Links August 2021

Sciencealert has an interesting article on a game to combat misinformation by “microdosing” people [1]. The game seemed overly simplistic to me, but I guess I’m not the target demographic. Research shows it to work.

Vice has an interesting and amusing article about mass walkouts of underpaid staff in the US [2]. The way that corporations are fighting an increase in the minimum wage doesn’t seem financially beneficial for them. An increase in the minimum wage means small companies have to increase salaries too and the ratio of revenue to payroll is probably worse for small companies. It seems that companies like McDonalds make oppressing their workers a higher priority than making a profit.

Interesting article in Vice about how the company Shot Spotter (which determines the locations of gunshots by sound) forges evidence for US police [3]. All convictions based on Shot Spotter evidence should be declared mistrials.

BitsNBites has an interesting article on the “fundamental flaws” of SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) [4].

The Daily Dot has a disturbing article anbout the possible future of the QAnon movement [5]. Let’s hope they become too busy fighting each other to hurt many innocent people.

Ben Taylor wrote an interesting blog post suggesting that Web Assembly should be a default binary target [6]. I don’t support that idea but I think that considering it is useful. Web assembly could be used more for non-web things and it would be a better option than Node.js for some things. There are also some interesting corner cases like games, Minecraft was written in Java and there’s no reason that Web Assembly couldn’t do the same things.

Vice has an interesting article about the Phantom encrypted phone service that ran on Blackberry handsets [7]. Australia really needs legislation based on the US RICO law!

Vice has an interesting article about an encrypted phone company run by drug dealers [8]. Apparently after making an encrypted phone system for their own use they decided to sell it to others and made millions of dollars. They could have run a successful legal business.

Salon has an insightful interview with Michael Petersen about his research on fake news and people who share it because they need chaos [9]. Apparently low status people who are status seeking are a main contributor to this, they share fake news knowingly to spread chaos. A society with less inequality would have less problems with fake news.

Salon has another insightful interview with Michael Petersen, about is later research on fake news as an evolutionary strategy [10]. People knowingly share fake news to mobilise their supporters and to signal allegiance to their group. The more bizarre the beliefs are the more strongly they signal allegiance. If an opposing group has a belief then they can show support for their group by having the opposite belief (EG by opposing vaccination if the other political side supports doctors). He also suggests that lying can be a way of establishing dominance, the more honest people are opposed by a lie the more dominant the liar may seem.

Vice has an amusing article about how police took over the Encrochat encrypted phone network that was mostly used by criminals [11]. It’s amusing to read of criminals getting taken down like this. It’s also interesting to note that the authorities messed up by breaking the wipe facility which alerted the criminals that their security was compromised. The investigation could have continued for longer if they hadn’t changed the functionality of compromised phones. A later vice article mentioned that the malware installed on Encrochat devices recorded MAC addresses of Wifi access points which was used to locate the phones even though they had the GPS hardware removed.

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for Locus about the insufficient necessity of interoperability [12]. The problem if monopolies is not just an inability to interoperate with other services or leave it’s losing control over your life. A few cartel participants interoperating will be able to do all the bad things to us tha a single monopolist could do.

Links July 2021

The News Tribune published an article in 2004 about the “Dove of Oneness”, a mentally ill woman who got thousands of people to believe her crazy ideas about NESARA [1]. In recent time the QANON conspiracy theory has drawn on the NESARA cult and encouraged it’s believers to borrow money and spend it in the belief that all debts will be forgiven (something which was not part of NESARA). The Wikipedia page about NESARA (proposed US legislation that was never considered by the US congress) notes that the second edition of the book about it was titled “Draining the Swamp: The NESARA Story – Monetary and Fiscal Policy Reform“. It seems like the Trump cult has been following that for a long time.

David Brin (best-selling SciFi Author and NASA consultant) wrote an insightful blog post about the “Tytler Calumny” [2], which is the false claim that democracy inevitably fails because poor people vote themselves money. When really the failure is of corrupt rich people subverting the government processes to enrich themselves at the expense of their country. It’s worth reading, and his entire blog is also worth reading.

