A winter bitch, but summer's in my blood. Dataflex programmer; weltschmerz collector. Hayek and Hobbes. Radical centrist.
Calderdale, UK
Joined November 2007
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Sean Bamforth retweeted
You don't need to speak Thai to get this ad insight. It's a universal truth, that all cat owners understand. Created by Wolf BKK. The cats in the loo are 100% my cats.
Shout out to all the guys with wood burners and chainsaws scouring local facebook groups, looking for downed trees to chop up.
Every now and again "Andrew Hickey's musical opinions" come up on this hellsite and I'm reminded of his role as "one of my least favourite libdems"
I feel like I live in a parallel universe where pointing out that a piece of writing was copied makes you a racist.
For weeks, some racist Western media outlets published story after story against Professor Jason Arday, at times every few hours, branding him a plagiarist. They hounded him relentlessly, and the pressure became too much for him. He committed suicide in August, aged just 41.
This week, he was cleared of plagiarism yet again. A fresh investigation by the academic publisher Taylor & Francis found nothing to support the allegations. Of the four formal investigations into his work, not one substantiated the charge.
The same publications that hunted him are now silent. They have not corrected their reporting, and they have not had the decency to admit they were wrong.
This is how hard it is to be Black in a deeply racist world, and to succeed where they expect you to fail. Even those who present themselves as the moral conscience of the Western world have nothing to say.
In a shameful act, the Oxford Reform Society has invited Nathan Cofnas, the self-described "race realist" who first raised the plagiarism allegations against Professor Arday, to speak at Oriel College next month. Oriel College, the home of Cecil John Rhodes’ statue.
These institutions are racist. Sadly, Black leaders have failed to build rival institutions that give Black people respect and intellectual dignity.
We are forced to endure disrespect because our leadership has failed us completely. Black billionaires line up to hand money to these institutions in exchange for meaningless honorary titles, instead of building our own.
May Professor Arday's soul rest in peace. You were hounded to your death by publications that today do not even have the shame to admit they were wrong.
Sean Bamforth retweeted
Security called me at 6:12 AM today.
"Patch every PHP server immediately."
I asked what happened.
"Two critical vulnerabilities. Remote code execution. No authentication required."
Cool.
How many PHP servers do we have?
According to inventory: 12
According to reality:
Nobody knows.
We found one running WordPress.
Three running old internal tools.
One under someone's desk.
Two inside vendor appliances.
A forgotten employee directory from 2016.
And a server named:
PHP-OLD-DO-NOT-TOUCH
Naturally, that one runs payroll exports.
Then we found a PHP 5.6 box.
I asked who owned it.
The documentation said:
BRIAN.
Brian left in 2019.
We called Brian.
He said:
"Oh wow, that's still running?"
Excellent.
By 8 AM, leadership joined the incident call.
CEO:
"Can hackers actually get in?"
Security:
"Potentially yes."
CEO:
"Without a password?"
Security:
"Yes."
CEO:
"Then why do WE need passwords?"
Not the lesson.
Finance asked if we could wait until the weekend to patch because downtime affects revenue.
Security explained that the alternative was letting strangers execute code on our servers.
Finance asked for a cost comparison.
At 9:17, someone suggested temporarily taking the vulnerable websites offline.
Marketing refused.
"Our campaign is live."
So for the next hour, the company officially decided maintaining a landing page for 20% off webinar registration was more important than preventing remote server takeover.
We finally patched everything we could find.
Then our scanner discovered another PHP server.
Hostname:
TEMP-PHP-2014
Uptime:
4,512 days.
Nobody knows what it does.
Nobody owns it.
Nobody can shut it down.
But every time we block network access, the warehouse stops printing shipping labels.
Security has classified it as critical infrastructure.
It is running PHP 5.4.
The vulnerability has existed longer than half our employees.
The emergency patch took four hours.
Finding out what PHP actually runs took eleven.
The internet isn't held together with code.
It's held together with servers everyone is afraid to turn off.
France already has a wealth tax. This is the problem with calls for extra / different taxation. They're usually demanded by people who have little to no understanding of what people already pay. They just think "wealth tax" and somehow that's enough.
Sean Bamforth retweeted
In order to build 3.3 miles of rail line, the UK needs to produce 14.6 miles of paperwork.
Sean Bamforth retweeted
microsoft just walked away from the uk's flagship ai data centre because of repeated delays, with the grid not expecting to supply power until the 2030s. it was the only announced customer there, signed up to rent 23,000 nvidia chips.
the telegraph:
"However, it has faced repeated delays, with grid bosses telling Nscale that they do not expect a power supply until the 2030s."
four days earlier jensen huang told nscale it could be the most valuable uk startup created in the last 10 years. nscale says this is a london-wide grid issue and its other contracts are not affected.
Exclusive: Microsoft cancels UK data centre deal with Nscale. Comes just as Nscale hopes to pull off a $35 billion IPO telegraph.co.uk/business/202…
Sean Bamforth retweeted
Today, Starlink. Tomorrow, F-35.
European nations need to stop buying American and Chinese weapons and technology. It will be extremely painful, but necessary in the long run.
Imagine a scenario in which Russia invades an EU country, and the Russian agent playing the role of American president decides to shut down fighter jets and weapons systems using a kill switch.
According to SIPRI, 58% of major arms imported by European NATO countries in 2021–2025 came from the US.
And we shouldn't forget about China. In Norway, Chinese-made vehicles used during a military exercise recorded soldiers' movements, sensitive locations and even access codes to military facilities.
It's time to invest massively in Europe's own defence and technology industries.
This kind of news organisation is so important for our democracy. Ignore the strong Leeds focus and subscribe. £9.00 a month. theexchange.news/i-was-offer…
If we built a couple more nuclear power stations, then we could power as much AI as we needed.
🚨 NEW: Ed Miliband is reportedly blocking AI investment into Britain over concerns it harms net zero
[@Telegraph]
To paraphrase a certain comedian "Reform have shit their hotel bed as a complaint against leftie charities and are now realizing that they have to sleep in a shitted in bed."
They needlessly kicked out a community charity from a building that was in the process of being asset transferred and now seen incredulous that the charity has stopped providing the community services they were providing from the building they're being evicted from.
Below are posts from Reform and the charity they're criticizing
