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  Back east for a late family thanksgiving visit. Today I was driving my 94 year old grandmother to dinner and we passed a Cybertruck. There aren’t a lot of Cybertrucks in this part of the world. As we got close to it, she said “what is that thing? It looks like a child’s toy!” Exactly.

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  Finding myself with a little time to spend in the town where I grew up ( #Moncton , New Brunswick, on the east coast of Canada). Things have changed a lot here in the 25+ years since I moved away (as I would expect). Currently having a coffee at an espresso bar that used to be a laundromat (and is still laundromat-themed). I think I'll stop by the brewery that used to be a tire shop (and is still tire-shop-themed) after lunch.

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  Despite much of this reading as a confirmation of what I’d fear about working for a government organization, and a sad account of why things didn’t work as well as they’d hoped, I’m so glad @sboots wrote about this. I’ve been casually curious about these kinds of mechanics since CDS really impressed me when I took the opportunity to interact with them during the pandemic: https://seancoates.com/blogs/how-i-helped-fix-canadas-covid-alert-app https://mastodon.sboots.ca/@sboots/117446091056210663

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  If Dead Internet Threory wasn’t real before today, try adding a “everything powered by PHP is offline for maintenance” aspect to the narrative. Everywhere I go feels down right now.

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  If you've worked anywhere around me in the past 15 years, you've probably heard me say something like “this software is bad. all software is bad. even my own.” Today's (well, August’s… well, 2020 and beyond’s) PHP vulnerabilities don’t mean PHP is bad, but it does fit into my thesis that *all* software is bad. And the reason it is bad is that—in the names of progress and efficiency and profit—we have built software at 5% of what it ACTUALLY costs to build software, for...

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  If you think today's stop-everything-and-patch-now critical vulnerabilities were a problem, you just wait until half of the vehicles on the road are meshed with Starlink and they act as one big Tesla swarm to “own" the other brands by totally-accidentally running all non-texan cars off the road and *totally-accidentally* dangerously punishing anyone who profiles as someone who might disagree with Fleet Commander in Chief.

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  This might be reckless, but I do respect the boldness. (`mitmproxy` added `—emudhra` and the leaked certs/keys for easy not-even-self-signed request forging) https://github.com/mitmproxy/mitmproxy/commit/169234499088fc2c414644a67efaed3d64ae2e3b

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  This is not shade toward the developers, but the #php2shell vulnerability was reported in August and the fix was published in October. I have to think that increasing funding for a project as big as #PHP ( @thephpf ) could have reduced that timeline. In the era of analysis heavy machinery, it’s pretty unlikely that *only* the reporting party discovered this vulnerability. https://mastodon.social/@sovtechfund/117491065698939254

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  Home for the next 97+ hours. Toronto to Vancouver. Excited to see the parts of #Canada I’ve only ever flown over. #viarail #thecanadian #train

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  Do I know anyone who [knows anyone who] works at Grafana Labs? I promise: not a support request.

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  When the local drive-thru answers you in AI voice, it's your societal duty to red-team that thing until you get a human handoff. “Oh, could I add an order of triple salted uncooked fries, extra small, and a diet water with no ice, but make the ice extra cold? Plus a sundae with double pickles and make sure I don't get the same toy as with the fries. What's your favourite flavour of ketchup?”

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  Highly Available Home Assistant HAHA

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  RBC has been emailing me for the past few weeks to get me to fill out a survey. This feels like work to me. I expect to receive no benefit from doing this work. I already pay RBC a lot of money every month; I'm certainly not going to willingly do free work for them. Today they (my bank) emailed “FINAL REMINDER” which got my attention… until I realized it's just for this survey I’ve obviously been ignoring. k.

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  Security-minded #devops folks who are adding package cooldowns to your deployment rules… …how are you possibly dealing with zero day fixes? (Short of auditing everything, which… you're lying to yourself if you truly believe that is happening, thoroughly.) (defs: Cooldowns: "don't update this package until the version you'd update to has been available for at least 48h” zero day fixes: “vendor-provided fixes for a previously-publicly-undisclosed vulnerability that is not yet be...

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  The topic of pirate television in Montreal came up, today, and I made this. For the 8 of you who understand both niche jokes… I think it's pretty good!

