This Google Cloud outage in Europe is huge. Almost every service offline, including Google SecOps (Chronicle), for almost 4 hours now.

And Lift Off! A glorious launch of #MMX, the start of an amazingly awesome 5 yr round trip to Mars' moon Phobos. 1yr to get there, 3yrs exploration landing on the surface (twice), then 1yr to get home with the bounty (2tbls of Phobos dust), arriving in the Australian outback in 2031! 🥳🔭🧪🛰️🚀

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ok3ms3dzop7gcwejp7lswhpi/post/3myaunvbqts2d

Edit: false alarm. This was something the account holder did, not a take over. Cc @renchap - they connected to a rss feed that pushed ads. False alarm. As you were. Nothing to see here

Ohh, we just had an old account with 2FA (so password not reset) apparently hijacked and used to send spam (a different kind I hadn’t seen before). That is a good indication some service that uses auth tokens got hit. Now to figure out which

Look who's #neuhier: solar physicist @kbarczynski, alumnus of @imprs_solar, coming right in with his latest paper - see his first post! Welcome Krzysztof

#introduction #astrodon #SolarPhysics

It's possible to deliver quality code with genAI just like it's possible to be on a diet in a candy shop.

@darkuncle I realize that the concern about the attestation flag and passkeys may seem rather speculative, but as a GrapheneOS user I have been bitten by similar things with Play Integrity.

I can't use certain apps because my OS has been judged unacceptable. Note that my OS is based off Android, just with some additional hardening. It's actually *more* secure than Android and even supports a form of hardware attestation. But because it isn't stock Android from Google, it fails the higher-level Play Integrity checks (while an un-patched, out-of-date stock Android can pass). This is not a theoretical concern, it's happening today.

This stops some people from being able to use GrapheneOS at all, because some app they must use (e.g. for their job or for a government service) enforces one of these levels through Play Integrity. While I never experienced something like that, I did have my then 2FA app, Authy, suddenly stop working one day when they decided to start enforcing this check. Because they killed their desktop app at almost the exact same time, this meant that all my 2FA tokens were suddenly effectively lost*. So take it from me, you do not want companies to have this sort of de facto power.

* PSA: make sure you can export your 2FA tokens from whatever authenticator you use and securely back them up regularly.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@jwz/117452561118398421

Give this repo stars and forks please.

Do NOT bother finding the original repository as its maintainers are jerks who have wasted a truly embarrassing amount of my time and emotional bandwidth, and I'd rather they did not waste yours. I did report them to github but if this is a ToS violation it's going to be a really annoying grey area. Do not dogpile, just try to bury them in the search results.

I'm doing a social experiment to try talking to more folks (esp those I met online, like via Mastodon/Fediverse) and ideally about nerdy topics of mutual interest.

Signal or Google Meet. audio-only. call durations say 15 to 45 minutes? one-on-one, initially. tho we might expand later to small group calls, if enough desire it

topics of interest and/or my expertise:

* Golang
* Linux
* compute system performance, scaling, efficiency, optimization, instrumentation, tooling, HPC
* concurrency, parallelization, multi-threading
* EV charging
* DCC TTRPG (by GG)
* Advanced Squad Leader (ASL)
* Empire of the Sun (wargame by GMT)
* WW2 and Nazi German history

ping me if interested, either here or via email

Jef Raskin: "In every study that considered the question, icons were demonstrated to be more difficult to understand than were labels, especially at first viewing, which contradicts one of the most frequently cited reasons for using icons, namely, comprehensibility for beginners."

It doesn't appear that today's Apple is even bothering to study usability.

https://unsung.aresluna.org/in-every-study-that-considered-the-question/

It’s Hamilton Day!

You may be interested that quaternions form the core mathematical framework used in the Euclid satellite's telemetry system to represent and control its attitude (i.e. pointing direction and orientation). I also make extensive use of quaternions myself in preparing my annual tax return.

http://telescoper.blog/2026/10/16/its-hamilton-day/

RE: https://mathstodon.xyz/@highergeometer/117444294992347686

Follow the money ... it's clear that at least some of the "breakthroughs" by the "AI"s are not breakthroughs, are building on other people's work, not giving credit, and not providing any understanding.

But ... HEADLINES !!!

The IPOs are coming, so of course they are doing everything they can to look good, and don't care that they are lying by omission.

Today at work I have had problems with both instant messaging (Teams) and cut and paste (Microsoft Office). It is funny to me that functions that used to work reliably in the late 90s (or even before) are now unreliable. Such is "progress" in software.

Some of this is probably specifically Microsoft and organizational software management, but I think it's also representative of the state of a lot of software.

A nice article explaining that while passkeys may improve your #security, they ultimately shift control of how you manage your login credentials and, eventually, maybe even what software and hardware you use from you to the organizations that run online services. So if you want to continue to have control over how you use and share your credentials (as makes sense for your particular use case) and what software and hardware you use rather than corporations and governments that run online services, you are probably better off fighting passkey adoption.
#2FA #authentication

https://nonfunctional.substack.com/p/passkeys-are-a-trap-do-not-use-them?r=1batt

We gave the entire (well, no-PII, no active secbugs, etc) contents and history of Bugzilla to some very smart PhDs at uMontreal, and one of the things they came back with was this: somebody submitting their first bugfix was relatively unlikely to submit a second, but somebody on their fourth bugfix is quite likely to get to five, and six, and stick around.

I cannot emphasize enough how much you get from up front code ergonomics and human care in the early stages of the contributor relationship.

NEW: Governments are abusing online ads to infect people's phones and computers with zero-click spyware, per Citizen Lab. Al Jazeera had ~45 devices hacked this way, simply by visiting a website that displayed a malicious ad. Researchers say it's tip of the iceberg.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/15/citizen-lab-says-governments-are-abusing-online-ads-to-hack-people-with-zero-click-spyware/

Ad-block bypass: https://archive.is/Smm3d

Hello fine people of Mastodon!

I'm Frank: a soil ecologist, popular-science author, nature macrophotographer, university lecturer and science communicator (and exhausterwhelmed new father). Through my research and outreach, I'm determined to raise awareness of the tiny organisms that keep our soils (and our world) working!

Make sure you've tapped the follow button if you want to learn more about:

🪱 Life in soil
📸 Nature macrophotography
🎙️ Science communication
📚 My debut (award-winning) scientific nonfiction book 'The World Beneath our Feet'

Still reading this? You're my kind of person!

#Introduction #AboutMe #TheWorldBeneathOurFeet #Nature #SoilBiodiversity #Entomology

passkeys are generally hated and distrusted by users? the things that keep trying to dark pattern me into using them instead of the password manager I chose? the things that won’t prevent my account from getting compromised when the service nagging me about passkeys gets hacked again? god I wonder why

did you know that Linus Torvalds, boy genius, thinks you need an LLM to do an incredibly basic thing that we’ve been doing in IDEs an editors since the 80s? https://peoplemaking.games/@clayote/117439268154603995

maybe we should stop assuming this guy was ever good at anything, honestly

AI boosters love humiliating themselves by insisting you need their shit to do something you can do faster and better with an editor you know how to use, and now torvalds is doing it too

RE: https://social.coop/@cwebber/116319429565466073

It is always a pleasure for @regento to help organizations fight for the public good, particularly in the Free & Open Source software movement and digital public infrastructure building. We also enjoy helping organizations that align with the various UN sustainable development goals we support!

#FLOSS #OpenSource #NGOs #nonprofits #charities #Spritely #UnitedNations #SDGs #SDSN #FreeSoftware #FOSS #strategy