CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@mastodonmigration @MaryAustinBooks @briankrebs That reminds me of the story about Penzias and Wilson and their discovery of the 3°K microwave background radiation of the universe. Trying to eliminate all noise sources, they discovered that the inside of the antenna had become home to some pigeons, who had decorated it with their droppings. They removed the pigeons and drove them far away—but of course, pigeons are *homing pigeons* and promptly returned to the antenna (https://www.lindau-nobel.org/pigeon-waste-cosmic-melodies-and-noise-in-scientific-communication/).

@MaryAustinBooks @briankrebs At Bell Labs Holmdel, they decided to use some artificial ponds as part of the heat exchange system for the air conditioners. The geese found those heated ponds lovely, but their droppings clogged the intake filters. Management responded by deploying fake swans. Guess how well that worked?

@mattblaze @20002ist USB-A to USB-C cables aren't uncommon, especially for charging. But "only their cable works" is bizarre.

Decades ago, according to lore, someone connected Eliza, the "psychiatrist" program, to Parry, which purportedly simulated paranoia. I wonder what would happen today in a face-off between Claude Code and Mythos…

@hal_pomeranz Mmm—not sure about the causality. See, e.g., https://www.columbia.edu/cu/computinghistory/#year1960 — the Columbia University Computer Center (where I spent far too much time as an undergrad) was located underground starting in 1963, well before campus unrest. The Berkeley Free Speech Movement, one of the first large campus protests, was 1964-1965 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Speech_Movement). I think that many academic computer centers were in basements because that's where there was enough space available.

@20002ist @newsguyusa Yup.

@20002ist @newsguyusa Yes—and residents of American Samoa aren't even US citizens.
And the Philippines? I used to give a talk where I said that "Philippines" is a word that today we pronounce as "Afghanistan". The odd thing is that the conflict with the Moros could possibly have been avoided—their clerics felt that the US was not a threat, since it wanted only political and economic control, as opposed to the Spanish who wanted to convert them all.

https://flipboard.social/@newsguyusa/116557592651175078 (per @newsguyusa) is seriously insane. Apart from the fact that only Congress can admit new states, not the president (Article IV §3 of the Constitution), admitting Venezuela as a state would mean that the Bill Of Rights and other constitutional protections would apply, which I suspect is the last thing Trump wants. And from a political perspective, would they vote Democratic or Republican? (His nativist allies would not be happy at granting full citizenship to a population that is mostly Spanish-speaking, either—and per Wikipedia, there are many indigenous languages recognized as well.)

@wendynather @davefischer Me, too. I don't miss them…

@joebeone Cool hack!

@mattblaze To say nothing of when you have to talk about resistance.

@doctorlaura My fix was to call the front desk for help… The building engineer, after visualizing it via a phone picture, managed to move it with a pen, since the safe would open a couple of inches.

Pro tip: be very careful about how you put an Apple Watch charger into a hotel safe. It's magnetic and can stick to mechanisms, jamming the safe so it won't open properly. No need to ask me how I learned this… (Yes, next time I'll disconnect the charger from the rats' nest of stuff I'm shoving into the safe.)

New book, released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license: "Don't Get Hacked! Protecting Yourself at Home": https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/homesec/index.html

Retoot for reach!

@miekg @sundogplanets At this point, I have so much infrastructure for books—and I have two in progress now—that switching would be painful.

@sundogplanets I’ve typeset three CS books in LaTeX but have to do my legal writing in Word. I *hate* Word, and for all my battles with LaTeX overall it’s far better.

@peterhoneyman At an IETF meeting in Stockholm, there was a T-shirt showing the Vasa with the caption "The Original 7-Layer Model".

That thing where a message on a privacy-focused mailing list contains a tracking pixel…

@ncweaver.skerry-tech.com Remember how many New Yorkers live in apartment buildings. The last place I lived in NYC was modest in size: six floors, 30 units—and it needed three containers, plus compost and recyclables. Now consider a high rise building.

@20002ist Probably, Elon Musk suggested it because the tariffs were high.