It is, today, the 55th anniversary of that gift to satire James Arkell, whose solicitors wrote to Private Eye on this day in 1971, prompting everyone’s favourite reply. You may know the story, but I put it to you that you cannot hear it enough. We begin with that initial letter... 🧵

Morning

ISOC LIVE summary of a new paper from David Huberman at ICANN, 'ICANN and the IETF' - on the unsung toilers who keep the Internet interoperable via identifiers, protocols, and IANA functions that bridge them. isoclive.substack.com/p/icann-and-... @ietf.org #ICANN #IANA #IETF

FOR ASTETIC REASONS

Hungarians celebrated the landslide defeat of Orban by singing "We Are the Champions" out in the streets

This Donnie Darko sequel SUCKS.

right now the astronauts are calling houston because the computer on the spaceship is running two instances of microsoft outlook and they can't figure out why. nasa is about to remote into the computer

I'm a little surprised that the Internet Protocol Police have only just been formed. honestly thought they already existed 🤷‍♂️ www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9948....

Security Vulnerabilities in DNS over HTTPS (DoH) - mailarchive.ietf.org/arch/msg/dns...

This is quite something from Singapore's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Vivian Balakrishnan, in an interview with Reuters. The end of the post-war order, diagnosed in technocratic language. www.mfa.gov.sg/newsroom/pre...

Great example of how Oxford / Harvard comma can be useful!

Neal Stephenson, who coined the term ‘metaverse’, says head-mounted VR hardware will never happen

Ok, this is cool.

20 years ago today.

So... the actual story reported here is that the administration set up a dedicated task force to document EU censorship and THEY COULD NOT FIND ANY. Not that you'd know that from the headline. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

It’s just so fucking typical that Zuckerberg’s big moonshot idea that he burned $80 billion on was a bigger, better Second Life

Web3 “domains” are dead The web3 domain experiment was a failure. This week, Unstoppable Domains CEO Matthew Gould posted on X about the company's transition to traditional domain names. He explained that the company's website is focusing more on "web2 domains" because web3 names aren't panning…

Wow. Foraminifera! ROV pilots paused and carefully zoomed in to collect footage of these single-celled microorganisms, or protists, at 843 m during the #OBVI #LivingBioreactors expedition w/ @schmidtsciences.bsky.social offshore of Argentina. Read the full caption: youtube.com/shorts/Yv_ud...

Website: linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/stone-... Substack: open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

This is entertaining. We are sending someone interesting to Eurovision with an actually fun track. A small ray of sunshine.

This perfectly illustrates my point that the British tabloids are aiming at a US audience. There like 5 people in the UK who think about this. But it is huge among US evangelicals. British politicians need to ignore UK tabloids, as UK tabloids are talking to an audience in the US for clicks.

The Underbar (the #perl podcast) has an interview with Olaf Kolkman about Perl and DNS and other things pca.st/episode/042e... #dns #dnssec #ietf #icann

NEW The death of the Firm The arrest of Andrew may not show the end of the monarchy, but it may show the end of a certain model of monarchy By me at @prospectmagazine.co.uk www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/law/th...

love a bit of continvouclous morging

On almost everything – fraud, polarisation, radicalisation, misinformation – evidence suggests that over 60s are in much more urgent need of online protection and education than teenagers. But that issue gets zero political attention, and is a total non-starter. Nothing good will come of it.

.AU (the ccTLD for Australia) gained an RDAP server yesterday! More data at deployment.rdap.org

.SG (the ccTLD for Singapore) gained an RDAP server yesterday! More data at deployment.rdap.org

Ancient 21st century curse: may the thing you depend upon get bought by a billionaire

My monitoring script broke and I missed it, but some time in the last 6 weeks, the .gov TLD gained an RDAP server! As did .as, .ng and .to! More details at deployment.rdap.org #rdap

*I blame Marxist AIs

The pivot from 'we shouldn't bother with Net Zero 'cause China' to 'How does China have a massive lead in so many key 21st century technologies' doesn't seem to have caused any reflection at all from quite a few parties.

How have I only learned about this story today?!

100% tariff on the MM/DD/YY format.

With #Greenland raising awareness of our massive 24/7 dependence on US clouds for vital services, I made a list of what (government) stuff would break here under US sanctions. It is EXTREMELY depressing. Tip: also make a list like this one for your own country! berthub.eu/articles/pos...

i would suggest an online safety act that can’t deal with CSAM on a widely used social network frequented by most westminster public figures isn’t doing a very good job of keeping anybody safe online

Some of us were warning about this well over a decade ago. Same with pictures of your kids.

Open up this picture fully. Then look at the surface of Mars. Then look up to the top right. Spot Mars' moon Phobos high in the sky. Then notice the bright spot beside Phobos. That's Earth.

another robot highlight for 2025: man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

Data is important. Keep him safe.

(The answer, for anyone blessedly too young to remember is: Yes. Yes it did.)

Turns out a million monkeys on a million typewriters will generate `sudo rm -rf /` quite expeditiously!

My family on school day mornings.

My analysis. Polarisation does not exist in way it's to often described ('echo chambers'). But the mechanism can be exploited in propaganda, disinformation, mechanical information operations. Bonus: agreement with 'enemies of the group' is penalised socially. blog.lukaszolejnik.com/polarisation...

The only surefire way to stop oligarchs buying up the things we love is to drop those things the moment oligarchs buy them & that requires changing habits and massive self-discipline. It means going to alternatives that might not be quite as good or convenient. It’s really hard. But there it is.

I believe that NVIDIA is breaking no laws, committing no fraud, and not doing anything other than forcing partners to buy endless GPUs, taking advantage of exec ignorance and FOMO. Repercussions will be the company's main revenue source going away (NVDA won't die)

Mark Zuckerberg’s gamble on the "Metaverse" has lost his company more than $77 billion.

Great culture can save lives. Literally. Amazing letter in today’s @thetimes.com about Tom Stoppard