columns

(date: 2024-10-20 08:34:07)

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-20, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Just last week my beautiful Xcode-inspired design for the debugger pad met the reality of iPad and launching an app side by side.

It is hideous, and I am fixing:

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113340323996071935

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-20, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

The sole reason I haven’t release Godot on iPad is that I have some 100 bugs that must be fixed, and everyone using it would be pretty annoyed at things like this:

We are working around the clock, but the “must be fixed for a small preview” list as grown to about 30 bugs has we do full tutorial walkthroughs, and get to experience every bit:

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113340300888539368

Aretha Franklin‘s ’Think‘

date: 2024-10-20, from: Dan Rather’s Steady

A Reason To Smile

https://steady.substack.com/p/aretha-franklins-think

Sunday caption contest: If his lies could speak

date: 2024-10-20, from: Robert Reich’s blog

And last week’s winner

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption-contest-if-his-lies

October 19, 2024

date: 2024-10-20, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

A number of people telling me we all need a night off had almost convinced me not to write tonight.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-19-2024

October 18, 2024

date: 2024-10-20, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

download audio/mpeg

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-18-2024-bb3

Election Countdown, 17 Days to Go: Ground Truths That Matter.

date: 2024-10-20, from: James Fallows, Substack

In the chaos of daily news, don’t lose sight of: The danger of JD Vance, the naked agitprop of Fox, and the common sense of citizens.

https://fallows.substack.com/p/election-countdown-17-days-to-go

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

I asked ChatGPT to illustrate my post. Not bad. Very colorful!

http://scripting.com/2024/10/19.html#a132955

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

It’s possible the Dodgers let the Mets win as I begged them to yesterday, but it’s also possible the Mets just crushed the Dodgers, but either way, the Mets are still in it. The series is now 3-2, and returns to Los Angeles tomorrow. So we don’t have to tear down Citi Field after all. If the Dodgers win it’ll be in their own stadium. The Mets were magnificent! Absolutely inspiring. A three-run home run by Alonso started things off. Everyone got on base. Doubles and triples. It wasn’t without the concern that our wonderful and lovable Mets would do the usual Mets thing and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, but they held out. The final score was 12-6. We’re still in it. Lets go Mets!

http://scripting.com/2024/10/19.html#a132034

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-19, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Eugen Rochko, the lead developer of Mastodon: “Fediverse integration in Threads is still in a sorry state over a year since launch. They need to be able to follow us back. They need to see when we mention them. Those are such basic things.” They got what they wanted, they got the users and press to relax because they’re Facebook who we know, but this is different, it’s the fediverse. And they got Eugen and others to validate them. This always works, standard tech playbook. they give up nothing, then the priority changes. I don’t like being right. But they’re never going to change in Silicon Valley. They do what works, and take advantage of newcomers who want to believe.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/19.html#a131620

Trump is unstable, Harris is super able | The Coffee Klatch: October 19, 2024

date: 2024-10-19, from: Robert Reich’s blog

With Heather Lofthouse and Yours Truly, Robert Reich

download audio/mpeg

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/trump-is-unstable-harris-is-super

October 18, 2024

date: 2024-10-19, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

The events of January 6, 2021, overshadowed those of January 5, 2021, but that day was crucially important in a different way: Georgia voters elected two Democrats, Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, to the U.S.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-18-2024

Weeknotes: Oct. 11-18, 2024

date: 2024-10-19, from: Tracy Durnell Blog

Win of the week: finally did a bit of writing! Looking forward to: voting — got my ballot in the mail today! 🗳️ Stuff I did: 6.5 hours consulting — multiple client meetings, which is uncommon for me 2.5 hours writing — woo! took Monday off from consulting work more pruning and dug up a volunteer […]

https://tracydurnell.com/2024/10/18/weeknotes-oct-11-18-2024/

History Extra for October 17, 2024

date: 2024-10-19, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

“Reality TV” as its own genre arrived in the U.S.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-october-17-2024

My 2024 Election Video of the Week: Trump’s tax scam

date: 2024-10-18, from: Robert Reich’s blog

Trickle-down economics on steroids

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/my-2024-election-video-of-the-week-c41

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Scarf

date: 2024-10-18, updated: 2024-10-18, from: Bruce Schneier blog

Cute squid scarf.

Blog moderation policy.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/10/friday-squid-blogging-squid-scarf.html

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-18, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

UI-Design friends, I need some guidance and the Apple HIG does not have much for me here (it just says do this, but not how).

Godot validates that certain values on a form are acceptable before letting you proceed. I have replicated this behavior, but I hate the way that it looks.

It is a blob of red text saying, this is what is wrong. What are good iPadOS idioms that people use?

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113330314490863528

October 17, 2024

date: 2024-10-18, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

download audio/mpeg

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-17-2024-f80

Strolls with stops use more energy than continuous walking, scientists show. “Researchers…

date: 2024-10-18, updated: 2024-10-18, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045475-strolls-with-stops-use-mo

2024-10-18 Firefox/72

date: 2024-10-18, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog

2024-10-18 Firefox/72

I’ve now seen this shit running on systems hosted by: Amazon, Google, Carnegie Mellon University, NVidia, Oracle, University of Texas, San Diego Super Computing Center, Alibaba, University of Edinburgh, Huawei, Intel, Coreweave, Samsung, Hong Kong University, University of Washington… and dozens, or perhaps hundreds more. This shit makes requests from the United States, Germany, China, Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, United Kingdom, Netherlands, Portugal… and so on, and so on. – Block This Shit by @alexskunz

I decided to see whether this bot was scraping my pages, too. Here’s how to use network-lookup to see who’s doing it:

grep "Firefox/72" /var/log/apache2/access.log \
 | tail -n 100 \
 | bin/admin/network-lookup \
 > result.log

Let’s look at the organisations hosting that bot:

To get a feel for the level of incompetence of the engineers behind it, check out this example:

20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:37 +0200 | GET /cw?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:37 +0200 | GET /cw?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:38 +0200 | GET /cw?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:39 +0200 | GET /wiki?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:40 +0200 | GET /cw?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:40 +0200 | GET /cw?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:41 +0200 | GET /cw?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:41 +0200 | GET /wiki?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:42 +0200 | GET /cw?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:42 +0200 | GET /cw?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:43 +0200 | GET /cw?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0
20.64.0.0/10 | 20.112.49.107 | 18/Oct/2024:14:58:43 +0200 | GET /wiki?action=download;id=MattisManzelPortrait HTTP/1.1 | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0

Every fucking second‽

Now, a decision needs to be made:

• I could ban all the requests this bot makes by banning the specific user agent string.
• I could ban the networks that host this bot on the premise that they’ll probably also host other harmful bots.

Guess which option I’m taking?

Remember: 2023-10-04 Search engines, the deal is off!:

For a while it seemed that we all benefited from search engines – authors and readers both. These days, you’ll find that search results are full of garbage sites. Big sites with the most flatulent of pages explaining in great detail why the thing you’re looking for is important and how to do it, clearly optimized for an ad company and not for a reader. Big sites that have a gazillion answers are preferred over small and individual sites. Perhaps that’s easier. Perhaps it allows them to diffuse responsibility for the garbage, I don’t know. The effect is, in any case, that there is no benefit to search engines for small site authors, either. I was unable to find my own pages on the search engines. If you you are a small site owner and you think you can find your own pages on Google and Bing, I suspect that’s because they track you. Try it on a different computer, anonymously. Perhaps you won’t find yourself, either.

