iam-TJ

Quote from Chris Aker's Linode blog post [0]:

"For the immediate future, we will continue to operate as we always have. Akamai has no intention of changing what has made us successful. This acquisition will propel us both forward — not take anything away. Linode will soon be able to call on the power of Akamai to offer entirely new products, services, expertise, locations, and scale, while Akamai will be able to tap into Linode’s deep expertise in compute, storage, and on-demand infrastructure-as-a-service.

Today, we start a new chapter in Linode’s story — one that strengthens our position in a market increasingly looking for alternatives. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2022.

Thank you — our customers, partners, and community — for supporting and empowering us to make cloud computing simple, affordable, and accessible."

[0] https://www.linode.com/blog/linode/linode-and-akamai/

I've been using Linode since the mid 2000s when Chris Aker, the owner and CEO, provided support on IRC ( OFTC: caker) and the company only had two or three staff.

Great to see how he built Linode organically to the scale it has reached. In the context of venture capital and Y-combinator its a good contrasting story on how successful a bootstrapped, patiently built, profitable sustainable business can become when the focus is on excellent (and personal) customer service.

Real shame that someone who's own web-site [0] has the strap-line "No trackers, no ads. Black type, white background. Privacy policy: we don't collect or retain any data at all ever period." publishes on Medium which imposes tracking on readers with no option to opt-out and will not display the simple article text without support of 44 active scripts!

[0] https://pluralistic.net/

There's one aspect of these deprecations of functionality in widely-used tools and agents that is often overlooked.

The very premise of the deprecation and removal is that any code-base that uses that functionality is being constantly maintained and can be updated. That is a major misunderstanding that in the 'web' development world has become the norm due to 'DevOps', Continuous Integration, Continuous Testing.

There are many codebases out there that achieved their objectives, are finished, and are effectively unmaintained since they work as designed. When the functionality they use is removed they fail and the end-user loses out.

This is always going to be a major problem for historians, historical web-site and code archives that have active code (not just passive HTML/CSS). The problem we have is that with deprecations and removals of functionality that was previously recommended and/or 'best practice' our ability to maintain digital history is being chipped away.

Historically, we've already lost the ability to easily use Adobe Flash (good from a security perspective but not so much from a historical perspective) and Java applets (still many 'enterprise' devices rely on them) and all those web-sites that relied on Internet Explorer specific features.

For each codebase we now have to figure out which specific tooling and versions are required and try to re-acquire them. Not excessively difficult for open-source tooling but challenging for closed-source and proprietary tooling. Another related issue building up is the switch to 64-bit and the subsequent bit-rot of 32-bit support.

It feels like the horizon to failure of a completed "web" codebase is less than 10 years.

Thanks for working on such a great project. I've seriously hacked on the codebase about a decade ago and recall what a minefield it can be!

I'm not going to purchase a service I'll never use - I'm also philosophically opposed to centralised 3rd party VPN endpoints no matter who operates them. It's not a "Private" network, it's simply a proxy to side-step (most) ISP level interference or geo-fencing by services.

But if Mozilla can re-sell the Mullvad VPN service then sell me a unique personalised copy of Firefox that has my name in the Help>About* dialog! No messing about with donations then :)

*actually just read the string from a (possibly downloaded) prefs.js/user.js key.

One caveat to note is the LED needs to be connected to a GPIO port that the software can control.

That leads to the obvious question for high-value systems that may be targeted - presumably fixed systems not laptops/notebooks/tablets - are the activity/power LEDs commonly connected via software-controlled GPIOs or mostly part of the electronic circuit only ?

I want to focus a comment on Mozilla Firefox generally. I see a lot of hate being expressed here but I do get a sense of entitlement from some comments. Firefox is a free-of-cost product and surely we all know by now that if you don't pay for it you're the product, not the customer.

I don't allow tracking or advertising at all, whether from Internet services or local radio and TV (mostly do not use ad-supported stations), never had a Facebook/Twitter/etc., account, not used Google for the last decade, and so on.

