meejah @meejah@mastodon.social

We just published a Snowden document from 2006 about NSA successfully breaking the encryption and spying on VPNs run by Al Jazeera, the Iraqi military, airlines and reservation systems, and other "high potential" targets https://theintercept.com/2018/08/15/nsa-vpn-hack-al-jazeera-sidtoday/

I wonder how performant a primitive x86 processor, but fabbed on modern processes, could be.

No branch prediction.
No speculative execution.
No out-of-order execution.
No attempts to extract instruction-level parallelism.
Just a single-issue pipeline that issues things as they're ready, and stalls if they're not ready.

Looking for more moderators for mastodon.social (paid), DM me if you are interested.

If I find someone I will reply to this toot, so if you find this much later than now please check it for replies before applying.

Happy Birthday, Debian. 🎂 🎉 🎈
25 years old.

Ian Murdock announced #Debian on August 16th 1993. The first release, 0.01, was made the next month, on September 15th.

Congratulations & thanks to the Debian volunteers, past and present, for making it such a fantastic distro. Here's to the next 25 years.

https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/project-history/ch-intro.en.html

I just went around and did some basic nmap-ing on the most popular Mastodon instances, and there's some seriously sketchy stuff in there. Publicly reachable Postgres servers, tons of open internal HTTP ports, SSH with password login, multiple Mastodon instances that seem to be running on mail server VMs, …

I guess if you're just running a single-user instance for yourself, sure, but those are all 2000+ user instances.

Hey #Fediverse. When you post pictures, please please please with puppies on top fill in that description box for the visually impaired. You will be helping us out tremendously. We want to enjoy your pictures as much as others do. You don't have to write a novel, but just fill in some details.

Thanks with much love:
A Blind Dude

"For 50 million years our biggest problems were too few calories, too little information. For about 50 years our biggest problem has been too many calories, too much information. We have to adjust, and I believe we will really fast. I also believe it will be wicked ugly while we’re adjusting." -- Penn Jillette

If having a coffee in the morning doesn't wake you up, try deleting a table in a production database instead.

@meejah ooh I've never tried this, but maybe that's what I'm in for

tfw when logging on to my favorite Mastodon instance after logging off of hellsite

@aral You can't venture-capital your way out of a problem you venture-capitalled your way into in the first place.

Folks: yes, venture capitalists and Silicon Valley gave us surveillance capitalism but now they say they’re sorry and want to give us the cure. Shouldn’t we just let them?

Me: “Insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting different results.” – Narcotics Anonymous, 1981.

@josemanuel I would say that the fact that we're so bad at our jobs is a very important aspect.

There is a bigger picture, as you note, but I think I would put it a bit differently.

The purpose of democratic elections is not choosing the leader. This could be done in a number of ways.

The purpose of democratic elections is choosing the leader *and* making sure everyone agrees on the outcome. And this can only happen when verifying election results is *easy*.

" the question I have been asked most often has been: how has the basic income trial changed my life? My answer is simple. In money terms, my life has not changed at all. However, the psychological effects of this human experiment have been transformative. I vastly prefer basic income to a benefits system fraught with complicated forms, mandatory courses and pointless obligations."

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/07/universal-basic-income-rich-finland-work-benefits

Graph story time.

I got curious about the effect of a country's total tax burden (tax-to-GDP ratio) on its UN World Happiness Index, so I took both datasets from Wikipedia and made this scatter plot:

https://snabeltann.no/media/kKZtgLknzJXExUwmQtk

Looks like high taxes, or high ability to collect them, make people happier.

After a while of inactivity #RocketChat has finally merged my FOSS build flavour! 🎉 That means that there will be a @fdroidorg release for the next version.

I have to say it was a very positive experience working with them, they even brought it over the finishing line themselves as I had very little time recently. We also had our own little discussion channel on their RocketChat instance. The benefits of working on a chat app 😃.