In any case, if I can’t get anything in return, both as a reader and as an author, I feel that the deal is off. Why let them feed on my words for free? Nay, at a cost, since they are keeping my website busy, producing CO₂ and heating the planet for no benefit at all.

Better to block them all.

Here we go:

grep ipset result.log|sh

That’s because network-lookup is kind enough to include the appropriate ipset instructions:

ipset add banlist 160.91.0.0/16 # Oak Ridge National Laboratory / OREN
ipset add banlist 20.64.0.0/10 # MSFT / Microsoft Corporation
ipset add banlist 3.36.0.0/14 # AMAZON-ICN / AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region
ipset add banlist 35.222.104.0/21 # Google LLC / GOOGLE-CLOUD
ipset add banlist 34.30.0.0/16 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 35.239.48.0/20 # Google LLC / GOOGLE-CLOUD
ipset add banlist 34.27.0.0/16 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 31.13.168.0/23 # NET-DEM-4SITSOLUTIONS / TWK-NET-CUSTOMER1
ipset add banlist 117.161.0.0/16 # CMNET / China Mobile / ORG-CM1-AP / China Mobile communications corporation
ipset add banlist 82.156.0.0/18 # IPv4 address block not managed by the RIPE NCC / NON-RIPE-NCC-MANAGED-ADDRESS-BLOCK
ipset add banlist 34.121.48.0/20 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 35.223.240.0/20 # GOOGLE-CLOUD / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 35.225.64.0/20 # GOOGLE-CLOUD / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 3.34.0.0/15 # AMAZON-ICN / AWS Asia Pacific (Seoul) Region
ipset add banlist 15.164.0.0/15 # AT-88-Z / Amazon Technologies Inc.
ipset add banlist 34.123.224.0/20 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 34.45.0.0/16 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 47.252.0.0/18 # ALIBABA CLOUD - US
ipset add banlist 45.38.206.0/24 # EGN-22 / EGIHosting
ipset add banlist 34.72.112.0/20 # Google LLC / GOOGL-2
ipset add banlist 121.30.0.0/16 # UNICOM-SX / CNC Group CHINA169 Shan1xi Province Network
ipset add banlist 104.198.48.0/20 # GOOGLE-CLOUD / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 34.68.176.0/20 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 34.68.96.0/20 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 34.16.0.0/17 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 34.122.64.0/20 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 35.239.16.0/20 # GOOGLE-CLOUD / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 202.120.234.0/24 # CERNET-CN / Beijing, 100084
ipset add banlist 104.154.160.0/20 # GOOGLE-CLOUD / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 34.70.112.0/20 # Google LLC / GOOGL-2
ipset add banlist 35.224.160.0/20 # GOOGLE-CLOUD / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 34.66.128.0/20 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 34.133.16.0/20 # Google LLC / GOOGL-2
ipset add banlist 109.171.128.0/18 # KAUST Section 1 / King Abdullah University of Science and Technology / ORG-KAUo2-RIPE / SA-KAUST-20091118
ipset add banlist 34.68.144.0/20 # Google LLC / GOOGL-2
ipset add banlist 8.130.0.0/16 # Alibaba.com Singapore E-Commerce Private Limited / ALICLOUD
ipset add banlist 34.122.128.0/20 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC

Thanks for nothing, leeches!

Oh, and of course I have an Apache config file called “blocklist.conf” where I added the following:

# Deny the image scraper
# https://imho.alex-kunz.com/2024/02/25/block-this-shit/
RewriteCond "%{HTTP_USER_AGENT}" "Firefox/72.0" [nocase]
RewriteRule ^ https://alexschroeder.ch/nobots [redirect=410,last]

#Administration #Butlerian Jihad

And more!

ipset add banlist 198.82.0.0/16 # Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State Univ. / VPI-BLK
ipset add banlist 34.31.0.0/16 # Google LLC / GOOGL-2
ipset add banlist 34.72.32.0/20 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 35.238.176.0/20 # Google LLC / GOOGLE-CLOUD
ipset add banlist 34.173.0.0/17 # Google LLC / GOOGL-2
ipset add banlist 35.223.128.0/20 # GOOGLE-CLOUD / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 34.172.128.0/17 # Google LLC / GOOGL-2
ipset add banlist 35.202.224.0/20 # Google LLC / GOOGLE-CLOUD
ipset add banlist 34.69.112.0/20 # GOOGL-2 / Google LLC
ipset add banlist 34.136.224.0/20 # Google LLC / GOOGL-2
ipset add banlist 72.52.64.0/18 # Hurricane Electric LLC / HURRICANE-8

https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-10-18-firefox-72

Polostan: Volume One of Bomb Light: A Riveting Historical Epic of International…

date: 2024-10-18, updated: 2024-10-18, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045456-polostan-volume-one-of-bo

We’ll meet again

date: 2024-10-18, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News

Imagine the editorial the NYT runs the day after the election when Trump wins and it dawns on them that it’s really over. For good. No backsies. We’re going down. Sayonara. Thanks for the memories. We’ll meet again, don’t know where, don’t know when.

It was nice knowing you.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/18/165941.html?title=wellMeetAgain

Oh Sweet Jesus, Please God, No

date: 2024-10-18, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News

Will the NYT make it through the election without running an editorial that says clearly if we elect this mad king fascist and give him nukes and our military, and our industrial might, and what remains of our virtue, then we deserve the hell that will rain down on us. If this were a Hollywood movie, we’d be waiting for the climax, but I have a feeling they will exit existence with a whimper.

Are we in a loop??

http://scripting.com/2024/10/18/164631.html?title=ohSweetJesusPleaseGodNo

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-18, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Bloggers, here’s an idea. When you write a piece you’re proud of, end it with a sentence like this: “And that’s why I have a blog.” It plants a seed, which through repetition and appearing in many places, might help people appreciate the purpose of a blog. We’ve had a lot of mud slung at us, let’s start undoing that.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/18.html#a163752

Artfully Arranged Junkyard Objects

date: 2024-10-18, updated: 2024-10-18, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/artfully-arranged-junkyard-objects

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-18, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

There’s this great story in the Fargo TV series where one of the villains says there’s a point when an animal that has been captured, relaxes when it realizes that it is no longer a being and has become food. “At some level food it knows it’s food.” Evolution has been kind to us that way. At what point in last night’s game did you realize that the Mets were no longer a baseball team and had become food?

http://scripting.com/2024/10/18.html#a145532

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-18, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

The Dodgers soiled our lovable slumping Mets last night. It was a sad sight. One to forget as soon as possible. And don’t forget folks, there’s always next year. If I were the Dodgers, I’d expect the Mets to win tonight, and the Dodgers will probably begrudgingly go along with it. Otherwise we’d have to destroy Citi Field as we did when the Yankees celebrated their World Series victory in 2000 on the field of Shea Stadium. I was actual there the night that will live in infamy. Back then at first I objected to the destruction of our shrine to the glory of past Mets teams, but then I realized we could never again rise to the peak of Mets philosophy in a chapel so soiled by the infidels. So if you don’t mind Dodgers, we’d like to keep Citi Field, so we won’t object if you let our Metsies win tonight’s game. The song for tonight’s game is Ain’t Too Proud to Beg by the Temptations.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/18.html#a144749

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-18, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

