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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


๐ŸคขOh geez. Sorry for TMI, but Meiselas is reporting this:

Meiselas: What Iโ€™m hearing from credible sources is that Donald #Trump is actually farting in the courtroomโ€ฆ Iโ€™m hearing it from actual credible people that as heโ€™s kind of falling asleep, heโ€™s actually passing gas and that his lawyers are really struggling with the smell. #TrumpTrial

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in reply to Josh Susser

@joshsusser The courtroom sketch artists are going to need to start adding stink lines.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Incredible research at BlackHat Asia today by Tong Liu and team from the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ๅœจiie.ac.cn ็š„็”ตๅญ้‚ฎไปถ็ป่ฟ‡้ชŒ่ฏ)

A dozen+ RCEs on popular LLM framework libraries like LangChain and LlamaIndex - used in lots of chat-assisted apps including GitHub. These guys got a reverse shell in two prompts, and even managed to exploit SetUID for full root on the underlying VM!

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in reply to Kenn White

This is a good thing.

Perhaps some folks can rm -rf / with abandon and nip this BS in the bud.

*sigh* Alas, I doubt anyone is that forward thinking anymore.



Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Mortgage office near me had an Alexa in the window. At night, I'd shout things at it like "Remind me at 10:30 every day to apply pile cream", or other puerile stuff. I missed any of these going off, but enjoy the thought of them alerting mid-mortgage-chat. Alexa has been moved.


There's a provision of the Children Act 1989 which requires the court to have the child's welfare as its paramount consideration.

I am finding it very hard not to call this the prime directive.


in reply to NanoRaptor

first thing I checked (and I salute you) the dual write-protect tabs! Bravo.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


* mutters and grumbles about old server *

Anybody know what happened to witches.live?

Anyway, here now, hoping to refind everybody

in reply to ๐Ÿฆ‡Jennie๐Ÿณ๏ธโ€๐ŸŒˆ

I can still call up witches.live and see accounts, so it seems like it should be possible to do a normal account transfer.

Do you know anything about witches.live @tchambers ?



Exhausted. Going to take a quick nap before attempting to write this essay thatโ€™s due in in a week.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


We've released #PuTTY version 0.81. This is a SECURITY UPDATE, fixing a #vulnerability in ECDSA signing for #SSH.

If you've used a 521-bit ECDSA key (ecdsa-sha2-nistp521) with any previous version of PuTTY, consider it compromised! Generate a new key pair, and remove the old public key from authorized_keys files.

Other key types are not affected, even other sizes of ECDSA. In particular, Ed25519 is fine.

This vulnerability has id CVE-2024-31497. Full information is at https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/wishlist/vuln-p521-bias.html

in reply to Simon Tatham

Given that that's 3 additional clicks in the PuTTYgen UI (ECDSA, Dropdown, nistp521) I can almost assure we won't have any in our enterprise.

Surprised to see that the default in PuTTYgen 0.81 is still RSA, and only 2048 bits. Ed25519 even works with RHEL 7 (EoL 2024-06-30).

in reply to *sigh*Ber nard

@brnrd I must admit I've always been nervous about switching the recommendation over to any form of DSA. _Mostly_ because of exactly this fragile k business, but not only that. Though Ed25519 is IMO an improvement on integer DSA and NIST ECDSA โ€“ it's easier to see its security argument.

Plus I half expect any day now the post-quantum Next Big Thing will be standardised for SSH and then we'll all have to switch again.

Bumping the default RSA size, though, fair enough โ€“ patch welcome!

in reply to Simon Tatham

Also thanks for posting these here. It really helps spread the word!


To read the UK media youโ€™d think Cameron was swooping in to sort the mess Brexit left Gibraltar in. Talking to a Gibraltarian friend though he didnโ€™t have much part in it beyond bringing the tea. The hard work has been done by the Gibraltar government and the local government of La Lรญnea just over the border.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


If you are looking for lockable cabinet to store important papers / jewellery etc, should DDG's "safe search" be on or off?