Cory Doctorow has an insightful article about his own battle with tobacco addiction and the methods that tobacco companies and other horrible organisations use to prevent honest discussion about legislation [3].

Cory Doctorow has an insightful article about “consent theater” which is describes how “consent” in most agreements between corporations and people is a fraud [4]. The new GDPR sounds good.

The forum for the War Thunder game had a discussion on the accuracy of the Challenger 2 tank which ended up with a man who claims to be a UK tank commander posting part of a classified repair manual [5]. That’s pretty amusing, and also good advertising for War Thunder. After reading about this I discovered that it’s free on Steam and runs on Linux! Unfortunately it whinged about my video drivers and refused to run.

Corey Doctorow has an insightful and well researched article about the way the housing market works in the US [6]. For house prices to increase conditions for renters need to be worse, that may work for home owners in the short term but then in the long term their children and grandchildren will end up renting.

Links June 2021

MIT Technology Review has an interesting article about Google Project Zero shutting down a “western” intelligence operation [1].

There’s an Internet trend of people eating rotten meat they call “high meat” (rotten meat) [2]. This is up there with people setting themselves on fire and “nut shot” videos.

A young female who was making popular Twitter posts about motorbikes turned out to be a 50yo man using deep fake technology [3]. He has long hair IRL and just needed to replace his face. After coming out of the closet he has continued making such videos and remains popular.

FYHTECH has an informative blog post about using sgdisk to backup and restore GPT partition tables [4]. This is in the Debian package gdisk along with several other tools for managing partition tables. One interesting thing to note is that you can backup a partition table and restore to a smaller device (with a bunch of warnings that you can ignore if you know what you are doing). This is the only way I’ve discovered to cleanly truncate a GPT partitioned disk, which is sometimes necessary when running VMs.

Insightful blog post about PCIe bifurcation and how PCIe lanes are assigned to sockets [5]. This explains why many motherboards have sockets with unused PCIe lanes, EG *8 sockets that are wired for *4. The PCIe slots all go back to the CPU which has a limited number of *16 PCIe connections that are bifurcated to make the larger number of PCIe slots on the motherboard.

New Republic has an interesting article on the infamous transphobe Jordan Peterson’s battle with tranquiliser dependency [6].

Wired has an interesting article about the hack of RSA infrastructure related to the SecureID keys 10 years ago [7]. Apparently some 10 year NDAs had delayed it.

There are many posts about the situation with Freenode, I think that this one best captures the problems in the shortest amount of text [8]. You could spend a few hours reading about it as I have just done, but just reading this gives you the basics that you need to know to avoid Freenode. That blog post has links to articles about Andrew Lee’s involvement with Mt Gox and claims to be the heir to the throne of Korea (which is not a monarchy).

Nicholas Wade wrote an insightful and informative article about the origin of Covid19, which leads to the conclusion that it was made in a Chinese laboratory [9]. I first saw this in David Brin’s Facebook feed. I would be hesitant to share this sort of thing if it wasn’t reviewed by a reliable source, I think David Brin has the skill to analyse this sort of article and the contacts to allow him to seek verification of any scientific issues that are outside his field. I believe that this article is reliable and it’s conclusion is most likely to be correct.

Interesting Wired article about an art project using display computers at Apple stores to photograph people [10]. Ends with a visit from the FBI.

Links April 2021

Dr Justin Lehmiller’s blog post comparing his official (academic style) and real biographies is interesting [1]. Also the rest of his blog is interesting too, he works at the Kinsey Institute so you know he’s good.

Media Matters has an interesting article on the spread of vaccine misinformation on Instagram [2].

John Goerzen wrote a long post summarising some of the many ways of having a decentralised Internet [3]. One problem he didn’t address is how to choose between them, I could spend months of work to setup a fraction of those services.

Erasmo Acosta wrote an interesting medium article “Could Something as Pedestrian as the Mitochondria Unlock the Mystery of the Great Silence?” [4]. I don’t know enough about biology to determine how plausible this is. But it is a worry, I hope that humans will meet extra-terrestrial intelligences at some future time.

