2025-10-01


Worthy

  • Surreptitious Surveillance

    By 2012, NSA's budget for its "SIGINT Enabling Project", part of its amusingly named "Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative", had reached a quarter billion dollars per year. In its budget request, NSA wrote that this project "actively engages the US and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products' designs. These design changes make the systems in question exploitable ... To the consumer and other adversaries, however, the systems' security remains intact." Specific project activities listed by NSA were to "influence policies, standards and specification for commercial public key technologies", to "shape the worldwide commercial cryptography marketplace to make it more tractable to advanced cryptanalytic capabilities being developed by NSA/CSS", etc.

celebrity gossip


Religion / Tribal / Culture War and Re-Segregation

Info Rental / ShowBiz / Advertising

TechSuck / Geek Bait

  • Why Heavy Codes of Conduct Are Unnecessary for Open Source Projects

    DHH condemned detailed and strict CoC like the Contributor Covenant as a “trojan horse” that should be purged from projects. ESR went even further, asserting that CoC are nothing more than a “tool for troublemakers” and that the best course of action is to delete them entirely from projects. While both individuals are often seen as controversial figures in the community, their views on this matter align closely with my own. How did the CoC, once considered a tool to foster collaboration and maintain a healthy community, become the subject of such intense controversy?

    • The entire point, from the beginning, was the exclusion of people from projects for non-technical reasons. The idea that an open source project could focus on code quality as reason to accept or reject submissions was showing too many people the merits of merit based judgments; thy had to advocate prejudice and hate back into the program.
  • Codes of Conduct in Open Source

    If you’ve ever tried to keep a project healthy at scale, you know behavior problems are latency spikes: rare, but disruptive enough to distort the whole system. Some developers resonate with Raymond’s “minimal interface” approach because it promises constant time moderation: quick ejects, low process overhead, and a bias toward making progress. Others argue that without some structure, you simply externalize costs onto newcomers and underrepresented contributors who leave long before they can demonstrate “merit.” Survey work (2021 DEI, pdf) and reporting from industry observers have repeatedly flagged that open source participation skews heavily and that negative interactions drive people away, which is the exact failure mode most CoCs aim to address. If you strip the rhetoric, you’re choosing between two operational models for social coordination in a codebase. A minimal policy treats social friction like a rare outage and optimizes for fast mitigation. A structured policy treats social friction like a recurring reliability concern and invests in process, documentation, and clear escalation paths. Neither model is free. The question is where you want to pay and how predictable you want the outcome to be.

  • ip over lasers

    Using minicom, data could be transferred character by character over the lasers at 4800 baud. At 9600 baud only garbage was transfered. I was having trouble with the relay of IP data so I dropped it down to 2400 baud. There were some bugs in the code at that time so maybe it could be bumped back up to 4800. Either way, ping time isn't pretty and connecting using SSH takes... a minute or so.

AI Will (Save | Destroy) The World

Space / Boomy Zoomers / UFO

Economicon / Business / Finance

Gubmint / Poilitcks / Law Making

Democrats

  • Comey Faces Indictment, but His Real Crimes Remain Untouched

    He is not being investigated for improperly disclosing his newly reopened investigative case against Hillary Clinton on the eve of the 2016 election. Nor is he being investigated for predetermining that Hillary Clinton was innocent of the charges of unlawfully transmitting confidential material before his own FBI investigation was complete—and before Comey’s FBI had even interviewed her.

    He is not being investigated for tasking Peter Strzok to alter his own original condemnation of Clinton’s conduct by replacing the initial and correct term “gross negligence,” a phrase that denotes a federal crime, with “extreme carelessness,” which involves no criminal liability.

    He is not being investigated for, nor charged with, birthing the entire governmental role in the Russian collusion hoax that warped the 2016 presidential election and transition by his use of the discredited Christopher Steele as an FBI confidant/source.

    He is not being investigated for using the fraudulent Steele dossier as a “central and essential” document to obtain a FISA court writ to improperly surveil Carter Page—an act that even he later admitted was wrong.

  • How a Government Agency You've Never Heard of Censored Everyday Americans

    The agency had received an email from the Washington secretary of state's communications director, Kylee Zabel, flagging the post as "potential misinformation." CISA had solicited such communication, and within 20 minutes, the agency had forwarded the complaint to Twitter. By 8 a.m. the next day, Twitter had taken the tweet down. The incident, which has not been previously reported, is one of the many examples of government jawboning discussed in a new report on CISA by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation.

    As early as 2018, the report reveals, CISA was holding meetings with social media companies about alleged misinformation—both foreign and domestic—on their platforms. And in 2020, CISA directed state election officials to report false or misleading posts to the agency so that it could forward those reports to social media companies, a practice known as switchboarding. CISA never identified a statutory basis for these practices, according to the report. The most forthright defense of the agency's actions came from former CISA director Jen Easterly, who said in 2021 that "the most critical infrastructure is our cognitive infrastructure."

    "Our report shows that the Biden administration used CISA to strong arm social media companies into taking action against speech protected by the First Amendment," said Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas), the chairman of the Senate commerce committee, who this month blasted the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, for threatening to revoke ABC's broadcast license over the comments Jimmy Kimmel made about the assassination of Charlie Kirk. "For the past decade, I've led the fight against government censorship, whether it's CISA or the FCC or the Biden White House. Inevitably, these tactics have been and will be disproportionately used to silence conservatives." The report shows how the Biden administration used the levers of federal power to stifle dissent—without a murmur of concern from political allies.

  • Biden admin put Americans who flouted COVID mask mandate on no-fly list — which is usually reserved for terrorists

    DHS flagged 19 Americans to Transportation Security Administration watchlists between Sept. 30, 2021, and Oct. 25, 2021, more than half of whom received the most severe no-fly designation and were prevented from boarding domestic flights as a result. At least 11 of those Americans were kept on the watchlists until April 2022, when a federal court ruling forced the Biden administration to end its mask mandate.

Left Angst

External Security / Militaria / Diplomania

World

Health / Medicine