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Fifty Years Of Diff | blarg
mhoye> …this month marks the fiftieth anniversary of a core piece of free software technology that would quickly become a seminal piece of collaborative software, the bedrock under every version control system and arguably the single most important piece of social software ever created. Written by Douglas McIlroy and James Hunt and released with the…
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When ‘Nerd Harder’ meets International Standards: @profmusgrave tells us how ISO “screwed the pooch” with ISO8601
A story in six acts, and it somehow encapsulates every single one of the “I am a politician and the nerds are clearly doing it the wrong way” debates of the last 20 years:
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Husband pursues Apple after wife finds ‘deleted’ messages to prostitute
Messaging platforms already have a hard time offering coherent, comprehensible data management features like “disappearing messages”, and users have a hard enough time comprehending them. I’ve little sympathy for the user, not for what he did but I’m not convinced there is (nor should be) a standard for what “deleted” means; but it’s interesting to…
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If you’re living in the EU you should read this & urgently contact your representative TODAY to combat this invasion of your privacy
Chat Control: The EU’s CSEM scanner proposal | Patrick Breyer https://www.patrick-breyer.de/en/posts/chat-control/
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The Stanford Internet Observatory is being dismantled
I’m surprisingly ambivalent regarding this. Net neutral. It’s great to have teaching and research but I see benefit in such organisations being churned to create fresh ideas and prevent stagnation into reactionary safetyism. https://www.platformer.news/stanford-internet-observatory-shutdown-stamos-diresta-sio/
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Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
At least something good is going to come out of this year:
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On the new Dutch Intelligence and Security Law | Bert Hubert’s writings
So apparently the Dutch government decided to pass oversight of their surveillance to a new committee and then failed to hire anybody onto it: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/dutch-intelligence-and-security-law/
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Age Verification to purchase Red Bull?
As someone on Twitter observed: it seems a bit silly to try banning sales of these when a Starbucks frappuccino will likely top them: > Labour will ban under-16s from buying energy drinks such as Prime and Monster https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/labour-ban-energy-drinks-children-33000704
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A nanoGPT pipeline packed in a spreadsheet
Awesome coolness: https://github.com/dabochen/spreadsheet-is-all-you-need Via:
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Cyber, MacGyver, and the Limits of Covert Power | Lawfare
Is it possible for the cyber industry to actually become unwound and made proportionate? > For several years, Maschmeyer has been at the fore of efforts by a small band of scholars to highlight the message that cyber power—albeit an important tool of modern statecraft for both authoritarian and democratic regimes—cannot do magic. This is…
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Machine learning with matchboxes: A journey from a childhood game to… | Pavel Anni
I was a huge Martin Gardner fan during my teenage years – I still have the books and almost a complete set – so I was delighted to find my former Sun colleague Pavel Anni recapping the essentials of machine learning through an old “mathematical recreation” of matchboxes and beads: https://medium.com/@pavelanni/machine-learning-with-matchboxes-436e98edd929