Die Vision: Dein Browser identifiziert sich gegenüber dem Provider mit einer eID, und die Filterregeln für Deine IP werden gemäß Deinem Alter/Jugendschutz-Status eingestellt. Außerdem bist Du bei an TrustPID teilnehmenden Sites automatisch eingeloggt, ganz ohne Paßwort und "trotz" TLS.

Sicherheit allerorten, ohne Paßwort, "datenschutzkonform" und souverän!

In the past 10 years, the median size for a desktop webpage has gone from 468 KB to 2284 KB, a 388.3% increase. For mobile, this jump is even more staggering — 145 KB to 2010 KB — a whopping 1288.1% increase.

That’s a lot of weight to ship over a network, especially for mobile. As a result, users experience terrible UX, slow loading times, and a lack of interactivity until everything is rendered. But all that code is necessary to make our sites work the way we want.

This is the problem with being a frontend dev today. What started out fun for frontend developers, building shit-hot sites with all the bells and whistles, has kinda turned into not fun. We’re now fighting different browsers to support, slow networks to ship code over, and intermittent, mobile connections. Supporting all these permutations is a giant headache.

How do we square this circle? By heading back to the server (Swiss basement not required).

Of course, it already has. Layoffs are contagious across industries and within industries. The logic driving this, which doesn’t sound like very sensible logic because it’s not, is people say, “Everybody else is doing it, why aren’t we?”

Retailers are pre-emptively laying off staff, even as final demand remains uncertain. Apparently, many organizations will trade off a worse customer experience for reduced staffing costs, not taking into account the well-established finding that is typically much more expensive to attract new customers than it is to keep existing ones happy.

'uppercase' and 'lowercase' are remnants of the moveable type practice of keeping capital letters on a separate case, above the miniscule letters.

The fundamental problem of shells is they are required to be two things.

A high-frequency REPL, which requires terseness, short command names, little to no syntax, implicit rather than explicit, so as to minimize the duration of REPL cycles.
A programming language, which requires readable and maintainable syntax, static types, modules, visibility, declarations, explicit configuration rather than implicit conventions.

And you can’t do both. You can’t be explicit and implicit, you can’t be terse and readable, you can’t be flexible and robust.

Shells optimize the former case, so that you can write cat beef.txt | grep "lasagna" | sort -n | uniq instead of:

with open(Path("beef.txt")) as stream:
lines = filter(
stream.readlines(),
lambda line: re.match(line, "lasagna") is not None
)
print(set(reverse(sorted(lines))))

Which does not spark joy.

So the programming language aspect suffers: shell scripts are an unreadable nightmare of stringly-typed code resembling cyphertext.

Mobilizon is your federated organization and mobilization platform. Gather people with a convivial, ethical, and emancipating tool.

The strength in hiring, which occurred despite layoffs in the technology sector as well as in sectors like housing and finance that are sensitive to interest rates, poured cold water on market expectations that the U.S. central bank was close to pausing its monetary policy tightening cycle.

Several attacks have been carried out on universities in German-speaking countries in recent weeks, resulting in suspension of their IT services for extended periods of time

Als viele Leute Mitte der 1990er Jahre über Unis E-Mailadressen bekamen, haben sie dieses Medium für sich erschlossen. Daher finde ich es natürlich auch wertvoll, wenn die Unis auf diesem Umweg einen Beitrag zur allgemeinen Etablierung von nicht-kommerziellen dezentralen sozialen Kommunikationsinfrastrukturen leisten könnten. Dieser Beitrag würde in zweierlei Hinsicht bestehen: einerseits im Betreiben von Instanzen, aber andererseits auch im Mitbringen von Menschen. Das ist ja gerade für das Funktionieren von dezentralen und allgemein von sozialen Netzwerken das Entscheidende: Wie kriege ich die Leute, wie komme ich auf eine kritische Masse?

Damit würden die Unis auch einen Beitrag leisten, von dem wir als Gesellschaft ganz allgemein etwas hätten. Das ist auch der Sinn von öffentlich finanzierten Hochschulen: dass sie ganz allgemein Wissen produzieren für die Gesellschaft. Dass sie in dem Maße, in dem es sinnvoll und möglich ist, auch zum Beispiel Kommunikationsinfrastruktur liefern. Ich glaube, das würde gut passen zu dem Auftrag einer Hochschule als wissensbasierte Institution in einer arbeitsteiligen Gesellschaft.

Shell is a thing you want to understand and then not use, because you learned to understand it. (in German, from 1998 )

For the rest of this discussion, we assume “Python 3” as an instance of “something else”, but if you are older than 50, feel free to use “Perl” instead.

If you are already doing Python, the rest of this is not for you. You already know these things.

Dutch privacy negotiators have spurred major changes at Google, Microsoft and Zoom, using a landmark European data protection law as a lever.

This is an ongoing effort for documenting and understanding the Austrian "ID Wallet" apps:

Digitales Amt
eAusweise

First, the user logs in at the Digitales Amt app. Then, the eAusweise app is set-up, which sends an intent to the first app.

Based on a reverse-analysis, the ./demo.py script re-implements this procedure. After a successfull run, it provides you with TLS Client Certificates (and keys) for use with:

The Digitales Amt backend API endpoints
The eAusweise backend API endpoints

You will need some eIDAS compliant identity token during the process, such as the german national identity card.

The concept of radical novelties is of contemporary significance because, while we are ill-prepared to cope with them, science and technology have now shown themselves expert at inflicting them upon us. Earlier scientific examples are the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics; later technological examples are the atom bomb and the pill. For decades, the former two gave rise to a torrent of religious, philosophical, or otherwise quasi-scientific tracts. We can daily observe the profound inadequacy with which the latter two are approached, be it by our statesmen and religious leaders or by the public at large. So much for the damage done to our peace of mind by radical novelties.

I raised all this because of my contention that automatic computers represent a radical novelty and that only by identifying them as such can we identify all the nonsense, the misconceptions and the mythology that surround them. Closer inspection will reveal that it is even worse, viz. that automatic computers embody not only one radical novelty but two of them.