One of the private keys behind eight eMudhra intermediate CA certificates was the integer 4. Several other keys in the same set were nearly as easy to recover. Keys capable of supporting trusted TLS issuance made it through key generation, certification, auditing, and root program review before an outside researcher noticed, and the previous article examined how that happened. This article asks why a failure at an Indian CA became an incident response problem for relying parties around the…

Episode Synopsis Paul and Dusey ask and answer: is player agency always sacrosanct? Should every new roleplayer start in a dungeon? Did Tolkien know how to name women and did he care? And why everything in every game, table and session is a trade-off. Plus talk about The Slow Knife and Urban Shadows. Weird Terminology and Acronyms Bleed: The spillover of emotions between character and player. DungeonTube: The ecosystem of YouTube creators who make videos about D&D and other RPGs.…

Today is the 25th anniversary of my weblog. Hooray! It’s been a long time on the Internet and a lot has changed. But some of the sites I linked in that first month are still around, like the Half Bakery and urinal.net. There’s a funny update on the EA / Ultima story. I’m still around too! I don’t blog as much as I do, no one blogs like they used to. I have more places to publish now. I write short posts on Fedi. Links are now shared on my linkblog. Casual tech posts go to my secret work blog.…

Über sieben – oder acht – neue Brücken werden Radfahrer in Bochum zukünftig fahren können – irgendwann, vielleicht. Eins: Die neue Brücke der Lothringen-Trasse über die A43 in Hiltrop Die neue Brücke steht schon, aber die Fernwärmeleitungen müssen noch verlegt werden. „Der Radweg wird als letztes verlegt, weil zunächst die Fernwärmeleitungen montiert werden“, sagt Tobias Fabri, Projektleiter der Stadtwerke. Im Oktober 2027 soll die neue Bücke freigegeben werden. Bis dahin steht die alte Brücke…

Finally got around to checking out one of the Northwest Trolls, this one nearby in Oregon, with most being up in Washington state. I love how these look in person and now I want to see them all.Then I headed up to the Japanese Garden to see how the Fall color was coming along. The famous tree looks like it already lost most of its leaves before the whole gardens have turned but here are some color highlights.

Looking out over London from the Duck & Waffle at 110 Bishopsgate My boss retired on Friday. In one form or another, I’ve been working for him for most of the past 16 years. Looking back, deciding to move to this company and having the good fortune to meet and work for him feels like one of those extremely improbable events. As Ronnie Barker said when looking back over his career, “What luck.” His planned retirement, something that we’ve known about for over half a year, is one of those…

The legend of the horsemen of the apocalypse goes back to the first century AD. It is a gripping image which has transcended cultures. The best-known of the horsemen is Death, riding an ashen-coloured horse. This is the only one given a name in the original. One horseman, riding a black horse, brings famine, making…

IntroductionI've started a Cairn campaign using Dogtooth Valley by Nate Treme of the Highland Paranormal Society and some house rules I have been cooking up specifically for kids. I almost didn't, and in fact I've been putting off running a game for my kids for a long time. This is, of course, despite the fact that I have run Cairn for a bunch of kids at this point. This post is a little bit of a confession about my TTRPG design tendencies, a little bit of play report, and perhaps a bit of…

It can be beneficial for your thinking, if you explain to yourself or others. The process of explaining is a powerful learning tool.From a young age, humans ask “why”; answering that question can reveal deeper meanings and reveal hidden patterns. Explaining can unlock abstraction, a complex thought process that allows people to generalize from specific examples to identify common themes. The need to know why can unlock learning, but it can also drive some people to latch on to patterns that do…

I am having another good recovery day today. Finished off a crochet bowl, but haven’t started anything else, yet. It was warmer today, so when I headed outside to walk around, I decided to stay out and give the haskaps a deep watering. About 5 minutes in, there was a sudden clap of thunder. No … Continue reading A tiny storm.

Many people are saying that AI will make software faster by rewriting it in faster languages, but this isn’t generally true. Most programs cannot be meaningfully sped up by rewriting them in C or Rust. How can this be true? Some languages are orders-of-magnitude faster than others: for instance, C can be fifty times faster than Python. Won’t rewriting my Python program in C thus make it fifty times faster? No, it won’t. Software performance is usually dominated by I/O, not the speed of the…

In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book. Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Hanif Abdurraqib, Andrew Sean Greer, Roxane Gay, and many others. Matt Kish’s Moby-Dick in Pictures brilliantly shares an illustration for each page of Melville’s classic n0vel, and this new edition celebrates Moby-Dick’s 175th anniversary next month. The…

My wife Clara launched her art store earlier this year on ACGGOODS, and after much gentle prodding has allowed me to share it here. It has high-quality vinyl stickers, cards, and keychains of her favourite vtubers and indie authors, all hand drawn and small-batch printed. She laboured over finding a good supplier for months, but after receiving a bunch of samples she’s found one that does beautiful work. They look amazing; just as good as any anime merchandise you’d find at an Animate. If…

