A lot of "I don't want to talk about politics" is wanting to avoid the conversations about who gets to be respected and who must volunteer as a sacrifice. Who gets the benefit of the doubt. Who gets second chances. Who gets the presumption of innocence and leniency based on circumstance and their "promising future". Who gets to fear for their life and act out in violence to protect it.
These are the places where people's existence is "politics" in ways they don't get to opt out of.
Russia is spying on Telegram chats in occupied Ukrainian regions
@pkedrosky @anildash will be interested to see if that holds.
i tell this story all the time, but i talked to a CIO at one point who said, "i got locked in to Windows, didn't like it, and then it happened again with VMware. that's not happening a third time."
i asked if he was using AWS, he said yes. i asked which services.
"hmm, let me think. DynamoDB, ECS, Kinesis, Redshift, a bunch of other services. why?"
I did a writeup of the #Rackspace breach https://doublepulsar.com/rackspace-cloud-office-suffers-security-breach-958e6c755d7f
#Rackspace have a 12 hour and counting outage on their managed Exchange Server infrastructure. It might just be an IT issue, but a quick thread on something I noticed cybersecurity wise 🧵
This week, LastPass, and its parent company GoTo, both published blog posts about their recent data breach: http://tcrn.ch/3ucMvBx
But if you search for GoTo's blog post in Google, you won't find it, because GoTo hid its breach notice from search engines using "noindex" code.
RT @juliaioffe@twitter.com
That island of darkness right above the black blob of the Black Sea is Ukraine. It is dark because Russia has taken out over 50% of its energy infrastructure. And that blob of bright light to its northeast is Moscow, where people live in comfort while their gvt kills Ukrainians.
🐦🔗: https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/1597650383366918144
Mastodon architecture question
Am I right in thinking that Mastodon servers download and store their own copy of every image and video that is posted by any user in the wider Mastodon network that's followed by at least one member of that server?
Anyone know the history and rationale behind that design decision?
My guess is it's about privacy, predictable client performance and avoiding undue traffic load on source servers, but it has some pretty hefty costs too - would love to understand more
I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it
The "Weird Old Book Finder"
Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: https://weird-old-book-finder.glitch.me
Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just *start readin'*
Can't promise every book will be weird, but most are
A longer essay on how/why I developed it: https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4
This was a search for "mastodon"
Mastodon stampede. "Federation" now apparently means "DDoS yourself." Every time I do a new blog post, within a second I have over a thousand simultaneous hits of that URL on my web server from unique IPs. Load goes over 100, and mariadb stops...
https://jwz.org/b/yj6w
Cricut cutting machines, ubiquitous in schools, libraries and makerspaces, can be used to make embossed or stenciled tactile graphics. A Braille embosser costs at least $1500 — Cricuts cost a fifth of that or less. Today I learned that I can handle the hardware and make great stencils: all that holds a Blind maker back is a set of unlabeled controls in the software. Does anyone know somebody at Cricut I could talk to about making the interface more accessible? Boosters beloved on this one!
It's an interesting time in Alberta politics where the provincial government is trying to make us mad at the federal government ruining our economy while we also have a huge budget surplus but also we're opening temporary portable waiting areas at a children's hospital while it's being overrun with infectious diseases that municipal governments and school boards aren't allowed to do anything about.
I am on YouTube. I invite you to follow my work there:
https://www.youtube.com/GurdeepPandher
****
https://www.youtube.com/GurdeepPandher
I'll be honest here, as a humble instance admin receiving all kinds of DMs and emails...
The abuse, excessive reports... folks our instance grew from 60 users to 22000 in the span of two weeks. I didn't expect to suddenly commit 6-8 hours of my day to this. Knowing I have other commitments like a day job and other things.
I'm burning the candle on both ends here. Look at this toot timestamp. Please save space for some patience.
Y'all clearly don't remember this image:
RT @mgeist@twitter.com
Not a surprise, but still disappointing. Canada makes copyright term extension official. Term extended to life + 70 years as of December 30th.
New works entering the public domain lost for a generation.
https://orders-in-council.canada.ca/attachment.php?attach=42842&lang=en
Buying votes is the classic Alberta conservative strategy from Ralph bucks until today. The messed up thing is it usually works. #abpolitics #abpoli
Facts, not wishful thinking.
🇨🇦