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in reply to Neil Brown

Sorry, I'm talking about "safe search" off persistently. If I remember correctly, DDG defaults to safe search on.
@Neil Brown
in reply to Andy H3

@andy

Ah!

I was just making a joke about searching for

a lockable cabinet to store important papers / jewellery


And the notion of "safe search"!





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WHERE THE WEB IS GOING: The convergence of LLMs and web advertising will lead to "ads" consisting of several hundred gigabytes of javascript containing a (weighted) neural network designed to generate unique per-user video advertisementsโ€”generated on your computer at your expense to ensure the imagery is unique and evades AI-based ad-blockers.

"AI spam" is an entire AI, squatting on your CPU and making it glow dull red as it works out how to capture your attention.

Welcome to the spamularity.

Unknown parent

Si Dawson

<starts shopping the idea down Sand Hill Road>

<instantly receives a billion dollars funding>



Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


just time traveled to the Android 18 launch event here are some features you can look forward to
- Google's new chat service Semaphore is replacing Google Pigeon (formerly Google Chat (for business (old version))). it will launch without encryption
- Gemini can now physically stare at you while you sleep
- Pixel Camera will automatically edit out people it doesn't like and replace them with your favorite Fortnite skins
- Settings is now a progressive web app
- Material4 is launching. the corners are now so round they bend the opposite direction
- the current Maps API has been deprecated and replaced with an unfinished newer version
- all the non-ads on the Play Store were ruining the experience so they removed them

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Bus your drivers trying to poach customers from the queue for the cable car. I think they miss the point that itโ€™s a cable car!

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Famous American murderer from the telly, O J Simpson, has been in the news recently for dying. Here are some lesser known facts about him:

O J was known by his fans as "The Juice". This is because his full name was Orangejuice Jorangejuice Simpson.

King Edward VIII of England was forced to resign because he wanted to marry him.

In addition to being good at rugby and murder, O J was also the first man on mars.

He was acquitted after his lawyer, who was one of the Cardasians from Star Trek, convinced the jury that there were five lights.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

He wasn't even called Simpson, I saw a documentary once and he was an accident-prone cop called Nordberg in real life

And he wasn't in the Simpsons

Answer me that


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Asserting we havenโ€™t got a constitution because it is not written down is like saying your washing machine doesnโ€™t exist because you havenโ€™t got the manual
in reply to d a t green

"all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." should cover it all. In that use "men" is was meant to mean humanity. It should be updated.

So women should have a bloody right to live, not be livestock.

in reply to d a t green

no it isn't. A washing machine is a physical thing. If you wanted to, you could kick it. An invisible constitution is imaginary and can easily be ignored, changed, or discounted.


Instructor: gives stern words about timeliness in professional sailing
Also instructor: โ€œIโ€™ll be five minutesโ€

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


"If you're under 25 your brain isn't fully developed, so you can't be trusted to make informed decisions"

I'm seeing this a LOT lately, especially today with the Cass Review fallout. And it's utter guff, based on hearsay, misunderstandings of neuroscience, or wilful ignorance.

Why? I'll tell you why

/1

Unknown parent

Colman Reilly
@ketmorco <looks around at my 50s peers for any sign of an ability to make reliable long term decisions> I have bad news.
Unknown parent

Wayne Werner
I *had* heard that your brain stops /developing/ -- e.g. your prefrontal cortex actually functions so you can make long-term decisions. But it doesn't surprise me that the idea has taken on a life beyond that understanding ๐Ÿ˜‚

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Worrying that a cis person might take cross-sex hormones long term by mistake is like worrying that your child will go out and roll in the nettles if you let them in the garden. Sure. Hypothetically they might roll in the nettles. What theyโ€™re not very likely to do is go out there and roll in the nettles a second time. Meanwhile trans people are yelling to be let out of the nettle patch while being told that moving around the garden is dangerous and to stay put for our own safety.
in reply to zip (happy halloween 2024!) Sarah Brown reshared this.

People seem to think that hormones fundamentally donโ€™t really feel like anything, that they just change your body and nothing else. Nothing is further from the truth.

