This extortion spam email's attempt at evading spam detecting by using homoglyphs is hilarious, mostly the

"broωsing" -> "oωo"

but also the rather... lol language?

Incredible spam 10/10, not even upset it landed in my inbox

The PDU, it screams, and honestly... Me too buddy

Unsure how to feel about @NetworkManager being the Linux fedi's version of the Wendy's twitter account

Ouch! Hetzner will be wholesale replacing the motherboards of 3 different SKUs over all of their locations, That's a rough decision to have to come to

https://status.hetzner.com/incident/7fae9cca-b38c-4154-8a27-14e6dfea5c1e

https://docs.hetzner.com/robot/dedicated-server/general-information/mainboard-replacement-for-several-dedicated-servers/

huge hugops to Hetzner, that's a immense amount of work to commit to

Is it too much to ask for a 2024 version of the HP Gen 8 Microserver? It honestly feels like HPE accidentally made a machine so good it cannibalised so much of their other markets that they vowed to never make a microserver that nice ever again

Another great NetLdn meetup last night! Including a talk about mitigating "acts of god" as a WISP (hint, wind makes your radios fly away, and water makes everything sad)

The next NetLdn is on Feb 13th and already has a full line up! If you are around say come say hi!

@benjojo

We do not know why we are here. We do not know who built the underground. We do not know why everyone on the underground is as they are.

Did another hidden London tour! This time Baker Street.

Love the post apocalyptic vibes the behind the scenes bits of TFL always have

/me eyebrows in low earth orbit

(cite)

I don't miss many x/witter accounts, but I really do miss the daily posting of @defencecharts

How could you not love these incredibly easy to understand works of art

Huh, first ever case of seeing a "verified" RCS message like this... from HMRC?!

What "verified by BT" actually means in this context is a bit of a mystery, but the whole thing seems a tad jank, this is the first non-spam RCS message I've gotten so far

New post!

After a over a year of slowly messing around and calling favors, I have to get a TOSLINK (yes, the HiFi audio standard) link to go 14600 times further than the spec sheets suggests!

And learned a whole load of how modern optical stuff works along the way!

Building Ultra Long Range TOSLINK

https://blog.benjojo.co.uk/post/sfp-experiment-ultra-long-range-toslink

Visited a nuclear power plant today (Sizewell B)! Sadly no photos allowed, but a remarkably great tour given the average tour group was clearly schools or various non-ish technical groups, ours were all infra/power nerds and I was amazed how well they could answer all of the meaty questions!

This may not look like it but this is what peak oven element looks like

Happy new years to the 2026 CT logs that are now slowly populating with 2025 1 year duration X.509 certs!

Even bigger ups to the certs that issued bang on UTC new years!

I love this prompt from the angle that it's such a low cost airline thing to do.

Surely it is not worth prompting for 3p riiiight??

Need a dedicated button on google flights for "actually London airports" that sets this

@benjojo why yes, I just happen to have this lying around
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Emxe-j5EcuvW9Us2Z-NKxwpt7J3R6PMn/view?usp=drive_link

"HEALTH EFFECTS
EVALUATION OF THEATRICAL
SMOKE, HAZE, AND PYROTECHNICS"

Page 170 for the conclusions.

Does anybody know of any academic literature around the medium-term (10 hours a day for 5 days) exposure to smoke machines?

The best thing I can find is literature around accumulated exposure around vapes, and this isn't really a fair comparison as people typically don't vape via their noses

I'm mostly asking because it turns out that I get a very slow running nosebleed around these things, it's not really an issue but I know other friends where who get much bigger problems

(For what it's worth, I realise it's not just a #38c3 smoke machine thing, I've never managed to figure out what causes these very slow nose bleeds until just the last few days, but the last 10 years of these now make sense with this context)

pfft, welp, I was not expecting my laptop stickers to be that visible on the video! I guess the audience angle vs the c3VOC angle is quite different lol

See you next year #38c3

hot damn the linux-firmware package is 498 MB, the chips thinking way too much these days

Missing the vibe with the lasers in Hall H #38c3

And some more pictures from #38C3

Happy to see that our sfp-experimenter boards were put to some good use by @benjojo in his #38C3 talk on doing (among other things) TOSLINK over SFP transceivers https://media.ccc.de/v/38c3-going-long-sending-weird-signals-over-long-haul-optical-networks

I get the impression that the LTE/NR roaming story is worse (and getting wrose) than it's former 2G/UMTS counterparts. This SMS from my carrier when I got back to the UK does not help this impression

me too, bye #38c3

Good night yolocolo #38c3

#38c3, awake, but at what cost

@c3noc feels like you hit some wifi client ceiling ?

dial up BBS at #38c3 !

