dpwm

UK Police are interested in finding non-exculpatory evidence and securing convictions.

Computer forensics usually means software bought from a vendor and operated by a technician sometimes with no deep technical knowledge beyond the tool they use. It probably even works well for the common case, but breaks in cases where something unusual has happened.

UK ISPs mostly use an IP pool – meaning they have to keep records about who was assigned which IP at which time. Some may run carrier-grade NAT. Those records are obviously trusted, but may not necessarily be accurate – and even if they are, human mistakes occur, especially when working with things like IP addresses, dates and timezones.

But if not for following IP addresses, how else do you investigate this sort of thing?

I would argue the fault is in a mentality that suggests presuming guilt based on an IP address, then looking for the confirmatory evidence as an "icing on the cake," and a mentality that the investigation process should be so harrowing that the guilty will always go punished even if there isn’t enough evidence for an attempt at conviction. This is long after several such scandals around the same type of crimes.

> It's not more complicated than bruteforcing a WPS PIN or WPA2 password.

In the UK a prepaid SIM is normally linked to you in some way.

There was an idea going around education circles that type in comic sans was easier or even easiest for those with dyslexia to read.

The claims struck me as a bit unlikely, but helped explain its widespread adoption in higher education beyond differences in taste. A quick searching suggests that there is little evidence for the claims made about it, but I can see why some would still use it.

Still, at least it’s not Papyrus.

One of the more surprising combos at university was Physics and Music. That was the degree, and the numbers were similar to those doing Computational Physics.

> The broadband industry funded the fraudulent creation of about 8.5 million of those, while a 19-year-old college student submitted 7.7 million, and the remainder came from unknown but spurious sources.

The article doesn’t explicitly say that the comments funded by the broadband industry were in favour of rolling back net neutrality, so I had to guess on that one too.

Thinking about it some more makes me question these assumptions. It seems plausible that putting forward straw-man arguments to be robustly demolished could be a useful tactic to those interested in manipulation.

> Your comment clearly shows that you haven't read the article.

This was my first thought. Then I thought about it some more, and became persuaded I was wrong. I definitely did read the article.

According to the explanation in the article, it’s a narrow slice, so the back of the wheel would be photographed when that passed the finish line, even if ~30cm out – at which point the front would be clearly over the finish line.

The point being that the wheel is bigger than 30cm. It’s subtle, but I’m persuaded – unless I’m missing something, like them not having or not actually enforcing wheel-size regulations.

I personally find it very difficult to reason about something that looks so much like a photograph where only vertically-aligned points were taken at the same time.

Thanks for writing that up! I had no idea about paged.js and it’s pretty close to what I was looking for.

Thanks for posting this. I was actually just today looking for a solutions to render a website as a PDF, and didn’t get as far as puppeteer – which is probably too heavy a dependency for my use case, but is still nice to know about.

Does anyone know of a print-oriented web-browser that understands CSS? It seems like the kind of thing that would be useful to many.

I was surprised not so long back to find out just how much of the proprietary 3D market that Autodesk held. It seems like they own pretty much all of the big, studio-oriented 3D packages I had heard of from 10-15 years ago.

> Autodesk is the Oracle of the professional media world.

Autodesk’s reach in the niche of M&E 3D packages seems far more horizontal than Oracle’s in even databases. It is as though they set out to own all of the competition and largely succeeded – and this isn’t even the area that brings in most of their revenue.

> So, as long as you ignore the formatting they presented it with and decide to read it without it, you can come to a different conclusion?

No. It reads that way with the formatting they provided. You can’t take that paragraph break out without putting one back exactly there. It’s refreshingly transparent, and perfect if you expect them not to care about the underlying cause as much as they care about the ban.

> I don't think contortions such as that to link sentences is fair, nor the fault of the organization that put forth for a statement specifically separating them.

It’s not a contortion, it’s just how it reads to me. I’m not taking some deliberately contrarian stance – I was really quite shocked at the multiple comments saying how great the statement was when it inadvertently or otherwise conveyed the very message I believe they should have avoided – the one where they simply do the least they need to do to get unbanned, which may well be closer to the real objective. It’s the difference between being shamed into action and recognising why action is necessary.

I would not want to be the person to have to write such a statement

Well put. It’s taken me the last hour to realise that it really is refreshingly transparent.

