Notices by Tim Bray (timbray@cosocial.ca), page 3

Of geek interest: UUIDs have been around for a long time and they work well and interoperate fine, but the specification space is a mess. So the IETF just shipped RFC9562; it has a fine consideration of the history and the trade-offs involved in all the different flavors of UUIDs, and is well-written and I think, as of now, the place to start looking if something UUID-flavored is puzzling you. Strong work! https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc9562.html

@snarfed.org Hey Ryan, brid.gy is kind of working, that’s cool. I can see my Fedi account and posts from Bsky, but can’t see my Bsky account from Fedi. Should I? I’m @tbray.org on Bsky, so the handle should be @tbray.org@bsky.brid.gy, correct?

Hey Fediverse, quoting a post from my Bluesky account, federated via the brid.gy service, see https://fed.brid.gy/docs
It’s early-stage stuff, lots of little awkwardnesses. But it does seem to be two-way, which beats the Threads experiment. The next post below the one I’m quoting is the mirror image, me on Bluesky quoting a Fedi post; it strains the federation fabric a bit.

[Hmm, quoting the URL didn’t bring in any text or picture. But it may in a few minutes…]

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:uzwwzqpwg7tsboo2vohg6njb/post/3krk4pa7a7d2t

This apparently touched a nerve; I had no idea. Check the comment thread.

My own major gripe with passkeys is that I could never find a simple straightforward explanation of what they were and how they were to be used. I have a decent understanding of asymmetric crypto and PKI and key exchange and JWT and so on, so if you can’t explain it to me, you have a big problem.

https://cosocial.ca/@timbray/112339186728840038

Passkeys were hot last year, don’t seem to be catching on, here’s one view of why that is. Dark and sobering but convincing: https://fy.blackhats.net.au/blog/2024-04-26-passkeys-a-shattered-dream/

@evan https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2007/03/10/Baby-Dread

Watching the US House debate on C-SPAN. The Putinistas are treading lightly except for a deranged rant from MTG. Now they’re on the $-to-Israel bill; one voice so far is uncomfortable with Netanyahu's slaughter of the innocents. Apparently invisible or irrelevant to all the others. Anyhow, the bill has a useful humanitarian-aid-for-Gaza component (one GOP voice wanted to amend that bit out).

@evan Don't hold back there Evan, let us know how you really feel.

@evan me too

@mike @ricmac @rabble @evan @Gargron @dansup @JsonCulverhouse @greg @emilynguyen My feeling is that the world’s UI innovators may solve this problem for us. What with Ivory and Mona and Elk and Phanpy, you can already have wildly-different experiences of the same underlying network. Seems to me that many of the things that distinguish these alternate servers can be accomplished with sufficiently good client-ware.

https://fediwall.social is kinda cool. Hit the little “settings” gear, it appears at the top right corner when you send the cursor that way.

@dansup In what ways does PF differ from Masto, server-side I mean. A photo centric UI is easy to understand, but are there things that *work* differently?

Why we won't accept the narrative of regrettable incidents in Gaza | MSF https://www.msf.org/why-we-wont-accept-narrative-regrettable-incidents-gaza

Now here are some people who are working the issue seriously. Not ready for prime time obvs… https://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2023/the-full-source-bootstrap-building-from-source-all-the-way-down/

Anyone else going this deep?

I think the #xz incident is teaching us that our infrastructure is dangerously fragile in the face of well-organized/funded attackers. The response isn’t “try harder” or “donate to your OSS project”, it needs to be institutional, professional, and at scale.

So, here’s my proposal, called “OSQI”, aimed at starting a how-to discussion: https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2024/04/01/OSQI

@alanc @josephholsten @dalias

Leaving the autoconf world is starting to sound awfully attractive in 2024. Mind you, Im prejudiced, I’ve loathed GNU AutoHell since 1998 or thereabouts.

For those who don’t remember, apartheid’s number one argument in its own self-defense were “You may not like what we do but our neighbors are much worse, so criticizing us is unfair and unbalanced.” Sound familiar?

Old folks like me remember the Eighties when the civilized parts of the world decided that the South African and Rhodesian apartheid states were no longer acceptable and systematically excluded them from sports and culture and commerce and, basically, civilization.

To me it seems plausible that #Israel is heading down a very similar path.

@hazelweakly An OAuth 2 access token is *exactly* like a hotel room keycard.

Hey @CBCNews @CBC sup?

https://mastodon.social/@laurendw/112151675611632398