ijk64✅ @ijk64@m.futex.au

Microsoft Corp. issued software updates to plug more than 70 security holes in its Windows operating systems and related products, including multiple zero-day vulnerabilities currently being exploited in the wild. https://krebsonsecurity.com/2023/08/microsoft-patch-tuesday-august-2023-edition/

We only get one starship. We have to look after it.

Space travel takes a long time...

(Credit to originator. Non-attributed image grabbed from Instagram.)
#Space #Cooperation #climatechange #ClimateChange #

Another totally boring evening in the Sonoran Desert

Quick factcheck on zoom changing T&Cs to allow them to use your calls to train algorithms. Result: yup.

Voyager 2 Is Alive and Well!

For those of you wringing your hands for the last few days over the silence of one of the fabled Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977 to the outer solar system & beyond, you can chill now.

After finding a faint signal coming from Voyager 2 despite its mis-orientation, #NASA made an attempt to communicate with the spacecraft. And it worked!!

Read on & be happy that we'll be hearing from deep space for some time to come.

https://tinyurl.com/3x3ar85n
#science #space

Escher would have been proud of this...

When you're hired as "IT manager," just to realize you're the only IT person to babysit all servers and devs. 😒

@MissingThePt

😂 😂 😂

Best. Edit notification. Ever.

If you ever wanted an extraordinarily in-depth look at how a #bicycle works (physics-wise) have I got the article for you.

https://ciechanow.ski/bicycle/

#cycling

"What are your top 12 #programming books?"

Me: 🤔

People often talk about their “ideal weight”.

I’m not sure what that means, but not much talk, say, of their “ideal competence” or “ideal wealth” or “ideal curiosity”.

“Don’t delegate tasks, delegate ownership” — Casey Watts

Story:

At a party recently, some guests arrived early and offered to help set up.

They expected me to tell them exactly what to do (delegating tasks)

Instead, I told them my goal and trusted them to do it: “set up the food so it’ll be very easy for folks to get at the food, whatever that looks like” (delegating ownership).

They did a MUCH better job that I would have come up with! 👏🏻👏🏻

Humans Might Be About to Break the Ocean? Don’t Stop the Presses

When a cornerstone of the global climate may soon collapse, you'd think news outlets might want to put that on the front page.

https://fair.org/home/humans-might-be-about-to-break-the-ocean-dont-stop-the-presses/

#ClimateChange #Disaster

No matter how many times I walk past or how commonplace I know it to be, this joint always feel like the set of a theatrical production. #Vietnam #StreetPhotography

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m4Bnb4PUt_U

What an incredible human being. Via James Hawkins on the bird app. 🥺❤️ #SineadO’Connor

[error]: lp0 on fire

LIVE: Managers from NASA and @NorthropGrumman give an update on #CRS19, the next cargo resupply mission to the @Space_Station, scheduled to launch on Tuesday, Aug. 1, from @NASA_Wallops: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCIaD73bVDo
#AskNASA your questions about the mission.
#NASA

Error: low toner

If your computer can’t lie to other computers, then it’s not yours.

This is a fundamental principle of free and open source software. The World Wide Web abides by this principle, although we don’t often think of it that way. The Web is just an agreed-on set of programmatic interfaces: if you send me this, I’ll send you that. Your computer can construct the “this” by whatever means it wants; it’s none of the other side’s business, because your computer is not their computer.

Google’s so-called “Web Environment Integrity” plan would destroy this independence. “Integrity” is exactly the wrong word for it — a better name would be the “Browser Environment Control” plan.

In the normal world, you show up at the store with a five dollar bill, pick up a newspaper, and the store sells you the newspaper (and maybe some change) in exchange for the bill. In Google’s proposed world, five dollar bills aren’t fungible anymore: the store can ask you about the provenance of that bill, and if they don’t like the answer, they don’t sell you the newspaper. No, they’re not worried about the bill being fake or counterfeit or anything like that. It’s a real five dollar bill, they agree, but you can’t prove that you got it from the right bank. Please feel free to come back with the right sort of five dollar bill.

This is not the Open Web that made what’s best about the Internet accessible to the whole world. On that Web, if you send a valid request with the right data, you get a valid response. How you produced the request is your business and your business alone. That’s what software freedom is all about: you decide how your machinery works, just as other people decide how their machinery works. If your machine and their machine want to talk to each other, they just need an agreed-on language (in the case of the Web, that’s HTTP) in which to do so.

Google’s plan, though, steps behind this standard language to demand something no free and open source software can ever deliver: a magical guarantee that the user has not privately configured their own computer in any way that Google disapproves of.

The effrontery is shocking, to those with enough technical background to understand what is being proposed. It’s as though Google were demanding that when you’re talking to them you must somehow guarantee, in a provable way, that you’re not also thinking impure thoughts.

How could anyone ever agree to this nonsense? Must all our computers become North Korea?

The details of your own system’s configuration are irrelevant to — and unnecessary to accurately represent in — your communications with a server, just as your private thoughts are not required to be included, in some side-band channel, along with everything you say in regular language.

If a web site wants to require that you have a username and password, that’s fine. Those are just a standard part of the HTTP request your browser sends. But if a web site wants your browser to promise that it stores that username and password locally in a file named “google-seekritz.txt”, that’s not only weird and creepy, it’s also something that a free software (as in libre) browser can never reliably attest to. Any browser maintenance team worth its salt will just ship the browser with a default configuration in which the software reports that to Google when asked while, behind the scenes, storing usernames and passwords however it damn well pleases.

Indeed, the fundamental issue here is the freedom to have a “behind the scenes” at all. Environments in which people aren’t allowed to have a “behind the scenes” are totalitarian environments. That’s not an exaggeration; it’s simply the definition of the term. Whatever bad connotations the concept of totalitarianism may have for you, they come not from the fancy-sounding multi-syllabic word but from the actual, human-level badness of the scenario itself. That scenario is what Google is asking for.

My web browser (currently Mozilla Firefox running on Debian GNU/Linux, thank you very much) will never cooperate with this bizarre and misguided proposal. And along with the rest of the free software community, I will continue working to ensure we all live in a world where your web browser doesn’t have to either.

(Cross-posted at https://rants.org/2023/07/the-right-to-lie-and-google-wei/ .)