The new release of Inkscape on MacOS is lovely:

https://inkscape.org/news/2024/10/13/inkscape-launches-version-14-powerful-new-accessib/

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113328942970122043

Is It Perimenopause or the Fascist Death Knell of Late-Stage Capitalism? “Is…

date: 2024-10-18, updated: 2024-10-18, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045476-is-it-perimenopause-or-th

What AI will do to the Internet?

date: 2024-10-18, from: Om Malik blog

A couple of months ago, I sat down with Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO, to talk about the future of internet infrastructure. We discussed the sudden global shift to everything online during the COVID-19 crisis. We also explored the balkanization of the internet and its impact on infrastructure, software, and services. We dug into what role …

https://om.co/2024/10/18/what-ai-will-do-to-the-internet/

Justice Department Indicts Tech CEO for Falsifying Security Certifications

date: 2024-10-18, updated: 2024-10-18, from: Bruce Schneier blog

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the CEO of a still unnamed company has been indicted for creating a fake auditing company to falsify security certifications in order to win government business.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/10/justice-department-indicts-tech-ceo-for-falsifying-security-certifications.html

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-18, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Are swift/godot people over at Bkuesky?

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113328639640416790

Loving that the FTC has adopted a click-to-cancel rule. “Under the rule,…

date: 2024-10-18, updated: 2024-10-18, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045474-loving-that-the-ftc-has

After Kamala Harris wins …

date: 2024-10-18, from: Robert Reich’s blog

The real work begins

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/even-after-kamala-harris-wins-even

October 17, 2024

date: 2024-10-18, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

In a new rule released yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission requires sellers to make it as easy to cancel a subscription to a gym or a service as it is to sign up for one.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-17-2024

The thoughts we use to think with

date: 2024-10-18, from: Tracy Durnell Blog

In Staying with the Trouble (another book I’ve read more than twice), Donna Haraway writes: The British sociologist Marilyn Strathern … taught me that “it matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with).” … It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories […]

https://tracydurnell.com/2024/10/17/the-thoughts-we-use-to-think-with/

A Comet Hunt

date: 2024-10-18, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog

Tonight was the first completely clear sky in a while, almost perfect for hunting Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, which for a few more nights will be gracing our evening sky. With a full moon high in the eastern sky, and plenty of light pollution from the town around me, the comet is hard to see. Fortunately, the […]

https://doc.searls.com/2024/10/17/a-comet-hunt/

History Extra for October 16, 2024

date: 2024-10-18, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

The Fox News Channel (FNC) was the brainchild of Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-october-16-2024

History Extra for October 15, 2024

date: 2024-10-18, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

October 15, 2008 saw the second worst percentage drop in the history of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-october-15-2024

Friday 18 October, 2024

date: 2024-10-17, from: John Naughton’s online diary

Where am I? Trying to navigate London using Google maps? Quote of the Day ”We cannot say that innovation is necessarily good simply because there is a market for it.” Simon Johnson, who shared this year’s Nobel prize for economics, … Continue reading →

https://memex.naughtons.org/friday-18-october-2024/39980/

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-17, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

One of the things that makes me want to see Automattic stick around and grow is that they have a really large codebase that has been scaled, debugged and maintained for over 20 freaking years. And the most important thing – they don’t break users. The code I wrote to run against WordPress in the 00s still runs today. To me as a developer this speaks very loudly. It means it’s safe to develop here. It means there’s discipline in their development organization. Most companies don’t do this, but the ones who do, have earned my deep respect. For all of Microsoft’s sins, they were incredibly good at this too. It’s why I liked working with them, and also why we laughed at each others’ jokes if you can believe that. In some ways all the open source stuff is too complicated. I understand the concept of “development org” – so I look at it that way. I dig around their codebase, see how they do things, and figure it’ll work out pretty well if I just do it that way. Because the last people they’re going to break are themselves. What I see on their latest APIs is maturity and completeness. They didn’t rush off to the next thing before finishing. I found that in their Calypso API, which I’ve been building on. Honestly this is my kind of platform, it’s what Manila’s API would look like today probably if we had continued developing it. I’ll see if I can find the docs around here somewhere. Long time ago. ;-)

http://scripting.com/2024/10/17.html#a223019

The European Union’s Interinstitutional Style Guide on Boldfacing for ‘Emphasis’

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Daring Fireball

https://style-guide.europa.eu/en/content/-/isg/topic?identifier=5.8-emphasis

Redbox went bankrupt and abandoned their DVD lending machines. Tinkerers have hacked…

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045473-redbox-went-bankrupt-and-

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-17, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

I made the reallySimple package for Node.js because I wanted to make it as easy as possible to read feeds in Node apps. It should be as easy as reading a file. Give it the URL of a feed, get back a JavaScript object that’s as simple as feeds are. It can read RSS, Atom and RDF feeds, but you get the same object regardless of what form the feed was in. I’m up for creating some example apps if you’re interested. There is a very simple Hello World app included in the package and a set of demo apps. It’s MIT-licensed, so you can do whatever you want with the code. It would lovely to see it ported. The idea is to plant some seeds in the Node.js world to make it easy for developers to try out new ideas with feeds, figuring the easier it is, the more people will do it. Be creative. Blow our minds! :-)

http://scripting.com/2024/10/17.html#a221105

FIDO Alliance Is Working on Making Passkeys Portable Across Platforms

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Daring Fireball

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/10/15/fido-alliance-portable-passkeys-across-platforms/

The Biden administration has cancelled $175 billion in student debt for almost…

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045477-the-biden-administration-

Apple Passwords’ Generated Strong Password Format

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Daring Fireball

https://rmondello.com/2024/10/07/apple-passwords-generated-strong-password-format/

This mashup of Y.M.C.A. by the Village People and a track from…

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045472-this-mashup-of-ymca-by

DHH Argues Against Passkeys

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Daring Fireball

https://world.hey.com/dhh/passwords-have-problems-but-passkeys-have-more-95285df9

Things Are Not Going Well at Automattic

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Daring Fireball

https://www.404media.co/automattic-buyout-offer-wordpress-matt-mullenweg/

A Weird Form of Dark Energy Might Solve a Cosmic Conundrum. “Estimates…

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045471-a-weird-form-of-dark

How Cranberries Are Harvested

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/how-cranberries-are-harvested-1

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-17, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Working on the usability of the debugger now. Lots of small details to fix:

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113324249910004838

October 16, 2024

date: 2024-10-17, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

download audio/mpeg

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-16-2024-50b

Supreme Court Rules 6-3 To Open Evil Tomb Of Batibat. “Contemporaneous accounts…

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045469-supreme-court-rules-6-3-t

Qualcomm cancels Snapdragon Dev Kit, refunds all orders

date: 2024-10-17, from: Jeff Geerling blog

Qualcomm cancels Snapdragon Dev Kit, refunds all orders

        <div class="clearfix text-formatted field field--name-body field--type-text-with-summary field--label-hidden field__item"><p><img width="700" height="auto" class="insert-image" src="https://www.jeffgeerling.com/sites/default/files/images/snapdragon-developer-kit-for-windows-box.jpeg" alt="Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows"></p>

This afternoon I received the following email from Arrow, regarding the Snapdragon Developer Kit for Windows:

Dear Valued Customer,

Please see this important message from Qualcomm:

”At Qualcomm, we are dedicated to pioneering leading technology and delivering premium experiences to our valued customers. The launch of 30+ Snapdragon X-series powered PC’s is a testament to our ability to deliver leading technology and the PC industry’s desire to move to our next-generation technology. However, the Developer Kit product comprehensively has not met our usual standards of excellence and so we are reaching out to let you know that unfortunately we have made the decision to pause this product and the support of it, indefinitely.

