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#HardwareHacking, #ReverseEngineering, #lowtech enthusiast, #permacomputing hobbyist, #typography nerd, #retrocomputing and retro tech enjoyer, France's okayest #cybersecurity consultant, data recovery tinkerer, artisan software enginer ; come for the infosec shitposts, stay for some Memphis Rap and #Feminisms. MacGyver at some #RepairCafés for a decade 💾 🏴‍☠️ 🛠 🏳️‍🌈 #righttorepair

«We're sexy, sexy Von Neumann machines»

(profile pic is a colorful picture of a X-rays scan of an Intel 386 microprocessor courtesy of @kenshirriff)

Pronounshe/him/../../etc/shadow_hedgehog.txt
PlanetPluto
Brutalist Programming Manifestohttps://forum.malleable.systems/t/the-brutalist-programming-manifesto/146
Smolweb guidelines for lean websiteshttps://smolweb.org/guidelines.html
Hot take on digital sovereignty of #fileformats #digipres "A license tells you who owns the software, while the format tells you who owns the data", "Digital sovereignty is not achieved by changing who hosts the software, but by changing the format in which data is encoded." https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2026/04/02/document-formats-a-mystery-to-many/
Document formats: a mystery to many - TDF Community Blog

Euro-Office’s announcement – which sees IONOS, Nextcloud and other companies coming together to create a European alternative to office productivity software – has predictably sparked a wave of comments. Most of these focus on the issue of licensing: is the code open source? Who controls the repository? What are the conditions for forking, modifying or implementing it? While these are all valid questions, they fail to address the most important issue. The fact that almost no one is asking the question that matters tells us something significant about how the debate on digital sovereignty has been framed and who benefits from that framing. A licence tells you who owns the software, while the format tells you who owns the data A licence can be renegotiated, modified or updated. The history of FLOSS is full of projects that have changed governance models, divided communities, or changed course under new management. Licence terms are important, but they operate at the level of the software artefact. The native document format operates at a completely different level. It is the encoding level of every document produced, archived, and exchanged by institutions that adopt the software. It is the invisible structure of administrative memory within

TDF Community Blog
Today (and every day) I refuse AI (and the "it's inevitable" tech industry narrative).
https://www.thehandbasket.co/p/refusing-to-accept-big-tech-s-ai-poisoned-future-of-journalism
OH: "EBITDA - Earnings Before Iran, Tariffs & Donald Announcements"

I teach cybersecurity. And I genuinely don't know what to tell my students after this one. Federal reviewers spent years trying to get basic encryption documentation from Microsoft for its GCC High government cloud. They couldn't get it. One reviewer called the system a "pile of spaghetti pies," with data traveling from point A to point B the way you'd get from Chicago to New York: a bus to St. Louis, a ferry to Pittsburgh, and a flight to Newark. Each leg is a potential hijacking. They knew this. They said this out loud in writing. Then they approved it anyway in December 2024, because too many agencies were already using it. 🔐 That's not a security review. That's a hostage negotiation. Two things in this story should make every CISO and CIO uncomfortable:

🧩 Microsoft built its federal cloud on top of decades of legacy code that it apparently can't fully document itself
👮 "Digital escorts" often ex-military with minimal software engineering backgrounds are the firewall between Chinese engineers working on the system and classified U.S. networks 🤦🏻‍♂️

The scariest line in the whole ProPublica investigation isn't the "pile of shit" quote. It's this: FedRAMP determined that refusing authorization wasn't feasible because agencies were already using the product. Read that again. The security review process reached a conclusion based on sunk cost, not risk. Ex Post Facto Fallacy

If that logic holds, the compliance framework is just documentation theater. And right now, CISA is being hollowed out, so there are fewer people left to even run the theater.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2026/03/federal-cyber-experts-called-microsofts-cloud-a-pile-of-shit-approved-it-anyway/
#Cybersecurity #Microsoft #FedRAMP #Leadership #RiskManagement #security #privacy #cloud #infosec

Federal cyber experts called Microsoft's cloud a "pile of shit," approved it anyway

One Microsoft product was approved despite years of concerns about its security.

Ars Technica
i think the best way to use LLMs is this: don't type into the AI chatbot's input field. instead, write a description of the problem in a text file. work through the specifics of what you want to accomplish, and how you'd go about doing it. once you've got a few hundred words of ideas and planning, you can go back to the empty, unused AI tab and close it. then begin doing the work yourself. consider sending your notes to friends or experts. when you're done, remember to thank them for their help!

The average knowledge worker maintains accounts across system after system, switching between applications hundreds of times per day. And they produce, in aggregate, a staggering amount of coordinated and collaborative activity that never actually becomes anything resembling ~output.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/collaboration-is-bullshit/

"Collaboration" is bullshit.

This newsletter is free to read, and it’ll stay that way. But if you want more - extra posts each month, access to the community, and a direct line to ask me things - paid subscriptions are $2.50/month. A lot of people have told me it’s

Westenberg.

Let's make an #ebike out of garbage. You will need.

* One dumpster bike (free)
* One cargo rack (free)
* One hub motor (dumpster dived, but about $200 new)
* One motor controller (about $20-$50 new)
* A battery (recycled, but about $100 new)

I'm going to rewire some used 12v lithium batteries to make a 36v battery with a smart battery management system (monitor charge from your phone).

I started by installing the front wheel, installing the cargo rack, mocking up where I'll mount the battery, controller and throttle.

Next I'll wire the key components, get the wheel turning, then look at which of the other wires need to be connected. (Some brake cutoffs, pedal sensor, maybe a key lock to see if a wild @alice appears).

This happens to be a folding bike, because that's what was at the front of the bike pile.

I love how vibecoded commits are called vommits. It's so perfect.

Good reading on RAM/Flash price spikes and how maintaining and keeping your hatdware is more relevant than ever

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/hold-on-to-your-hardware/

Hold on to Your Hardware

A warning about rising prices, vanishing consumer choice, and a future where owning a computer may matter more than ever as hardware, power, and control drift toward data centers and away from people.

マリウス
reverse engineering is the process of finding out after somebody else fucks around