Notices by Charlie Stross (cstross@wandering.shop), page 2

North Carolina child’s ‘monster in the closet’ was in fact 50,000 bees in the wall

Family discovers ‘terrifying’ gigantic bee colony in wall of home with blood-like honey oozing down wall and $20,000 in damage

(Beekeepers ultimately removed tens of thousands of bees over several extractions, and a honeycomb weighing more than 100lb.)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/apr/30/north-carolina-bees-house-wall

@LALegault It's bad enough that some of the more honest politicians have noticed, and are discussing what to do: unfortunately this is the Welsh Assembly, not Parliament in Westminster, but it's a start.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/apr/30/welsh-senedd-members-consider-criminalising-lying-by-politicians

@foone This is especially true of SpaceX, who have a demonstrated repeatable capability to drop a ~hundred ton booster onto a bullseye, only dropping subsonic in the last couple of seconds of flight. Forget the landing burn and it's a smart FAE bomb the size of a MOAB, incoming faster than a point defense C-RAM can track.

(Via reddit): "Q: what gives away that someone is not a good person?"

Me: it's always a red flag if they start showing you pictures of their secret base inside an extinct volcano on a tropical island, and there are missile launchers and boiler-suited minions in mirrorshades in the background.

Especially if their selfies all feature a fluffy white cat and a control room with a map of the world labelled TARGET.

@foone You label it CAUTION: ENERGY CONTENTS 23 TERA-CALORIES. (Because that's equivalent to about 40 kilotons, right?)

Mm, fattening!

A rightwing Christian lobby group that wants abortion to be banned has forged ties with an adviser to the prime minister and is drawing up ­policy briefings for politicians.

The UK branch of the US-based Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) has been appointed a stakeholder in a parliamentary group on religious freedoms in a role that grants it direct access to MPs:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/apr/06/extreme-us-anti-abortion-group-ramps-up-lobbying-in-westminster

(More evidence that reality is taking its cues from the Laundry Files,"The Apocalypse Codex" this time.)

@foone Is it with you inside a Tesla Model X? Enquiring for a billionaire.

Thought for the day: if your business is collecting personal data sufficiently sensitive that your government doesn't want it to be processed or sold overseas, then you shouldn't be collecting it in the first place. (That aspect of your business should be totally illegal.)

Apple users from 1988-2008 had to justify to themselves staying with an awkwardly non-compatible platform run almost as a cult by a control freak (Steve Jobs). But Jobs got ill then died JUST as Apple launched a breakout product range (the iPhone, which revolutionized previously-awkward smartphones, and the iPad as a spin-off that totally overturned the idea of how a portable computer should work) and was replaced by a soulless paperclip maximizer of a CEO (to be unfairly nasty about Tim Cook).

The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/12/youre-holding-it-wrong/#if-dishwashers-were-iphones

This actually says something about cultural continuity because back in 2004, when Apple was a roughly $3Bn (not $Tn) company it really *was* a minority pursuit in a sea of Windows, universally oppressed by corporate IT departments! It only shifted after iPhone ...

Cook took the existing Apple cultishness and advanced simultaneously on all fronts, building out the ecosystem along lines of attack that Jobs had already sketched in. Innovation since Jobs' death has taken place, but much more sluggishly. The key was to layer incentives for staying within the ecosystem.

Meanwhile the *existing* fetishistic Cult of Apple was already there. The religious iconography, minimalist store layouts, ads full of shiny, happy people: it's subliminally religious design.

@foone Your toaster works by casting tiny fireballs but to do that it needs roughly one ARM M3 microcontroller per square mm of exposed heating element surface and some utter arsewipe will upload a cryptominer to root it via zigbee and then later a different griefer will rootkit the mining software and there'll be a bug that turns it into a soul stealer and by the way your cat is now possessed by an eldritch horror from the universe next door

It's worth noting that the $6Bn cost overruns on SLS boosters and engines—the overruns ALONE—probably cost more than the entire SpaceX Starship program (for a fully reusable launcher with a much larger payload), currently running at an est. $2-3Bn/year total vs. $25Bn/year for SLS: https://techcrunch.com/2023/07/13/congress-prepares-to-continue-throwing-money-at-nasas-space-launch-system/

Liz Truss’s bid to ban trans women from sports runs out of time after MPs discuss ferrets instead: https://www.thepinknews.com/2024/03/16/liz-truss-ferrets/

In 2011, researchers from Japan and the Center for Unconventional Computing in the UK asked one of the most important questions ever asked. How many crabs do you need to build a computer?

Turns out that a carcinized computer runs on 640 crabs per byte.

And it takes 46 megacrabs to build an Apollo Guidance Computer so that you can land on the moon WITH CRABS.

https://www.southernfriedscience.com/everything-is-crabs-how-many-crabs-do-you-need-to-land-on-the-moon/

Google’s self-designed office swallows Wi-Fi “like the Bermuda Triangle”

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/03/googles-self-designed-office-swallows-wi-fi-like-the-bermuda-triangle/

Having an office with barely working Wi-Fi sure is awkward for a company pushing a "return to office" plan that includes at least three days a week at Google's Wi-Fi desert.

"You’d think the world’s leading Internet company would have worked this out."

@foone @Menhit I am pretty sure that "get it out of the tea ASAP, rinse in tap water, shove in airing cupboard to dry for a week" is about the least-bad option (in the absence of interesting solvents). Failing that, it's a years-old 32Gb stick, so not going to bankrupt me.

There is now a USB memory stick drying in my airing cupboard.

Because @Menhit pushed it off a shelf and straight into my teacup!

Obviously she doesn't want me installing Mint Linux on a spare ultrabook any time soon …

@foone The first website I made (in 1992? 1993?) was an attempt to use imagemaps for navigating an environment of "rooms". Turns out my drafting skills were inadequate. Conceptually, it should work like a dungeon map.

Why yes, I *do* remember when the world wide web was so small you could open the NCSA's daily "what's new on the web" email in the morning, visit every new website that had shown up overnight, and be finished by 10am.

Saw this, immediately thought of @NanoRaptor and @foone

https://infosec.exchange/@Muddobbers/111904927734429527