Because I was on a work trip to Singapore this whole last week, today's link dump contains the pieces I've collected over the course of two weeks instead. Flying for thirteen hours gives ample time to catch up on some reading. But even then, it seems my link archive grows faster than I can read through it. So at least partly it's also more time spent on on discovery, my human web crawling hobby.
Het Solvinity besluit in detail, en de mogelijke gevolgen by Bert Hubert.
Aantal interessante links naar verdragen die ogenschijnlijk definities geven en kader bieden, zoals de TFEU.
Can we have the day off? by Mike.
Tongue-in-cheek critique of the capitalist system in its latest disproportionate productivity appropriation (AI edition)
Character.AI is showing what AI enshittification looks like by Jason Koebler in 404 Media.
Character.AI is now also losing the public goodwill from its users, enshittifying the free experience with bad models and ads. (It had already lost the goodwill from the rest of society a long time ago.)
Europese deregulering gaat ten koste van mens en milieu by Bas Eickhout in ESB.
Emphasizing the importance and the big impact of European regulation. Especially in the context of nature and health, where we in the Netherlands have to deal with a lot of the externalities because we're downstream of so many industrial waste dumps. And then there's the PFAS-pollution that's costing the public water facilities increasingly more. Though there are hopeful developments that might soon give us European bans on PFAS; the European Chemicals Agency will publish a definitive advisory on a PFAS-ban and the European Commission has promised to act on it.
Gezamenlijke actie politie en NCSC legt groot botnetwerk plat by NCSC.
The Dutch National Cyber Security Center took down two hundred C2 servers that controlled more than seventeen million infected devices (Mirai had six hundred thousand at its peak). But the press statement has zero details on the operation.
This blog ran on Ubuntu 16.04 for 10 years. I migrated it to FreeBSD by Bruno Croci.
A fun server admin dev log. Reminds me that I should play around with some BSDs.
Promises and perils by Mandy Brown.
when they say that you better learn AI or be left behind, they are admitting that a great many people will be left behind. And if you—smart and clever and hardworking person that you are—are somehow able to make it to the other side of the line, you’re supposed to find relief or pride at having done so, and not horror at all the people suffering in your wake. You’re supposed to be as uncaring as the capital that uses you.
Building Pi with Pi by Armin Ronacher.
We need stronger foundations, not weaker ones. Open Source needs more collaboration, not more isolated work with a machine. Human communication is hard, and it is tempting to avoid it when you can sit alone with your clanker. But isolation is not where Open Source derives its value. The value is in the community and the structure that lets projects outlive their original creators.
Transport Layer Security (TLS) beveiligingsrichtlijnen) by NCSC.
Apparently the proper translation for random numbers in the Dutch governmental cryptographic policy context is "toevalsgetallen", which I find very endearing.
Google Product Application Transparency
Google extends their binary transparency program to all their first party APKs.
The Story of Shantell Sans by Shantell Martin.
The fun story of Shantell Sans; a modern-day Comic Sans. Beautifully quirky but clean website too!
James Silk Buckingham on Wikipedia.
Some work published in his Calcutta Journal was at display in the Singapore National Museum. Turns out this guy wrote prolifically about his travels and the world, was at one point expulsed from India because he was critical of the East India Company, and advocated for abolition in the United States.
The French have the Quantum Circuits by Craig Gidney.
That Google zero knowledge proof of quantum elliptic curve point addition circuits? Yeah, a French researcher has now figured it out as well.
Knowing that you don’t even need to consider that a solution won’t exist can be very helpful. Often the hard part is just knowing to work on a problem at all!
I enjoyed publishing some cheeky ZKPs, but I don’t think it’s the right strategy moving forward. The benefits are negligible, and the costs are many. We should just publish openly.
A Post-Quantum Future for Let's Encrypt by Andrew Gabbitas.
Some commitments and plans from Let's Encrypt, echoing recent industry momentum of adopting Merkel Tree Certificates as the way to enable post-quantum cryptography in the web PKI.
June thoughts by Robin Sloan in Winter Garden.
Robin's latest set of thoughts in his pop-up newsletter, with lots of healthy, human takes on AI.
‘Teachers Are Going to Hate It’: How Social Media Apps Hooked Teens at School by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries in The New York Times.
Some initial investigative reporting based on ongoing lawsuits, serving as another reminder that social media companies are evil. The banality of all those internal slide decks is what worries me. There's no grand conspiracy like we've been trained to look for from watching all those epic Hollywood movies. It's just the profit-driven system working as it should.
Samenleven als zangvogels by Jop de Vrieze in De Groene Amsterdammer.
A good profile on Peter Kropotkin. The article ends by asking whether we'll ever see a sustainable anarchist society. And then immediately recognizes that the more important question is how we can further develop all existing forms of mutual aid, in the context of nation states and capitalism. Practical anarchism appears in many places already; local production, cooperatives, clubs. The way we organize society is pluralistic, even in its ideological implementation