FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

I had off by one errors in two directions! but sadly they didn't cancel each other out.

note to self: before you try to CALL a function, make sure you have a stack first.

We all know about the Pioneer Plaque and Voyager’s Golden Record but have you seen the ‘Water Words’ on the Europa Clipper. It is a plate made of tantalum and has the waveforms of the sound of the word water in 103 languages engraved on one side.
Its a plate of semiotic beauty and I hope future lifeforms will not listen to it backwards.
https://europa.nasa.gov/spacecraft/vault-plate/?ref=longnow.org

Remember the coup attempt in South Korea two months ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_South_Korean_martial_law_crisis

It started with late night declaration of martial law. Proceeded to military being actually deployed.

People came out into the streets in the middle of the night and physically refused to follow directions by military personnel enforcing the martial law.

Policymakers voted to end the martial law, inside the National Assembly building that was being stormed by the military.

Coup ended within 6h.

I've had a lot of people ask how BlueSky compares to Mastodon and the Fediverse. I've tried to make the answer as simple and easy to understand as possible:

🦋 BlueSky is designed to give corporations and wealthy people full control of the network. All of its traffic has to flow through expensive-to-run corporate relays.

The Fediverse is to designed to give ordinary people control of the network. All of its traffic flows directly from one cheap-to-run server to another.

#FediTips

"my son is fine" ma'am your daughter is posting ""my son is fine" ma'am your daughter" jokes on the fediverse

supervillain voice “We unfortunately have very long queue times to the ADHD service, currently more than 3 years, and we are therefore engaged in accessibility works […] Respond before the 25th or you will be removed from the queue”

Vanguard might be the one finance sector company that I actually respect

https://corporate.vanguard.com/content/corporatesite/us/en/corp/articles/no-bitcoin-etfs-at-vanguard-heres-why.html

my energy in 2025

This morning, on February 2nd 2025 at 06:58 (GMT+1) I've received an E-Mail by Oracle stating “Your Oracle Cloud account has been reactivated.”

I couldn't believe my eyes and didn't really understand how to respond. At the point in time where I received this E-mail, my post regarding Oracle's mistreatment has already gathered thousands of shares and was also discussed heavily on Hacker News among other platforms.

My many pleas and requests from the past week didn't do anything. My GDPR request didn't do anything so far. But within a few hours of public complaints and so many people telling me to take this to court... I guess this was simply the easiest way.

I still don't fully understand the E-Mail I've gotten. It talks about an order about universal credits that occurred at 5:20 AM, where I've been cold asleep. When I login to Oracle Cloud, no such credits exist. Additionally, they don't show up when I look into the “Cost and Usage Reports” under my account management. Even more interesting are the dozens of files showing an account and server activity, with the calculated cost of it all, for a time period where my account was supposedly irreversibly deleted.

I'll share more interesting findings soon. I am honestly just shocked about this development. I would've expected many things except for a 180.

Interestingly, two days before Oracle deleted my account and all servers associated with it, I publicly criticized Oracle's CEO in a viral post for promising dystopian AI surveillance technology to his investors.

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/113879369270806353

What a weird coincidence.

The tech person at Oracle at least lets me know that they'd feel similarly betrayed and dislike this handling of user data too 🥲✊

I also love how I ask “Is there anything I can do to avoid this happening in the future?” and they respond with “Oh, don't worry. You don't have a future at Oracle. This will not happen to you again, as we don't allow for you to make another account.”

This is a public service announcement to never ever use Oracle

After realizing that my servers were offline since the 25th of January 2025, I've been in contact with Oracle support in a multitude of ways trying to figure out why this happened and how we can recover both the account and data.

I wasn't told that my account was disabled. I didn't receive an E-Mail or anything. When logging in, I was simply told that my username or password was incorrect. After (successfully) resetting my password twice, I realized it wasn't about the password. Oracle had just deleted my account without any notice.

Both through calls and text, always with the same service request (SR) number, I contacted support. Initially, support told me that my account was flagged “Inactive” and hence disabled. They also verified that they saw me login almost daily and that I never missed a payment or anything. Even if an account was inactive, that's never a reason to disable it, especially without any warning E-Mail or an E-Mail letting me know that my account was disabled in the first place.

This chat was the result of all of that, where the highest team I've yet been elevated to told me that there's nothing they can do about it, there's no reason they can tell me for why this happened, and there's no one else I could ask.

lololol