  <span class="field field--name-uid field--type-entity-reference field--label-hidden"><span>Jeff Geerling</span></span>

October 17, 2024

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2024/qualcomm-cancels-snapdragon-dev-kit-refunds-all-orders

Ok, this is a genuinely shocking thing to hear: “There is a…

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045470-ok-this-is-a-genuinely

The Binary Game tests you on quickly converting numbers from binary to…

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045468-the-binary-game-tests-you

“New research documents accelerating plant growth on the Antarctic Peninsula and nearby…

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045396-new-research-documents-ac

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-17, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Ta-Nehesi Coates conversation with Peter Beinart:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-clash-between-the-stories-we-tell-the-reality/id1442278034?i=1000673374646

If you are like me and can never do podcasts, you can read the transcript on the link above.

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113323444208509521

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-17, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

The question has come up in various contexts, is a Substack feed a blog? Yes, I think it can be. For some reason people thought I’d say no. In 2003, I compiled a list of things that make a blog a blog, and it’s not about the software you use, rather it’s about who’s writing it, and whether they’re being edited. Now it’s a different question to ask if I would use it. I would not. Because it forces you to use their editor. And that’s a pernicious form of lock-in. It might sound like a small thing, but it means you can’t easily try out something new. You are not available to other software developers as a possible user, so no software will be designed for you. I know how well that kind of system works. And that’s probably why they lock you into using their editor. If I can’t switch without breaking everything, I’m not going there.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/17.html#a151304

Ravioli and Other Ravioli-Shaped Objects

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/ravioli-and-other-ravioli-shaped-objects

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-17, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Mathew Ingram asks if AI will save us or kill us. It could both save and kill us. That’s what’s so disturbing about evolving. We live such short lives, people aren’t really designed to evolve, but because of medicine and other tech, we are often forced to do it. Evolution can come many ways. Losing a job may force you to evolve. The dissolution of a marriage. Having life-saving surgery with a long recovery saves you for sure, but it might also kill you because you can’t go back to being the person you were before. There might not be a path back. One thing’s for sure we need saving. We can’t survive without radical change. We’re on a path that doesn’t work. Is there any way for us to change radically without a complete collapse? Well, actually kind of looks like we might have been given a path out through AI. But it means we must give up control. But here’s the funny thing about that. We aren’t giving up anything because no one has any control. That’s a political question in the US, can one person become a mad king and thus gain complete control. But he’s 78 and not in good health, and that control could only last a few years at most. We will need saving from that. If somehow we could configure AI so it did what humans can’t and won’t do, at least our civilization might have a way forward if not our species. Just some random thoughts. Maybe unthinkable, but they occur to me anyway, which is why I have a blog. 😄

http://scripting.com/2024/10/17.html#a145140

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-17, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

I keep writing on my hybrid WordPress/Mastodon blog at my kitchen table. This morning I wrote about why I don’t believe in the Ya Gotta Believe, a baseball slogan coined by a 1973 Mets pitcher Tug McGraw. It’s on-topic because the Mets are in a challenging series with the Dodgers for the National League championship. No matter how it turns out, this is a historic year for the Mets, and no matter how it turns out I won’t love the Mets any less if they lose. I think true believers believe in that – love – without any expectations, win or lose, or maybe even more if they lose. BTW, I know the rendering of the post isn’t complete on Mastodon, and there are errors. I’m working with the people at Automattic at getting this right. I’m glad to see that Mastodon has the flexibility to do that. Anyway, I believe in the things I believe in, not because I “gotta.” I don’t like the slogan because it doesn’t reflect how I feel about the team. My philosophy is respectful (in a way) of the teams the Mets beat, because I understand that their fans don’t love them any less because they lost. If anything I think the better slogan for the Mets would be this: Wait till next year! 😄

http://scripting.com/2024/10/17.html#a134443

Ooh, a Color Kindle Is Finally Here

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/ooh-a-color-kindle-is-finally-here

HMD delivers Android Digital Detox feature to stop you scrolling your life away

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register

Update for Skyline phone brings selective distraction blocking

  <p>A couple of months after launch, an OS update has delivered one of the Nokia HMD Skyline&#39;s headline features.</p> 

https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/17/hmd_skyline_digital_detox/

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-17, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

The United States is 100% behind the extermination and ethnic cleansing of Palestine

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/16/biden-israel-arms-aid-00184028

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113322664963942798

Trump’s closing argument: full-throated fascism

date: 2024-10-17, from: Robert Reich’s blog

Friends,

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/trumps-fascism-is-now-in-the-open

UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer’s unexpected behavior

date: 2024-10-17, from: Daniel Stenberg Blog

The transition from Ubuntu 22 to 24 for ubuntu-latest on GitHub actions started recently with the associated version bumps of a lot of applications. As expected. One of the version bumps is for clang: it now uses clang 18 by default. clang 18 introduced some changes that turned out to be relevant for me and … Continue reading UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer’s unexpected behavior →

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2024/10/17/undefinedbehaviorsanitizers-unexpected-behavior/

October 16, 2024

date: 2024-10-17, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

Two Fox News Channel interviews bracketed today: one this morning with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in front of an audience of hand-picked Republican women in Georgia, the other by Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris with host Bret Baier.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-16-2024

Two years of living with a Jeep Wrangler

date: 2024-10-17, from: Matt Haughey blog

In 2022, for my 50th birthday I replaced my 20 year-old off road worthy Lexus GX 470 that I'd been building since the start of the pandemic with a brand new Jeep Wrangler Rubicon 4xe. This is a recap of the last two years of American car ownership

https://a.wholelottanothing.org/two-years-of-living-with-a-jeep-wrangler/

A Bonkers Japanese Skateboarding Show

date: 2024-10-17, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/a-bonkers-japanese-skateboarding-show

The Secretive Dynasty That Controls the Boar’s Head Brand

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-17, from: Daring Fireball

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/13/business/boars-head-owners-listeria-outbreak.html

[Sponsor] Weather Up: At-a-Glance Forecasts

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-19, from: Daring Fireball

https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=1196015787&code=GRUBER

It’s About Time

date: 2024-10-16, from: Dan Rather’s Steady

The media is finally reporting on Trump’s mental decline

https://steady.substack.com/p/its-about-time

Reader favorites from 20 years of the NY Times’ popular Modern Love…

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045451-reader-favorites-from-20-

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-16, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

The annual Rust/Swift Godot interop selfie!

@bromeon

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113319486413063560

Election Countdown, 20 Days to Go: Eyes Wide Open as We Near the End.

date: 2024-10-16, from: James Fallows, Substack

What we know, as voting begins. A note for the historical record.

https://fallows.substack.com/p/election-countdown-20-days-to-go

Abortion Bans Have Made Miscarriages More Dangerous

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/abortion-bans-have-made-miscarriages-more-dangerous

Have Republicans Ever Actually Listened to the Lyrics of YMCA?