Meredith Haggerty wrote an insightful Medium article about the love vs money aspects of romantic comedies [5]. Changes in viewer demographics would be one factor that makes lead actors in romantic movies significantly less wealthy in recent times.

Informative article about ZIP compression and the history of compression in general [6].

Vice has an insightful article about one way of taking over SMS access of phones without affecting voice call or data access [7]. With this method the victom won’t notice that they are having their sservice interfered with until it’s way too late. They also explain the chain of problems in the US telecommunications industry that led to this. I wonder what’s happening in this regard in other parts of the world.

The clown code of ethics (8 Commandments) is interesting [8].

Sam Hartman wrote an insightful blog post about the problems with RMS and how to deal with him [9]. Also Sam Whitton has an interesting take on this [10]. Another insightful post is by Selam G about RMS long history of bad behavior and the way universities are run [11].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for Locus about free markets with a focus on DRM on audio books [12]. We need legislative changes to fix this!

Links February 2021

Elestic Search gets a new license to deal with AWS not paying them [1]. Of course AWS will fork the products in question. We need some anti-trust action against Amazon.

Big Think has an interesting article about what appears to be ritualistic behaviour in chompanzees [2]. The next issue is that if they are developing a stone-age culture does that mean we should treat them differently from other less developed animals?

Last Week in AWS has an informative article about Parler’s new serverless architecture [3]. They explain why it’s not easy to move away from a cloud platform even for a service that’s designed to not be dependent on it. The moral of the story is that running a service so horrible that none of the major cloud providers will touch it doesn’t scale.

Patheos has an insightful article about people who spread the most easily disproved lies for their religion [4]. A lot of political commentary nowadays is like that.

Indi Samarajiva wrote an insightful article comparing terrorism in Sri Lanka with the right-wing terrorism in the US [5]. The conclusion is that it’s only just starting in the US.

Belling Cat has an interesting article about the FSB attempt to murder Russian presidential candidate Alexey Navalny [6].

Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of Anti-Social, a book about the work of an anti-social behavior officer in the UK [7]. The book (and Russ’s review) has some good insights into how crime can be reduced. Of course a large part of that is allowing people who want to use drugs to do so in an affordable way.

Informative post from Electrical Engineering Materials about the difference between KVW and KW [8]. KVA is bigger than KW, sometimes a lot bigger.

Arstechnica has an interesting but not surprising article about a “supply chain” attack on software development [9]. Exploiting the way npm and similar tools resolve dependencies to make them download hostile code. There is no possibility of automatic downloads being OK for security unless they are from known good sites that don’t allow random people to upload. Any sort of system that allows automatic download from sites like the Node or Python repositories, Github, etc is ripe for abuse. I think the correct solution is to have dependencies installed manually or automatically from a distribution like Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, etc where there have been checks on the source of the source.

Devon Price wrote an insightful Medium article “Laziness Does Not Exist” about the psychological factors which can lead to poor results that many people interpret as “laziness” [10]. Everyone who supervises other people’s work should read this.

Links January 2021

Krebs on Security has an informative article about web notifications and how they are being used for spamming and promoting malware [1]. He also includes links for how to permanently disable them. If nothing else clicking “no” on each new site that wants to send notifications is annoying.

Michael Stapelberg wrote an insightful posts about inefficiencies in the Debian development processes [2]. While I agree with most of his assessment of Debian issues I am not going to decrease my involvement in Debian. Of the issues he mentions the 2 that seem to have the best effort to reward ratio are improvements to mailing list archives (to ideally make it practical to post to lists without subscribing and read responses in the archives) and the issues of forgetting all the complexities of the development process which can be alleviated by better Wiki pages. In my Debian work I’ve contributed more to the Wiki in recent times but not nearly as much as I should.

Jacobin has an insightful article “Ending Poverty in the United States Would Actually Be Pretty Easy” [3].

Mark Brown wrote an interesting blog post about the Rust programming language [4]. He links to a couple of longer blog posts about it. Rust has some great features and I’ve been meaning to learn it.