Getting on HRT when youโ€™re trans feels like youโ€™ve been wearing shoes two sizes too small for your entire life and youโ€™ve just got a pair that fits. Getting on HRT when youโ€™re not has the opposite effect: instead youโ€™re taking a drug that will cause crushing depression. Itโ€™s even on the side effects list!

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in reply to zip (happy halloween 2024!)

But say Iโ€™m wrong. Perhaps thereโ€™s folks out there who feel equally comfortable either way. People should still get to choose what happens to their body! Even if they might change their minds! _Especially_ with puberty blockers, which simply delay things.
in reply to zip (happy halloween 2024!)

I kind of forgot while saying this that in their mythology weโ€™re embarked upon a sinister project to propel cis kids through transition.

Obviously fucking not, dickheads. We recoil at the idea of someone being pushed to transition as hard as we recoil at the idea of them being pushed not to. Itโ€™s always self-led. How dare you accuse us of the same monstrosity that you are so determinedly perpetrating yourselves.

in reply to zip (happy halloween 2024!)

Remember, with the right, it's always projection. Correct? (It's what they'd do, so they project it on the trans community.)
in reply to zip (happy halloween 2024!)

Wouldn't it be easier to just refer to HRT as 'meds'? Like if you take epilepsy meds, you will have a bad time.

It seems easier to explain 'trans men do not produce the right hormones for men, so they need these meds'.


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Dear UK residents. Iโ€™m sorry to be tedious, but Iโ€™m going to do the trans Cassandra thing again.

The government is now moving towards regarding trans people as effective children until the age of 25.

This will be established as precedent and then used to screw over any and all young adults who canโ€™t escape from abusive parents, especially young women.

If you want to do anything about this, you need to fight for trans people. Yes, you. Now.

We all know that isnโ€™t going to happen to any significant extent though.

As you were.

Unknown parent

kรฆt

@crocket2001
I think it's easy to underestimate how far most people have moved on this already. (Not that *most* makes it safe). There seem to be two groups pushing this:

1. boring folk who moan about the metric system, car parks, youth of today, ULEZ, "they're all as bad as each other", immigrants, etc.

2. Westminster-y policy type people, both left and right, professional dinner-party attenders, columnists, writers, wonks, essayists, student union types.

The (dangerous) difference now is that these groups -- our society's loudest, most boring, dull, dim, and reactionary, who only differ in social class -- are united on one subject.

The public don''t need to "come round".

People think Guardianista idealists lay out liberation's groundwork -- surveyors going ahead. But they're just apologists hanging on the coat-tails of emperors, minting excuses for comfortable lives at court. The powerful, their "clients", are moving right, so they're representing them, coining theories and writing reports.

in reply to Jinshei

labour candidate came back with all the things I want, including saying how well trans people do when they get treatment. He is a good lad.


Sailing lots today, getting lots of practice at taking the helm and tacking the boat. "Helm to lee!" is cried and then there is much winching and pulling in of lines as the boat turns into the wind. When we first did this it was a bit disastrous and chaotic, but after doing it several times the panic distills into a concentrated focus that punctuates the periods where we just sit on the boat and let it go.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

If it wasn't for the photo, I would have assumed that was a euphemism. ๐Ÿ˜€


After about the first night or so itโ€™s amazing how you get used to sleeping on a boat. The rocking motion and creaking sounds of the lines just become the comforting background rather than the thing that keeps waking you up.

Reminds me of a holiday where the B&B was right above the platforms of Lancaster station. The noise of trains quickly became the background. So much so that when there was engineering works in the last night it was eerily quiet and hard to sleep.

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

We live within earshot of a very busy section of motorway. If it's closed it seems very strange how quiet it is.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


I just made a command-line typo: 'locat' in place of 'locate'.

Ubuntu's command-not-found package offered me 'lolcat' as a higher-ranked preference than what I actually intended.

The Internet has won.

