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That feeling when you finally give up on trying to find the book that you probably lent out to somebody, and go buy a second-hand replacement on eBay; this is mildly sweetened by the observation that…
…I’m trying to replace my beloved copy of “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and eBay is suggesting the “AA Trucker’s Atlas of Britain” as being “inspired by your recent views” I deeply, deeply hope that there is a subculture of British truckers who are into algorithms & the development of consciousness.
Fediverse reactions
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US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency strongly endorses use of robust, unsurveilled End-to-End Encrypted Messenger software; it would be bizarre for #Ofcom to oppose this
Note that client side “your message has been scanned for abusive content” scanning extends far beyond the warned-of metadata collection into content surveillance, thereby breaking end to end security: https://www.cisa.gov/sites/default/files/2024-12/guidance-mobile-communications-best-practices.pdf
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Presumably Lorna Woods & @WillPerrin are delighted at saving British children from the “harms” of lycra-clad cyclists
Heaven forbid that our children seriously get into cycling as a hobby: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/12/17/hundreds-of-websites-to-shut-down-under-chilling-internet Archived at: https://archive.ph/94rzg
Fediverse reactions
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Ofcom publishes “illegal harms” codes and guidance; follow @cyberleagle for analysis of how Ofcom imagines that privacy & technology work, how people can have “too much” privacy
Remember kids: it’s ok to surveil all the people if less than 1% of them might be really bad people.
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Tony Blair calls for roll out of digital ID | “…put all your eggs in one basket, it makes it easier to lose them all and for the government to surveil you…”
Imagine that all your health information was in one place: easy, with your permission, for anyone anywhere in the health service to see. That your passport, driving licence, anything you need to prove your identity, were in one simple digital wallet, unique to you. That you could purchase and pay for any goods or services
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Google says its breakthrough Willow quantum chip can’t break modern cryptography | The Verge
Quelle surprise: https://www.theverge.com/2024/12/12/24319879/google-willow-cant-break-rsa-cryptography
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If you’re interested in tech policy or security & looking for Christmas read, I recommend “A History of the World in 6 Glasses” by @tomstandage
I don’t get much time to read nowadays so I do a lot of audiobooks, and after his Victorian Internet – itself a transformative read – I attacked Tom’s history of the world through drinks: Beer, Wine Spirits, Coffee, Tea & Coca-Cola… and Water makes 7 – and the found the whole content, if not
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Dual_EC_DRBG with Justin Schuh & @matthew_d_green | …listening to Matt not trying to be rude, but achieving it, makes a worthwhile morning podcast
Put me on #TeamMatt (~31m00s) Source: https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2024/12/07/dual-ec-drbg/
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Linux Kernel: TOCTOU in Exec System | …I am sure that there was a vulnerability of this exact kind in Unix circa 1988 +/- 4yrs
I’m pretty sure there was a direct one on the inode permissions, and possibly a second one involving symlinks. Every bug has its day again and again and again. There is a Time-of-Check / Time-of-Use issue in the Linux kernel in the exec system calls. The executability permissions are checked at a different time than
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Austrian federal court decides that use of reCAPTCHA is not “essential” and therefore the cookies it sets are in violation of GDPR/EPD, thus reCAPTCHA is illegal
I suspect you are not even allowed to force people to accede to the cookies which protect your site from spammers. Bonkers. In any case, the cookie “_GRECAPTCHA” used was not a technically necessary cookie and consent would therefore have had to be obtained. Implementing this service with [that cookie] could not be considered a
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I remain perpetually amazed how often the same people are one moment calling for “open APIs” and “access to data for research” and the next are “what do you mean you let just anybody scrape the locations of all rental bikes in New York City?”
This guy scrapes the NYC city bike locations once per minute and has used the data to possibly track a murder suspect; that’s exciting enough but some folk on Bluesky are now panicking about “surveillance” Tell us: which do you want? Open Data or Privacy?