I'm not impressed with the Dutch government website for signing up for the tests you need to become a citizen. It's a confusing labyrinth of unclear information, one of the tests that is absolutely mandatory is simply not scheduled at all anywhere in the country forever, and now that I'm signed up for what *is* scheduled, I am informed that I must report to "Rotterdam" to take them. Where in Rotterdam, exactly? Well telling me would spoil the fun!

here is the Dutch news covering the JIT supply chain collapse issue. The machine generated English subtitles are Good Enough https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CCQ2xcNd_go

it boggles me that AH is apparently so dependent on JIT computerized supply chain management that they don't even have the ability to say "well, while the system is down, we should probably just load what looks like a Normal amount of vegetables onto trucks and send some to each grocery store", they just don't send any at all and leave them rotting in the distribution centers

Unironically, a key difference between life in the US and the Netherlands is that in the US, life is inconvenient because nothing is maintained, and in NL life is inconvenient because everything’s always in the middle of being maintained

Behold! I can make a power drill magically begin maintenance tasks outside my window at will

[I begin Chinese listening exercises]

so, Albert Heijn, one of the main Dutch grocery chains, has had a major IT disruption because of some sort of ransomware attack, and this has caused stores to not get deliveries of fresh fruits and vegetables

Some passerby was quoted on the news as saying to chin up and stop whining because "it's nothing compared to third-world countries" (their phrase, not mine)

The type of places they mean typically have a *fantastic* selection of fresh fruits and vegetables. A city running out of vegetables overnight is a situation you only get yourself into by complete dependence on hyper-optimized centralized computerized supply chains...

Everyone, I have a suggestion: New Skill November.

#NewSkillNovember

Anthropic is bragging about rolling their own from-scratch in-house version control system because git couldn't keep up with their 30,000 commits per day, and it doesn't seem to occur to them for a nanosecond that they are not fixing the actual problem in their engineering practices but making it exponentially worse

Someone has been embedding hardware implants in Ledger crypto wallets to steal the randomly-generated seed phrases produced by the devices that protect crypto accounts. They used the stolen seeds last week to hijack $100 million in crypto from 300+ crypto accounts. It turns out that Ledger was warned last March about the implants but did little because no one had yet used the implants to steal crypto from wallet owners. That all changed last week with the simultaneous heist of hundreds of accounts. I dug into the mystery behind this, including evidence that indicates stolen seeds may have been sent to servers in Hong Kong.

https://www.zetter-zeroday.com/who-is-planting-backdoors-in-ledger-crypto-wallets/

Everyone, I have a suggestion: New Skill November.

#NewSkillNovember

RE: https://c.im/@rijksmuseum_roulette/117411966197371526

I collect public domain images of women reading or writing, btw. If you ever want to cheer me up, dig out an obscure old engraving of a woman with a book

H. Anastasia van Sirmium
Maker: Antonie Wierix (II) (mentioned on object)
Technique: engraving (gravure)
Dimensions: height 81 mm x width 60 mm

https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/nl/collectie/object/RP-P-1904-173--3d546425686082746e34c782d6fbf87e
#Rijksmuseum #musea #collection #mastodonart #mastoart #random #art

Lol, I think someone managed to nab the patreon name "oauth2" so now when you visit https://www.patreon.com/oauth2/documentation you get some random user

small languages have it hard enough without American tech companies saying "we know you probably understand English anyway, so how about we just replace this authentic human audio in your native language with some nice cozy machine-generated English, isn't that better 😌 "

[Dutch is not my native language. But it is my husband's and it was his computer]

hey, could the Youtube product manager who decided that when a Dutch household puts on a video from the Dutch national news, the audio should automatically be replaced with a TTS voice reading a machine-generated English translation, come meet me in the darkest corner of the Amsterdamse Bos where there's no cell coverage? I just want to talk.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/114360232542400530

“Based on a sudden flurry of comments, someone must have boosted this old post. Was it @catsalad ? It was catsalad.”

yes! yes!! YES WE FOUND MILA

Odin is looking for Mila… but will we find her?

Just had a conversation with peers that was like:

"my friend says github's changed their SSH key fingerprint again and it's generating scary warnings you have to ignore"

"oh? it hasn't changed for me"

"or me"

"can't find any documentation on them having changed it since 2023"

"... uh-oh."

If you get a scary warning about Github's ssh fingerprint changing: STOP! it's scary for a reason! You might be a victim-in-progress! Don't proceed unless and until you know exactly what's wrong!

Alas, I suspect the fact that Github really did have to force a key rotation a few years ago has planted the recollection in everyone's minds that this is a normal Github failure mode.

(Yes, messages have hastily been sent to warn people about the possible account compromise. Edit: well the good news is that it's already been diagnosed that they somehow still had the old key from pre-2023 saved, so it's *probably* not an active compromise. )

So, this silly recall is real, and it’s because the sand filling is contaminated with asbestos. How did I verify that? well, not simply by going to gov.uk like the announcement says!

The front page of gov.uk does not have a header for “recalls”, “product safety” or anything of the sort. Okay, but there is a search box. So I entered “recall”. And yes, it brought up a recalls page featuring several toys, but not this one.

On that page is a subtle link to the real, full list, that I completely missed despite actively trying to verify that these malevolent poison gnomes are real; I had to backtrack to google to find a deep link. Terrible web design, 1/10, gov dot uk was designed by a murder gnome.

https://www.gov.uk/product-safety-alerts-reports-recalls/product-recall-primark-halloween-gonks-2610-0004