Regarding the #PHP2Shell crisis, it seems like a lot of containers use @alpinelinux as a base (for size, mainly), and right now #PHP 8.4 was last built a month ago: https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/packages?name=php84&branch=v3.24&repo=&arch=&origin=&flagged=&maintainer=

Does anyone have any insight into what's going on with alpine/containers? Debian seems well cared-for, in particular those that use Ondřej Surý's backports, but a vast number of sites use docker/k8s/etc!

Today is the most "Captain, it's Wednesday" it has been for me in a long time.

Happy Cybersecurity Awareness Month, everybody!

RE: https://mastodon.me.uk/@spdegabrielle/117257119947694201

In the US, the people are genuinely attacking genuinely terrifying camera systems designed to oppress people. Here, it's a bunch of right-wing terminally-online cranks who have elaborate conspiracy theories based on "but I don' WANNA pay my traffic fines!"

Alan Perlis was a font of epigrams about computing, to the point where a collection of over a hundred were published in the 80s.

When it comes to #LLM coding tools, I am often reminded of possibly his most quoted bon mot:

> It is easier to write an incorrect program than understand a correct one.

https://youtu.be/FlndIiQa20o ← Here it is in video form. This used to be really popular before calculators were everywhere.

I love that the earliest reference we have for this method is a third-century book called "THE REFUTATION OF ALL HERESIES".

Okay, so now that everyone in the UK knows not to light fires in the middle of a blasted drought, it's time for everyone on Mastodon to learn about Casting Out Nines:

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

Kind of amazing how losing a war in Iran got everyone to stop talking about the Epstein Files.

WAIT WHAT DO YOU MEAN THIS IS THE FIRST EDITION COVER OF THE JOY OF COOKING?????

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@cR0w/116969713312274427

Now do this with someone using a wheelchair.

A horrible man named Kelvin McKenzie was the editor of The Sun in the 80s and early 90s. The Sun was a tabloid that was mostly famous for putting topless photos of women on page three until about a decade ago. The joke when they stopped doing this was that they still printed bollocks on all the other pages like always. It's always been a right-wing reactionary rag.

Anyway, McKenzie set the editorial dictat that the role of the paper was "to stick a ferret up the trousers" of the British readership. Everything was about making the reader feel outrage at some chosen target, and driving the political consensus through some outsider or villain.

Famously, he'd get this wrong. He'd get it so very very wrong. He'd set the paper against some helpless group like schoolteachers or NHS nurses or something, and after a while it would become painfully clear that No One Was Having It.

At this point, legend goes, he'd storm into the bull-pen screaming "REVERSE FERRET!!!!!" and demand that all staff tear the current edition to shreds to instead pick a new threat that was hovering over the helpless and heroic salt-of-the-earth workers the paper had been terrorising just the other day.

So we keep this term in modern politics to note the moment when the press are suddenly forced to reverse direction. We've seen this happen with politicians who seemed to be made of Teflon, from the way the press treated them. Boris Johnson's struggle against the reverse ferret moment resulted in the infamously bad "Save Big Dog" movement.

We're now watching the UK press lose patience with Nigel Farage, after decades of him being the NoVeL oUtSiDeR papers could use to fill their column inches musing on What Mainstream Politics Has Failed To Listen To or How Politics Has Changed. Journalists are finally beginning to publish articles that appear to hold him to account for his decisions, which has been almost unthinkable for the two decades I've lived in this country.

But make no mistake: they're looking for another Nigel to back. The reason this is happening is that he's made it impossible for even the Murdochian monsters at the top of this media circus to defend him any longer. They'll need someone else, and they'll probably jump back to the Tories or maybe pick some other brand of racist, but they need a bigot for this role.

Still, it'd be a laugh if Binface won, I guess.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@gutenberg_org/116911742330330118

I read this after reading *In Dubious Battle*, and after seeing the *Grapes of Wrath* film adaptation. I was kind of shocked when I got to the weird coda about "There are no great collaborations" and all that: gosh, guess you didn't have an editor, then??

I was left with the feeling that *East of Eden* was a work compromised by McCarthyism, and that Steinbeck was pressured by Cold War forces to renounce his earlier consciousness. Whatever the facts of his life, that remains my reading of the book.

