Relationship counsellor here. Part of my process is to ask each half of the couple (separately) which song best reminds them of their partner - to date, no-one has topped Size Of A Cow as the answer that gave me the most difficulty in keeping a straight face.
#ukpol #transphobia Why does anyone still think the Guardian is a progressive newspaper? Their latest fun is an “exposé” of being able to buy HRT on the internet.
One thing I didn't get from you post is — you mention web apps to cross security boundaries — and that doesn't make any sense to me. But maybe I've just been stuck in a cave for far too long. Can you provide an example of such a web app?
i was thinking of the self-service commands a sysadmin might provide for their users on a university timesharing system
in the past i have had colleagues who used ssh with forced commands for similar things – i should have said more about ssh
there’s also the fact that systems are always distributed, so a single-box utility like sudo is less likely to be the right kind of tool than something natively distributed like a web form
interesting post! I like using sudo and I feel like there's an attribute of my workflows using it that isn't captured in your post, apologies if I noodle here.
My interactive shell environment is pretty rich, and I like those affordances. (History, fancy prompt, editor settings, aliases, various app configs and bindings). I want to use those features while doing sysadmin. But I don't want to set them up for root!
And, I often want to poke around and think about things, testing theories, before I do something "for real". For example, I might build an awk and for-loop contraption to perform some admin task, iterating on it on the command line, safe in the knowledge I can't accidentally overwrite /etc/fstab, and after I get it working right, add a sudo to execute.
I even also do use the auth.log entries? Both to remind myself what I've done, and to figure out who changed something in the lab. It's pretty low stakes stuff tho.
i tend to use Many Windows with key shortcuts to make them convenient, so in the experiment -> for real workflow i use another terminal when i need rootly powers
(tho for serious stuff it’s more like experiment -> script -> for real)
when i’m sharing ops duties with others i typically `. ~fanf/.bashrc` to make a root shell palatable
6. All that universal use of sudo does is encourage everyone to be in the habit of prepending "sudo " to any system-level command, without actually thinking about if this is a good idea. See all the tutorials that just *assume* you're using sudo always, so include "sudo " as a prefix on the commands.
If you'd always "sudo <command>" where someone else would "<command>" in their root login, then the only real difference is the logging. If that logging is of little value, then what's the real difference ?
7. Use of sudo makes the user's password in effect a root password, actually *expanding* the attack surface for gaining root. You'd better be sure that the user's password is *always* transmitted/used in a secure manner. No TLS-less *anything*.
@hlindqvist i have been slightly surprised by how many people told me they like their complicated sudo setups, but they tend to be 1990s university sysadmins, which is much less surprising
Pharmacies in Portugal (verified) and Spain (unverified) will often sell oestrogen HRT over the counter to tourists without a prescription. If you watch Ryanair prices, you could day trip there for £50 or less.
This will likely be cheaper and potentially safer than using an internet pharmacy.
@Siguza Like, I’m frequently named personally by connected TERFs in the UK as the trans woman they hate the most, and I use FAO/STN like it’s a city bus. I’m at the, “oh, you again, hi! Usual in flight meal?” stage with some of the cabin crew and I can confirm that UK Border Force find me wholly and entirely uninteresting. They are looking for some people. They aren’t looking for us.
(As in on Wednesday, I was in my own kitchen in the UK, making tea, exactly 40 minutes after the Ryanair flight I had been on touched its wheels to the ground and engaged its brakes. Barely broke stride for the border).
@Siguza And as for the usual in flight meal thing, the green chicken curry on Ryanair is surprisingly good, and also gluten free. It’s my meal plan for Sunday, when I will be eating one about 10km above the Bay of Biscay.
The “recommended legal max” was mentioned to me by the Thai doctor I visited because I don't have the energy to fill out all the forms in the UK, let alone wait that many years.
There may have been a misunderstanding I dunno.
It sounds like maybe I'm one of those folk who struggles with estradiol valerate as my level was 60-something I think and they said the 'target level' for a trans woman was 100.
I bought 6 months' worth of E before I left Thailand though so I'll stick with that for now.
Do you know if estradiol hemihydrate is available in Thailand? If my levels aren't great in November, maybe I can ask to go on those.
@StuffByBez the 8mg limit tends to be what the NHS and UK private providers stick with. There are patches/gel you could try. Different people react differently.
@StuffByBez @jen To my understanding this is mostly if you use overly high doses, which is sadly kinda common because medical professionals are idiots and often don’t take into account that E is an anti-androgen and prescribe full 50mg pills.
The linked document is being circulated amongst NHS service providers for young trans people. It advises cessation of ALL medical intervention for transition but goes further. It suggests that if the patient or parents continue to access trans healthcare outside their system, they should be reported to social services with the implicit threat that the children will be taken from their parents.
