tech

Scripting News: Online suckage is everywhere

Scripting News:

The 300 char limit here has as much suckage as Claude pretending you want to know what it thinks you’re trying to do.
It’s another freaking algorithm.

Bluesky assumes you can say whatever you have to say in 300 characters. It’s a fucking machine, how could it possibly know.

Claude thinks it can tell me what to do, but it’s a fucking machine. it has no idea what i’m doing.

First we need freedom from billionaires. Then we need freedom from character limits. And finally we need freedom from machines who think they know better.

[It’s some kind of mess.]

making things true

making things true:

when i look at the history of computing, the most important moments weren’t new features. they were new primitives. the command line gave us composable programs. the GUI gave us direct manipulation. the web gave us hyperlinks. the smartphone gave us sensors and connectivity. each unlocked entire ecosystems because they provided new atoms that could be infinitely recombined.

AI isn’t just a feature. it’s a new primitive. it’s a new way of decomposing and recomposing reality.

[Hmm…]

npilk // ChatGPT is my static site generator

npilk // ChatGPT is my static site generator:

In the end, I decided to cobble something together with Jinja. I wrote a base_common.html for my header and footer, a basic template for posts, and a custom script to generate the full site from the post templates. This wasn’t quite as automated as I hoped, but it was simple, and left me with plenty of control.

Modern problems require modern solutions

After tediously copy-pasting the first couple of posts into my template, I had a thought that’s becoming more and more common. Why not just ask ChatGPT to do it?

I wrote a simple prompt:

I need to put my blog post into my standard template. I’ll paste the template from an old post and then the new post content. Can you update it into the correct format?

Here’s the template from a prior post: {pasted template}

And here’s the new post: {pasted new post}

[Nice!]

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors:

So many feed readers, so many bizarre behaviors

It’s been well over a year since I started serving 429s to clients which are hitting the feed too often. Since then, much has happened, and most of it is generally good news.

I’ve heard from users and authors alike of feed software. Sometimes the users have filed bug reports and/or feature requests and have gotten positive results from the project (or vendor). Other times, the authors of such software have gotten in touch, did some digging, found a few nuances of how their libraries work, and improved the situation.

Some of them are trying but are still not quite making it right.

Here’s some of what’s been going on.

[Facinating how we keep looping around…]

Scripting News: One way is always better than two

Scripting News: One way is always better than two:

It’s not mentioned in the Wikipedia page on RSS that I had a format that does what RSS does, a year before it existed, but I gave it up so that Netscape and UserLand would build on the same format, RSS.

[I can attest to this. I don’t remember the context, but Dave and I had a conversation about the two formats. His was, from my perspective, clearly better*. I think he had already made up his mind about the situation (we only talked formats, not the larger context of what he was trying to accomplish and with whom), but I didn’t know it at the time. Still the “Scripting News format” was being used by Dave back then.]

[* My perspective was as a developer who had a native desktop editor for blogs. The very first I believe. It was beautifully simple to use. I miss it a lot. But it was written as a personal project, not a business, and I chose an environment and language that didn’t last. It also led to the creation of Really Simple Discoverability, the XML format I created to make it easier to use editors with blogs. Allez!]

Interesting that Edit This Page came up the day before or so. One of the things I loved about using “Archipelago”, the editor I had written and mentioned above, was exactly this feature. There was a link on every page of the blog, and if you clicked it the magic was performed to open that page in the editor. No matter how long ago that page was created you didn’t have to go searching for it in order to edit it, the link was always there. Days like this make me feel that so much was lost along the way to today. The open web is making a bit of comeback these days… who knows? Maybe we’ll catch up with the past.

SSH protects the world’s most sensitive networks. It just got a lot weaker

SSH protects the world’s most sensitive networks. It just got a lot weaker | Ars Technica:

Fabian Bäumer, one of three researchers from Germany’s Ruhr University Bochum who devised Terrapin, described this approach in an email:

The Terrapin attack is a novel cryptographic attack targeting the integrity of the SSH protocol, the first-ever practical attack of its kind, and one of the very few attacks against SSH at all. The attack exploits weaknesses in the specification of SSH paired with widespread algorithms, namely ChaCha20-Poly1305 and CBC-EtM, to remove an arbitrary number of protected messages at the beginning of the secure channel, thus breaking integrity. In practice, the attack can be used to impede the negotiation of certain security-relevant protocol extensions. Moreover, Terrapin enables more advanced exploitation techniques when combined with particular implementation flaws, leading to a total loss of confidentiality and integrity in the worst case.

[Well… that’s not good.]

Here’s a Warrant Showing the U.S. Government is Monitoring Push Notifications

Here’s a Warrant Showing the U.S. Government is Monitoring Push Notifications:

The letter does not disclose the legal mechanism used by governments to demand this data from Apple or Google. But the court record reviewed by 404 Media does include some specifics around push notification demands. Court Watch shared the record with 404 Media. The record is a search warrant application from May 2020 related to the investigation of a person suspected of theft or bribery concerning programs receiving federal funds.

In the search warrant application for information associated with a specific Yahoo email account, an FBI Special Agent writes under a section of the record entitled “Background Information Regarding Provider Services” that when a user of a mobile app installs and launches an app, the app will direct the device to obtain a “Push Token.” This is “a unique identifier that allows the provider associated with the application […] to locate the device on which the application is installed.”

[If they can, they will…]