Jasper @jasper@pointless.net

which one is better?

[repost for visibility]

I want David Cronenberg to design the new USB standard, so all the ports and plugs sigh and moan and writhe before finally accommodating each other’s anatomy in a blissful, disturbing union that allows charging and data transfer to occur effortlessly between all equipment.

This is the Twitter -> Mastodon friend migration tool we've all been looking for: https://www.movetodon.org/
1) authorize Twitter
2) authorize your Mastodon instance
3) wait while it greps through your Twitter followers
4) click on the ones you want to add on Mastodon
Easy peasy!

You’ve heard of Elf on a Shelf
In Canada we have

This is an old project, but by some miracle it's still working and I woke up this morning wanting to celebrate the things I love more.

This Inkplate e-ink screen shows Conway's Game of Life, seeded from tarpits I have on the Internet. The tarpits are programs on my computer that superficially look like insecure Telnet and Remote Desktop services, but actually exist to respond super slowly and make bots scanning the Internet 'get stuck'.

When a bot connects to the tarpit, the data it sends gets squished into a 5x5 grid and 'stamped' onto a Game of Life board. Data from a bot at the IP address 1.1.x.x will get stamped on the top left corner, data from a bot at 254.254.x.x will get stamped on the bottom right corner.

Conway's Game of Life, a set of simple rules that govern whether cells should turn on or off, updates the display once per second. The result is that bot attacks end up appearing as distinct 'creatures', that get bigger and more angry looking over time (as their centre is updated with new data). After the attack finishes, the 'creature' eventually burns itself out.

Despite that description, it's a really chill piece of art that doesn't draw too much attention but I can happily watch for a long time.

Credit for the idea goes to @_mattata, I had been wanting to make a real-life version of XKCD #350 for years before seeing his Botnet Fishbowl project.

#projects #inkplate #esp32 #eink #infosec #tarpit

They ported PostmarketOS to the nokia 8110 4G... it looks so derpy running XFCE. I guess I found another project

Last week the National Security Archive at GWU released a series of documents obtained via FOIA¹ which contain, in particular, a document² entitled "The Origins and Evolution of S2C at Sandia National Laboratories: 1949 to 1996" by William Stevens which has an incredible classification history: it started off as "For Official Use Only" (FOUO), then became "Secret/RD" (Restricted Data), then FRD (Formerly Restricted Data) which made its distribution impossible.

Eventually the archive managed to get it via FOIA in 2014.

It is an excellent companion to a book I recommend: Eric Schlosser, "Command and Control"³ and was written by "someone on the inside" at Sandia (the archive webpage has a much more detailed history of it and the other documents being released).

A small excerpt of the Stevens document:

"One nuclear risk illuminated by Stevens’ history is the “POPCORN” phenomenon—a recuring concern during the 1960s and 1970s that some weapons were vulnerable to accidental detonation that could, like popcorn, trigger the detonations of other nearby weapons, such as multiple weapons carried on a bomber or weapons kept together during transport or while in storage."

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¹ https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/nuclear-vault/2022-11-18/new-declassifications-nuclear-weapons-safety-and-security
² https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/29457-document-2-william-l-stevens-origins-and-evolution-s2c-sandia-national-laboratories
³ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/303337/command-and-control-by-eric-schlosser/

what our IT is like:

If you're considering running a nice little fediverse server for your community, please read this birdsite thread by one of the Dreamwidth folks.

Its US focussed, but there are likely similar things in your jurisdiction and the liability advice applies almost worldwide.

https://twitter.com/rahaeli/status/1593819064161665024

I started collecting #mastoadmin resources some time ago: https://github.com/mszell/mastoadminresources
Hope it can be useful (also for non-admins). Please help adding to it! 🐘 🤍

Boost this toot if you're planning on sticking around Mastodon whether or not it becomes more popular than the birdsite.

My favourite discovery is MOCA, the museum of computer art.

While it looks like a time capsule from 1999, you'd be wrong - people are actively submitting artworks. That look like they came from 1999.

https://moca.virtual.museum

Walk to Leitur Fura through the Kinloch Forest #IsleofSkye

If you’d say to me years ago that it would be possible to not only design your own silicon chip but get it manufactured too for a minimal amount, I’d have muttered a rude word at you.

But Matt Venn has done just that with his Zero to ASIC and Tiny Tapeout initiative https://tinytapeout.com/

We are living in a golden age of hardware right now and stuff like this truly excites the hell out of me.

There are so many mushrooms in the hills this year.

Hi everyone out there in #Mastodon land! Please can you boost this toot for me - I'm running a new server for friends and family and pushing it will help it #federate with the wider network.

Thanks lovelies!