Emergent Harms in the Security Group
at the University of Cambridge have put out of a researcher paper around how over half of all cybercrime court cases in the UK are prosecuting UK police officers for abusing systems access.

Technologist Bert Hubert tells The Reg Microsoft Outlook is a huge source of geopolitical risk

How Breeze Liu, an advocate for digital abuse victims, got Microsoft to scrub 142 nonconsensual explicit images of her hosted on Azure after months of struggle.

Based on my research, the earliest computer to use the term "main frame" was the IBM 701 computer (1952), which consisted of boxes called "frames." The 701 system consisted of two power frames, a power distribution frame, an electrostatic storage frame, a drum frame, tape frames, and most importantly a main frame. The IBM 701's main frame is shown in the documentation below.

This paper presents an indirect methodology to assess IRQ overhead by constructing preliminary approaches to reduce the impact of IRQs. While these approaches are not suitable for general deployment, their corresponding performance observations indirectly confirm the conjecture. Based on these findings, a small modification of a vanilla Linux system is devised that improves the efficiency and performance of traditional kernel-based networking significantly, resulting in up to 45% increased throughput without compromising tail latency

Open offices are hailed as hubs of collaboration and innovation. They are supposed to bring us together. Tear down the walls, the enthusiasts said, and watch collaboration flourish.

But what did we actually get?

A noise-filled stress and distraction factory where productivity plummets, introverts suffer, and sensory-sensitive neurodivergent talent is excluded

Infrastructure “ Becomes visible upon breakdown. The normally invisible quality of working infrastructure becomes visible when it breaks: the server is down, the bridge washes out, there is a power blackout. Even when there are back-up mechanisms or procedures, their existence further highlights the now-visible infrastructure.”
— Susan Leigh Star, “The Ethnography of Infrastructure"

TIL: neurodivergent teenagers are a security risk

... “we have a lot to learn from,” including the neurodivergent ways that some of these younger hackers think and operate.
“They don’t care that you’re not good at a mixer,” said Gantt-Evans. “We in cybersecurity need to do a better job at embracing neurodiverse talent, as well.”

GPs couldn't treat patients, people were stranded as planes couldn't get off the ground, and small businesses lost much-needed sales.

Two months on from the global IT outage on 19 July, its full impact is only now becoming apparent.

A rogue software update by the US cybersecurity company CrowdStrike crippled up to eight and half million computers using Microsoft systems around the world.

Adam Meyers - a senior executive at CrowdStrike - will testify at the US Congress on Tuesday.

He will speak of being "deeply sorry" about what happened, and his company's determination to "prevent it from happening again."

"You and your children cannot breathe the air or swim in the waters of our culture without breathing in the toxic particulates and stinking effluvia that belch and pour unchecked from their companies into the currents of our world," he said of the pair.

Since so little documentation exists online about the history of this important communication network, below I include the introduction I wrote for the section on barbed wire along with the entry on barbed wire fence phones.

You’d expect Electron to be more popular than Tauri because Electron pioneered the category of “use web tech to make mediocre desktop software” and Tauri is a johnny-come-lately that commits the cardinal sin of requiring that you care about the security of your app.

we can form theories about what sustains popularity – why do some frameworks and libraries go from strength to strength and while others plateau or even peter out.

My theory is fairly straightforward:

The long-term popularity of any given tool for software development is proportional to how much labour arbitrage it enables.

Documents show Microsoft’s lawyers admitted to Scottish policing bodies that the company cannot guarantee sensitive law enforcement data will remain in the UK, despite long-standing public claims to the contrary

DevOps is all about making it easier for developers and system administrators to complete software work quickly and efficiently. That’s not been happening.

Instead, out of the tens of thousands of developers surveyed by SlashData’s Developer Nation, a mere 14% can get code into production in a single day. That’s about the same as we saw when SlashData started asking this question in the third quarter of 2020.

"The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

[...]

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

[...]

The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world."

For nerds of my generation, Infocom is a legend.

With no commentary or narration but made up of the protagonists’ testimonies alone, it effectively evokes the excitement and enthusiasm around the early computer game (and software development in general) of those early years. It is also a cautionary tale about how easy it is to fall once you reach the peak

Grüne Politik orientiert sich an der Autonomie jedes/r Einzelnen, an ihrer Würde und ihrem Recht auf ein selbstbestimmtes Leben. ...

Zu den Voraussetzungen und Rahmenbedingungen für ein selbstbestimmtes Leben gehören insbesondere... der Schutz der Privatsphäre, ...

Nach den jüngsten mutmaßlichen Attentatsplänen in Wien machte Innenminister Karner wieder vermehrt Druck für eine Messengerüberwachung. Terroristen würden heutzutage schließlich nicht mit Briefen und Packerln kommunizieren, sondern mit WhatsApp und Telegram. Ohne Zugriff auf Messengerinhalte könnten keine konkreten Hinweise etwa auf Täter, Ort und Zeitpunkt von drohenden Angriffen ermittelt werden.

Nach den bekanntgewordenen Anschlagsplänen auf ein Taylor-Swift-Konzert haben sich die Grünen zuletzt offener dafür gezeigt, die Befugnisse der Direktion für Staatsschutz und Nachrichtendienst (DSN) zur Messengerüberwachung zu erweitern.

Mit ihm als Kanzler würden „die Befugnisse kommen, die es braucht“, so Nehammer. Die zuletzt diskutierte Messengerüberwachung will er trotz Ablehnung der anderen Parteien. Die geforderten Punkte möchte Nehammer auch nach der kommenden Nationalratswahl weiterverfolgen: „Ein Regierungsprogramm ohne (diese Befugnisse, Anm.) wird es mit mir nicht geben“, sagte Nehammer.

Aus dem Bericht, der Bestandteil des Ermittlungsakts ist, geht hervor, dass die DSN sechs Tage vor dem ersten Swift-Konzert Kenntnis von den Anschlagsplänen bekam: Partnerdienste hätten die Information weitergegeben, dass ein „IS-inspirierter Einzeltäter“ einen Anschlag auf eines der drei Taylor-Swift-Konzerte plant.