Derek McAuley
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drdrmc.mastodon.me.uk.ap.brid.gy
Derek McAuley
@drdrmc.mastodon.me.uk.ap.brid.gy
I do interdisciplinary research to understand the opportunities and challenges in personal data use: the technical, the social, and the policy and regulatory […]

[bridged from https://mastodon.me.uk/@drdrmc on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
Reposted by Derek McAuley
Maths Puzzles for Conspiracy Theorists.
One of the cartoons from my new book 'Physics for Cats'. In good bookshops now and online in English, French, German and Spanish editions.
November 21, 2025 at 11:20 AM
Reposted by Derek McAuley
One of the best pieces I've read in awhile. Emily Bressler in @mcsweeneys.net writes "I Work for an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person":

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/i-work-for-an-evil-company-but-outside-work-im-actually-a-really-good-person
I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person
I love my job. I make a great salary, there’s a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I’m actually a really good person. Let me give you an example. Last quarter, I led a team of engineers on an initiative to grow my company’s artificial intelligence data centers, which use millions of gallons of water per day. My work with AI is exponentially accelerating the destruction of the planet, but once a month, I go camping to reconnect with my own humanity through nature. I also bike to and from the office, which definitely offsets all the other environmental destruction I work tirelessly to enact from sunup to sundown for an exorbitant salary. Check out this social media post of me biking up a mountain. See? This is who I really am. Does the leadership at my company promote a xenophobic agenda and use the wealth I help them acquire to donate directly to bigoted causes and politicians I find despicable? Yeah, sure. Did I celebrate my last birthday at Drag Brunch? Also yes. I even tipped with five-dollar bills. I contain multitudes, and would appreciate it if you focused on the brunch one. Mathematically, it might seem like I spend a disproportionate amount of my time making the world a significantly less safe and less empathetic place, but are you counting all the hours I spend sleeping? You should. And when you do, you’ll find that my ratio of evil hours to not evil hours is much more even, numerically. I just don’t think working at an evil company should define me. I’ve only worked here for seven years. What about the twenty-five years before, when I didn’t work here? In fact, I wasn’t working at all for the first eighteen years of my life. And for some of those early years, I didn’t even have object permanence, which is oddly similar to the sociopathic detachment with which I now think about other humans. And besides, I don’t plan to stay at this job forever, just for my prime working years, until I can install a new state-of-the-art infinity pool in my country home. The problem is that whenever I think I’m going to leave, there’s always the potential for a promotion, and also a new upgrade for the pool, like underwater disco lights. Time really flies when you’re not thinking about the effect you have on others. But I absolutely intend to leave at some point. And when I do, you should define me by whatever I do next, unless it’s also evil, in which case, define me by how I ultimately spend my retirement. Because here’s the thing: It’s not me committing these acts of evil. I’m just following orders (until I get promoted; then I’ll get to give them). But until then, I do whatever my supervisor tells me to do, and that’s just how work works. Sure, I chose to be here, and yes, I could almost certainly find a job elsewhere, but redoing my résumé would take time. Also, I don’t feel like it. Besides, once a year, my company mandates all employees to help clean up a local beach, and I almost always go. Speaking of the good we do at work, sometimes I wear a cool Hawaiian shirt on Fridays, and it’s commonly accepted that bad people don’t wear shirts with flowers on them. That’s just a fact. There’s something so silly about discussing opportunities to increase profits for international arms dealers while wearing a purple button-down covered in bright hibiscus blossoms. And when it comes to making things even, I put my money where my mouth is. I might make more than 99 percent of all Americans, but I also make sure to donate almost 1 percent of my salary to nonprofits. This way, I can wear their company tote bag to my local food coop. Did I mention I shop at a local food coop? It’s quite literally the least I could do. Of course, I don’t love everything the company does, but true love means loving something because of its flaws, not despite them. And more importantly, I’ve completely detached myself from reality and real suffering and intend to continue to do so as long as I work here and after I leave.
www.mcsweeneys.net
November 15, 2025 at 8:19 PM
Because of this toot (https://dataare.cool/@af/115537408464755052 by @af), I was led to RFC2324 (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2324) in which I find reference:

[HTSVMP] Q. Stafford-Fraser, "Hyper Text Sandwich Van Monitoring Protocol, Version 3.2". In preparation.

