Daniel Taylor @RandomDamage@mastodon.technology

@fool
The year 2057: scientists discover that the universe fundamentally runs on JavaScript. Half the world's developers are elated; the other half furious.

It's Ada Lovelace Day!

Fun fact for those of you that don't know:
There is a programming language named after her. It's used mostly in life critical systems, because it is one of the safest languages to write code in. It's actually the language that I use at work.

Ada Lovelace:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace

Ada the programming language:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_%28programming_language%29

Taylor Swift is done being apolitical:
https://n.pr/2PhCOf4

It hadn't occurred to me that most Sokal-style hoaxes are actually committing the same scientific bias they claim, but this Slate article makes a pretty solid point about publication bias making these numbers extremely hard to interpret.

(From https://slate.com/technology/2018/10/grievance-studies-hoax-not-academic-scandal.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_ru)

Allegedly a supply chain attack on Supermicro's servers installed small CPUs disguised as passive capacitors on the mainboard that were able to take over the BMC, which could then compromise the main CPU:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-hack-how-china-used-a-tiny-chip-to-infiltrate-america-s-top-companies?srnd=premium

#security question:

If I get a YubiKey, will it cover a large amount of common accounts? SMS is out, and I'm starting to not love using auth apps.

I'm also thinking of having my family use these things instead of teaching them auth apps and what to do if they change phones.

Been having a blast playing around with learning MULTICS. Lots of fascinating UNIX history buried in there, and major kudos to the BAN.AI maintainers for creating this awesome bit of history we can all go play with at no cost :)
https://ban.ai/multics/

(Yes I'm THAT big a nerd :)

folks. has it ever been summed up better than this. (senate hearing)

GNU Shepherd 0.5 (init system) released.

Can be used as an alternative to systemd on GNU Hurd and Linux systems.

With GNU Shepherd 0.5, the init system now gracefully halts with Ctrl+Alt+Del when running as PID 1 on Linux systems and restarting a service now also restarts any dependent services... Plus services now have a "replacement" slot as well and there are various other fixes.

--> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-09/msg00282.html

--> https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/
_
#GNU #GNUHurd #Hurd #Shepherd #initsystem #Linux

This is pretty cool, ARM ASM with the Raspberry Pi.

http://bob.cs.sonoma.edu/IntroCompOrg-RPi/intro-co-rpi.html

@danyspin97 this is why I don't trust Signal. Why is Moxie so opposed to F-Droid (or even Debian) compiling #Signal clients from source rather than using his binaries? If he does all the compiling, it doesn't matter that both the client and server source code are on public repos, because we only have his word for it that this is the code he's actually compiling from. Every claimed virtue of Signal, including passing an audit, depends on us trusting that he is compiling from the audited code.

#firewall

In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. We just don't know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.

~ Yuval Noah Harari

#InformationOverload
#FilterFailure
#information

I suspect that conspiracy theorists have never been project managers.

Just learned about a really cool thing - Przybylski's Star. It's a "chemically peculiar" (Serious Astronomical Term) that's VERY weird indeed - weird elements like holmium, scandium, neodymium, and uranium present at 1,000x to 10,000x their abundance in our own Sun.

In fact, some even weirder elements - plutonium, einsteinium, californium - have been detected as well. Which is REALLY weird - those have short enough half-lives at a cosmic scale that we don't really observe those ANYWHERE in nature, because they disappear so quickly that they would have to have been produced very recently in cosmic time.

It's actually been proposed that the star may contain the theorized but as-yet-undiscovered "island of stability" isotopes of exotic superheavy elements like flerovium, or Element 120, or Element 126 - and that the reason we're seeing those strange radioactive elements is actually as decay products from these exotic isotopes.

This just seems like the sort of thing that is OBVIOUSLY the hook for a science-fiction novel.