Notices by Russ Garrett (russss@chaos.social)

@ryanc I think that was actually planned for this year but it's been rather hectic and a lot of plans went out of the window...

@ryanc we don't *intentionally* give preference to earlier submissions, but we suspect there is some unavoidable effect due to the way the review process works (this could do with further study). We do say this!

There is currently a scanning electron microscope on eBay UK for the incredible bargain price of £470. I do not have space for this.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/267500902096

It appears they've identified the cause of the MV Dali accident: incorrect heatshrink cable label placement.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu7PJoxaMZg

Smarter Every Day somehow managed to get permission to film inside an active nuclear power plant during refueling, and it's absolutely fascinating

https://youtu.be/v0afQ6w3Bjw

ENTSO-E released their technical report on the Iberian blackout and they are absolutely spoiling us with the graphs in this one https://eepublicdownloads.blob.core.windows.net/public-cdn-container/clean-documents/Publications/2025/entso-e_incident_report_ES-PT_April_2025_06.pdf

Ah Germany, where you can pay in cash and the 90s-looking till will somehow spit out a ECDSA/SHA384 signature. Love some base64 on my receipts.

I call this the "reverse Itanium"

An update on how well the International Energy Agency is doing at predicting solar generation growth.

(source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032125000449)

@whitequark what the fuck is going on (in minecraft)

Very nice report on the fire at North Hyde substation which took down Heathrow in March.

tl;dr:

* Fire was caused by moisture ingress in a high voltage bushing which was detected in 2018 but got lost in the system.
* North Hyde is an ageing substation which didn't have adequate protection against spread of fire
* Heathrow didn't think that a loss of grid feed was a plausible risk, so they assumed 10-12 hours was a reasonable recovery time from that.

https://www.neso.energy/document/363891/download

@whitequark that one's written in Latin but then there was a period where they were in French https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Edw1/3/5/section/wrapper1

@whitequark this is the oldest one still in force! https://www.legislation.gov.uk/aep/Hen3cc1415/52/1/contents

The UK now has the world's first ETCS-enabled steam locomotive, because we're a very silly country.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/19/nobody-has-done-this-before-britains-beloved-steam-trains-trial-pioneering-technology

@harry_wood I don't think it's the big AI companies which are scraping excessively, it's random people who probably got a LLM to write their scraper bots... To make it more confusing, in some cases they're cloning the user-agents of the major AI bots.

@harry_wood oh it's probably LLMs or something LLM-adjacent. But I doubt it's the big AI players who are responsible for the excessive scraping.

This is not a narrowly-construed piece of legal text. This is some boilerplate that a lawyer hammered out with very little oversight and nobody thought to question it.

And that makes me more nervous about Mozilla than anything else they've done in the last few years.

How is Mozilla "operating Firefox" on my machine??

@amapanda it's also telling that people suddenly care about this and were apparently fine about Google both-sidesing borders of Crimea or Kashmir or Arunachal Pradesh.

Maps are always political and multinationals will happily do whatever horrible diplomacy is necessary to allow them to make money.

@ryanc @ljrk yeah their nudity policy is extremely vague: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2802002?sjid=12852059540298367797-EU#age_restricted&zippy=%2Cage-restricted-content%2Ceducational-content

It is of course available to everyone on media.ccc.de, and that's the version we embed on the EMF website.

And yeah it still has that "topical context" note...

@grifferz it wasn't quite an open S3 bucket this time:

https://chaos.social/@russss/113729717983729088