Seachaint @seachaint@hackers.town

New blog post: Ken Thompson Really Did Launch His "Trusting Trust" Trojan Attack in Real Life https://niconiconi.neocities.org/posts/ken-thompson-really-did-launch-his-trusting-trust-trojan-attack-in-real-life/

Ken Thompson's "Trusting Trust" compiler Trojan attack was not just a thought experiment. In fact, Usenet poster Jay Ashworth stated that, from personal communications, Thompson really did launch this attack in real life and successfully compromised the Unix Support Group at Bell Labs. In 2021, I've rediscovered this original message with full message headers in a search effort using various Usenet archives, showing the authenticity of the post.

I already posted it to Fedi in 2021 on my old account, now I think a full blog post is better as a matter of record. #retrocomputing

Sorry – screwed up my copying of AutBall’s alt text (because Twitter makes it hard to copy)

Second attempt!

This week at work, our team completed another newspaper archive project, focusing on rare Irish newspapers. Here's an example:

"The Irish Felon" was a nationalist weekly journal printed in Dublin in 1848 to advocate insurrection and violence. Only five issues were published before its suppression by the British Government.

#library #ireland #newspapers

On the bike ride to the school, I sometimes pass a parked car with a sticker that says, “Make tea no war,” and while I appreciate the sentiment the owner is _probably_ expressing, all I can ever think about is the deep link between tea and British imperialism that popularized the drink enough in the Anglosphere that a USian would even have such a sticker. Not to throw shade: I am making tea as I type this. It’s just a weird dissonance.

We are still a massive €254 short for the server bills for mstdn.social, misskey.ai, mastodon.coffee, pixey.org and some more free open source services ​

Hopefully next month I can pay most of it with a new job but that doesn't help now..

If you can, please think about supporting me in paying the bills for the various #Fediverse services I host for free❤️

https://paypal.me/stuxOS
https://patreon.com/mstdn
https://ko-fi.com/mstdn
https://liberapay.com/mstdn
https://opencollective.com/mstdn
https://bunq.me/stuxhost

If not me perhaps your own server admin ​​

"Oh dear, you have a lot of... things."
The cyborg looked up. "The word is prosthetics."
"So much machinery. Don't you worry you will stop being human?"
"Oh, there is a line I will not cross."
"What line is that?"
"I will not question another person's humanity."
#MicroFiction #SmallStories #TootFic

On this day in 1983, Stanislav Petrov saved the world.

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

you would think "the defenestration of Prague" would a good enough moniker for a historical even but it isn't cause there were THREE of them

Head over to https://exercise.cafe if you're looking for a #Fediverse instance to share your updates related to fitness/exercise!

Code of Conduct: https://dougbelshaw.com/blog/2022/09/13/exercise-cafe-registrations/

"I feel like we are headed for crisis territory now. There has to be an exit from this public finance situation. Rationality would suggest they reverse the tax cuts, but if this principle was operating they would not have done it in the first place."

Who's this radical?

https://nitter.42l.fr/t0nyyates/status/1573251802807558147#m

Tony Yates, former head of monetary policy strategy at the Bank of England.

Still, at least we do have a new term coined for this fuckwittery: "Kamikwasi Economics".

So Etsy has started using Plaid, which is a super-skeevy data-selling service that literally asks you to hand over your bank username and password to "verify" yourself (in the fine print you can also give them your account/routing number which gives them less initial data but then is not changeable unless your bank does the throwaway-account thing).

https://indiesellersguild.org/what-to-do-if-youre-out-of-time-on-plaid/

I am *really* of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I could just drop Etsy; I have Shopify.

#seambiz #etsy

They called it the Web, or the Net, because it was supposed to connect us all.

But now it's called that because all it does is captures us.

Pre-disclosure: we are planning a coordinated security release of multiple Matrix clients starting 16:00 UTC Wed Sep 28th to address some critical issues. We have no evidence of these being exploited in the wild, but please get ready to upgrade on Wed! https://matrix.org/blog/2022/09/23/pre-disclosure-upcoming-critical-security-release-of-matrix-sd-ks-and-clients

On a serious note, please remember that there are dozens of ethnic groups in what we call #Russia today:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_in_Russia

Some parallels can be drawn between the treatment of ethnic groups in Russia and treatment of First Nations and Black and Brown people in the USA:
https://www.refworld.org/docid/4b7cee862d.html
https://adcmemorial.org/en/articles/ethnic-profiling-in-russia-an-unrecognised-problem/

And it does seem like the military draft is affecting ethnic minorities the most right now. This is important context to keep in mind.

an abstract that does not Fuck Around
(image repeated to fit it all in alt text)