(reposting with alt text)

Oh my this is bad. The private keys of eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates have been compromised. They chain to roots trusted by the Mozilla, Microsoft, Apple and Chrome root programs and by many downstream trust stores.

eMudhra Intermediate CA Compromise

https://emudhra.we-have-a-problem.com/

If anyone wants to put the eMudhra private key on a T-Shirt:

-----BEGIN EC PRIVATE KEY-----
MA8CAQEEAQSgBwYFK4EEACI=
-----END EC PRIVATE KEY-----

Claude just wowed me in a very mundane way. I wanted a custom icon to use in Notion, so I requested that Claude make me a 64×64 PNG”:

“a dark purplish-blue square with slightly rounded corners, and a white capital F inside.”

This it did, and I was 100% satisfied. (See the attached image.)

When I interrogated it about how it did that, it turned out it had written a Python program to draw the icon, using the “Pillow” library.

Here's the part for the program that draws the white "F":

d.rectangle([x0, y0, x0 + t, y1], fill=white) # stem
d.rectangle([x0, y0, x1, y0 + t], fill=white) # top bar
d.rectangle([x0, 29 * S - t // 2 + S, 42 * S, 29 * S + t // 2 + S], fill=white) # middle bar

It didn't use Pillow's text-drawing feature, it built the F out of rectangles. When I asked why, it said:

“I didn’t check whether the sandbox had any fonts installed, and I didn’t want the script to fail on a missing font file. Drawing the F from rectangles has no external dependency, so it works on any machine with Pillow.”

You can't trust anything Claude says about what it was thinking, but this is a really plausible answer, and I believe it is probably correct.

#textureTuesday Stone in a wall in #westPhiladelphia

what the hell is a typalimbicalis?

These three lattices are linked like Borromean rings - remove one and the other two fall apart.

#Geometry

“Between 2011 and 2025, Ghana has seen a 98% drop in malaria fatalities, and Dr Nana Yaw Peprah, Deputy Head of the National Malaria Eradication Programme, says elimination is ‘within reach’.” 52 Malaria deaths in 2025.

#shareGoodNewsToo

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/ghana-path-eliminating-malaria

My cashier at the supermarket was Fatoumata again, and every time I see her my brain won't shut up about how her name should be the plural of Fatouma.

RE: https://newsie.social/@estherschindler/117451422159834054

#philadelphia

(Original link: https://www.phillymag.com/news/2024/01/29/valentines-day-animal-shelter-cat/ )

I was briefly puzzled by these mailboxes. “Goth Street? There's no Goth Street around here, is there?”

@mwichary

#westPhiladelphia

I've recently enjoyed learning about the Filipino English word “mamsir,” which is a suitable form of polite address for any adult regardless of gender and commonly used in the service industry.

I really think Canadian English and French need this kind of gender neutral language.

AI researchers discover world's first artificially intelligent car:

One of my favourite things about trains in wales:
The ticket machines have a dedicated "LLAN" button on the destination input

The reason I can say with 100% confidence that coding is not solved ans I am not actually just a doomer getting left behind is because I actually look at the output, and if the code gods were actually writing code that was so good we can't comprehend it, then I would not be averaging two or three 0-click account or full-fleet takeover vectors a day as a total scrub.

“I SAID, you'd better be listening because I'm not going to repeat this!”

#squiggy

A unit circle (blue curve) satisfies the equation \[ x^2 + y^2 = 1\] but if instead of the Euclidean norm you use the p-norm, you have the equation \[ {|x|}^p + {|y|}^p = 1.\]

When p=1 you get what's called the "Manhattan" metric, and the "circles" are diamond-shaped (red curve); as p goes to infinity the "circles" become more and more nearly square, and are called "squircles" (green and purple curves).

Today I learned that if one generalizes trigonometry to squircles, it's called "squigonometry" and the x and y coordinates of points on the squircle are given by the squine and cosquine functions.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squigonometry

The regions with the same color have the same area.

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/10/14/pythagorean-variation/