IF YOU ARE A YOUNG TRANS PERSON OR A PARENT OF ONE, IT IS LIKELY UNSAFE TO ENGAGE WITH NHS MENTAL HEALTH SERVICES.
@JamieR Exact same experience here. CAMHS recommended some group Zoom sessions but that's about it. I got the impression they were so overstretched, if the kid wasn't an immediate self harm risk they just didn't have the resources to do anything. We are also now going private but it sucks for the many people out there for whom that's not an option 🙁
@ian I think they do what they can, within limits, to meet bare minimum standard … if they get 6 months to respond to something, they’ll take 6 months, which is why they process with them could be 5 years before anything significant happens.
Yes, those fortunate enough can take the easier route and pay to go private, but I genuinely fear for those that don’t have that luxury, it’s heartbreaking
@grayface_ghost @StrangeNoises @cstross You're giving the British public more credit than they deserve,don't forget these are the people that gave the albino orang utan and 80 odd seat majority to do with as he wished to which he started wrecking the country. Mags happened on both sides of the Atlantic ocean we've gotta make sure it doesn't happen on this side again.
@sesquipedality I did vote for a police commissioner this time, though often I spoil the ballot. I've been less worried since it became clear they do nothing at all. But I should get back into the habit of spoiling.
I probably shouldn't have been told this, so I won't name names, but I've heard some hilarious Police Commissioner spoils from counters, from people venting about the police and their conduct to votes for Inspectors Morse, Frost, and Clouseau: it's a bit of an art-form, apparently, particularly for that particular post.
Since apparently some of my friends are unaware, these are the things that are bothering me and other UK trans people: theguardian.com/society/2024/a… - the UK government’s latest transphobic shit. 1/3
#ukpol #transphobiarcgp.org.uk/representing-you/p… - GPs’ representative body calling for end to shared care with the private sector, and restricting their role in other aspects of trans healthcare. 3/3
Like, there’s this person who I barely knew existed until I heard that they are now on a multi year deep dive obsession with me making a post saying that getting rid of TERFs was akin to getting rid of bedbugs.
I didn’t name this person; I had no fucking idea that they existed, until I started hearing on the grapevine that they are habitually walking around showing screenshots from this server and complaining that “Sarah said I am like bedbugs and pubic lice”. Bit self-important, but whatever.
Apparently recently they presented it as justification for their revolting behaviour towards trans women. “Sarah, who doesn’t know me, said mean things about a group of people which I took to include me, based on my own evaluation of my own behaviour, and I am now VERY OFFENDED”.
Ok, so here’s the thing:
I know you’re almost certainly reading this because you’re obsessed with m
Like, there’s this person who I barely knew existed until I heard that they are now on a multi year deep dive obsession with me making a post saying that getting rid of TERFs was akin to getting rid of bedbugs.
I didn’t name this person; I had no fucking idea that they existed, until I started hearing on the grapevine that they are habitually walking around showing screenshots from this server and complaining that “Sarah said I am like bedbugs and pubic lice”. Bit self-important, but whatever.
Apparently recently they presented it as justification for their revolting behaviour towards trans women. “Sarah, who doesn’t know me, said mean things about a group of people which I took to include me, based on my own evaluation of my own behaviour, and I am now VERY OFFENDED”.
Ok, so here’s the thing:
I know you’re almost certainly reading this because you’re obsessed with me. I fled the country to avoid people like you, so yeah, I don’t like you much. I think you’re objectively terrible human beings. You’re worse than my mother in law, and she steals tips off of restaurant tables.
And the fact that you’re still letting this live rent free in your head months and months, going into years later, and that people you think are your friends are laughing at you for it and then telling me about it, is clearly something that’s bothering you.
So I’m going to try and offer you a bit of insight, and maybe you might find it helpful. I dunno.
Anyway, were some random TERF to liken me to pubic lice or bedbugs, even if they specifically named me (and I sure as fuck didn’t do that; I’m not stupid), I know exactly what I’d feel:
NOTHING
Absolutely nothing. The fuck should I care what some random arsehole I don’t respect thinks about me? It’s not like I’m relying on their opinion for anything.
Maybe if I thought they had a point, I might be upset, and dwell on it tho.
@Alisdair Calder McGregor aaaaasanyway, must dash. Got a subtropical sunset to watch over my citrus trees, safe in the knowledge that I have no pubic lice.
Bottom line, anyone who protested as a student knows you simply don't have the education and sophistication to really understand the complexities of the Middle East.
In contrast, I look forward to the predominantly male Supreme Court ruling on women's bodies.