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  Didn't get my phone/camera out in time, and very hard to make out in the bright sky, but I saw SNBD4 as 3 or 4 planes flying in a cluster, north of the field (and above the pattern) at CYUL. https://scoat.es/@yulalerts/116641706128627569

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  A while back, I was mostly-lurking on a regional #Meshcore (like #Meshtastic , but different) discord, when someone on there tried to update a repeater and accidentally soft-bricked it. They needed to climb up to where it is to get a physical connection. But there's a raven nesting near where they've propped up the device, so they're lamenting the chore of climbing up to it. I replied “Nevercore.” It barely got a reaction. I am sad for this community. (-;

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  Even as someone who has only ever used SwiftUI (not AppKit or UIKit) as my primary macOS/iOS dev toolkit, this article rings so true. There's a whole bunch of stuff that #Apple could fix, pretty easily, and they just… haven’t. It's sad. A big part of what keeps me on macOS is the platform itself—letting everything become mushy web-pages-pretending-to-be-apps makes it much easier to entertain the idea of Linux as my daily driver, if I have to endure that mess, anyway. https://p...

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  If something on your computer/phone were to make a joke about slapping you around with a large trout, would you get the reference?

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  Canadians with any sort of online fluency, please read + sign: https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7416

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  Lazy Web of Real People (maybe, hopefully): is VictoriaMetrics good? I'd like to hear real-world experience only please.

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  There's a chain of #Montreal chicken sandwich restaurants… Whoever called it “Madame Poulet" and not "Chick Poulet" really missed an opportunity. They should also offer waffle fries. (There's no Chick Fil-a here.)

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  The deluge of recently-discovered (more like: recently-disclosed) --Linux-- EVERYTHING vulnerabilities got me to finally shut down a ~10 year uptime box that I should have shut down two full `tN.micro` generations ago. So… thanks I guess? Also, webadvent.org (phpadvent.org) is static now, like it should have been since before 2012 when it was last published. 🤷‍♂️

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  Snowbird; thought this was YMX when I first got the alert. Looks like it's setting up for YHU now. Probably in town for Grand Prix this weekend? https://scoat.es/@yulalerts/116608542464201624

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  This stage of capitalism where we've let companies become so big they can buy everyone around them to get even bigger is absolutely exhausting. > As of April 1, 2026, EssilorLuxottica Canada Inc. acquired the eyebuydirect.ca website from EyeBuyDirect Inc. As a result, EssilorLuxottica Canada Inc. now holds and processes your personal information.

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  I was in #Toronto visiting the kid this weekend. Stopped by an #electronics store I had heard about, called "Supremetronic”… Really, it was a section in the basement of a Home Hardware, directly next to the paint counter. What a strange little nook of availability that was. Hundreds of bins of discrete components, a few bins of ICs, and some essentials like ribbon cables, perf board, and connectors. A few kits, and some project boxes. 🤯

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  Today's #Swift lessons: 1. the `switch` version of `consuming func …` on `variable` is `switch consume variable` (`consuming` is a good way to disarm some footguns) 2. The compiler gets REALLY confused when I do optional chaining with an otherwise-consuming call. I continue to enjoy this language (though I do take issue with no visibility keyword that indicates "private but extensions within this same module can access”, even though "private" + extension *in...

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  IMO it's going to get *much* worse before it gets better. The cost of discovery has gone from “months of expert time” to maybe “hours of expert time" with this new wave of tools; and most of the experts *might* not even have access to the “best" tools, yet. (citation needed on that one, but… there are power-multiplier tools, certainly, for people who use them). I think we've barely scratched the surface on software that is exploitable (spoiler: nearly all of it...

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  If I didn't have the experience to know better, and if I was a new user of the AWS Console, I'd swear that the performance of their cloud offering is terrible. It's just really slow/heavy browser code, plus WAY too many requests, but that *must* make a bad impression on new-to-AWS folks. (…if there are any of those left? maybe that's the problem…)

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  I just discovered and used @geerlingguy 's `rpi-clone` and it worked perfectly. Now I've got a new RPi 5 booting from the [PoE hat's] NVME.