FoxQuirk 🦊 @quirk@computerfairi.es

Hackers, 2000: DMA allows arbitrary memory access!
Vendors: Isn't that great? Kernel debugging is so convenient!

Hackers, 2010: FBI and NSA can use ExpressCard and IEEE 1394 DMA to access memory at will and steal full-disk encryption keys from participants in movements like "Occupy Wall Street"!
Vendors: How many dissidents across the US are actually going to get targeted by the FBI like that?

Hackers, 2020: USB 4 allows arbitrary memory access via DMA, any standard USB device can be used to steal data!
Vendors: Physical security isn't our responsibility - you can just seal off the USB ports.

Hackers, 2025: PCIe DMA enables online game cheats that the system can't detect!
Vendors: Right now! Immediately! Enable IOMMU! Anyone who doesn't enable it gets their account banned!

oh sick, a few months ago the CJEU ruled that an EU citizen who moves to another EU member state and changes gender there must be able to have their new legal gender reflected on the passport issued by their country of citizenship

https://strasbourgobservers.com/2026/03/27/building-on-strasbourg-the-ecthrs-gender-identity-case-law-in-the-cjeus-shipova-judgment/

"please tell me how I can quickly address your objections so we can meet our KPIs, I have a hard stop in 45 minutes" and "you are a human being with a heart and a mind in community with other humans who must give each other grace and time and enough mutual recognition that we can ever possibly have enough safety margin to allow for us to make mistakes" are not really mutually intelligible discourses

git blame, or as they say in france, g'accuse

apparently, in the 1950's, Japan had electronic computers based on something much cheaper, more efficient and more reliable than vacuum tubes: parametrons, which are built around ferrite cores

https://ethw.org/Milestones:Parametron,_1954

The title is a little pointed, but I am very serious here. Academics, medical researchers, and other professional organisations should not collect data on birth sex. It is rarely relevant, and it almost always leads to privacy violations for transgender people. Please share. I would like people to read this one.

https://blog.djnavarro.net/posts/2026-08-06_separating-sex-and-gender-is-statistical-malpractice

”Going into schools, I meet thousands of children a year and every day I become more certain that, if justice for all is to be our organising principle, AI is not for children and not for young people. … It risks halting learning before it can take flight. Studies show, over and over, that when we engage in AI-assisted learning we give up sooner. … We undergo not just cognitive offloading, but cognitive surrender: we forget what was possible.”
—K. Rundell
https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/aug/08/i-hate-what-ai-is-doing-to-the-minds-and-happiness-of-the-young-katherine-rundell-on-the-view-from-the-classroom
#ai #learning

MEMENTO MORI

guitar strings are a cruel reminder of mortality

@foone so, antennas need to radiate photons. An antenna is "just" an arrangement of components that turns a changing electrical stimulus into enough of an electric/magnetic field flux that it emits photons.

Anything can radiate photons. Yes, people have hooked up bed springs and lightbulbs to HF radios to emit shortwave frequencies.

It's a question of what's in phase, what's out of phase, and how much is radiated versus reflected back down the antenna versus converted into heat.

(ctd)

maybe it's just more/less coiled? in which case... why?

I know it's folly to try to understand RF, which is all obscure magic, but one part I thought I understood was that frequency and antenna size were correlated, right?

but I got a pile of 433mhz transmitters and receivers, which have different sized antennas.

Isn't transmitting and receiving symmetric? wouldn't you need the same size antennas?

Naan throw

Baguette throw.

The question was: which could you throw further: a baguette, or a naan?

Science demands an answer.

OH: pro tip, other people are bad at telepathy

SHOCKING: Local YouTuber Makes Big Announcement, Writes 10,500 Words To Explain Why

here it is: an exhaustive discussion of what i've been up to this year, the art i've made, the things i've endured, the hope i've lost and gained, and what it all means for the future of my video work.

it's been a shit year, but i'm not dead yet.

https://www.patreon.com/ltas/posts/shocking-local-166161680