@quentinsf, care to […]
Original post on mastodon.me.uk
mastodon.me.uk
November 13, 2025 at 11:43 AM
I mostly get one msg a day on two of my Office365 (legacy!) accounts. Each is a phishing warning reporting precisely one phishing attack per day. Statistically it stinks. So I checked today, about 50% of the alleged source address domains do not exist - for clarity, I mean not found in DNS. So […]
Original post on mastodon.me.uk
mastodon.me.uk
November 11, 2025 at 9:45 PM
I dunno, but I think we on track for the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation which we know defines a robot as "Your Plastic Pal Who's Fun to Be With." https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2025/11/being-too-nice-online-is-a-dead-giveaway-for-ai-bots-study-suggests/
arstechnica.com
November 7, 2025 at 10:45 PM
Reposted by Derek McAuley
The translation of "just use our docker image" into human language is "we don't have good docs and we don't give a shit".
November 2, 2025 at 7:06 PM
“Eight Sleep users will be relieved to hear that the company is making their products usable during Internet outages. But many are also questioning why Eight Sleep didn’t implement local control sooner. “ because a combination of a) idiots b) driven by ship date c) features over resilience. Like […]
Original post on mastodon.me.uk
mastodon.me.uk
October 22, 2025 at 8:37 PM
October 17, 2025 at 6:33 PM
October 17, 2025 at 8:13 AM
Smeg! Apple Password app just delivered me 111 "compromised password" alerts. Offered to help me change the password, but so far, mostly they are dead websites. I am starting to wonder if maybe the alert should have been " you're too old, those sites have […]

[Original post on mastodon.me.uk]
October 16, 2025 at 9:20 PM
October 12, 2025 at 9:07 PM
858TB of Government Data May Be Lost For Good After South Korea Data Center Fire
South Korea's government may have permanently lost 858TB of information after a fire at a data center in Daejeon. From a report: As reported by DCD, a battery fire at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center, located in the city of Daejeon, on September 26, has caused havoc for government services in Korea. Work to restore the data center is ongoing, but officials fear data stored on the government's G-Drive may be gone for good. G-Drive, which stands for Government Drive and is not a Google product, was used by government staff to keep documents and other files. Each worker was allocated 30GB of space. According to a report from The Chosun, the drive was one of 96 systems completely destroyed in the fire, and there is no backup. "The G-Drive couldn't have a backup system due to its large capacity," an unnamed official told The Chosun. "The remaining 95 systems have backup data in online or offline forms." While some departmers do not rely on G-Drive, those that do have been badly impacted in the aftermath of the fire. A source from the Ministry of Personnel Management said: "Employees stored all work materials on the G-Drive and used them as needed, but operations are now practically at a standstill." Read more of this story at Slashdot.
hardware.slashdot.org
October 9, 2025 at 2:51 AM
Reposted by Derek McAuley
🇪🇺Germany's Minister of Justice today: "Suspicionless #chatcontrol must be taboo in a state governed by the rule of law." Private communication cannot be placed under general suspicion. "Germany will not agree to such proposals at the EU level." […]
Original post on digitalcourage.social
digitalcourage.social
October 8, 2025 at 10:04 AM
The rarest of Monopoly Community Chest cards “Bank error in your favour, receive £3billion”
October 8, 2025 at 11:18 AM
Probably an earthing problem with the PA.
October 7, 2025 at 4:08 PM
The irony is palpable… “Trump to punish countries that unjustly detain US citizens”

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5yq9d1ykdqo
Trump to punish countries that unjustly detain US citizens
The executive order creates a "state sponsor of wrongful detention" designation, which could be used to impose US sanctions on foreign states.
www.bbc.com
September 7, 2025 at 4:13 PM
So because AI companies are currently blatantly ignoring (C) issues we have a secondary market in ransomware. Good grief. https://www.404media.co/hackers-threaten-to-submit-artists-data-to-ai-models-if-art-site-doesnt-pay-up/
September 2, 2025 at 7:47 PM
Watching live TV for the first time in who knows how long. I see topical ad “I have Telecare and I’m telling my provider” - so what’s that? 5 years after the ripping out copper shit hit the fan? Now we get a program to deal with it. Frak you OFCOM and BT.
July 6, 2025 at 8:33 PM
Originally seen on Slashdot, I thought well this is some Internet shite. But no, it’s a piece of shite from Nature. There is no evidence presented in the article that the ratio has changed. In most fields, there has always been way more PhD students than academic posts. <continues…> […]
Original post on mastodon.me.uk
mastodon.me.uk
June 24, 2025 at 8:55 AM
“Google has proposed a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that allow web developers to write web applications or browser extensions that call a local version of Google's Gemini Nano mode “ Monopoly is as Monopoly does […]
Original post on mastodon.me.uk
mastodon.me.uk
June 11, 2025 at 7:43 AM