⊥ᵒᵚ Cᵸᵎᶺᵋᶫ∸ᵒᵘ ☑️ @falken@social.cleverlibre.org

You know you’re getting older when the names of online services become nouns before you get around to finding out what they are.

The gates at the entrance to the church in the town I used to live in are falling apart. I know this because there is a GoFundMe appeal looking for... twelve thousand pounds... to replace the gates.

I cannot help but wonder if those people donating couldn't consider giving the money to a cause whose parent organisation doesn't have £10.3 billion of investments under management?

Just feels like there might be more deserving organisations, who, you know, don't have more than the GDP of Kosovo.

I love my smart TV. I love the way it takes a long time to boot up because it's trying to refresh the advertisements on the home screen. I delight in the way it randomly restarts because it's downloaded an update without asking me, each of which makes the TV slower and slower with every subsequent install. I adore the way it buries the apps that I want to use, and that I use without fail every single time, below the apps that it's being paid to promote and which I have never touched in my life and would never use without the cold metal of a glock pressed hard against my sweating temple. I am infinitely thrilled by the way the interface lags constantly, due to the need to have one thousand unnecessary animations rendered on hardware ripped wholesale from a ten year old phone. I feel myself borne aloft on wings of pure joy when I am notified that my data will be collected and analysed to determine my useage patterns. Even now I am writing this from a field of beautiful flowers and soft luscious grass as I lie and look up happily at the bright blue sky, smiling happily to know that this is the future of technology

Voter ID in England led to racial and disability discrimination, report finds:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/11/voter-id-in-england-led-to-racial-and-disability-discrimination-report-finds

Science v. Religion

Heart racing, I run, the slapping of webbed feet just behind me. I stumble twice, but reach the car and slam the door, howling in triumph. Turning the key, I’m greeted with a dry clicking sound. The blood freezes in my veins. From outside the window, I hear a dark, throaty laugh.

A note to American authors, especially of fiction set in the UK :
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

Using 'hard' as a signifier of alcoholic makes English speakers laugh because it is so stupid.

"Cider" is ALWAYS alcoholic, if it wasn't it would just be apple juice!

You don't call wine 'hard grape juice' or beer 'hard hopped malt liquid' so why do it for fermented apple juice? It just makes you look silly.

Just stop!

The Truth is Out There: The X-Files started 30 years ago today with the aptly-named "Pilot"!

It's hard to believe that it's already been 30 years since I was hooked on what quickly became my favorite series of the 1990s (even though I gave up before the end of the first run).

And to think that the alien episodes were accompanied by so many fantastic, quality one-off stories. It was fascinating throughout my teenage years.

By the way, Tooms should be back in 2023.

#Babylon5 #TheRoadHome

My motivational phone lock screen

It’s not just about selling you ads.

Ex: you’re a teenager living in a highly conservative state. You’re visiting sites your ultra religious family don’t want you to. Google tracks you NATIVELY IN THE BROWSER and informs 3rd parties of your interest in LGBTQ sites.

You’re NOT SAFE using Chrome.

This is very interesting: https://bun.sh/blog/bun-v1.0

It’s sad to hear #ChaimTopol’s died, it really is.

SF fans of a certain Age will remember him in #FlashGordon … but his signature role was as #Tevye in #FiddlerOnTheRoof

#DoYouLoveMe has to be THE song from the piece …

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_y9F5St4j0

Ridiculed at first, "Flash Gordon" has become a campy cult classic, and Sam J. Jones talks about getting the role and making the film.

https://www.hollywoodoutbreak.com/2022/01/31/flash-in-the-pan-sam-j-jones-on-making-the-cult-classic/

#SamJJones #FlashGordon #CultClassic #80smovies #80s #movies #Movienews #entertainmentnews #entertainment #Film #Celebritynews

Since I've seen a lot of chatter about people switching to #Firefox as Google ramps up the enshitification of #Chrome, let me tell you about a killer feature for people who (a) need multiple accounts on the same websites (eg. devs) or specifically (b) have to use multiple Google accounts.

Firefox has an official addon called Multi Account Containers that lets you trivially set up color coded tabs that have separate sets of cookies. Log into your dev account in one, and your test account in another. Log into your personal #gmail in one and have another tab next to it with your work Gmail. I'm actually not signed in to any Google accounts in most my tabs, I just have containers for the specific tasks I do on Google products.

It'll take you 30 seconds to set up.

Add-on: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/multi-account-containers/

Mozilla's explanation: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/containers

NASA finally admits what everyone already knows: SLS is unaffordable

"At current cost levels the SLS program is unsustainable."

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/nasa-finally-admits-what-everyone-already-knows-sls-is-unaffordable/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social

This is absolutely crazy stuff. Chinese hackers were able to get into a bunch of government email accounts by forging Microsoft access tokens, but how it happened is wild.

Apparently an internal Microsoft system responsible for signing consumer access tokens crashed, then a bug in the crash dump generator caused the secret key to be written to the crash dump. Microsoft's secondary system for detecting sensitive data in crash dumps also failed, allowing the crash dump to be moved from an isolated network to the corporate one. The Chinese hackers compromised a Microsoft engineer's account and were able to get a hold of the crash dump. They were not only able to find the key and figure out that it's responsible for signing consumer access tokens, but were also able to exploit a software bug to use it to sign enterprise access tokens too, basically giving them the keys to the kingdom.

So many security system had to fail for this to happen. Either the hackers were very lucky or extremely patient.

https://msrc.microsoft.com/blog/2023/09/results-of-major-technical-investigations-for-storm-0558-key-acquisition/

It's true.