So I've got a VCR that I can control over serial. If I got a second one, I could stick tapes into them and cross-wire them so that each plays into the other. I could then set up a program to record from tape 1 onto tape 2, then back from tape 2 to tape 1. Attach a capture device and I can get video files of each generation.
Then we just watch the generational loss compound.
sounds like a good opportunity to get a linear editing controller and experience what it was like to edit video back in the good old days (and why everyone switched to non-linear editing as soon as the hardware became affordable and the software caught up).
As you likely know, Brexit import checks start in earnest on Tuesday... but at facilities which are (mostly) inland; in the case of Dover 22 miles inland....
Now, of course most shippers can be trusted to drive those 22 miles for a check, and then either 'enter' the UK or drive 22 miles back with their refused shipment....
Hmmmm.... so that 44 miles of driving when, for the less scrupulous, a little bit of clandestine unloading could take place... this is a system built to be circumvented!
Ha! I escaped Kent fifty years ago and rarely venture back so I can’t say with certainty. It was all far more bucolic in my day. Jack Hargreaves rendered in chalk and hop fields.
I understood that most of the testing locations are at the ports. The exception, and it's a major one, is Sevington, which is 22 miles inland from Dover, our busiest port. FWIW it wouldn't need a roundtrip, as Sevington is near Ashford, Kent, just off the M20. I suppose they could use ANR to track the lorries going to Sevington, and pick up any doing illicit diversions, but I don't think they are. But as it is, no one, apart from our Govt, thinks this is a good idea.
It’s the stupidity of the Solcitor Generals actions that terrify me the most. If they are willing to be so obviously wrong to secure a conviction it’s hard to know where they will stop.
Great article. I remember jury equity from my undergraduate law degree thirty years ago. I did not go on to practice and haven't thought about it since - I didn't know it was controversial and might have assumed it was part of jury swearing-in. The case will surely stand as a monument to a delusional Solicitor General who thought they might achieve anything other than being slapped down by a gleeful judge?
The Trudi Warner #contempt case brings to mind a significant so-called 'perverse' verdict from 1991.
Michael #Randle and Patrick #Pottle were charged with helping a spy escape from prison in 1963.
The judge told the jury the defendants had no defence. The jury knew they were guilty - the pair admitted it in a book - and yet the jury unanimously found them not guilty.
My language learning web page (linguno.com) has gone all political today on this 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal. This means I know how to say "I will abolish the death penalty".
I have got literally the happiest thing in the history of everything ever for you today! And that is no exaggeration whatsoever! In fact it is an understatement! Here is My Baby Goat! Get the mp3 f…
Suppose you are the judge in the fictitious case of Djarin v Skywalker. The parties each seek a child arrangements "live with" order in respect of a child, G. How would you apply the welfare checklist in s1(3) of the Children Act 1989?
"The hearing was entirely conducted remotely by Zoom" says this judgment*. I wonder in some future era this will make as much sense as discussion of stannary courts or writing things down on vellum.
"Zoom", hmm, let me see: "magnification, especially with the aid of optics". Well, it was at the time of the great illness, so probably they were sat in different buildings and using telephoto lenses.
It could just be that those people do not understand and could use some guidance instead of being categorized into a hateful group that are against trans.
I stopped asking questions about trans people after being totally put down, made fun of and categorized because I just didnt know something and evidently was stupid enough to ask.
Im an ally to humanity. I am good with ANYTHING you want to be. I do not care. But I do not publicly support or ask questions because every time I do Im treated like shit.
So there is that side of the coin too.
Now I fully expect everyone to come yelling at me for posting my cishet feelings, since my feelings no longer matter since I seem to be unfortunately average.
Publication on the wonderful EULawAnalysis blog, together with @Frederik_Borgesius: a short analysis of the Podchasov v. Russia case of the ECHR. This is an important case for the role of encryption for the protection of privacy (Article 8).
🤢Oh geez. Sorry for TMI, but Meiselas is reporting this:
Meiselas: What I’m hearing from credible sources is that Donald #Trump is actually farting in the courtroom… I’m hearing it from actual credible people that as he’s kind of falling asleep, he’s actually passing gas and that his lawyers are really struggling with the smell. #TrumpTrial
Incredible research at BlackHat Asia today by Tong Liu and team from the Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences (在iie.ac.cn 的电子邮件经过验证)
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!
TL;DR: The most popular chat-assisted app frameworks aren't even doing basic process sandboxing or sane file/network isolation. We are still very much in the early infancy of security maturity with current gen LLMs.
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.
Welcome. I was able to keep up with the old server on a different app before I had an official presence on Pagan Plus. I always enjoyed both your posts and your alt text. Great to see you here!
