One does not simply
telnet into Mordor.

One ssh-es in,
using an exploit in a compression library,
shipped to them by their trusted distro in a supply chain attack.

A classic bug for a leap day: At work, colleagues discovered and fixed a bug in a lesser used tool that only occurs on February 29th. It did trip up the tests, so no one got to merge until it got identified and resolved.

The source file in question hadn't been touched in over 4 years. Last leap year, the 29th was on a Saturday, so likely no one noticed.

What was annoying is that the logic had been clearly written with the intent of handling leap years. A leap year check condition was present, validated only on a February > 28th, but had to get inverted.

You may wonder why we wouldn't have used the languages' standard library date functions to validate the date - unfortunately the language in question doesn't have such a sophisticated standard library (language omitted to protect the innocent).

Best #37C3 quote so far:

[...] to observe the international compressor holiday [...]

Context: Newag's train "DRM"

Congratulations to Sergio Benitez on releasing rocket.rs 0.5.0! Thank you for this great framework. 👏

I got to follow rocket's journey to async and stable #rust with the PrivateBin directory service. Coming from Python flask apps, it is really easy to pick up and get going with your webservice, offering static & templated content, easy to create web forms and JSON APIs.

Thanks to rust's strict type system I could focus on the logic and didn't have to waste time double checking and casting data received by clients. If my API accepts an integer in a certain parameter, Rocket will ensure I only receive valid requests in my logic.

I like CSS-animations, clocks and dials for making metrics easier to digest (we are quicker at detecting angular changes than reading and parsing digits). So I'm in awe with this creative use of a watch-dial to visualize a 32-bit hexadecimal number:

https://retr0.id/stuff/2038/

The letters below were discovered in September 1993 in a reverse time-capsule apparently sent from 2023.

The first of those emails dates from this morning. Note the author of the RFC and the publication date.

RFC 1607

Schade das zu erfahren und vielen Dank an Herrn Dornier für die jahrzehnte-lange gute Betreuung und die ausgezeichneten Produkte!

Habe beruflich und privat seit Ende der 2000er Jahre immer wieder auf PC Engines für m0n0wall- und später OPNsense-basierte Router gesetzt. Diese Nachricht wurde über eine apu4d4 ins Internet geschickt und von einem Server hinter einer apu2e4 gehostet.

#TIL:

prompt injection, which is a form of cyberattack that exploits [an AI's] natural language processing abilities.

Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

Last week, Microsoft announced the new AI-powered Bing: a search interface that incorporates a language model powered chatbot that can run searches for you and summarize the results, plus do …

^{simonwillison.net}

PrivateBin 1.5.0 released - Adding S3 Storage backend, storage migration script & 4 new translations

https://privatebin.info/news/v1.5.0-release.html

My team at LzLabs GmbH in Wallisellen, Switzerland, is looking for a 4th DevOps Engineer. You'd be working primarily with a CloudBees (Jenkins) cluster of around 90 blades for build & testing, for several software stacks that targets RHEL, but hopefully soon™ also other platforms. And of course there are also a lot of build and deployment related projects to be spice things up on the side, like maintaining and developing a test statistics database, code coverage reporting, change log and other automation projects, all in a mostly ansible-ized environment. The companies main language is English, living in or moving to the vicinity of Zürich would certainly be advantageous.

#followerpower #Stellenangebote #jobs #jeRecrute

DevOps Engineer

As one of our DevOps engineers you will join a team who lead the way for our CI/CD environment. The ideal engineer will bring experience, best practices, and a collaborative attitude to help drive Linux based CI/CD initiatives.

^{lzlabs.peoplehr.net}

Momentan kennt dieser Knoten 2065 Knoten mit insgesamt 1238363700 registrierten Nutzern, die die folgenden Plattformen verwenden:
- Friendica (234/14306)
- BirdsiteLIVE (3/9295)
- Diaspora (104/745029)
- [...]
- Lemmy (4/15876)
- Mastodon (1195/2801105)
- Misskey (33/1234575069)
[...]

Als ich 1997 meine erste Reise in die USA machte, hatte ich einen Psion Siena dabei und darauf Tagebuch geführt. Leider konnte ich mir damals das Datenkabel nicht leisten und es irgendwann verpasst die leeren Batterien zu tauschen und die Dokumente gingen so verloren.

Vor einigen Wochen habe ich mir aus Neugier dessen grossen Bruder angeschafft, den Psion Series 3a. Und diesmal auch ein serielles Kabel dazu, damit ich Programme hoch- und Daten davon runter laden kann. Hab mal ein paar Notizen dazu gemacht:

Not entirely serious question: Why does the Gnome Terminal icon represent an IBM PC DOS prompt instead of UNIX shell prompt? Is that what folks think of first, when they think of a command prompt?

looks more like

as opposed to

python3 -c 'import random;exec("while True:\n\tprint(chr(int(9585.5+random.random())),end=\"\");")'
printf "import random\nwhile True:\n\tprint(chr(int(9585.5+random.random())),end='')" | python3 -

Shell parsing is hard.

Started looking into gemini space. Love how it feels - it's like the web ca. mid-90s. UI is back under your control and you can focus on reading the content instead of getting the site to work (because either you have issues with noscript turned on and sites requiring JS to display text or you have it disabled and have to click through modal windows informing you of cookie settings, sign up for that newsletter, etc. to get to the content).

I'm using Castor and wanted to merry it to my Gnome desktop, so clicking links in Firefox/Chromium opens them in Castor. Oh, and I got a gopher client for free with it as well. Was bummed when Firefox dropped gopher support. Here's how to register the gemini protocol in Gnome (and build castor):

While grep and sed are commoly used, awk fills a valuable niche when processing structured text, avoiding multiple pipes or more complicated regex extractions. Here is a handy flowchart to pick the ideal tool for your text processing task:

A plaintext chart and a simple example making use of several awk features can be found here:

Maybe a concept we could evaluate for use in our fediverse software as well:

This forms a relative reputation system. As uncomfortable as it may be, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and different jurisdictions have different laws - and it’s not up to the Matrix.org Foundation to play God and adjudicate. Each user/moderator/admin should be free to make up their own mind and decide which reputation feeds to align themselves with.

Everything you always wanted to know about punch card data encoding, but were afraid to ask:

@Retrocomputing Forum #RetroComputing