A correction request on a story Nicole didn't write opened up a mystery of strange bylines and oddly-written stories. aftermath.site/nicole-carpent...

Key quote: “the smartest thing to do would have been to go and power off all her devices.” https://www.cjr.org/news/hannah-natanson-fbi-washington-post-raid-devices-seized-runa-sandvik-security-computer-phone-laptop-sources.php #security #journalism #pressfreedom

Happy #wikipediaday, and congratulations to @wikipedia on their 25th anniversary! What a milestone! https://wikimediafoundation.org/wikipedia25/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Day #wikipedia #wikipedia25years

In case it somehow wasn't already obvious how completely repellent the administration's legal harassment of Becca Good (Renee Good's widow) is, *six* senior career prosecutors in the local US Attorney's office resigned today because they wanted no part of it. SIX.

Amazing lost media news! 52-year-old 9-track tape found with Unix V4, the operating system that everything else came from. Only 20 copies ever existed. University of Utah found theirs in a storage closet, knew what they'd found, and got the help of the California Computer Museum to reconstruct […]

propublica.org/tips

Firefox should really strip down the browser to the core, make that performant and secure. Maybe even improve extension interfaces and then deliver whatever "AI" nonsense they want through extensions. Would make it so easy to stop having to talk about kill switches and how "hard" those are […]

#psa: if you haven't done this in some time, today is a good day to check... - That your backups exist and are restorable - That your RAID arrays are healthy (e.g. cat /proc/mdstat on Linux doesn't show degradation) - That you still have access to all accounts you really need (even after e.g […]

To accommodate kid bedtimes we celebrated 2026-01-01 UTC (7pm EST) by watching the Y2K ball drop. https://youtu.be/nYq-NDwTgOA

BTW. While we're making a big deal about the censored 60 minutes report, worth noting the PBS Frontline report on CECOT is online and can be watched free. Trump *tried* to destroy PBS as he did 60 minutes, & did manage to kill the 58-year-old CPB, but PBS so far survives. www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontli...

Ran into a problem in prod? Just generate a fake cloudflare error page and blame it on them - gives you time to fix. #foss #devops #cloudflare #infosec

Just to be clear: should I have the terrible misfortune to be killed in a mass shooting, please feel free to politicize the hell out of it. And go ahead and do so immediately. No time will be “too soon”.

We're looking for a mission-driven director of product engineering for our product team at @ProPublica. Our journalists investigate abuses of trust and power in the public interest. This is a way to make a difference. (Must be US-based.) […]

OTD 1968: The Mother of All Demos, by Douglas Engelbart and William English. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY I knew Bill English 20 years later when he was working for #SunMicrosystems.

Someday, I will be marooned on an island, with a near-infinite supply of Duracell CR2032 coin cells in blister packs, and a medical device upon which I am critically dependent, which requires such coin cells, but no knife or scissors. I'll die trying to sharpen a piece of coconut rind to extract […]

This is what every police chief in America should be saying and enforcing. Minneapolis police chief warns officers: Stop unlawful force by ICE or lose your job https://www.ms.now/news/minneapolis-police-chief-unlawful-force-ice-jobs

It bothers me that before they show the footage of the murder of these people, the news man never says "We are about to show footage where people were killed some viewers might find this disturbing." As they would for other disasters, so when the bile rises in my throat, because I really did […]

"Costco is suing the Trump administration over its tariffs, arguing that the White House has exceeded its executive authority in instituting tariffs and that it should be entitled to a refund if the tariffs are found unconstitutional." 👀 […]

I was today years old when I learned about the `at` command in the unix shell?? Very useful for if I want to lazily do something non-critical in the near future. Like I upload a file for a friend, send them the link, tell them it's getting deleted in an hour, and then do $ echo 'rm the_file' | […]

On this #worldaidsday I’m thinking about PEPFAR defunding. “Forecasting models predicted that the current steep funding cuts could result in more than 14,051, 750 additional all-age deaths, including 4,537,157 in children younger than age 5 years, by 2030.” […]

“The Korean director, who is president of the jury, gave two responses, one measured, the other deeply personal. ‘My official answer is, AI is good because it’s the very beginning of the human race finally seriously thinking about what only humans can do. But my personal answer is, I’m going to […]

I will ask chat GPT I will boil the last of our drinking water Salt the soil of the scrub-lands Tear the pages from books and feed them to my fire I will ask copilot I will scramble your library maim the faces of your favorite paintings I will bury you in poor copies of your dreams I will ask […]

“A BBC spokesperson said the corporation had ‘made the decision to remove one sentence from the lecture on legal advice’. BBC News is not repeating the line in question on the same legal advice.” https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpvdzdnnp8xo

A federal judge throws out the criminal cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, concluding President Trump’s handpicked prosecutor was illegally appointed to the role when she singlehandedly secured the indictments […]

I've seen this story making the rounds in my Signal chats, and I don't think it would be if they @TheGuardian had a used a more accurate headline. Vetting is important for sensitive group chats!

