Before becoming a politician, one should complete a mandatory 1.5 years of social service, divided into three-month periods:

— in nursing care
— in a daycare center
— in a school
— in a medium-sized company
— in retail
— on a farm

All unpaid and voluntary, of course.

It never ceases to tickle my fancy at being able to console into my own server (In this case a thin client running OpenBSD).

I know it is mundane, and that the capability has been there since the very beginning of computing, but when I started out doing computers stuff the serial console was the mysterious domain of network equipment and special operating systems!

I am glad that understanding it a bit better has not stolen the wonder and joy from the thing.

#BSD #OpenBSD #RunBSD #Linux

Many, many years ago, at school for CS and before that interning at NASA Ames, I learned to take programming seriously as engineering work, and also the level of rigor that engineering work requires. In the intervening thirty years, I have had to come to terms with the degree to which this attitude is rare in theory and vanishingly rare in practice again and again. Tooling has gotten better, but the rigor applied to the average line of code has gotten worse.

I would hope that safety-critical systems would be different, and in some cases they really are. However, the number of people who want to build secure communications systems that they want to be safety critical and who expect thousands of people to literally use in a case where a breach of the threat model means the users will die and who as developers cannot bother to meet the basic design rigor requirement of 2006 — have a fucking threat model that is accurate and up to date — will never cease to shock me.

By Press Watch / Dan @froomkin

New York Times editor Joe Kahn says defending democracy is a partisan act and he won’t do it

https://presswatchers.org/2024/05/new-york-times-editor-joe-kahn-says-defending-democracy-is-a-partisan-act-and-he-wont-do-it/

#Press #Journalism #Democracy #Media

Please comment!

See also our Election Coverage Guidelines and we'd love to hear comments on those, too.

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On a multi-person video call this morning, we were asked what podcasts we listen to.

I didn't get a chance to chime in but here's my answer:

None regularly. I don't have the time, even at fast playback, to listen to something linear that I could scan much more quickly if it was text.

Podcasters, please post transcripts.

"No one buys [their] books" a report on the big publisher's court testimony.

wow:

"The DOJ’s lawyer collected data on 58,000 titles published in a year and discovered that 90 percent of them sold fewer than 2,000 copies and 50 percent sold less than a dozen copies. "

Yet, they sue to make sure libraries can not buy them (above and beyond copyright). They changed the laws so copyright lasts 95 years-- so no one can get to them.

good stewards of our cultural legacy?

https://www.elysian.press/p/no-one-buys-books

This report, from Just Security, is the best compendium of Trump/Republican dictatorship planning I've seen.

https://www.justsecurity.org/92714/american-autocracy-threat-tracker/

Read it, please, and pass it around to everyone you know -- especially people you don't agree with politically.

One notable aspect of this report is that it puts budding fascism in context. Big Journalism doesn't do context, so we have to rely on smaller organizations and motivated individuals most of the time.

Again, please read it and pass it along.

OK, the big experiment has begun. A ham radio group has funded the scanning of 4,000 manuals from the Great Manuals Plus Haul. Now, the experiment is - will people kick on a special link in the blog entry to help fund the other 20 PALLETS of manuals?

https://blog.archive.org/2024/04/24/a-happy-ending-for-some-manual-labor-and-a-call-for-support/