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.
@lispi314 @indigoparadox PuTTY on any platform, actually. PuTTY can run on Unix too, though it's less popular there. And its ECDSA signing code is the same wherever it's running.
Independent implementations such as OpenSSH aren't affected, that's correct.
@lispi314 @indigoparadox Am I paranoid when I connect this vulnerability with the xz-backdoor? To get the private keys an attacker needs access to ssh-servers, which the xz-backdoor could have provided. So it's imaginable that the group behind the backdoor found the ecdsa-sha2-nistp521 problem and thought: "how make the most of it"?
Off the top of my head I'd guess the number of P521 users is _relatively_ small. As another commenter pointed out, it's never been PuTTY's default; and generally the NIST curves seem to have mostly gone out of fashion these days, in favour of Ed25519.
So I doubt this was _all_ the xz backdoor actors were after. It doesn't seem worth all the effort by itself. But it could have been one thing on their shopping list.
@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 – 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.
@anonymous236 I'm sorry to say that I don't know anything about ArcosPutty or its version numbers. You'd have to ask its own maintainers which version of upstream PuTTY it's based on, or what fixes they've applied.
To read the UK media you’d think Cameron was swooping in to sort the mess Brexit left Gibraltar in. Talking to a Gibraltarian friend though he didn’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 Línea just over the border.
Musing on nationality and locality. Gibraltar, where I am right now, is a very strange place. It tries so hard to be British: literally the first thing you see when you step out of the border post is a red telephone box. The street furniture is British, the pedestrian crossings are the “WAIT until signal shows” type… and yet the driving is on the right and speed limits are 50kph. The feel of the place makes me want to go into foreign language mode and yet everything’s in English and the accents are mostly those of bits of the UK.
The aggressive Englishness is in the food too. Everywhere is desperate to sell British Fish and Chips, and on Sunday all the pubs do a Sunday roast. The policemen routinely wear old style helmets.
Compare La Linea just over the border, which is assertively Spanish. Little or nothing is translated into English on menus etc. and the waiters have only a little English. This is quite a contrast with Portugal where basically everyone under 50 has functional English. In the context of the competing claims to Gibraltar, thoug
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Musing on nationality and locality. Gibraltar, where I am right now, is a very strange place. It tries so hard to be British: literally the first thing you see when you step out of the border post is a red telephone box. The street furniture is British, the pedestrian crossings are the “WAIT until signal shows” type… and yet the driving is on the right and speed limits are 50kph. The feel of the place makes me want to go into foreign language mode and yet everything’s in English and the accents are mostly those of bits of the UK.
The aggressive Englishness is in the food too. Everywhere is desperate to sell British Fish and Chips, and on Sunday all the pubs do a Sunday roast. The policemen routinely wear old style helmets.
Compare La Linea just over the border, which is assertively Spanish. Little or nothing is translated into English on menus etc. and the waiters have only a little English. This is quite a contrast with Portugal where basically everyone under 50 has functional English. In the context of the competing claims to Gibraltar, though, it feels like an assertion of “we’re Spanish, cope with it”.
The atmosphere of the two places differs hugely too. Gibraltar has wavered when I’ve been here between a bit dead and utterly heaving when a cruise ship is in town. La Linea has this constant buzz and hubbub of people sitting and chatting outside in many street cafes. Everybody seems to be meeting someone and catching up.
The last observation is that when we’re at sea in Gibraltar bay, Jebel Musa in Morocco is clearly visible, closer to Gibraltar than England is to France. And yet Africa is somehow (in the popular mind anyway) distant and different.
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 advertisements—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.
Not with a bang but with the delivery of an item we don't recall ordering or ever even seeing because our AI ad-sistant decided that people who liked buying things also bought this.
What is the item? It's a faster server for our ad-sistant.
@Grimblob Radioactive glow-in-the-dark dental implants, right? Or maybe a USB-powered snake-egg incubator (comes with seven free random snake eggs! Exciting fun for all the family!) or an electric bread-chewing machine (for when the radioactive dental implant causes your jawbone to rot until it falls off).
In one of the earliest scenes, Tennison Tarb gets hit by the most advanced form of advertising and becomes hooked on Moka-Colas. He gets more and more hooked - there's a nasty scene where he tried to deny that he ordered some large number of these drinks, and is shown his signature on each purchase.
Later he goes through a horrifying detox, phase one of which is described in great detail, and he is repeatedly told...
@TomSwirly @ianturton Ahem: I too have written a book that Tor, for inexplicable reasons, mispunctuated the title of so it came out as THE MERCHANTS’ WAR. And it does not have a sequel titled THE SPACE MERCHANTS.
xanna
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