Notices by abadidea (0xabad1dea@infosec.exchange)

Apple’s on-device translation doesn’t know it should ignore URLs, so you can hand it a post written entirely in Chinese with a URL at the end that is also mostly Chinese characters, which it sees as %20-type encoding, and it will be like “☹️ Sorry, I can’t automatically identify this language that’s 50% Chinese characters and 50% hexadecimal keysmash. … But my best guess is Polish.”

psst

hey you, with the eyes 👀

stop being stubborn and increase your computer's default font size. magnify that web page you're reading a bit

maybe try a different display font, most things default to sans fonts these days but I personally find serifs much easier to read, especially at, ahem, bigger font sizes

also, if light mode hurts your eyes, there's a significant chance the problem is that you bought a new monitor that gets 10x brighter than your old monitor and you turned it up to 100% brightness out of habit

phishing training really doesn’t spend enough time on “how to structure your mass corporate communications in such a way that your employees won’t conclude that you communicate exactly like scammers and still expect a reply so they’d better assume scammy emails are legitimate”

@misty there was one the other day where the paywall was reasonably effective, so I checked if it had served archive.org the whole article, and it had. Only to discover that after a few seconds, the archived page’s javascript would realize it wasn’t running on its expected domain, and nuke the page. Reader mode didn’t work.

I didn’t feel like going through all the effort of turning javascript off and back on, so I reloaded and quickly control-a control-c’d the text before it got nuked so I could paste it into a word processor 😂

I spent some time looking into the rsync regressions. I found the general shape of the cause of one of them, and a discord buddy was able to further nail the exact chain of failure. We reported our findings in the appropriate github issue. (It was a classic: security fix introducing a new bug. New tests for the fix didn't expose it.)

I took the opportunity to politely push back that there has been a sudden flurry of very large Claude-cosigned commits, and that seeing things like the entire test suite being rewritten from bash to python by an AI in a single commit sets off a lot of alarm bells in my head for ugly surprises. Too much, too fast.

when I was younger, I didn’t get the “goat farming” trope. I sincerely loved computers, after all! And my job was to make them even better for everyone!

Goats. Goats never commit human rights abuses at incomprehensible scale in a way that intentionally dilutes responsibility too thinly to convict any one person. I’d like to go feed some goats

local man who has alarmed tens of thousands of people into worrying he’s not emotionally stable enough to be in charge of Wordpress and Tumblr reassures everyone that the problem is merely that so-called “lawyers” are the mocking mask of the threefold demiurge, Shoggoth Golem Jagannath, who emerged through a hell portal to torment him for reasons unknown but clearly unrelated to the last few years of his increasingly alarming behavior

I doubt he will see my post but, Mr. Mullenweg, a) I sincerely hope your friend having heart surgery will be okay b) LOG OFF. DON’T POST. TOUCH GRASS

https://wordpress.org/news/2026/05/wp23/

the infosec people at my work are rioting because the Distant Corporate Overlord sent an email that scores 10/10 on the phishing scale (“We want to give you a present to thank you for all your hard work! [Click here] to claim your gift!”)

She’s putting Emily on. There haven’t been any gansbroemen fatalities in over 30 years because the canals don’t freeze over anymore

#netherlands

o noble beast. o mighty hound

Writers: here are ten free and easy ways to add a dash of visual interest to your blog posts without resorting to AI imagery (which signals to readers that your blog post is probably also AI and there’s no need to bother reading it):

1) A thoughtful photo you’ve taken yourself — a nice sunrise you saw, a cool angle spotted on vacation, your pet curled up on the couch, flowers. Play with your phone photo app’s filter settings to nail the tone. It doesn’t need to be particularly related to the post, it’s related to you as a person.