However, in exchange for avoiding tracking and adverts, I actively pay for services I appreciate in whatever way they provide for whether through purchase, subscription, or donation.

I really wish Mozilla Corporation would have a DONATE TO FIREFOX option* to directly support development of the browser (and Thunderbird) and a max-privacy version. This would directly quantify real support from those like me that object to tracking and/or invasive adverts - I suspect the amount raised would be minimal, but it'd put the default search engine funding into perspective.

Not a lot of people realise that donating to the Mozilla Foundation does NOT support Firefox development by Mozilla Corporation.

* I was one of those that paid for Netscape Navigator back in the mid 1990s before Microsoft released Internet Explorer as part of the Windows OS and wiped out the paid-for browser market and forced Netscape Navigator to be released free of charge in order to try to compete - which directly led to Mozilla and Firefox.

Yes, but my thought with (2) is you can use someone else's telephone number without their permission or knowledge until it is permanently blocked as a method of verification and authentication.

I wonder if this is a potential denial-of-service bug?

There are two scenarios:

1. The expected use-case: Create account(s), assign number for verification, verify, account active, number remains assigned to account(s)

2. The unexpected: Attempt to create account(s), assign number for verification, ignore or fail verification, no account created

If the attempted use of the number in (2) is counted and remembered then there's an anonymous potential DOS against any number

Whenever I read discussions about space travel and trying to approach the speed of light for human travel I have the feeling there's a lot of tunnel vision (excuse the pun). It always seems to assume travelling along a linear path through space.

In my mind, using the admittedly poor analogy of space-time as a membrane that is distorted by gravity, my thinking is we'll find some way to effectively bring two points in space-time adjacent to each other and 'step' between them. Wormholes, Warp, or whatever you want to call it.

Think of a flexible membrane 10 meters long and we are going to travel from one end to the other. We can either travel in a linear fashion over its surface for 10 meters or we can wrap the membrane so both ends are next to each other and travel 0.01m across the gap between them.

Yes, I know there are all sorts of obstacles and arguments against this simplistic visualisation but this is how I've always imagined the physics of any science fiction faster-than-light travel - worm-holes, warp drives, etc.

If you want an actual, real, possible-right-now analogy, think of our current situation where the fastest way to travel from London, UK to Sydney, Australia (1/2 way around the world) is through the atmosphere in an aeroplane travelling ~17000 kilometers and taking at best 19.5 hours.

SpaceX (Musk) Virgin Galactic (Branson), other companies [0], and space agencies [1] have talked about, and are actively working toward, stepping outside the atmosphere into space to reduce the time element to around an hour.

So just like with supposedly faster-than-light travel, by 'stepping outside' the linear/conventional thinking/physics we reduce the time of travel element dramatically. The start and end points don't move but the distance travelled by the transport vehicle itself changes in order to enable the reduction in time.

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/new-flights-space-lo...

[1] https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/hypersonic-flight-air...

I've just asked the UK ICO for advice and got a confirmation it wouldn't be considered as a data controller or processor. I gave this example:

Me: "Effectively, in my case, the user is adding 'post-it' notes of their own devising that remain 'sticky' so the next time they visit the same page they'll see their own notes - but those notes are never sent to the server"

Me: "It's effectively the same circumstance as a classical computer program being downloaded by the user, and then used (locally) to create/save files on their local device. In that case you wouldn't consider the author of the computer program to be the data controller, surely?"

ICO (Flynn): "Flynn: Okay that sounds reasonable." ICO (Flynn): "So if your product/service is not dependant on personal data and you are not processing it then you appear to not be captured by data protection legislation."

Interesting that you mention localStorage.

If the web-page's javascript ONLY stores and processes data stored in the client's localStorage to generate the local page, and sends nothing back to the server, so the web-site operator never sees that data, then is the web-site operator processing that data, or is it only the user-agent's operator ?

