tjk @tjk@oldbytes.space

This didn't age well.

The Enabling Act was an amendment to the Weimar Constitution that gave the German Cabinet — in effect, Chancellor Adolf Hitler — the power to enact laws without the involvement of the Reichstag.

Remember that when a president starts to govern by decree without the involvement of Congress.

And by "govern" I mean divert huge amounts of attention away from the machinations of the regime by blaming a group of innocent people for a crime that never happened.

Android PNG image vulnerability.. Update your phone, if there's an update for your device!

https://source.android.com/security/bulletin/2019-02-01.html

(It's just a meme, not a real RCE)

Dear kids in Washington State: you can make an appointment with your doctor, or walk into a clinic or ER, and get vaccinated. You don't need permission from your parents. You don't have to wait until you are 18. If the health care provider gets confused, the magic phrase is "Mature Minor Doctrine", and point out that not wanting to catch measles is sign of sufficient maturity.

Please reshare, and copypaste this any place this would be useful.

Silk woven portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard, woven by Michel-Marie Carquillat on a Jacquard loom - France, 1839.

The program for this weave required Carquillat to encode ~24,000 Jacquard punch cards.

The image is fine detailed enough to capture detail like the translucency of the curtains over the window.

This achievement was one of the main things that later convinced Babbage to use punch cards for his Analytical Engine, cascading into actual use in computing later on.

#art #retrocomputing

"I love to do data science while I'm keyboard typing and butt sitting, listening to sound music."

pinched from fbook 😊

If you really want to help Firefox succeed, file a bug on https://webcompat.com/ when you find a broken website. Don't just switch back to Chrome; let Mozilla know there's a problem so they can try to fix it.

When browsers lose market share, they fall into the "compatibility death spiral." Sites don't bother to test, they break, and users flee to the browser that "just works." Mozilla is fighting this battle every day, and it just got harder.

Firefox is now more important, isolated and vulnerable. Some suggested ways we can support it:
• Set it as your default browser. And if you're back home with family over Christmas, suggest/set as their default too.
• When you hear web devs say "can't everyone just use Chrome", please challenge it.
• Contribute to Mozilla-led projects, e.g. MDN Docs: https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2018/05/contributing-mdn-webdocs/
• Donate to Mozilla if you can: https://donate.mozilla.org

Want to use a link shortener on #Mastodon?

Don't! All links in Mastodon posts count for 23 characters, no matter how long they really are.

(via @jond )

#MastoTips

gave myself a little project yesterday: after discovering AppArmor is enabled on all official arch linux kernels, i decided to turn it on and start locking down some processes.

in turn, i found out that discord just absolutely loves to open ptrace on anything it can find.

i can only guess this has something to do with the game integration and "rich presence" features, as denying it hasn't broken anything yet. just wish it were more up-front about this stuff.

google captchas are fucking unethical stop making me train their neural nets to log in to my accounts

EU citizens!

#Article13 has lurched back into life due to a last minute Franco-German deal:

https://juliareda.eu/2019/02/article-13-worse/

Any profit-making site over 3 years old will have to install YouTube-style automatic copyright filters on all uploads.

In practice, they would have to outsource it to Google etc. Big tech would choose what we see, even on tiny indie sites.

Please tell your MEPs today, in your own words, that this is not acceptable. They vote on this next Monday:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/meps/en/home

Wow, turn any stdin/stdout using program into a websocket server. https://github.com/joewalnes/websocketd/blob/master/README.md
«websocketd is a small command-line tool that will wrap an existing command-line interface program, and allow it to be accessed via a WebSocket.»

I’m surprised that #Mastodon 𝘀𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 doesn’t have a way to sync the reading position - neither between web on two different devices, nor with between native clients on different devices.

// cc @Gargron

Still some of the best advice for programmers:

Don't be clever. Be obvious.

TIL: You can temporary become part of a unix group with sudo -s -g GROUPNAME. Which is quite useful if you need more permissions but don't need full root permissions. Good for reading logs.