Hanging out by the exit to the NYSE in ominous dark robes with a bunch of guys with good baritone voices going "Koyaanisqatsi" "Koyaaaaanisqatsiiii" over and over

major "cloud" providers say they're too big to fail, and yet they keep having multi-hour long downtimes, which just means nobody is too big to fail

Just wanted to surface this long comment from me on the state of #hometown and its future: https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown/issues/1358#issuecomment-3549758036 I've been an absentee on the "Future of Hometown" thread for a year now and plan to be more responsive. I say more about it […]

Chatting with a friend about Cloudflare's intermittent outages today, they brought up an interesting point: How many organizations have started relying on Cloudflare to do basic security blocking and tackling stuff, like stopping SQL injection attacks at the edge? Maybe your devs were lazy at […]

Theo Jansen still at it with full force... (life goals!) Strandbeest evolution 2025 https://youtube.com/watch?v=ANhA94ZqnEQ ...and obligatory re-sharing of some pics of our joint generative design workshop in 2013, incl. Theo's graveyard of older Strandbeests and mechanisms […]

Doctors in China have used lab-grown insulin-producing cells to treat a woman with type 1 diabetes. The cells were made from her own tissue, reprogrammed into stem cells, and then grown into tiny clusters that release insulin. A year after the transplant, her blood sugar remains normal without […]

Do I need a dazzle camo print rain cape? Not necessarily Do I want a dazzle camo print rain cape? Most definitely

This thing that 404 is writing about in the US—the dehumanizing fake content created purely because Facebook pays people to make it? https://www.404media.co/ai-generated-videos-of-ice-raids-are-wildly-viral-on-facebook/ It has a direct precedent in the Myanmar genocide and has been widely […]

Breaking news (to me): "If wheel running is indeed caused by captive housing, wild mice are not expected to use a running wheel in nature. This however, to our knowledge, has never been tested. Here, we show that when running wheels are placed in nature […] [Original post on social.vivaldi.net]

In case you needed another reason not to: https://www.pcmag.com/news/ask-chatgpt-about-affairs-abortion-be-careful-marketers-peek-prompts

I had missed this whole thing, yikes yikes yikes. https://www.politico.eu/article/microsoft-did-not-cut-services-international-criminal-court-president-american-sanctions-trump-tech-icc-amazon-google/ h/t @janl

A federal judge, appointed by Reagan, resigns so that he can proclaim Trump is “using the law for partisan purposes, targeting his adversaries while sparing his friends and donors from investigation, prosecution, and possible punishment.” […]

I'm really excited about how well one of my new lesson ideas for fifth grade CS is working out. I teach them to count in binary early in the class which they LOVE. In the new lesson I have seven sets of cards with numbers and symbols on them from: binary hexadecimal base 3 base 3 but with […]

In US first, #newmexico launches #free #childcare for all Saturday NM became the first #us state to offer free child care to all residents in a bid to boost its #economy & lift #education & #childwelfare levels… NM Gov Michelle Lujan Grisham (D) told reporters #child #care was "the backbone of […]

New, by me: Aisuru Botnet Shifts from DDoS to Residential Proxies Aisuru, the botnet responsible for a series of record-smashing distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks this year, recently was overhauled to support a more low-key, lucrative and […] [Original post on infosec.exchange]

Useful chart listing the most invasive apps. Meta products are the worst offenders by far. Full story here: https://www.pcmag.com/explainers/these-20-apps-are-watching-you. (Even worse: AI-powered browsers: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2025/10/22/chatgpt-atlas-browser/)

“Mr. Sanborn acknowledged that keeping the secret could be a strain: His computer has been hacked repeatedly over the years, he said, and obsessive fans of the work have threatened him. ‘I sleep with a shotgun,’ he said.” #GiftLink #cryptography #art […]