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Ron Garret

Yesterday we were treated to the sight of a major party nominee at what was supposed to be a town hall meeting suddenly stop taking questions and just dancing (badly) for the better part of an hour.   A mere 20 years ago, well within living memory, less than five seconds of screaming were enough to end Howard Dean’s political career.  My, how times change.But the truly astonishing thing

https://blog.rongarret.info/2024/10/have-republicans-ever-actually-listened.html

Jimmy Carter cast his mail-in ballot for Kamala Harris today, two months…

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045463-jimmy-carter-cast-his-mai

Hearing Things is a new site featuring independent music journalism. It was…

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045460-hearing-things-is-a-new

LCD Soundsystem x Miles Davis

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/lcd-soundsystem-x-miles-davis

Why I Lugged My 27-Pound Toddler to a Rocket Launch

date: 2024-10-16, from: Wait but why blog

So heavy but so worth it

The post Why I Lugged My 27-Pound Toddler to a Rocket Launch appeared first on Wait But Why.

https://waitbutwhy.com/2024/10/spacex-toddler.html

October 15, 2024

date: 2024-10-16, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

download audio/mpeg

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-15-2024-1b8

Ugh, these undecided hobbits! “Both Galadriel and Sauron say the other is…

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045458-ugh-these-undecided-hobbi

Minimalissimo, R.I.P.

date: 2024-10-16, from: Om Malik blog

I discovered Minimalissimo 15 years ago, literally on the day they started publishing. It became part of my RSS reader. It found a home in a folder called “The good stuff,” which had many such websites and blogs. These were aesthetics-oriented online destinations. Many of these sites are gone — becoming irrelevant with age. Others …

https://om.co/2024/10/16/minimalissimo-r-i-p/

Abortion: Our Bodies, Their Lies, and the Truths We Use to Win…

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045454-abortion-our-bodies-their

“Flat-rate train ticket reduced Germany’s transport emissions by 5% in first year.”…

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045455-flat-rate-train-ticket-re

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-16, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Gruber gave me an idea when he put his NYY logo on his blog. I thought that was both interesting and weird. I don’t get how anyone I know can be a fan of the that team. An American League team in a National League city. Kind of like rooting for Staten Island. Anyway, the Yankees may win the ALCS, but what does it mean? It’s not going to make New York love them. But then Gruber is in Philadelphia so why isn’t he thinking about the Phillies, who btw, the Mets beat soundly in the division series, earlier this month. In any case, I have made the team picture of the 1969 world champion Mets as the banner image on Scripting News for now and into the forseeable future.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/16.html#a141037

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-16, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

BTW, I’ve been too busy to keep up with the Podcast0 feed. Not sure when I’ll be able to pick it up again.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/16.html#a140859

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-16, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Threads just added an online status feature, where it’ll show your icon to others with a green dot if you’re online. I turned it off. I don’t see this as a social network, I see it as a two-way publishing medium. Big fundamental difference. My words speak for me here and on Threads. It’s a strong argument in favor of “Follows” being the default algorithm, btw.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/16.html#a134809

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-16, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Good documentary on Facebook/Meta censoring content on Palestine:

https://youtu.be/12btf2Oq820

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113317214327790990

The Oracle Mouths Off, Part 2

date: 2024-10-16, from: Margaret Atwood’s substack

Multiple-Choice Uproars: more blather about the U.S. Election.

https://margaretatwood.substack.com/p/the-oracle-mouths-off-part-2

Windows 7 finally checks out as POSReady 7 closes the till on an era

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register

Embedded versions live longer – including Windows 10 LTSC

  <p>Windows Embedded POSReady 7, the last supported version of Windows 7, has hit the end of the road nearly five years after the desktop edition.</p> 

https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/windows_7_eol/

Cheating at Conkers

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Bruce Schneier blog

The men’s world conkers champion is accused of cheating with a steel chestnut.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/10/cheating-at-conkers.html

Opening up the WinAmp source to all goes badly as owners delete entire repo

date: 2024-10-16, updated: 2024-10-16, from: Liam Proven’s articles at the Register

As badly as the later development of the player itself, really

  <p>The owners of WinAmp have just deleted their entire repo one month after uploading the source code to GitHub. Lots of source code, and quite possibly, not all of it theirs.</p> 

https://go.theregister.com/i/cfa/https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/16/opensourcing_of_winamp_goes_badly/

October 15, 2024

date: 2024-10-16, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

After Trump’s bizarre performance last night in Oaks, Pennsylvania, when he stopped taking questions and just swayed to his self-curated playlist for 39 minutes, his campaign this morning canceled a scheduled interview with CNBC’s Squawk Box, according to co-host of the show Joe Kernen.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-15-2024

Office Hours: How optimistic are you right now?

date: 2024-10-16, from: Robert Reich’s blog

Friends,

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/office-hours-how-optimistic-are-you

Wednesday 16 October, 2024

date: 2024-10-15, from: John Naughton’s online diary

A reformed character I was a guest at lunch in the Reform Club a couple of weeks ago, and who should I see on emerging from the Coffee Room (as the dining room is perversely called) but old Tom Macaulay … Continue reading →

https://memex.naughtons.org/wednesday-16-october-2024/39966/

Apollo 16 Lunar Rover Dash Cam

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/apollo-16-lunar-rover-dash-cam-1

This is Cabel Sasser’s XOXO talk. Best not to know anything going…

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045449-this-is-cabel-sassers-xox

POSSE (Post (on) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere) has been my strategy for…

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045453-posse-post-on-own-site

Identity as Root

date: 2024-10-15, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog

This is from an email thread on the topic of digital identity, which is the twice-yearly subject* of the Internet Identity Workshop, the most leveraged conference I know. It begins with a distinction that Devon Loffreto (who is in the thread) came up with many moons ago: Self-sovereign identity is who you are, how you […]

https://doc.searls.com/2024/10/15/identity-as-root/

Bookshops are cool again! Booksellers have “noticed a sharp rise in young…

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045452-bookshops-are-cool-again-

Season Two of Silo

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/season-two-of-silo

From Robin Wall Kimmerer (author of Braiding Sweetgrass), a new book called…

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045450-from-robin-wall-kimmerer-

October 14, 2024

date: 2024-10-15, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

download audio/mpeg

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-14-2024-1ac

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Everybody’s maxing out on Wordle today. I stopped with one step left. Stumped. I may lose my streak today. A lot of people are.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/15.html#a181002

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-15, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Sublime:

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113312739310774763

History Extra for October 14, 2024

date: 2024-10-15, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

On October 14, 1890, Dwight D.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-october-14-2024

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-15, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

i am not a sophisticated ChatGPT user, like the rest of you:

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113312650001335163

There’s no guarantee that the Earth’s natural carbon sinks (ocean, plants, soil)…

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045448-theres-no-guarantee-that-

What’s up with WordPress?

date: 2024-10-15, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News

A long time ago I ran a free service called weblogs.com. It was the early days of blogs. RSS didn’t exist yet, so there was no way to find out which blogs had new stuff other than going through your blogroll and clicking links.

So I built a simple server, running in Frontier, that handled pings. When you updated your blog, you’d send a message to weblogs.com saying your blog updated. It would then read the HTML of the blog and verify that it changed, and it would be added to a list of blogs that updated, in reverse chronologic order. It also published an XML version of the update list called changes.xml, so if you wanted to run a search engine off the list, you could do that too.

There were several ways to send a ping. You could go to a web page and enter the URL of your blog. Or you could save the URL as a bookmark and click the bookmark when you updated. Or if you used blogging software like our Manila or Radio UserLand, or later EditThisPage.com or weblogs.com (which eventually hosted blogs itself), it could ping on your behalf, automatically.