To me, it’s like the distinction between offence caused and actually showing some genuine reflection as to why there might be offence caused. This statement, to me, is firmly in the former camp.

I think we’re mostly in agreement. The ban is clearly the trigger, and it’s pretty transparent.

> For all you and me know, said review will say their processes are just fine which I would personally disagree with but it could happen.

Agreed. For what it’s worth, I don’t actually think there’s much they can really do besides acknowledge it and make sure their ethics board is competent and consulted.

> the ban is the focus – not what led to the ban

I was talking about the ban being the focus of the statement, as it’s the point at which there’s a clear shift from the situation to the fix. This is unfortunate, because to me it is placing the emphasis on the trigger, rather than the cause.

I believe it could have been written in a way that mentioned the ban, left room to investigate, but made it crystal clear that the community concerns and the ban were not the problem. It makes it feel to me as though their primary motivation to investigate is to get unbanned – which, to be fair, it probably is – rather than to be committed to root out alleged unethical practices. Even if the short-term consequences are the same, it’s a subtle but important distinction.

I suppose it’s a form of honesty, and I could instead embrace its transparency.

> Not once do they talk about getting the ban removed, instead they talk about figuring out why it happened and how to be better at having research done being ethical.

I feel as if we’re discussing two different statements.

> The research method used raised serious concerns in the Linux Kernel community and, as of today, this has resulted in the University being banned from contributing to the Linux Kernel.

Here the cause is that "the research method used raised serious concerns in the Linux Kernel community"

Not that it was unethical, or potentially how it was. It’s not that something clearly went wrong. The cause can be read as the response, rather than the action.

> safeguard against future issues, if needed

> The research method used raised serious concerns in the Linux Kernel community and, as of today, this has resulted in the University being banned from contributing to the Linux Kernel.

> We take this situation extremely seriously.

I think it’s because the last bit of the first paragraph – the ban – flows onto the second paragraph – the situation.

Once you’ve had the two linked, it’s like one of those ambiguous optical illusions, where you just can’t see the other.

If I were writing that statement, I’d be concerned it looked that had there been no ban, there would be no situation. Said statement doesn’t do that for me.

I’ve read and re-read that statement, and it seems like the ban is the focus – not what led to the ban.

I get that they may not know anything, but there are other ways to word that without admitting liability, making it seem less like the focus is on the ban and more on the allegedly shady stuff.

It seems a fair discussion point, even if you don’t agree that the payoff is worth the effort.

I don’t read it as a negative thing, and for me <500kB seems reasonable. Page size is an aspect of design – even if many websites are suffering far greater needless bloat than this one.

Could something like purgecss be effective with removing unused bootstrap classes?

If the .wal file is not backed up, then any information in it will not be backed up. Depending on the settings for the WAL, this can be quite a lot. You would need to do something like the VACUUM INTO trick described above if you want to safely backup the sqlite database from a live filesystem, because there is a risk of the WAL and database being out of sync. I’m not sure that SQLite, good though it is, can get around the WAL being taken at a different time to the rest of the database.

The problem here isn’t the .wal file, but doing backups from a moving filesystem. The solution is to use snapshots. ZFS supports snapshots natively, and Linux’s device mapper supports snapshots of any block device. [0]

[0] https://www.kernel.org/doc/html/latest/admin-guide/device-ma...

Oh wow, thanks for that. I’m new to .NET and didn’t know anything about Source Generators. That seems to be a pretty interesting feature.

I followed the link to the F# suggestions and found

https://github.com/fsharp/fslang-suggestions/issues/864

It seems like there is interest but with a "let’s wait and see what happens with C#" kind of approach. I’ll admit it looks far off, but there appears to be interest.

I’m certainly not expecting them, and for my purposes F# provides more than enough anyway. I am nonetheless interested: why do you think they will never come to F#?

> Ah and don't expect Code Generators to ever support F#.

What sort of Code Generators are we talking?

I ask because I have a very early alpha project that does F# code generation using Fantomas. Apart from an (uninvestigated) slightly higher startup time than I hoped for, it seems fine.

> Assuming appropriate licensing

For such customers the mere fact it is free would make the licensing questionable.

Consider a service like unsplash: what vetting can there be that the people who upload actually hold the copyright? Do unsplash indemnify you if it turns out they never had permission? How does it look in a court, should it come to that?

