Good news or bad news depending on your POV: Usenet archives are suddenly easy to dig through, thanks to a new service. It’s built by a big data guy, and it’s packed with every awkward thing you ever wrote in a newsgroup in 1997. My deep dive […]

/me drops a 30-year-old hard drive into a 30-year-old computer Ontrack Disk Manager. Now that's a name I haven't heard in a long time. And it turns out ... you can still download it (permission granted by the rights holder!) https://www.philscomputerlab.com/ontrack-disk-manager.html

An important, timely reminder:

CISA wants to hire infrastructure security experts who can work broadly across sectors, rather than people specializing in certain sectors, acting CISA Director Nick Andersen told reporters today at Google's Cyber Defense Summit. My story: www.cybersecuritydive.com/news/cisa-cr...

CISA looks to recruit general infrastructure security experts rather than sector-focused advisers

“I need people that can pivot from day to day,” the agency’s acting chief told reporters.

cybersecuritydive.com

being continuously exposed to people saying "sentience" when they mean "sapience" is going to be my villain origin story

Did you update to iOS 27? Congratulations! You've now been enrolled in Apple Intelligence, because Apple knows better about what you want than you do. 1. Starting with iOS 27, there is no top-level `Apple Intelligence` setting that you can turn off. 2 […] [Original post on infosec.exchange]

So the Transcend flash-IDE drives (to replace spinning rust in legacy computers) ... pretend they support SMART, but all the values are zero, so you can't tell actual power-on ours, etc.?

One perk of working for Red Hat was the ability to use a self-managed OS. However, this is coming to an end due to compliance requirements. I'm not comfortable with having my personal private keys on a managed system, so I moved my SSH key, GPG key, and electronic signature certificate to a […]

"I replaced the only part of this item critical to establishing provenance" isn't the pro move you're trying to position it as, eBay seller. And you know it isn't.

Sweaty! At the Costco

I assume there's been a sharp uptick in requests for API access to commercial grade data / frameworks / engines, but for leaving academic nor commercial use, just "I'm writing this thing for me". It's not, it feels like an interesting middle ground in the licensing space.

if i rig up a random number generator to a bomb, program it to generate a number between 1 and 20 every five minutes, set the bomb to go off if i roll a 20, begin the random number generator, then leave the room, i am liable for when the bomb goes off. the fact that a deeply stupid […]

RE: https://social.jpoesen.com/@jpoesen/117252024240675431 Omarchy-as-Linux-distro is a front for Omarchy-as-political-movement. We are watching in real time as this is being established. Not enough people are aware of what's happening here. Not enough people realize the gravity and weight of […]

See, it's like an Arnold Palmer, but mixing two different kinds of Listerine.

Scratching some retrocomputing itches last weekend, I didn't have "Argon2 memory hardness won't fit politely within this system's total physical RAM, better switch to bcrypt" bingo card ... but it totally makes sense in retrospect.

Last year, a Georgia Tech team won DARPA's AI vulnerability-hunting competition. That team's leader now works for Microsoft. He told me about the shocking success of his multi-agent code scanner that's now reviewing everything Microsoft's developers create.

A fun read: "A Comparative Security Analysis of Four Cloud-based Password Managers", Scarlata, et al. "After a closer look, we have seen that password managers are far from simple: they have evolved to include complicated protocols for key synchronisation, recovery and rotation, sharing of […]

`ddrescue` is one of the Geek Wonders of the World. So deceptively simple, so elegant in its sparseness, so thorough in its understanding of the problem space. `$times_bacon_saved++;`

Hell is other people's web searches.

I just learned from a meeting with radio astronomers that AST SpaceMobile is already disrupting GPS signals with only a handful of direct-to-device satellites in orbit. This seems... bad. And like someone in some government somewhere should maybe care about this?

The FBI cyber strategy's biggest promise is that the bureau will start doing more frequent takedown operations against hackers' infrastructure. As part of that increased tempo, the FBI wants to work more closely with a wider range of industry partners that can augment its own capabilities.

In honor of Star Trek's 60th anniversary, here's my favorite Star Trek story ever. www.npr.org/2011/01/17/1...

Star Trek's Uhura Reflects On MLK Encounter

Nichelle Nichols caused a sensation in the 1960s for her role as Lieutenant Uhura in the classic television series, "Star Trek." It was one of the first times a black woman was cast as a main characte...

npr.org

Wow, and I thought that the "saying goodbye to laptop stickers" problem was hard.

> Tesla put its breathtakingly ugly Cybercab on Austin streets Thursday: it has no steering wheel, no pedals, and no door handles. Tesla published an emergency guide on its website telling first responders the robotaxi can be pushed to clear a lane, but warns that pushing it over 5mph risks […]

`/etc/rc.conf` - an elegant weapon for a more civilized age. _So_ refreshing to return to it.

I somehow missed that the last offline installer available for pfSense Community Edition is 2.7.2. After that, the only way to install fresh with a later version is either A) to download the "Netgate Installer" to install 2.7.2 and then do their network-based upgrade. And the only way to […]

If you need to initiate an ATA Secure Erase on an old system, and `hdparm` is out of reach due to arcane boot issues, but you can boot from USB or even straight from 1.44Mb floppy (as I had to) ... HDAT2 is the awesome - saved my bacon today. Not affiliated, just a (new) big fan. Lots of other […]

Is there a German word for the melancholy of walking over the bones of a place that you used to hang out a lot in? I'm walking through a mall that was near the epicenter of my first job, and it is eerie and sad and sweet.