Scientific America has an informative article about research on the spread of fake news and memes [5]. Something to consider when using social media.

Bruce Schneier wrote an insightful blog post on whether there should be limits on persuasive technology [6].

Jonathan Dowland wrote an interesting blog post about git rebasing and lab books [7]. I think it’s an interesting thought experiment to compare the process of developing code worthy of being committed to a master branch of a VCS to the process of developing a Ph.D thesis.

CBS has a disturbing article about the effect of Covid19 on people’s lungs [8]. Apparently it usually does more lung damage than long-term smoking and even 70%+ of people who don’t have symptoms of the disease get significant lung damage. People who live in heavily affected countries like the US now have to worry that they might have had the disease and got lung damage without knowing it.

Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of the book “Because Internet” about modern linguistics [9]. The topic is interesting and I might read that book at some future time (I have many good books I want to read).

Jonathan Carter wrote an interesting blog post about CentOS Streams and why using a totally free OS like Debian is going to be a better option for most users [10].

Linus has slammed Intel for using ECC support as a way of segmenting the market between server and desktop to maximise profits [11]. It would be nice if a company made a line of Ryzen systems with ECC RAM support, but most manufacturers seem to be in on the market segmentation scam.

Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of the book “Can’t Even” about millenials as the burnout generation and the blame that the corporate culture deserves for this [12].

Links December 2020

Business Insider has an informative article about the way that Google users can get locked out with no apparent reason and no recourse [1]. Something to share with clients when they consider putting everything in “the cloud”.

Vice has an interestoing article about people jailbreaking used Teslas after Tesla has stolen software licenses that were bought with the car [2].

The Atlantic has an interesting article titled This Article Won’t Change Your Mind [3]. It’s one of many on the topic of echo chambers but has some interesting points that others don’t seem to cover, such as regarding the benefits of groups when not everyone agrees.

Inequality.org has lots of useful information about global inequality [4].

Jeffrey Goldberg has an insightful interview with Barack Obama for the Atlantic about the future course of American politics and a retrospective on his term in office [5].

A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon is an insightful Medium article comparing QAnon to an augmented reality game [6]. This is one of the best analysis of QAnon operations that I’ve seen.

Decrypting Rita is one of the most interesting web comics I’ve read [7]. It makes good use of side scrolling and different layers to tell multiple stories at once.

PC Mag has an article about the new features in Chrome 87 to reduce CPU use [8]. On my laptop I have 1/3 of all CPU time being used when it is idle, the majority of which is from Chrome. As the CPU has 2 cores this means the equivalent of 1 core running about 66% of the time just for background tabs. I have over 100 tabs open which I admit is a lot. But it means that the active tabs (as opposed to the plain HTML or PDF ones) are averaging more than 1% CPU time on an i7 which seems obviously unreasonable. So Chrome 87 doesn’t seem to live up to Google’s claims.

The movie Bad President starring Stormy Daniels as herself is out [9]. Poe’s Law is passe.

Interesting summary of Parler, seems that it was designed by the Russians [10].

Wired has an interesting article about Indistinguishability Obfuscation, how to encrypt the operation of a program [11].

Joerg Jaspert wrote an interesting blog post about the difficulties packagine Rust and Go for Debian [12]. I think that the problem is many modern languages aren’t designed well for library updates. This isn’t just a problem for Debian, it’s a problem for any long term support of software that doesn’t involve transferring a complete archive of everything and it’s a problem for any disconnected development (remote sites and sites dealing with serious security. Having an automatic system for downloading libraries is fine. But there should be an easy way of getting the same source via an archive format (zip will do as any archive can be converted to any other easily enough) and with version numbers.

Links November 2020

KDE has a long term problem of excessive CPU time used by the screen locker [1]. Part of it is due to software GL emulation, and part of it is due to the screen locker doing things like flashing the cursor when nothing else is happening. One of my systems has an NVidia card and enabling GL would cause it to crash. So now I have kscreenlocker using 30% of a CPU core even when the screen is powered down.

