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, thereās 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 didnāt 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 āSarah said I am like bedbugs and pubic liceā. Bit self-important, but whatever.
Apparently recently they presented it as justification for their revolting behaviour towards trans women. āSarah, who doesnāt 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 OFFENDEDā.
Ok, so hereās the thing:
I know youāre almost certainly reading this because youāre obsessed with me. I fled the country to avoid people like you, so yeah, I donāt like you much. I think youāre objectively terrible human beings. Youāre worse than my mother in law, and she steals tips off of restaurant tables.
And the fact that youāre 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 thatās bothering you.
So Iām 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 didnāt do that; Iām not stupid), I know exactly what Iād feel:
NOTHING
Absolutely nothing. The fuck should I care what some random arsehole I donāt respect thinks about me? Itās not like Iām 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!
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.
Itās 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 itās 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 fā¦
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.
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).
š¤¢Oh geez. Sorry for TMI, but Meiselas is reporting this:
Meiselas: What Iām hearing from credible sources is that Donald #Trump is actually farting in the courtroomā¦ Iām hearing it from actual credible people that as heās kind of falling asleep, heās 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 (åØiie.ac.cn ēēµåé®ä»¶ē»čæéŖčÆ)
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 ā 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 youād think Cameron was swooping in to sort the mess Brexit left Gibraltar in. Talking to a Gibraltarian friend though he didnāt 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 LĆnea 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 āWAIT until signal showsā typeā¦ 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 everythingās 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 āweāre Spanish, cope with itā.
The atmosphere of the two places differs hugely too. Gibraltar has wavered when Iāve 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 weāre 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 advertisementsāgenerated 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 MERCHANTSā WAR. And it does not have a sequel titled THE SPACE MERCHANTS.
Asserting we havenāt got a constitution because it is not written down is like saying your washing machine doesnāt exist because you havenāt got the manual
No, it is like everybody is operating their washing machines with multi-generational trial-and-error knowledge which differs between local (sub)cultures.
That seems like a confused metaphor. Surely it would be more apposite to say it's like saying your washing machine MANUAL doesnāt exist because it's been cut into lots of different sized and shaped pieces and scattered around the house.
the problem of āundocumented codeā is ubiquitous in software. Which makes it hard to distinguish from āit was meant to do this and we mustnāt break itā from āit shouldnāt do that and if we fix it people will be gratefulā or āwe donāt quite know what it does -or why it seemed to work in the pastā
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.
"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.
That's not my stance, in the slightest. But if you're going to make rigid rules that insist on individual's brains having the capability of a 'fully developed' one, then you can't ignore the fact that this development can be 'reversed' due to the consequences of age.
Why? Well, if you're a species who likes familiarity and safety, you're at risk of stagnation. But if certain members of your population, particularly ones in their physical prime, tend to reject the norms and wander off to try new things, that'll stave off stagnation
The risk-taking, emotive, exploratory, parent-rejecting tendencies of adolescents are seen in many social species, not just human. Unless it's the mother and father of all wild coincidences, this shows that teen brains are *meant* to do what they do.
Teens in particular get a lot of stick for this. Their rebelliousness, they're highly-emotional nature, it's seen as proof they have something 'wrong' with their brains, because they're immature
The opposite is true. Their brains are doing exactly what they evolved to do
If having a brain functioning at its peak is a requirement of making important decisions, then it's probably more important to have a *maximum* age limit than a minimum. Because the older you are, the more your brain wears out
If under-25s are too neurologically underdeveloped to make decisions that affect their body and wellbeing, then that rules out all career athletes under that age. You can't possibly let a 18 year old take up a sport that comes with significant concussion risk, surely?
Once you're over 45 your brain's completely calcified.
It's basically just a lump of granite that replays songs from your teenage years while you still think of technology in terms of the poorly-scripted Sci-Fi TV you still own on DVD.
Definitely can't be trusted to vote on any new issues (i.e. 'any issues at all') once you lose all ability to develop beyond the thinking of the previous century.
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 š
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 theyāre 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.
People seem to think that hormones fundamentally donāt really feel like anything, that they just change your body and nothing else. Nothing is further from the truth.
Getting on HRT when youāre trans feels like youāve been wearing shoes two sizes too small for your entire life and youāve just got a pair that fits. Getting on HRT when youāre not has the opposite effect: instead youāre taking a drug that will cause crushing depression. Itās even on the side effects list!
But say Iām wrong. Perhaps thereās 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.
I kind of forgot while saying this that in their mythology weāre 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. Itās always self-led. How dare you accuse us of the same monstrosity that you are so determinedly perpetrating yourselves.
Dear UK residents. Iām sorry to be tedious, but Iām 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 canāt 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 isnāt going to happen to any significant extent though.
I'm in my mid-30s now. I started HRT aged 19, had my mastectomy aged 20, hysterectomy aged 22 and phalloplasty aged 23. It was the best decision ever and I am sure I wouldn't be here if that hadn't been an option. There's no way I, aged 18 and suffering from crippling dysphoria, could have gone on another 7 years without medical care. The UK's plans to ban transition until age 25 makes me feel sick. It feels like an assault on my very existence.
@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.
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.
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