The web-site operator certainly wouldn't be a "data controller" since it isn't collecting or storing the data. And it's hard to see how the web-site operator would be a "data processor" in that circumstance.

"Due to internet piracy we needed to close access to proxies. If you have to use the proxy of your company, contact us. We'll check the IP address and possibly reenable access."

For the entire site. Not using a proxy, VPN service, Tor, etc!

Original press release from the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) itself:

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/cma-designates-amazon-as-...

The pre-print's introduction suggests the most likely cause of contamination is machine misalignment. Date of sequencing has not been determined other than to say late December 2019 to early January 2020 (when results were sent to the sample submitters).

"We think that the most likely scenario is that the SARS-CoV-2 sequence fragments are not from the Antarctic soil samples,but are mistakenly assigned reads from another sample(s) sequenced on the same flow cell at the Sangon Biotech sequencing facility in Shanghai.

The equipment, Illumina HiSeq 4000 that was used for sequencing according to the project’s metadata, is known to be prone to barcode misassignment errors6,7.In a nutshell, as detailed in Illumina’s whitepaper6, this artifact is related to the exponentially increasing density of next-generation sequencing (NGS) chips. Nowadays a single flow cell has such a large capacity that it is rarely filled up by a single sample. For example the 12 antarctic soil samples in PRJNA692319 altogether contain around 320 million paired end reads, while Illumina HiSeq 4000’s capacity is up to 10 billion paired end reads. The increased capacity is utilized through multiplexing, which adds unique sequences, called indexes or barcodes, to each DNA fragment during library preparation.Before final data analysis, sequencing reads from pooled libraries need to be identified and sorted computationally in a process called demultiplexing. This allows large numbers of libraries to be pooled and sequenced simultaneously during a single sequencing run. After adapters are ligated to nucleic acid fragments, the products are cleaned up to remove any free, unligated adapters. Libraries can be cleaned up by a bead-based or gel purification step to remove free adapters or primers. Failure to remove free adapters or primers can lead to contamination of prepared libraries and may result in index hopping and misassignment. As a results, sequencing reads from other, not related samples that are sequenced on the same flow cell can get into our samples."

It's disingenuous of the Telegraph journalist not to provide links to, or attributed quotes from, the Hungarian scientists.

After doing some in-depth research to find the original research or reports I've found nothing published by the Hungarian institutions nor Dr Jesse Bloom - the only person quoted in the article. Having dug further I don't take his statements at face value either, for the reasons described below, since there's more than a hint of preconceived bias in his general thrust and previous publications.

I REALLY wish journalists would clearly share published sources to original research and data for such important events rather than stir up controversy without demonstrating a strong foundation. Especially when claiming this is a "finding".

For clarity, I've no opinion on SARS-Cov-2 origin but I do want to see claims well-supported by evidence.

I went looking on both the mentioned Hungarian web-sites [0][1], searched biorxiv, and checked the Bloom Lab [2] publications since the only person quoted is Jesse Bloom [3] who claims to have reproduced (Hungarian) results. In my research I also found a prior report by Bloom in June 2021 [4] reporting 'recovery of deleted files containing partial sequences' [4] that were soon criticised by multiple other scientists; e.g: "...The language of the paper is unusual, its contains a significant degree of supposition and conjecture, cites blog posts..." [5].

[0] https://univet.hu/en/research/topics/

[1] https://www.elte.hu/en/facts

[2] https://research.fredhutch.org/bloom/en/publications.html

[3] https://research.fredhutch.org/bloom/en/members.html

[4] https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.06.18.449051v1....

[5] https://edition.cnn.com/2021/06/23/health/coronavirus-sequen...

Updated: just discovered there's a recent github repo [6] created by Bloom with much more detail. Telegraph should really have pointed to this.

[6] https://github.com/jbloom/PRJNA692319_public

Update 2: Pre-print [7] of the Hungarian report (see [6] for details as to why it was rejected by Biorxiv several times).