Northbound: Landscapes of Late Release Information Artist Northbound Title Landscapes of Late Date November 1, 2006 Download Bandcamp, InternetArchive Introduction When looking at the CerebralRift, I found that Landscapes of Late by Northbound was the first review I posted. So, it seems fitting to kick off the Revisited series with this release. The Review The original review of Landscapes of Late wasn’t all that long. In fact, one could say that it was more about the idea that I had stopped…

Many thanks to everyone who attended our event last weekend, but guess what? The Kaweco DIY fun continues this week through close of business on Saturday! Come build a DIY Sport in the special edition “Glow Green,” and shop a range of new arrivals including the newly arrived TRAVELER’S Notebook 2027 Diaries/Planners, the Blackwing Volumes 143 Frida Kahlo pencils, and the Lamy Studio Petrol series. We also have the Lochby Daily Folios in three different sizes, including the large A4, the…

I was expecting another fairly journalistic-distant nonfiction experience here, but instead what I got was a gloriously opinionated fireball. The author is working in the music journalism rather than tech journalism tradition and the result is an excoriation of nobody’s favorite streaming service and the major labels (‘the majors’) who payola it. The author is clearly passionate about independent music but takes pains to explore the culture of other genres and point out that there’s something…

Alright friends, it’s time.I made a Claude prompt that will walk you through checking your exposure to the hacks happening now and setting up a more secure system. PLEASE do not wait (but only do this if you have the time to fix what comes up, and be sure to delete the transcript first.)Thanks for reading This is Definitely Real! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.We’re hosting a meetup in East Bay on Saturday to secure our systems. Let me know if you’re interested in…

This past August, the fortieth anniversary of Metroid came and went with little notice from Nintendo. But because this site has become a place where I write about urban legends in video games, I thought I’d write about the mysterious Justin Bailey, who also turned forty, whether or not he actually exists. Whatever you heard about him back in the day was probably wrong, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t larger lessons that Justin Bailey can still teach us, all these years later.In true urban…

First time at the gym in a while and it was tough to grip everything. But the forearms focus will help I hope. I have a slight twinge in my left upper lat that I’m hoping to work out in the next couple days. Unknown location (probably inside)

(LLMs were used to help organize and translate this post) In my previous post, I described the principles guiding my personal information system: security, privacy, simplicity, efficiency, sovereignty, portability and longevity. This time, I want to get more concrete and explain how these principles translate into an actual implementation. The goal is not to build a sophisticated infrastructure, but to create a system I can understand, control, maintain and recover, without depending…

A well-researched look into what's on our upcoming ballot.Read the whole thing.

Nowadays, new tech gadgets are being released at an increasingly faster pace than ever before. Every week there is either a new cutting-edge foldable-pro-max-biggest-screen-ever smartphone or a jumping, flying box-like car with revolutionary rocket tech. And do not forget that new AI model which will make your charlatan boss look smarter, and help him cut the budget by firing half of the team. I know I have made many assumptions here, but bear with me. Despite these amazing advancements in…

Disclaimer Previously… Whispers Conclusions The Good The Bad Stay Tuned… Disclaimer In these posts, we discuss a non-“Free as in Freedom” popular culture franchise property, including occasional references to part of that franchise behind a paywall. My discussion and conclusions carry a Free Culture license, but nothing about the discussion or conclusions should imply any attack on the ownership of the properties. All the big names serve as trademarks of the owners, and so forth, and everything…

BeamNG.Earth lets you drive anywhere on the planet at 1:1 scale, on real elevation and aerial or satellite imagery, with view distance out to a curved horizon. The world is filled in from real data: land-cover ground textures, 3D grass, regional trees with seasonal colours, buildings with local architectural styles, and roads with lane markings, sidewalks, signs, signals and street lights. It also includes bridges, sea and lakes deep enough to sink in, rivers, and airports with marked runways.…

SummaryIn which we face a bevy of international tourists, sneak into British Columbia for the afternoon, and are completely blown away by a mountain lake.Day FiveAfter three great days in Banff, we packed up our rented VW Taos & headed north to Lake Louise. Our route was the Bow Valley Parkway - a two-lane road that runs roughly parallel to that Trans-Canada highway but through forests and at a slower pace. We stopped a couple of times to soak in the views… Morant’s Curve was particularly worth…

Mysterious randomness

I didn’t consider getting an iPhone Duo (I like my iPhone 17 Pro and its cameras too much!), but I was certainly curious about how it would feel to use. Gruber’s lengthy, detailed review has answered all my questions, and then some.It’s something of a hatchet job, but this quote stood out and made me chuckle:It’s a bit like using an ancient BlackBerryPretty cutting, but then again people did love their Blackberrys back in the day, so maybe the Duo will be popular despite the drawbacks and the…

let's build a nest of feathers and fluff of sweet thoughts and warm feelings let's build a nest just big enough to hide us both from gloom and dread let's build a nest and rest

Tabletop roleplaying games are currently back in vogue. Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition continues to be the biggest fish in the pond, with a revised edition released in 2024, whilst games like Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk RED, Mothership, Mork Borg and Dragonbane continue to do well. But another venerable RPG recently (ish) returned with a new edition (with a minor new revision arriving soon). What is Deadlands? What is it about? We have you covered with a Franchise Familiariser…