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in reply to d a t green

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.


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".
in reply to kæt

@kæt In 1974 Eurovision had already been and gone on the 6th April! But Portugal's entry was played 50 years ago at 22:55
@kæt
in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@Alexandra Lanes @kæt Amusing AF to consider that it was up against Waterloo.
in reply to Sarah Brown

@goatsarah I remember watching a replay of that contest, I don't remember it (but then again, I don't remember any except Waterloo).

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

@sundogplanets ob https://rathergood.com/2015/09/10/my-baby-goat/

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


"babe, the upside down peas aren't real, they can't hurt you"
upside down peas:
in reply to tiddy roosevelt tiddy roosevelt reshared this.

everybody's laughing but peas only do this when they're stressed
in reply to tiddy roosevelt

Oh no, they are back. I gotta move somewhere they can't follow.


Is Grogu Gillick-competent? Do they have Cafcass in a galaxy far, far away?

Sion [main] reshared this.



Fantasy problem questions...

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?

in reply to Alexandra Lanes

the no order principle applies -making no order is definitely better than being lightsabered in two by an adorable moppet.
This entry was edited (3 days ago)

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.



Re A (A Minor)

In this key case, the judges were in a chord.



No, no, I get it: glass is a terrible material for ceilings.


"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.

* [2020] EWHC 1238 (Fam)

in reply to Alexandra Lanes Alexandra Lanes reshared this.

"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.

Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Cass report: there’s a useful phrase in politics for the kind of thing that it is: policy based evidence making.

in reply to Ian Smith

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.

in reply to EarthMomma


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


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).

For our analysis and some short comments, see the blog post: https://eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/2024/04/podchasov-v-russia-european-court-of.html

Thanks for publishing @StevePeers!

#encryption #humanrights

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🤢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

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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 (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!

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.


Or the worst. 😎
This entry was edited (6 days ago)

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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.
in reply to Fesshole 🧻

well played. Alexa has no business being present for confidential meetings about personal finances.


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.


Alexandra Lanes reshared this.


Dual layer VHS.

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in reply to NanoRaptor

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

@catsalad @bourgwick
💀 Deadheads jumped on these for portable audio recordings in the “tapers sections” 📼 at shows in the mid 1980s
https://heads.social/@bourgwick/112282298345332159


according to lore, the 1st unofficial tapers’ section after front-of-house engineer dan healy melts down after seeing “around 100 tapers” blocking his view from the soundboard & orders them to set up behind him. [3/6]

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 🦇Jennie🏳️‍🌈

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!


Exhausted. Going to take a quick nap before attempting to write this essay that’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 – 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 – patch welcome!

in reply to Simon Tatham

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


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.




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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 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.

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 it’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 haven’t got a constitution because it is not written down is like saying your washing machine doesn’t exist because you haven’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: “I’ll be five minutes”

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 😂

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 they’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 don’t really feel like anything, that they just change your body and nothing else. Nothing is further from the truth.

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

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in reply to zip (happy halloween 2024!)

But say I’m wrong. Perhaps there’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 we’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. It’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. I’m sorry to be tedious, but I’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 can’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 isn’t going to happen to any significant extent though.

As you were.

Unknown parent

kæt

@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. 😀


After about the first night or so it’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.

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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.

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in reply to Simon Tatham

I don’t have an ubuntu machine at the moment, but I’m guessing it’s this ?

https://github.com/busyloop/lolcat

Probably not useful ever, but it’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 “plane’s here, pile on”. 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 don’t know whether I’m just narrow or always choose extra legroom but I’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 (2 weeks ago)