! #38c3

another day, another time I have been caught by the auto-CW behavior of honk where any two letters and a : will turn into a content warning title

Me: hello German ATM, I would like 100 EUR?

ATM: Would you like that in a variety of notes?

Me: Yes!

Proceeds to supply 1x100eur note

Well, my apologies to the bar as I try and pay for a 2 EUR drink with 100 euro note

Merry Xmas, and hello from the kitten that is a guest this year!

See some of you at #38c3 soon!

birds

Cat

"if you have been on a video call in the past year or so, you have probably been on a call that a AI assistant has joined"

(cite, a CF demo/ad)

-

At this moment, I realised I am clearly in a entirely different orbit of existence to most of the tech companies

You certainly wont regret having a emergency ipset of 3.5M entries:

[8690887.043966] SLUB: Unable to allocate memory on node -1 (gfp=0x8020)
[8690887.043969]   cache: kmalloc-64, object size: 64, buffer size: 64, default order: 0, min order: 0
[8690887.043974]   node 0: slabs: 32738, objs: 2095232, free: 0
[8691714.855952] ipset: page allocation failure: order:0, mode:0x200020
[8691714.855965] CPU: 0 PID: 11215 Comm: ipset Not tainted 3.10.0-1160.119.1.el7.x86_64 #1
[8691714.855967] Hardware name: Bochs Bochs, BIOS Bochs 01/01/2011

I'm sure that every packet that needs to this ipset is like when something drives into a concrete wall

aww yeah, it's that week again

adding /* Ansible managed */ to the top of my my config files I don't want anyone to touch as a psyop.

It's not like I use Ansible, but that same thing did just trick me on another system into searching for a Ansible that didnt exist, so well done past operator

Is anyone keeping a high score board for sizes of GDPR polycules of various sites?

this morning I've made the choice to close 300 forum sites that have about 275k monthly active users, nearly all from the UK.

I've run forums for over 28 years, and did so to build families for those without families, to try and create a cure for social isolation and loneliness, to combat suicide, to create joy and love out of nothing but connections between people.

and it worked. it still works.

but on the 16th March 2025 I will delete the virtual servers running it all... that date is important, it's the last day before the UK Online Safety Act goes into enforcement.

I run these communities philanthropically, giving my time and money to do so, I ask nothing back, I just help build a nicer World.

but the scope of the Act is too broad, and my forums come under it... it does not matter that it's run by an individual and not a company, that it loses money every month... merely by being linked to the UK and allowing users to speak to users... it's within scope.

the penalties of non-compliance would be so devastatingly ruinous to me, that I don't see I have a choice... I must now perform a social harm to protect myself.

this is devastating.

https://www.lfgss.com/conversations/401475/

I cannot even express what these forums have achieved... the marriages, births, support for those with cancer, the love, the communities they have created.

Happy Xmas lights testing the RCD/GFCI season

I was annoyed that the bank my biz uses is increasing prices by 80%, and then I looked at NatWest and see that they charge at least £0.35 to do anything (receiving money, cash, paying something on card, really, the whole lot!) and now I am somewhat less upset

Y'all know what... this #X11 -> #Wayland switch is a great parallel on why we haven't ditched and rewritten #FRRouting yet:

Yes, it's >25 year old code, some of it truly toxic and radioactive, and some really poor design too.

But writing a new one is yrs of pain to get it to 90% (that also need to be funded = 404 here), and then a decade to fix half the edge case hellbugs.

It's written in the blood of previous users&bugs. (h/t @benjojo for that idiom, I had no wording for that concept before)

One for the Brits at the moment

@benjojo HDMI to two cigarettes adapter vibes.

Double ~~barrelled~~ RJ45 QSFP+ module anyone? This monstrosity gets you 2x10G BASE-T in a single QSFP+ port (you are still throwing away 50% of port capacity here though)

It bends around tight spots by the looks of it as well!

HPE Synergy Dual 10GBASE-T QSFP+ 30m RJ45 Transceiver 838327-B21

https://www.ebay.com/itm/196729269081

ooh, Kernel space OpenVPN dataplane on net-dev

https://lore.kernel.org/netdev/20241209-b4-ovpn-v14-0-ea243cf16417@openvpn.net/T/

The KEX/Auth,etc stuff is still user space with this, vs wg being entirely kernel space

Unsure what to think about this, seems like a "well if wg can do it, why can't we"