Notices by Matthew Garrett (mjg59@nondeterministic.computer), page 2

Someone should run a conference that is just people explaining how absolutely fucked up computers are

PLEASE check your kids' Halloween candy. Just found an Okta admin access token in a Snickers bar.

I've been nerdsniped into discovering that there *is* actually a way to get the framebuffer offset in UGA, but it's documented in a self-extracting zip file that's only available from the Wayback Machine

STOP DOING SPECULATIVE EXECUTION

INSTRUCTIONS WERE NOT MEANT TO HAVE REVERSIBLE SIDE EFFECTS

Twitter attempting a Substack-style "Being fash-adjacent makes you money" strategy except instead of being funded by subscribers who are interested in being fash-adjacent they're funded by advertisers who mostly aren't is a choice I guess?

Did you know! US federal legal filings are publicly available via PACER, but cost money. The RECAP extension (https://free.law/recap) uploads any PACER downloads you make to https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/ where they're freely available. Also, if your PACER balance is under $30 in a quarter, it's written off. If everyone who reads this uploaded $29 of stuff to RECAP every quarter, way more material in the public interest would be publicly available. Is there any way to organise this?

@jeff No

@jeff Some things simply should not be shitpost about what if a child had read that

@jeff It all seems like lighthearted fun but then someone grows up to think that blockchains might actually solve real problems and everyone in high school refuses to talk to them

I think what I love most about it, though, is that the content of the presentation is entirely up to the speaker - so if you turn up to LambdaConf and give a presentation on how the Code of Professionalism is just a dogshit idea rather than actually talking about anything to do with structured programming, and the organisers are not only still obliged to pay you, they're also forbidden from saying anything bad about you afterwards

Not that I'd *encourage* people to submit to conferences listed in https://github.com/speakers-in-tech/conference-data with the intent of talking about how important an actual code of conduct is instead (especially since you'll be at a conference that attracts the sort of person who thinks this is a good idea), but, well.

Any conference that's willing to sign an agreement that commits them to paying off a speaker whose talk they cancel because, eg, said speaker turns out to be a nazi is probably not a conference you want to be at: https://github.com/speakers-in-tech/sea/blob/main/SEA.md

(Of course this is John De Goes, also responsible for https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/46791.html)

It is obscene that governments effectively require people to have internet connectivity to be able to function in society but abdicate responsibility for ensuring that people actually have that and delegate it to for-profit enterprises instead

Had an interesting conversation last night about how we're basically failing to teach kids that things are hackable. @pluralistic has obviously written about this with YA vibes, but I worry that it's not obvious that fiction set in the future applies to the real world right now. How do we ensure that people understand that, with enough effort, any electronic device you can lay your hands on can probably be bent to your will?

Patch for supporting Pluton's TPM functionality is now merged, so with luck will land in 6.3: https://patchwork.kernel.org/project/linux-integrity/patch/20221231091432.40365-1-mjg59@srcf.ucam.org/