Dаn̈ıel Раršlow 🥧 @pieist@social.cleverlibre.org

@RollingStone The jokes about Lot's daughters write themselves

@JohnShirley2023 @kissane In that situation, the company that manufactures the paper Mr Jones uses wouldn't be in a position to cut off his supply, and it really wouldn't fall to them to police him.

In the same way, Eugene Rochko literally cannot stop others from using his software. He can only say "I won't carry anything that comes from your instance and I might even go so far as to block other instances that do." But he can't stop them using it.

@JohnShirley2023 @kissane

Founder Eugene Rochko has made a number of policy statements on what he will and won't blanket ban on the instances he controls. For example, he decided not to blanket-ban Gab, which is a right-wing site forked from Mastodon. I'm in no position to summarize his reasoning. Don't know much about who administers your instance. There's some info on his/her profile: https://mastodon.cloud/@TheAdmin

@JohnShirley2023 @kissane

Other instances can shut them out. The bigger, better known ones tend to cooperate on this, particularly the ones operated by Mastodon project.

But unfortunately as Erin points out, there are no controls on who downloads open source software -- there almost by definition can't be.

@JohnShirley2023 @kissane

Your instance can block them. Looks like it doesn't block very many, though:

https://mastodon.cloud/about/more

But Mastodon as a whole is just a software project that's freely redistributable. It's effectively impossible to stop an instance from being created which allows anything. Other instances and individuals can refuse to federate with them, and that's basically how that's handled.

@JohnShirley2023 @kissane

Mastodon as such isn't in a position to forbid anything, really. Your instance's home page will tell you what they'll block another instance for and what instances they're blocking. I'm on one that errs on the side of letting users do it themselves.

@kissane @JohnShirley2023 I was going to say the guy's just a shitposter, then I looked at the site's front page. Definitely for the ignore list unless your time and attention have no value.

@JohnShirley2023 This is exactly the sort of thing that right-wing state legislatures are trying to make it illegal to teach.

If an astrophysicist says "the stars are but pinpricks in the dome of night through which the light of heaven can be seen", then it's perfectly reasonable for you, as a reasonably informed layperson, to tell him he's either lying or delusional.

An academic credential in the area someone's lying about doesn't make lies true.

@JohnShirley2023 (Also, "wrought" which means "worked" or "made" [see "wright"] but not something you do to havoc. That'd be wreaked.)

@JohnShirley2023

Or inchoate, as if it meant some kind of portmanteau of chaotic and incoherent, which it doesn't. And dont' get me started on "begs the question", which is simply a translation of petitio principii, and not as they suppose a way of saying "makes you wonder".

@ottocrat @royalastrosoc

I really enjoyed the High Definition Earth Viewing experiment, where for several years the ISS had four Earth-facing cameras: one looking ahead, one straight down and, for some reason, two behind, and a continuous live stream that cycled between them at fairly long intervals. Used to leave it on a spare monitor sometimes. You'd get the most breathtaking views sometimes.

(The stream's still active but just one camera looking straight down, and not always on.)

@tronic
It's a bit like people who try to use "common sense" as an argument about things radically outside of any human frame of reference: as if your evolved instincts had anything to tell you about, say, quantum mechanics or relativity.

"I don't believe in the big bang! How can you get something from nothing?"

Well, let's start by breaking down your assumption that your notions of "something" and "nothing" are in any way useful here...

@JohnShirley2023

#NotTheOnion
#NotEvenMcSweeneys

Not only was that asteroid the size of a bus, the wait for it was nearly as long.

Also, we just barely missed it so there's that as well.

Your accent is always the correct one.

OTOH I can just put basic http auth in front of it. I mean that's double-authentication the first time but one can just save that login and never see it again in any given browser.

... aaaand done.

So I've done something I didn't want to do: deployed a PHP-based webmail client on my server. There doesn't seem to be a stable, currently-maintained webmail client that isn't PHP.

Sure, enough, less than one day later, the logs are filled with attempts to run PHP remote exploits against it from all over the world.

Yes, I'm running an updated PHP: version 8.1 But am I really supposed to just assume that any and all attacks will fail? PHP has a TERRIBLE security record: historically it's more attack surface than functionality.

So I'm probably going to have to compromise and write something along the lines of the old port-knocking trick to enable the webmail interface when I need it, and turn it off again when I'm done.

I'm still boggled by the fact that nobody ever considers using a serious professional platform designed for grownups when writing webmail clients.

@clackable@mstdn.social @JohnShirley2023 I like the notion, derived somewhat from @gregeganSF's "Permutation City", that from one moment to the next we find ourselves in a universe that's capable of explaining our existence. In this manner I expect subjectively to live forever, if perhaps for increasingly improbable reasons.