[7] https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-1330800/v1

If you can build your house, or drive your car, at that altitude I rather think you'd be the one being liable! :D

(based on the fact these satellites are designed to burn up completely upon re-entry into Earth's atmosphere and so no 'chunks' reach the surface)

Let's hope it supports IPv6 RA/SLAAC and DHCPv6.

BBC report adds to the original report by The Stack [0] which says the clues came to light in a urgent contract tender document in January (2022) [1] which says:

    Provision of Business Analyst and Technical Architect support to analyse an Authority cyber security incident. Due to the nature of the cyber security incident, the specific Deliverables cannot be disclosed.

[0] Foreign Office hacked in “serious cyber security incident”https://thestack.technology/foreign-office-hacked-fcdo-cyber...

[1] "Provision of urgent business support" https://www.find-tender.service.gov.uk/Notice/003220-2022?or...

The big problem here is you've no fall-back for when the place you're trying to pay, or their merchant services provider, has a communications/network outage or malware attack or has assets frozen - some of which affect multiple large retailers.

There have been many instances over the years, even just in the U.K., where small and large stores have been unable to accept digital/network-required payments and ended up with massive queues or customers abandoning shopping carts full of items due to not having cash.

"Spar cyber attack hits more than 300 convenience stores" (2021-12) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-lancashire-59554433

"Manx Telecom broadband outage affects 4,000" (2020-08) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-isle-of-man-53920785

"Wirecard: 'It’s really bad. I’m left with nothing'" (2020-06) https://www.bbc.com/news/business-53222181

"Debit card glitch means thousands charged twice" (2018-09) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-45400234

"Visa (Europe) says service returning to normal" (2018-06) https://www.bbc.com/news/business-44335804

"Asda card machine fault leads to queues at checkouts" (2016-10) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-37815973

"RBS says it has resolved debit card computer glitch" (2016-10) https://www.bbc.com/news/business-37658559

"Lloyds Banking Group says card problems sorted" (2014-01) https://www.bbc.com/news/business-25907000

"Card payments system crash disrupts shoppers" (2010-10) https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-11458962

Also, interesting and somewhat unexpected contactless from long distance!

"Contactless 'charging errors' at Marks and Spencer" (2013-05) https://www.bbc.com/news/business-22545804

Looks like the TTL on the records is still affecting local resolution. I'm aware of the git protocol work-around to force IPv4 but that doesn't help when using a regular web-browser to visit the published URL for issues (first thing I evaluate for a new-to-me project):

https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage/issues

I was just writing something similar after some research when I found this existing thread. Maybe we should refer to these public-private-public carousels as PEPOs (Private Equity Public Offering) ? :P

Pedantic nit: not quite an IPO (Initial Public Offering) in its true sense since the original ARM Holdings was already a public limited company (PLC) before Softbank bought it from its shareholders in 2016. The trading entity and group parent is Arm Ltd, a private limited company formed in 1990 [0].

There is however a currently dormant Arm Holdings Ltd [1] incorporated in 2018 which may be converted to a public company so it would be the first time this legal entity has been publicly listed.

[0] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

[1] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/c...

Your git repository is not reachable over IPv6 despite publishing a DNS AAAA record:

    $ curl -v https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage/issues
    *   Trying 2001:41d0:8:ba0b::1:443...
    *   Trying 5.135.179.11:443...
    * Immediate connect fail for 5.135.179.11: Network is unreachable

    $ dig +noquestion +nocmd aaaa git.deuxfleurs.fr
    ;; Got answer:
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: NOERROR, id: 46366
    ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 2, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 2

    ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION:
    ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 65494
    ;; ANSWER SECTION:
    git.deuxfleurs.fr.      6822    IN      CNAME   hammerhead.machine.deuxfleurs.fr.
    hammerhead.machine.deuxfleurs.fr. 6822 IN AAAA  2001:41d0:8:ba0b::1

This from an IPv6-only network. Since you publish an IPv6 record our DNS64/NAT64 gateway doesn't get involved hence the IPv4 immediate connect fail.

