. The customs officer processed things and at one point asked, “Where are the trucks?” The broker said, “There are no trucks—this is all there is,” and pointed to the tape reels on the desk. The customs officer said, “These two envelopes can’t be worth $2M; I can’t process this.” We went to court, an expert committee examined whether the two reels were worth $2M. Fortunately, they ruled that they were, and we were saved from the charge of fictitious export. The same broker took the same two reels to the same customs officer, with the court ruling, and restarted the procedure. However, during the process, the unit price, quantity, and total price of the exported goods had to be entered—as per the regulations. To avoid dragging things out further, they looked at the envelope, saw that it contained tape, estimated how many meters of tape there are on one reel, and concluded that we had exported 1k to 2k meters of software. So the unit of software became the meter.
In a move that will surprise nobody except British “safety” activists who are unused to the concept of “positive rights”, Age Verification has been declared unconstitutional in Louisiana
For various reasons today has been a pretty shit day, but this offers a spark of hope:
“…the law, which conditioned Louisianans’ ability to access protected speech online on their willingness to hand over sensitive government ID, violates the First Amendment”
Obligatory Babylon 5: The avalanche has already started, it’s too late for the pebbles to vote.
Via:
https://twitter.com/prestonjbyrne/status/2001333065742954814?s=20
#ageVerification #censorship #feed #Louisiana #onlineSafety #onlineSafetyAct #surveillance #vpns
BATON ROUGE, La.—Today, the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Louisiana granted NetChoice’s motion for summary judgment in NetChoice v. Murrill, striking down Louisiana’s Act 456. The court […]
I hate sudo with a passion. It represents everything I find offensive about the modern Unix security model: like su, it must be a SUID binary to work it is monolithic: everything sudo does runs as root, there is no privilege separation it uses a non-declarative and non-hierarchical configuration format leading to forests of complex access-control policies and user errors due to lack of concision it supports plugins to extend the policy engine which run directly in the privileged SUID process I could go on, but hopefully you get the point.
Natasha 
🇪🇺
Jen Gentleman
Year Progress
Mark Dominus
joomy
tehfishman
Reilly Spitzfaden (they/them)
alecm
amos
Ariadne Conill 🐰