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80 years later, GCHQ releases new images of Nazi code-breaking computer | …the British approach to encryption, in a nutshell
Without Diffie & Hellman, nobody today would know about Ellis, Cocks & Williamson, either. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/new-images-of-secret-nazi-busting-computer-emerge-on-80th-anniversary/
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twitter.com is blocked | twitter.com refused to connect | ERR_BLOCKED_BY_RESPONSE | …what the hell is this?
Chrome on Android over Wifi to non-censoring ISP; vanished when I killed and restarted the browser app.
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“Daddy Makes Pizza Night” is getting better
I’m still a rank amateur, but the quality is improving. I am still nowhere near making decent circular pizzas, though; the dough has a lot of gluten and it’s easier to pull square even if I am dropping it onto hot round ceramic pizza stones.
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A new variation on the Scunthorpe problem: a cable company which will not accept the surname “Cable”
Welp, that’s a first. Xfinity won’t let me pay them for Internet service, because my … last name is “not valid.” https://kolektiva.social/@ELLIOTTCABLE/111773847035950535
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The UK’s political class needs to learn to love the economy it actually has | …excellent article
The UK’s lack of pride or interest in its video games industry is part and parcel of a tendency that Sunak often complains about: that the country is not just bad at maths, but proud of it. But it also reflects a problem that his own party is part of: a political class that for
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From Amazon to Facebook and Google, here’s how platforms can ‘decay’ | NPR | …another Cory “enshittification” piece, but having seen USENET & various BBSes decay, I feel he overcooks the “capitalism” aspects
In truth: platforms either evolve their user demographics or they die with them. Cory’s arguments feel reminiscent of Douglas Adams’ use of the Shoe Event Horizon to explain the fall of a planet and it’s culture, which (in the radio series) Adams both sets up & knocks down people who are caught up in the
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Gradually, Civil Society is starting to wake up to the idea that “Government algorithms” are less an issue than underlying Government policy of treating people as objects or stereotypes
Quote: U.K. civil society groups as well as my organization, Human Rights Watch, have found that the system relies on a means-testing algorithm that is prone to miscalculating people’s income and underestimating how much cash support they need. Families that bear the brunt of the algorithm’s faulty design are going hungry, falling behind on rent,
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Nineteen Eighty Pooh
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clock was stuck at ten to thirteen. Time for a little something thought Winnie-the-Pooh, his chin nuzzled into his fur in an effort to escape the vile wind as he stomped through Victory Woods. A coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked
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Short (but deep-clickable) thread by @matthew_d_green which foreshadows debate about power the UK Government seeks: to prevent fixes of security bugs they are exploiting
UK context: Device manufacturers would likely also have to notify the government before making available important security updates that fix known vulnerabilities and keep devices secure. Accordingly, the Secretary of State, upon receiving such an advance notice, could now request operators to, for instance, abstain from patching security gaps to allow the government to maintain access for surveillance
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This new data poisoning tool lets artists fight back against generative AI | …I’m always torn whether to call these things “pettyware” or “get off my lawn-ware”
This stuff is the tech equivalent of the Facebook post to tell everyone that you’re leaving Facebook. It happens to each cycle of technology & commercial innovation: ad-blockers, image watermarks (stego or not), OCR-resistant fonts, tagging innocuous web-pages as “porn” to either distract/dissuade attention, blocking scrapers at the network level. My take: this blog is
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Is anybody working on algorithmic, engagement-led feed generation for Mastodon?
Serious question. One reason I still visit & use Twitter is: there are people in other time zones whose fediverse content is basically unseen by me, since they post at times when I’m parenting/asleep and so are buried under a chronological timeline. Mostly they also post to Twitter which mostly automatically solves that problem for