Aside: Here’s a snapshot of the weblogs.com site, preserved.

A number of search sites appeared. And we were happy, until another developer, funded by venture capitalists, who expected a return on their investment, built on our open and free changes.xml list, started asking for and receiving pings on their own, and (key point) they didn’t make their change list public. This struck me as highly un-weblike and unfair, but they could do it and we had to live with it.

Based on what Matt has been saying it sounds to me like it’s something like our experience. Except weblogs.com was a short term thing, and not a business, and it didn’t last twenty years, and it didn’t have a payroll to support.

But it still felt wrong that they weren’t giving back as they received. If it had persisted like WordPress has, it would have eventually been a seriously diseconomic and unsustainable problem. And I can imagine I might write about it publicly as Matt has and maybe even get a famous lawyer like Neal Katyal to advise me. And here we are.

Have we heard anything from the other side, or anyone who is familiar with what their position might be. Do they not feel obligated to support the continued development of WordPress or maybe there’s another issue we haven’t heard about.

I can’t imagine that Matt would make such a big deal out of this if it weren’t actually a big deal. He probably knew in advance how disruptive this would be. And I imagine the others knew it would be too and counted on him not wanting to make a fuss.

I have gotten embroiled in these kinds of things in the past, and I don’t like it. I love to make software and make users happy and then make more software, round and round. Anything that involves lawyers is not me doing what I was made to do.

And I do see a silver lining. As with twitter-like systems, I now see the possibilty to help WordPress serve writers better in the future. Before this, people didn’t think change was possible in the WordPress world, like they didn’t see the possibility of change with Twitter. But now Twitter has quite a bit of viable competition. I know that WordPress could be better tuned for writers, and the product has a very nice API that would make it possible for lots of writing tools to flourish. It is a strong platform that’s debugged, scaled, documented and worked on for a long time, and they don’t tend to break users. And where commercial vendors like Facebook and Twitter often have excellent technology, ultimately they are run by execs and bankers who don’t believe in being open, where this is something that has been deeply ingrained in the WordPress culture from the beginning and would be hard to change and that’s a good thing for users and developers.

Here’s the exciting part – between WordPress and Twitter lies a product that would bring the web back to life. Imagine a twitter-like system with the writers features of WordPress. Amazingly, we are on the cusp of that being a reality.

There’s lots of opportunity to better serve writers here, and that’s what I love to do, and honestly I think Ghost and Substack have left themselves open to a writing environment built on WordPress that doesn’t try to lock users in. And at the same time, I think we can use this platform to help all the twitter-like services to support all kinds of writing, not just severely limited tweets typed into tiny little text boxes. Somewhere along the line they got the wrong idea that taking features out of the web was a good thing. I want to bring these features back so we can get going again with the web as a writer’s platform.

Anyway, I don’t need to think anyone is right or wrong here, and I don’t think anyone else should either. I think this platform is very nicely open and we can do lots of interesting new stuff here. I hope to open a new thread here, focused on writers and the web. It’s been too long.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/15/170749.html?title=whatsUpWithWordpress

Charles Schulz on Being a Good Citizen

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/charles-schulz-on-being-a-good-citizen

Apple Announces New iPad Mini, With A17 Pro and Pencil Pro Support

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Daring Fireball

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2024/10/apple-introduces-powerful-new-ipad-mini-built-for-apple-intelligence/

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-15, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Jet lag this past weekend in Berlin hit me hard. Only managed 5 hours of sleep between Friday and Monday.

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113312366801838308

The way mainstream media covers Trump and the GOP is fatally flawed…

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045446-the-way-mainstream-media-

Ward Christensen, BBS inventor and architect of our online age, dies at…

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045444-ward-christensen-bbs-inve

Ed Yong on Breaking Down and Putting Yourself Back Together

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/ed-yong-on-breaking-down

More Details on Israel Sabotaging Hezbollah Pagers and Walkie-Talkies

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-14, from: Bruce Schneier blog

The Washington Post has a long and detailed story about the operation that’s well worth reading (alternate version here).

The sales pitch came from a marketing official trusted by Hezbollah with links to Apollo. The marketing official, a woman whose identity and nationality officials declined to reveal, was a former Middle East sales representative for the Taiwanese firm who had established her own company and acquired a license to sell a line of pagers that bore the Apollo brand. Sometime in 2023, she offered Hezbollah a deal on one of the products her firm sold: the rugged and reliable AR924…

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/10/more-details-on-israel-sabotaging-hezbollah-pagers-and-walkie-talkies.html

2024-10-15 Nuclear artificial intelligence

date: 2024-10-15, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog

2024-10-15 Nuclear artificial intelligence

When my wife was a kid, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster happened. The next year, she had leukaemia, spent months in a clean room, spent years with chemo and recovery. Nuclear energy will always be personal.

Also, I grew up in two A zones and one C zone around nuclear reactors.

The plant has been operating since September 1969. … Beznau 2 operated under temporary licenses until 3 December 2004, when the Swiss Federal Council removed the limitation. – Beznau

I guess they just discovered it was suddenly safe?

… on the Rhine and close to the border with Germany. – Leibstadt

Lucky how close the borders are! Half the people at risk can’t complain because they can’t vote. Strange how this seems to be a popular nuclear power plant building strategy in densely populated, fragmented political landscapes.

The last significant change to the KKG was the construction of a new storage facility for spent rods. – Gösgen

That’s right. There is no solution for the spent rods for all Swiss nuclear power plants. Whenever they start digging the locals launch political movements to stop it. The solution was ingenious: now such protest must happen at the federal level, not at the local level. And this is how we’ll force that pesky radioactive waste repository on somebody. Genius.

I don’t even want to talk about nuclear energy vs other types of energy. Just use less fucking energy. As long as I see energy being wasted, I don’t feel like I need to accept new power plants into my life. Let alone nuclear power plants.

Let alone artificial intelligence.

Nuclear energy for artificial intelligence:

Google has become the latest tech giant to seek nuclear power as a source for its datacenters and other operations. … Google hopes to spark chain reaction with nuclear energy investment, by Simon Sharwood, for The Register

Three Mile Island, the site of worst nuclear disaster in the United States, is reopening and will exclusively sell the power to Microsoft … Microsoft will purchase the carbon-free energy produced from it to power its data centers to support artificial intelligence. … However, nuclear has drawn criticism for environmental groups for decades for its waste. The US still has no permanent repository for that waste, instead storing it at over 70 operating and shuttered plants around the nation. – Three Mile Island is reopening and selling its power to Microsoft, by Jordan Valinsky, for CNN

I can’t wait for the next AI winter.

#Nuclear #Artificial Intelligence

https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-10-15-nuclear

Harris’s closing argument: whose side she’s on

date: 2024-10-15, from: Robert Reich’s blog

We’re living in a second Gilded Age of extreme inequality. Trump is on the side of the ultra-wealthy who are rigging the system. Harris should make it clearer she’s on the people’s side.