Here is the full text of The SpaceHobo Conservancy's Recommendations When Using LLM-backed Generative AI Systems for FOSS Contributions:

> Don't.

I'm still tinkering with the symbology, and one of my constraints is that it not rely on colour to convey information. Everything on the legend needs to have a distinct visual pattern even in greyscale. #cycling #london #ealing #mapping #osm #gis

Not the fastest nor most reliable kludge, but it does the job for now.

OK, I was able to hack around this most of the way by making a layer sandwich, and using `overlay_nearest()` in the top one. Definitely a kludge.

I am REALLY FRIKKEN MAD now that the PBF→Spatialite conversion of #OSM data loses all of the relationships made by the relations in the data. I had to give up on #overpass queries because hey nobody can run an API any more without drowning in LLM scrapers, and the SQLite database is so much quicker in #QGIS than my old geojson/shapefile approach, but the limits of the separate multilinestring rendering of relation data are significant.

My project used to have really nice distinct rendering for signposted cycle routes that changed depending on whether or not the route forced the rider to tAkE tHe LaNe on a designated road. It really highlighted how bad the gaps were in the local cycle network, and was a really important tool for local campaigning!

But now I'm forced into some compromises that make my maps far less useful, all because everything's a botnet now. I'm still not sure it's going to work!

Americans, if you're trying to get used to temperatures in Celsius (actual Celsius, not Canadian-made-up-numbers Celsius), then just refer to this helpful chart:

0° and below - Freezing
5° - Cold
10° - Chilly
15° - Cool
20° - Normal
25° - Warm
30° - Hot
35° - Miserable
40° - The climate is not "changing": it is being changed by billionaires who have names and addresses.
45° - London 2022
...
100° - Boiling
...
180° - Just leave the oven on this for most meals.
220° - Roasting some veg or something.

I actually worked at the same place as Andrew Tridgell, over a quarter-century ago. I got to know a few of the OzLabs folks during their immediate post-IBM years, and always had the highest respect for them in that way where you feel acute impostor syndrome when they're in the room.

Tridge almost walked backwards into implementing the Windows SMB protocol (he was just debugging some funny NetBIOS extensions IIRC). But his paper on the #rsync algorithm was groundbreaking, and actually writing the tool to implement it was brilliant. It's become one of those tools like #curl that just forms one of the major structural supports of the modern Internet. I still remember the day that the SSH transport became the default, and I remember being able to thank him in person when he came to the San Francisco office (although IIRC by that point he'd handed control of rsync over to mbp).

I remember at my next job he came to a summit of folks working on print driver/spooler software. When he pointed out that some problems were effectively a cache-consistency algorithm, we all kind of put our fingers to our temples and said "Oh wow, you're SO right!" He was always insightful and sharp, while being gentle and approachable.

I write in the past tense because I haven't crossed paths with him in two decades, and only know what I see him put out. A friend of mine in Australia noted that he hasn't posted to the Canberra LUG list since 2020, thanking someone for congratulating him on receiving the Medal of the Order of Australia. He's very much alive, but from what little I see I grow concerned for him.

In 2024 he took over maintenance of rsync once more. The 3.3.0 release was the last one from the previous maintainer, and Tridge is currently working on 3.4.x releases.

Well... Tridge and #Claude, it seems: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@JeremiahFieldhaven/116654345332213390

The issue tracker for rsync has recently lit up with regressions, showing features that worked reliably for almost 30 years are suddenly coming crashing down in 3.4.2 and 3.4.3. People are scrambling to find ways to pin rsync to known-good versions. The considerate, incisive mind I briefly knew is letting the stochastic parrots do his work for him, and it just seems so astonishingly *unlike* the person I met back in the day.

I am still willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I hope all is well for him, but I will not cast aspersions on his goals or his abilities. No, instead I draw this conclusion:

If TRIDGE of all people can't handle #LLMs without a slopocalypse, no one can.

That means you. That means someone you admire who is intelligent and careful and considerate. Not even someone whose opinions on technology you respect a great deal.

No one.