Notices by Daniel Taylor (randomdamage@mastodon.technology), page 11

#security question:

If I get a YubiKey, will it cover a large amount of common accounts? SMS is out, and I'm starting to not love using auth apps.

I'm also thinking of having my family use these things instead of teaching them auth apps and what to do if they change phones.

Been having a blast playing around with learning MULTICS. Lots of fascinating UNIX history buried in there, and major kudos to the BAN.AI maintainers for creating this awesome bit of history we can all go play with at no cost :)
https://ban.ai/multics/

(Yes I'm THAT big a nerd :)

folks. has it ever been summed up better than this. (senate hearing)

GNU Shepherd 0.5 (init system) released.

Can be used as an alternative to systemd on GNU Hurd and Linux systems.

With GNU Shepherd 0.5, the init system now gracefully halts with Ctrl+Alt+Del when running as PID 1 on Linux systems and restarting a service now also restarts any dependent services... Plus services now have a "replacement" slot as well and there are various other fixes.

--> https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/guix-devel/2018-09/msg00282.html

--> https://www.gnu.org/software/shepherd/
_
#GNU #GNUHurd #Hurd #Shepherd #initsystem #Linux

This is pretty cool, ARM ASM with the Raspberry Pi.

http://bob.cs.sonoma.edu/IntroCompOrg-RPi/intro-co-rpi.html

#firewall

In the twenty-first century censorship works by flooding people with irrelevant information. We just don't know what to pay attention to, and often spend our time investigating and debating side issues. In ancient times having power meant having access to data. Today having power means knowing what to ignore.

~ Yuval Noah Harari

#InformationOverload
#FilterFailure
#information

I suspect that conspiracy theorists have never been project managers.

Just learned about a really cool thing - Przybylski's Star. It's a "chemically peculiar" (Serious Astronomical Term) that's VERY weird indeed - weird elements like holmium, scandium, neodymium, and uranium present at 1,000x to 10,000x their abundance in our own Sun.

In fact, some even weirder elements - plutonium, einsteinium, californium - have been detected as well. Which is REALLY weird - those have short enough half-lives at a cosmic scale that we don't really observe those ANYWHERE in nature, because they disappear so quickly that they would have to have been produced very recently in cosmic time.

It's actually been proposed that the star may contain the theorized but as-yet-undiscovered "island of stability" isotopes of exotic superheavy elements like flerovium, or Element 120, or Element 126 - and that the reason we're seeing those strange radioactive elements is actually as decay products from these exotic isotopes.

This just seems like the sort of thing that is OBVIOUSLY the hook for a science-fiction novel.

Multiple Explosions And House Fires Reported Across Three Massachusetts Towns
https://n.pr/2D5L6VZ

Chinese astrology is fascinating because it's so different from the Western kind.

No matched pairs of Jupiter/Saturn and Mars/Venus with Mercury as a mediator. Instead, there's a kind of rock-paper-scissors circle of the five elements, where Water (Mercury) makes Wood (Jupiter) grow but puts out Fire (Mars).

There's gotta be some fun Theosophical papers about this.

Does Hermetic Qabalah alchemy break if you go to China? Is the Great Firewall actually for protecting Beijing's spell servers?

Many robocalls look like they're from your neighbor, but of course they're not. Planet Money wanted to see who these scammers are. So they picked up the phone to find out.
https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2017/08/18/544448670/episode-789-robocall-invasion?utm_source=twitter.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=20180903