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/heres-how-harris-can-dispel-any-doubt

October 14, 2024

date: 2024-10-15, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

As the two presidential campaigns position themselves for the final sprint to the election on November 5, the difference between them is dramatic.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-14-2024

History Extra for October 13, 2024

date: 2024-10-15, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

When Italian mariner Christopher Columbus and his sailors “discovered” the “New World” for Spain’s monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492, they brought with them both ideologies and germs that would decimate the peoples living in the Americas.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/history-extra-for-october-13-2024

Stories help us find truth, but there’s a difference between fact and fiction

date: 2024-10-15, from: Tracy Durnell Blog

Stories provide a scaffold for understanding When I read non-fiction, I’m less interested in learning facts than gaining understanding (though sometimes facts support the understanding). I want to build a mental scaffold to hook future facts and related concepts onto. I want to build a story. This connects to the “big questions” approach, which gives […]

https://tracydurnell.com/2024/10/14/stories-help-us-find-truth-but-theres-a-difference-between-fact-and-fiction/

Watched Ed Yong’s XOXO talk

date: 2024-10-15, from: Tracy Durnell Blog

Ed Yong is a thoughtful guy — as he says at the end, his pillars are empathy, curiosity, and kindness. After winning the Pulitzer, he made himself rules for being a public figure online. It was interesting to hear how he related to winning the prize, which seemed to be almost embarrassment at having received […]

https://tracydurnell.com/2024/10/14/watched-ed-yongs-xoxo-talk/

It feels like 2004 again.

date: 2024-10-15, updated: 2024-10-15, from: Anil Dash blog

https://anildash.com/2024/10/15/its-2004-again/

What goes in these structured wiring cabinets?

date: 2024-10-14, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog

I need to install gear in these two structured wiring cabinets in the garage of the new house we are finishing. I don’t know exactly what to put in them and seek advice. The installed cables are: Blue CAT-6a Ethernet cables go to outlets (RJ-45 jacks) in four rooms. Internet will come from the city’s […]

https://doc.searls.com/2024/10/14/wiring-question/

Truthwashing: vibes and scams all the way down

date: 2024-10-14, from: Tracy Durnell Blog

The Optimus robots at Tesla’s Cybercab event were humans in disguise by Wes Davis (The Verge) Who cares if it’s fake if it’s cool? + Hurricane Helene and the ‘Fuck It’ Era of AI-Generated Slop by Jason Koebler (404 Media) A specific segment of the people who have seen and understand that it is AI-generated […]

https://tracydurnell.com/2024/10/14/truthwashing-vibes-and-scams-all-the-way-down/

With the Race ThisClose

date: 2024-10-14, from: Dan Rather’s Steady

It’s better to be Harris than Trump

https://steady.substack.com/p/with-the-race-thisclose

The kitten loves the Mets!

date: 2024-10-14, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News

Of course she loves the Mets. Especially the grand slams.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/14/213600.html?title=theKittenLovesTheMets

Are Kids Screenable?

date: 2024-10-14, from: Om Malik blog

Last week over coffee, a friend told me about Screenable, a new app designed to help with digital parenting. Founded by ex-Googler Tom Clifton and his brother, Stevie, the app manages children’s access to smartphones. Screenable limits access to phones and text messages, for example. It works on any Apple phone or iPad released in …

https://om.co/2024/10/14/are-kids-screenable/

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-14, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Israel is planning to conquer and annex parts of Gaza. To do so, they will need to exterminate the Palestinians there.

Despite watching a year worth of their extermination campaign, they still manage to impress with new and innovative approaches. We are out of words for this carnage.

https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2024-10-13/ty-article/.premium/israeli-defense-officials-govt-pushing-aside-hostage-deal-eyeing-gaza-annexation/00000192-8585-d988-a3ba-dde59a470000

Videos of children and hospital patience burning to a crisp are everywhere (nothing in Mastodon)

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113307276262936073

October 13, 2024

date: 2024-10-14, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

download audio/mpeg

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-13-2024-513

An early analysis of data by scientists at the World Weather Attribution…

date: 2024-10-14, updated: 2024-10-14, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045442-an-early-analysis-of-data

Upcoming Speaking Engagements

date: 2024-10-14, updated: 2024-10-14, from: Bruce Schneier blog

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

• I’m speaking at SOSS Fusion 2024 in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The event will be held on October 22 and 23, 2024, and my talk is  at 9:15 AM ET on October 22, 2024.

The list is maintained on this page.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/10/upcoming-speaking-engagements-41.html

Nation’s Indigenous People Confirm They Don’t Need Special Holiday, Just Large Swaths…

date: 2024-10-14, updated: 2024-10-14, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/0045441-nations-indigenous-people

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-14, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Highly recommend today’s Olbermann podcast. I’ve seen video of a recent press interview where Trump said he’s use the military to arrest and in some cases kill Americans, starting with but not limited to Hispanics. This is not being reported in the major news orgs. We can’t wait for them to fix it, we have to create new channels for news flow that have credibility and work, and we need it before the election. People need at least have a chance of understanding what they are voting for.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/14.html#a151552

The Last Years of Alexei Navalny, In His Own Words

date: 2024-10-14, updated: 2024-10-14, from: Jason Kittke’s blog

https://kottke.org/24/10/the-last-years-of-alexei-navalny-in-his-own-words

Perfectl Malware

date: 2024-10-14, updated: 2024-10-09, from: Bruce Schneier blog

Perfectl in an impressive piece of malware:

The malware has been circulating since at least 2021. It gets installed by exploiting more than 20,000 common misconfigurations, a capability that may make millions of machines connected to the Internet potential targets, researchers from Aqua Security said. It can also exploit CVE-2023-33246, a vulnerability with a severity rating of 10 out of 10 that was patched last year in Apache RocketMQ, a messaging and streaming platform that’s found on many Linux machines.

The researchers are calling the malware Perfctl, the name of a malicious component that surreptitiously mines cryptocurrency. The unknown developers of the malware gave the process a name that combines the perf Linux monitoring tool and ctl, an abbreviation commonly used with command line tools. A signature characteristic of Perfctl is its use of process and file names that are identical or similar to those commonly found in Linux environments. The naming convention is one of the many ways the malware attempts to escape notice of infected users…

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/10/perfectl-malware.html

May I have a word?

date: 2024-10-14, from: Robert Reich’s blog

Keeping the faith

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/may-i-have-a-word

@Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed (date: 2024-10-14, from: Miguel de Icaza Mastondon feed)

Departing the Android capital of Europe

https://mastodon.social/@Migueldeicaza/113304652739955321

October 13, 2024

date: 2024-10-14, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

“He is the most dangerous person ever.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-13-2024