2) An image from Wikimedia Commons that’s somehow related to the subject matter — there are unfathomably many, you can search by keyword. Remember to credit. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

3) A screenshot of a scene you made in a sandbox game such as Minecraft or Animal Crossing

4) A scene you made with toys such as Lego (you can also use free Lego design software such as Bricklink Studio) https://www.bricklink.com/v3/studio/main.page

5) Play with the effects in whatever image editor you have access to, using your own photos or free-to-use images, to create something a bit abstract and avant-garde

6) Even if you can’t draw or paint very well, you can probably make some pretty cool abstract or collage imagery with whatever art supplies you have around. Dampen some paper and randomly dip watercolor paint onto it and see what happens

7) Those stickers you stashed and never used? Yeah you can make something with them. If they’re individually cut, you don’t even need to peel them, you’ll still find the One True Way to use them one day, I’m sure

8) Shelfies. None will dare question your competence after they see you have a real paper copy of Subject Matter Tome Volumes 1 through 6

9) You can get a lot of mileage out of compositing pre-made video game assets into an image. A good place to start is Kenney’s free and generously licensed 2D assets: https://www.kenney.nl/assets/category:2D and the Tiled editor which is specifically meant for assembling images out of video game asset tile sheets https://www.mapeditor.org

10) the most ridiculously amateurish thing you can scribble on a post-it note or in MS Paint is preferable to AI imagery because it clearly signals a real human cares about the post.

#writing #writingcommunity #collage #blog

Spring this year was persistently chilly, and Odin didn’t shed that much. The weather went from too cold to too hot overnight, so we spent like an hour manually thinning out his coat.

犬之初，性本善；不必习，狗乃善。

When doggies are born, they are naturally good; they don't even practice, they're really that good. – lost verse of the Three Character Classic

#classicalchinese

when a corporation has been sending emails for 23 years, claims to be powered by cutting-edge AI, and still hasn't figured out how to automate the "a/an" distinction in email templates

"Unforeseen Interactions", a play in three acts:

1) an older lady who wears perfume hugs me, who is wearing short sleeves.

2) a few hours later, I have a nice, big glass of orange juice, which I enjoy enough to put up with the mild allergic reactions it sometimes gives me

3) a hand-shaped chemical burn erupts on my arm

@hypha @njion I think you're thinking of me because I once posted a similar sentiment: "[I personally have no interest in furry porn but] a website with no furry porn is like an ecosystem with no bees."

"Please set a new password for your account."

okay

"Your password does not meet your organization policy."

okay, you could have hinted that in the interface before I hit enter, but what's the policy

"It's a secret to everybody."

How to get prescribed ADHD medication in the Netherlands, a guide based on real world success:

1) spend over a year repeatedly trying to tell the GP that it’s not going well and you need help. This will not cost you money, only your precious finite time on this earth. It helps if you have a husband to drag you to the doctor when you’re at your lowest and argue with them

2) finally get escalated to a psychologist who takes a few months to be sure there’s definitely something wrong. She will recommend the GP to prescribe ADHD medication

3) Your prescription mysteriously disappears into the system. After several attempts to follow up that take months, and several confused phone calls from your psychologist to the GP, it turns out the GP refuses to authorize it because *shrug* reasons. Maybe if a psychiatrist also signs off on it?

4) You attempt to get an appointment with a psychiatrist. Every psychiatrist in the Netherlands is booked until 2034.

5) Finally, after a dozen rounds of pleading and nagging, you get a mysterious phone call from an unknown number. They give you an address and tell you to be there at 7 in the evening.

6) You find yourself at the door of a historic art deco mansion in the most exclusive district of Amsterdam. There is absolutely no indication that this is a medical practice. You ring the doorbell. Nothing happens. You wait nervously, and try again.

7) The door creaks open. An elderly man wearing crocs stands before you. He silently bids you follow him up a winding staircase to a parlor filled with a thousand thick and aging books in every tongue of the earth and perhaps a few also of the angels. They concern prophecy, and music, and poetry, and the apocalypse.

8) In a thin whisper of a voice barely to be heard, he asks your name, and where you were born. He slowly, very slowly, so slowly that you think you have died and this is purgatory, types this into a computer. It is in his lap because his desk is covered with strange devices beyond identification.

9) He tells you the prescription will be ready for pickup tomorrow.

gonna gently push back that there's no reason (according to github's version of the story) to associate this with AI or with spectacular incompetence on the part of the employee; the issue is that industry standard, extremely widely used text editor Visual Studio Code has a big button that says "click here to add useful functionality to do your job" that has a 1% chance of installing ransomware

info on the github breach appears to only be available on xitter 🙄 , I fished it out for you.

#github