Notices by Matthew Garrett (mjg59@nondeterministic.computer)

Many years earlier I'd been trying to download the code referenced in a scientific paper but the URL provided resolved to an HP printer and after a month I just started sending print jobs with big text saying "TAKE THIS TO YOUR IT DEPARTMENT" and small text telling them to fix whichever of their DNS or DHCP was broken

Direct action works

Remembering the time Amazon somehow added an internal address to my account that only showed up through the "Buy now" flow, so I ordered the cheapest thing I could find with free shipping (a $0.69 dog treat) and added a gift note containing a bug report and eventually it went away although I have no idea whether these events are linked

It's been another day of dealing with the fallout of people unconditionally running

eval $(ssh-agent)

in their shell startup. Please don't:

1) If you run it on remote systems, it breaks ssh agent forwarding - everything now talks to the remote agent, not the forwarded one
2) You end up with a per-shell agent, so keys loaded form one shell aren't available to others
3) It overrides any per-session agent started by your desktop

At minimum, check if SSH_AUTH_SOCK is already set before doing it!

We produce some of the finest memory unsafe code in the world. Big code mines just digging up beautiful buffer overflows, factories turning out world-class use after frees. I spoke to someone and he said sir, those commie Europeans want to get rid of their data races, sir, but we make the best data races. Did you know that America made 15 of the top 20 most exploitable codebases in 2000 year? We're going to be bringing that back. No more woke languages. Good honest American C.

(Or the secret third thing of simply not getting involved at all which would be fairly on brand)

…ok putting the FSF where they're going to have to choose between supporting Drew DeVault or Jack Dorsey is *extremely* funny

Hit a *really* corner case bug today - a binary was absolutely present but returned ENOENT whenever you tried to run it. strace showed exevce() returning it, so it was happening when the kernel tried to run it. Normally I'd assume that the rtld (the thing that the kernel delegates loading of dynamic libraries to when running a dynamically linked binary) was missing, but ldd showed nothing missing - everything was resolved, including the rtld. WTF?

Turns out that ldd doesn't run the rtld that's defined in the binary - it has a list of rtlds it tries to run against the binary. If I'd read the output more closely I'd have seen:

/lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 => /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 (0x00007f0c656cd000)

The toolchain that built the binary set the rtld to a path in /lib, but ldd was reading it out of /lib64.The kernel only uses the built-in path, so we got ENOENT.

Fucking computers, man

(We'll ignore that a bunch of the board use MacOS)

Maybe the FSF needs the equivalent of a constitutional convention every few years

It's taken a while for me to figure out why https://www.fsf.org/news/anchoring-the-fsf-in-its-values bothered me so much, and in the end I think it's that the FSF doesn't recognise its unique position in the free software community. Sure, if people sufficiently disagree with the FSF they could start up their own foundation - but the FSF has unique control over the GPL, one of the bedrocks of free software

The FSF asserts it's staying true to its original goals through strict control of who can become a board member, but what if they're wrong on something? What if the board refuses to recognise something fundamental? There's no clear avenue to engage with the board to change their mind, there's no way to become elected to the board to work from within. Someone could start a competitor but the FSF own the copyright to GNU and (more importantly) they own the GPL family of licenses.

I think it's fine for an organisation to making it hard to be subject to ideological takeover, but if that organisation has power nobody else does then what next? We're asserting that the current FSF voting members have an insight into free software that nobody else does, and this doesn't feel great

I've just been handed what appears to be an elaborate party invitation?

Me fucking about with an LTE hotspot ended up helping enable an EFF project that's then turned into a Wired story about mass surveillance around the DNC, so never stop fucking about with things: https://www.wired.com/story/2024-dnc-cell-site-simulator-phone-surveillance/

People justifying their behaviour based on being neurodivergent and accusing anyone who criticises them as being a bigot without considering that those people may also be neurodivergent challenge, difficulty apparently impossible

This is made weirder by the last time my bags went missing being them *not* getting to Istanbul when they were supposed to

Current confusion: how my luggage, which was supposed to go from Dublin to Seattle, apparently somehow ended up in Istanbul?

@munin plausibly both, time travel doesn't seem out of the question in this case