This entry was edited (1 week ago)

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in reply to Simon Tatham

I donโ€™t have an ubuntu machine at the moment, but Iโ€™m guessing itโ€™s this ?

https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat

Probably not useful ever, but itโ€™s good to see people having fun from time to time XD

in reply to KungFuDiscoMonkey

@kfdm yes, I think you're right. command-not-found offers me two instances of 'lolcat', one from a .deb and one from a snap, but as far as I can see, both of them are the thing you link to.


Ryanair just does โ€œplaneโ€™s here, pile onโ€. BA does faff with boarding groups, and plays music while you board. In accordance with the prophecy this is no faster. https://youtu.be/oAHbLRjF0vo
in reply to Cyberspice

@Cyberspice I donโ€™t know whether Iโ€™m just narrow or always choose extra legroom but Iโ€™ve not had problems.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

I use Jet2. Never had a problem with them so wont be trying Ryan Air again. Oh and their 'home' airport is Leeds Bradford which is a 10 minute taxi ride, so there's that.
This entry was edited (1 week ago)


It is too early to be navigating airport land. Fortunately the only suspicious item in my baggage was conditioner and I have located a full English breakfast.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Got a tattoo of the windows mouse cursor so that I can sit like this on Teams calls in the hope that someone frantically tries to move it.
in reply to Jack

@Buster ok, I'm going to remove it. Anyhow, it doesn't change my opinion on the tattoo fashion.
@Jack



A few years ago I was on Scarlet (the yacht of @Sarah Brown and @Zoรซ O'Connell ) and noticed mid morning that I didn't have the bloating sensation I was used to having some time after breakfast. The reason for this, of course, is that Scarlet runs on lactose-free milk. Evidently I was slightly lactose intolerant, started buying lactose-free milk at home, and everything was better.

It shouldn't have been only today that I extrapolated this experience to cover a large takeaway banana milkshake.


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Yuval Abraham, author of the 972 mag reporting on the #IDFโ€™s use of the #Lavender and โ€œWhereโ€™s Daddyโ€ targeting systems in #Gaza, walked through the whole story in an extended segment on #DemocracyNow

https://www.democracynow.org/2024/4/5/israel_ai

#Israel #Palestine #FreePalestine #AI #genocide #NotInMyName #NotInOurName

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Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Kerbal Space Program is basically a dollhouse for people with A-Level further maths.

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in reply to Sarah Brown

Observant viewers will note the presence of hydrofoils. Each one of those is an INTERPLANETARY SEAPLANE!

Also, not a single expendable launch in this game.



It does occur to me that โ€œbetter drowned than duffers. If not duffers wonโ€™t drownโ€ was an excellent summary of the Cambridge pedagogical approach in the early 1990s.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


the six sexual roles: top, bottom, up, down, charm, strange

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Overhearing people on the train. โ€œThey have to get people back into the office at $big-research-instituteโ€ with the accompanying impression that not doing this is responsible for some kind of scientific stagnation.
in reply to Sesquipedality

@Sesquipedality I think itโ€™s possible they are the brand of academic who used to science. Ironically heโ€™s something to do with public health.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

because the people who actually like dealing with people actually gravitate towards management, i think the assumption that social interaction is productive is kind of baked in. They seem to conflate their progress up the heirarchy with knowledge based progress, which is odd, but perhaps understandable in terms of how people are.
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

uncharitably it occurs to me that this might have been my former employers, and it does nothing to change my very low opinion of them. One would hope in 20 years they might have improved, but stagnation would be entirely on brand for them.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


I guess the takeaway from the xz backdoor situation is:

If youโ€™re an open-source project maintainer, and somebody starts getting on your case for not doing enough free work for them, you reply โ€œbig Jia Tan energy thereโ€ and then block them forever.

in reply to Andrew Plotkin

me, as I'm writing my first comment on bugzilla.redhat in 15 years regarding an EPEL request: wow this looks dodgy as

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


A new post on misleading Covid charts & why Covid really is low right now, and why we should be glad of it.

christinapagel.substack.com/p/hospitals-...

โ‡ง