Develop a plan to deal with the depression first and work towards it gradually; incorporate plenty of physical activity to keep you fit, active, and with non-technology interests. That could be anything from playing sports to photographing birds or recording bird-song.

Identify some topic you have a strong personal interest or curiosity about and follow that up. As you do that try developing some technology project around it. Document (maybe blog) your journey, publish your background research and analysis, any schematics, diagrams or code that you create, and if you decide to drop the project document your reasons before moving on. Then find another interest and repeat.

Contribute to existing open-source projects that relate you your interests.

Those projects can be "bite-sized" (a few days or weeks worth), "flirting" ('exciting' new topics that quickly become mundane or boring) or "passions" (projects you may continue on and off for years).

You'll develop clear evidence of how you approach problem-solving, how you adapt and grow as you gain experience and skill, and how you deal with obstacles.

Keep in mind that there are many opportunities for remote working especially since many technology companies have embraced it due to the CoViD-19 pandemic (that does mean you'd need to be able to demonstrate self-discipline and self-motivation - which the above approach will support).

If you're serious about pursuing Google then investigate the grounds for claiming "Tortious Interference".

The kernel source repository has a directory specifically for it, strangely called "Documentation" [0] :)

There are also comprehensive web pages for both programmers and system administrators published for all versions and 'latest' [1] which is where the article's document is to be found.

[0] https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...

[1] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/

I've been operating 64-bit kernels and user-space for at least a couple of years for embedded and network and server usage and not experienced anything to even remind me it's 64-bit rather than 32-bit.

I've used both the original Raspbian 64-bit builds and plain Debian 64-bit with the few required RaspberryPi specific tools added in. Kernels are all self-built (cross-compiled) keeping up with mainline Linux.

Maybe their perspective is different ?

Generally, extreme excellence in one domain is balanced by a lower-than-average (for a given value of 'average') performance, or attention, in some others. It is related to single-mindedness (is that a word!?) and possibly to individual mental and social make-up.

E.g. great scientists don't necessarily make good home-keepers (also insert famous memes about 'scatter-brained' and/or unkempt genii/geniuses).

I hesitate to use the word 'genius' for mere software developers in order not to devalue its meaning :P [tongue in cheek grinning emoticon here]

However, many extreme performers need, prefer, or desire to operate inside an ecosystem (bubble) that looks after and caters for their other needs so as not to distract them from what they consider most important to focus upon. Consider top-class sports people and the 'teams' of non-athletic support people they're often surrounded by.

The resulting effect could likely be described as a by-product of tunnel vision - anything outside their primary interest is a secondary consideration, if at all.

I see the link (from 3 February) is to a short video capture of the ship burning and apparently with a broken back judging by the fore and aft deck angles.

Other sources give latest updates [0][2] which show of ten crew, three (or four) are known to have died, three recovered but their health unclear, and four (or three) still unaccounted for. The vessel spit in two and partially sank. Some information suggests it was operating in shallow water (~30m) in the Niger river delta.

The vessel is the FPSO (Floating Production Storage and Offloading) unit Trinity Spirit [1], a single hull VLCC (Very Large Crude Carrier) built in 1976 and converted to a FPSO in 1997, operated by SEPCO (Shebah Exploration and Production COmpany) Limited, a Nigerian business apparently currently in administration.

According to some reports [2] SEPCO, or this specific vessel, lost its production license in 2019 and was only storing approximately 60,000 of its 2,000,000 barrel capacity. It is over 30 years old, operating 20 years beyond its design life with reports stating it was poorly maintained.

[0] https://shipsandports.com.ng/sepcol-vessel-explosion-death-t...

[1] http://marinelike.com/en/vessels/7370325-trinity_spirit.html

[2] https://www.hazardexonthenet.net/article/189306/Three-crewme...

In my case, I 'own' it. Building kernel and several core packages from source frequently.