It’s not about paying money for the image as much as it’s about buying an assurance – even if it is only to be able to say "we acted in good faith and licensed this from a ‘reputable’ supplier.” Some legal teams are incredibly risk averse.

Unsplash almost certainly isn’t considered by these sorts of customers. It’s not some kind of snobbery, it’s to avoid having to deal with the case where the one image that you build a multi-million dollar ad campaign on turns out not to have been improperly licensed.

> Getty has already demonstrated that it is willing to sell free works to people who don't realize they can get it for free (legally).

It seems plausible to me that there are some customers whose legal teams would be very uneasy about anything free.

For those customers, Getty’s name and “reputability” may be the service they are paying for.

I rarely go on aggregate review scores, but instead on the worst reviews.

I read the text of these reviews. Sometimes the reviewer had unrealistic demands. If this worst case is acceptable, I proceed. If it is a choice between competitors, it often comes to the least bad option.

If there are no reviews under 5 stars, I'm suspicious. If a company replies to reviews, I mentally flag it as doing reputation management - not something you tend to need do when providing a service your customers love.

It is amazing how many nightmare companies have 4-5 star trustpilot reviews.

About four years ago, when I had a low end Android phone, some kind of "make the screen white" app was really useful.

I remember the play store being scary but I think there was something in fdroid.

I am not so sure on this, but I do not recall my nexus 5 having flashlight in the OS.

> I guess some pro palestinian posts may have strayed into the antisemitic territory?

My understanding is that any pro-palestinian posts can be labeled antisemitic under the IHRA/EUMC working definition of antisemitism (as adopted into UK law) if it any way singles out Israel for the oppression in a way not done for other states.

> “criticism of Israel similar to that levelled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic”

This to me seems vague and a point of likely disputed interpretations likely to have at the very least a chilling effect.

You don't really have to squint too hard to see crises of overproduction.

I very much doubt that Claire Fox is an accelerationist.

> > CPGB-ML who are full on tankies

> It remains astonishing that a number of these people did a full 180 turn to right-libertarians and from there to Brexiteers, eventually leading to Claire Fox, apologist for the bombing of Manchester, becoming a member of the House of Lords.

Claire fox was never CPGB-ML, but the “Revolutionary Communist Party.” From what I can understand, the RCP was always a primarily contrarian entity and always more libertarian than Marxist. To quote their journal, Living Marxism:

> We live in an age of caution and conformism, when critical opinions can be outlawed as 'extremism' and anything new can be rubbished as 'too risky'. Ours is an age of low expectations, when we are always being told what is bad for us, and life seems limited on all sides by restrictions, guidelines and regulations. The spirit of LM is to go against the grain: to oppose all censorship, bans and codes of conduct; to stand up for social and scientific experimentation; to insist that we have the right to live as autonomous adults who take responsibility for our own affairs. These are basic human values that cannot be compromised if we are ever going to create a world fit for people. [0]

This seems to have more in common with the libertarian right than Marxist, particularly “to insist that we have the right to live as autonomous adults who take responsibility for our own affairs,” which is almost the antithesis of Marxism.

> Fox stayed with her ex-RCP members when the group transformed itself in the early 2000s into a network around the web magazine Spiked Online and the Institute of Ideas, both based in the former RCP offices and promoting libertarianism. [1]

Given their apparent funding, contrarian headline-generating antics and subsequent banding together, some may question whether they were a model for what would come later: an opaquely funded right-libertarian outlet.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_Marxism

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claire_Fox

My first encounter with the SWP was at a stall outside a university building. They didn't seem shouty, but I remember asking questions and getting vague, half-thought-out answers. Then about ten years later, I met a couple who were ex SWP but switched to labour once Corbyn became leader. I was reminded slightly of that stall by Corbyn's speeches.

It's worth noting that the harder left Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist) can only really talk of imperialism, bourgeois democracy, the labour aristocracy and overproduction — at least in relation to the UK.

No serious leftist group in the UK is even hoping for the conditions in which a revolution might be possible, because in those conditions they believe that the counterrevolutionaries would be the darlings of the UK media, would have near full police backing, and would likely target leftists as an enemy to deal with.

Under floating point we have two zeros, so we can have RELU'(+0) != RELU'(-0). Hence, I propose:

RELU'(-0) = 0

RELU'(+0) = 1

Thanks for an interesting rabbit hole.