Informative NYT article about the latest security features for iPhones [2]. Android needs new features like this!

Russ Allbery wrote an interesting review of the book Hand to Mouth by Linda Tirado [3], it’s about poverty in the US and related things. Linda first became Internet famous for her essay “Why I Make Terrible Decisions or Poverty Thoughts” which is very insightful and well written, this is the latest iteration of that essay [4].

This YouTube video by Ruby Payne gives great insights to class based attitudes towards time and money [5].

News Week has an interesting article about chicken sashimi, apparently you can safely eat raw chicken if it’s prepared well [6].

Vanity Fair has an informative article about how Qanon and Trumpism have infected the Catholic Church [7]. Some of Mel Gibson’s mental illness is affecting a significant portion of the Catholic Church in the US and some parts in the rest of the world.

Noema has an interesting article on toxic Internet culture, Japan’s 2chan, 4chan, 8chan/8kun, and the conspiracy theories they spawned [8].

Benjamin Corey is an ex-Fundie who wrote an amusing analysis of the Biblical statements about the anti-Christ [9].

NYMag has an interesting article The Final Gasp of Donald Trump’s Presidency [10].

Mother Jones has an informative article about the fact that Jim Watkins (the main person behind QAnon) has a history of hosting child porn on sites he runs [11], but we all knew QAnon was never about protecting kids.

Eand has an insightful article America’s Problem is That White People Want It to Be a Failed State [12].

Links September 2020

MD5 cracker, find plain text that matches MD5 hash [1].

Debian Quick Image Baker – Debian VM images for various architectures [2].

Insightful article on Scientific American about how dental and orthodontic problems are caused by our modern lifestyle [3].

Cory Doctorow wrote an insightful article for Locus Magazine about Intellectual Property [4]. He makes the case that we are losing our rights due to changes in the legal system that benefits corporations.

Anarcat has an informative blog post about how to stop people using your Mailman installation to attack others [5]. Since version 1:2.1.27-1 the Debian package of Mailman has created a SUBSCRIBE_FORM_SECRET by default on install, but any installation upgraded from an older version of the Debian package won’t have it.

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Links July 2020

iMore has an insightful article about Apple’s transition to the ARM instruction set for new Mac desktops and laptops [1]. I’d still like to see them do something for the server side.

Umair Haque wrote an insightful article about How the American Idiot Made America Unlivable [2]. We are witnessing the destruction of a once great nation.

Chris Lamb wrote an interesting blog post about comedy shows with the laugh tracks edited out [3]. He then compares that to social media with the like count hidden which is an interesting perspective. I’m not going to watch TV shows edited in that way (I’ve enjoyed BBT inspite of all the bad things about it) and I’m not going to try and hide like counts on social media. But it’s interesting to consider these things.

Cory Doctorow wrote an interesting Locus article suggesting that we could have full employment by a transition to renewable energy and methods for cleaning up the climate problems we are too late to prevent [4]. That seems plausible, but I think we should still get a Universal Basic Income.

The Thinking Shop has posters and decks of cards with logical fallacies and cognitive biases [5]. Every company should put some of these in meeting rooms. Also they have free PDFs to download and print your own posters.

gayhomophobe.com [6] is a site that lists powerful homophobic people who hurt GLBT people but then turned out to be gay. It’s presented in an amusing manner, people who hurt others deserve to be mocked.

Wired has an insightful article about the shutdown of Backpage [7]. The owners of Backpage weren’t nice people and they did some stupid things which seem bad (like editing posts to remove terms like “lolita”). But they also worked well with police to find criminals. The opposition to what Backpage were doing conflates sex trafficing, child prostitution, and legal consenting adult sex work. Taking down Backpage seems to be a bad thing for the victims of sex trafficing, for consenting adult sex workers, and for society in general.

Cloudflare has an interesting blog post about short lived certificates for ssh access [8]. Instead of having user’s ssh keys stored on servers each user has to connect to a SSO server to obtain a temporary key before connecting, so revoking an account is easy.