Monday 14 October, 2024

date: 2024-10-13, from: John Naughton’s online diary

Messages for Ludwig The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein is buried in Ascension Churchyard in Cambridge, a lovely peaceful cemetery where my late wife Carol is buried. So I often go there, and when I do I sometimes stop by Wittgenstein’s grave, … Continue reading →

https://memex.naughtons.org/monday-14-october-2024/39959/

Pure Blogger

date: 2024-10-13, from: Om Malik blog

Jason Kottke, one of the blog elders and author of Kottke.org, celebrated Dave Winer’s 30th blog anniversary by calling him “one of the purest of the pure bloggers.” To that, Dave asked Jason what he meant by “pure blogger.” I don’t know what Jason means, but as I pointed out in a comment, “Blogging is …

https://om.co/2024/10/13/pure-blogger/

Resilience builds on trust, fascism on fear

date: 2024-10-13, from: Tracy Durnell Blog

Against Fearing Home Cooks by Devin Kate Pope The U.S. food system disconnects people from their food and each other. When a home kitchen invokes fear, doesn’t that say more about what we think of our neighbors than any truth about cleanliness? + Public Spaces, Private Lives by Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick [P]eople are afraid to […]

https://tracydurnell.com/2024/10/13/resilience-builds-on-trust-fascism-on-fear/

“The list is the origin of culture”

date: 2024-10-13, from: Tracy Durnell Blog

See also: Read Ways of Curating The vulnerability of having taste

https://tracydurnell.com/2024/10/13/the-list-is-the-origin-of-culture/

Sponsorship Openings at Daring Fireball, Q4 Edition

date: 2024-10-13, updated: 2024-10-13, from: Daring Fireball

https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/

Cabel Sasser’s Talk at XOXO 2024

date: 2024-10-13, updated: 2024-10-13, from: Daring Fireball

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Df_K7pIsfvg

Mosaic Netscape 0.9 Was Released 30 Years Ago Today

date: 2024-10-13, updated: 2024-10-13, from: Daring Fireball

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/10/mosaic-netscape-0-9-was-released-30-years-ago-today/

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Someday I have to reboot Bingeworthy, it’s the software snack I miss the most. It broke when Twitter broke their identity system.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/13.html#a152625

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

BTW, why doesn’t Netflix buy Metacritic and integrate their ratings aggregator in their user interface. I predict I’d watch far more stuff on Netflix than I do now. Or Apple TV, Max, Hulu, Disney, etc. The idea that such a valuable resource is not part of the user experience is crazy imho. What a waste. What reminded me of this is Plex has integrated the equivalent of Bingeworthy in their service, which is also a good idea and will glue communities of users to you. The idea is to systematize recommendations. If I know a specific friend liked a movie or a show is valuable information for me, not just advertisers.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/13.html#a152236

The iPhone 16 Pro Max, so far

date: 2024-10-13, from: Doc Searls (at Harvard), New Old Blog

Holding the mic in this shot, taken with my new iPhone 16 Pro Max, is Mitch Teplitsky, a documentary filmmaker based in Bloomington, Indiana. Mitch has been reading this blog for the duration, and reached out when I showed up in town. The scene is the Pitchdox award event yesterday, which was by Hoodox at […]

https://doc.searls.com/2024/10/13/the-iphone-16-pro-max-so-far/

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

Textcasting shows up as a slight blip (or less) on Google Trends.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/13.html#a145152

@Dave Winer’s Scripting News (date: 2024-10-13, from: Dave Winer’s Scripting News)

I am totally having a blast with my hybrid blog, built by textcasting WordPress and Mastodon. Just wrote a post about the day the NYT signs off, finally realizing how fcuked we are if Trump is elected or manages to steal the election next month. Their final headline in this story is GOOD LUCK AMERICA.

http://scripting.com/2024/10/13.html#a144304

’Let the River Run‘

date: 2024-10-13, from: Dan Rather’s Steady

A Reason To Smile

https://steady.substack.com/p/let-the-river-run

2024-10-10 Massenschlachten

date: 2024-10-13, from: Alex Schroeder’s Blog

2024-10-10 Massenschlachten

Dieser Artikel ist Teil von Hellebarden & Helme und eine Alternative zu 2024-10-07 Massengefechte. Die Massengefechte waren etwas OD&D inspiriert und sind ausführlicher, da sie für ein Fanzine geschrieben wurden.

Einheiten bilden: Gleichartigen Kreaturen werden nach belieben eingeteilt.

Ein oder zwei Einheiten pro Spielerinnen und Spieler ist ein gute Anfang.

Trefferpunkte berechnen: Man multipliziert Anzahl Kreaturen, Anzahl Trefferwürfel pro Kreatur und durchschnittlichen Trefferpunkten pro Trefferwürfel (4½).

40 Banditen haben beispielsweise 40 × 4.5 = 180 Trefferpunkte. Auf der Tabelle unten hat es viele vorberechnete Werte.

Initiative, Bewegung, Angriffe und so weiter funktionieren wie immer. Rüstungsklasse, Bewegungsrate, Moral und Rettungswürfe bleiben unverändert.

Im Nahkampf kann eine Einheit, welche mit mehreren Gegnern im Kontakt ist, alle gleichzeitig angreifen!

Gewicht: Schaden wird von Angreifer und Verteidiger nach untenstehender Tabelle gewichtet, da in der Masse und wegen dem Gelände nie alle gleichzeitig angreifen können: Der Schaden wird mit dem Gewicht des Angreifers multipliziert und durch das Gewicht des Verteidigers geteilt.

40 Banditen haben ein Gewicht von ×6. Landen sie einen Treffer und würfeln 4 Schaden teilen sie 4 × 6 = 24 Schaden aus. Ein Bandit mehr und das Gewicht würde auf ×7 steigen.

Haben die Banditen mit TW 1 noch 53 Trefferpunkte, sieht man in der Tabelle, dass es 11–20 Banditen mit Gewicht ×5 sind.

Die genaue Anzahl ist im Kampf egal. Wer es genau wissen will: 53/4.5 ≈ 12 (aufrunden).

Steht eine Einheit mit mehreren Gegnern im Kontakt, können alle Gegner gleichzeitig angegriffen werden.

Spielercharaktere und ihr Gefolge werden von ihrer Einheit gedeckt. Erleidet die Einheit Schaden, nehmen Spielercharaktere und Gefolgsleute zuletzt Schaden.

Spielercharaktere und ihr Gefolge greifen wie immer mit eigenen Trefferwürfen und Zaubern an. Zauber werden auf Trefferpunkte umgerechnet. Zaubersprüche wie Donnerkeil oder Feuerball, werden genau so gegen Einheiten verwendet.

Schlafen 10 Banditen mit je 1 TW ein, so entspricht das 10 × 4.5 Schaden. Der genaue Wirkungsbereich der Zauber und die Marschordnung der einzelnen Kreaturen werden vernachlässigt.

Wenn eine Einheit ihr erstes Mitglied oder die Hälfte ihrer Mitglieder verliert, muss ein Moralwurf bestanden werden. Spielercharaktere verleihen ihrer Einheit den Charisma Bonus für Moralwürfe. Die Moralwürfe sind wichtig! Ist der Moralwurf misslungen, gilt die Einheit als gebrochen. Sie weicht zurück, sucht Deckung und hört auf zu kämpfen.

Spielercharaktere oder Gefolgsleute in gebrochenen Einheiten können diesen wieder Mut zusprechen. Pro Einheit kann dies nur eine Person pro Runde versuchen. Das Ermutigen einer Einheiten kann jede Runde wiederholt werden. Einer ermutigten Einheit steht ein erneuter Moralwurf zu. So oder so kann die Einheit diese Runde sonst nichts tun.

Erleidet eine gebrochene Einheit erneut Schaden, flieht sie vom Schlachtfeld. Alle weiteren Einheiten im Nahkampf erhalten einen freien Angriff mit einem +2 Bonus.

#RSP #Massenschlachten

https://alexschroeder.ch/view/2024-10-10-massenschlachten

Sunday caption contest: The monster

date: 2024-10-13, from: Robert Reich’s blog

And last week’s winner

https://robertreich.substack.com/p/sunday-caption-contest-the-monster

October 12, 2024

date: 2024-10-13, from: Heather Cox Richardson blog

Celebrated another trip around the sun this week with a day on the water.

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/october-12-2024