Post 39c3 Ethernet switch mindwipe station

@benjojo the secret all along was to honk it

If anybody happens to see the age infobeamer thing at #39c3 please send a photo! I've yet to see it on a screen yet walking around

@benjojo

(nut rate)

I am occasionally reminded that free will exists and that people use it to find out just how huge a M64 nut is

#39c3 challenge: don't taste the ground (impossible)

my thinkpad still has the 38c3 fahrplan open, i should probably clean up some tabs

I just booked a last-minute trip to Hamburg for #39C3 ✨

Looking forward to seeing folks there. If we are mutuals and you're going too, text me!

If you have an extra ticket, DM me and I'll buy it full price.

Some fantastic tits in the winter sun!

I would love to understand why seemingly all LACNIC members use gmail/hotmail email addresses as their whois contacts. No other region seems to be this concentrated with "personal" email providers for what are almost always businesses, it seems to also extend all the way down to the actual company filings as well!

Corporate emails don't really seem to be that much of a thing in the LATAM region

When even LinkedIn starts doing the " year in review " type things, you know that the whole medium is lost

Screaming into the void about the short evenings

It has been zero days since .bash_history and my overconfidence use of "reverse-i search" has nearly killed me

lol.

I minted a new TLS cert and it seems that OpenAI is scraping CT logs for what I assume are things to scrape from, based on the near instant response from this:

Dec 12 20:43:04 xxxx xxx[719]: 
l=debug 
m="http request" 
pkg=http 
httpaccess= 
handler=(nomatch) 
method=get 
url=/robots.txt 
host=autoconfig.benjojo.uk 
duration="162.176µs" 
statuscode=404 
proto=http/2.0 
remoteaddr=74.7.175.182:38242 
tlsinfo=tls1.3 
useragent="Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/131.0.0.0 Safari/537.36; compatible; OAI-SearchBot/1.3; robots.txt; +https://openai.com/searchbot" 
referrr= 
size=19 
cid=19b14416d95

Today I learned first hand that it is actually possible to break (by mistake rather than doing it on purpose) an mpo breakout cable

If I shine a light through the cable it seems to be fine, but I suspect it is broken for the wavelengths that actually matter

The year is 2035 and all countries now have some kind of online safety act that prevents people from accessing any kind of societal ill (of which is subjective to each individual country)

Apart from "DontGiveAShitastan" who's suspiciously leads the world in VPN companies

AS206345 (Ayandeh Afzayeh Karaneh Co PJS) has signed ASPA objects for the first time!
This means 420 unique ASNs have signed ASPA objects at some point

Hello! I post when networks make ASPA objects for the first time!

Interesting, AS1299 (Arelion/Telia) has made ASPA objects for... AS0 (aka never transit)

This is... a bold move.

Glad that they will be the lab rat for how well this works in practice for a "transit free carrier", given that in practice it seems that a lot of the transit free carriers are not entirely transit free

Ah yes, disk "S.M.A.R.T"

# smartctl -x /dev/sdd
smartctl 7.3 2022-02-28 r5338 [x86_64-linux-6.1.0-32-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-22, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
...
Local Time is:    Mon Dec  8 15:24:45 2025 GMT
...

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: FAILED!
Drive failure expected in less than 24 hours. SAVE ALL DATA.
See vendor-specific Attribute list for failed Attributes.

=====
Left it for a bit, and
=====

# smartctl -x /dev/sdd
smartctl 7.3 2022-02-28 r5338 [x86_64-linux-6.1.0-32-amd64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-22, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
...
Local Time is:    Mon Dec  8 23:38:57 2025 GMT
...

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

It's somewhat nice that malicious crypto miners exist, because they seem to be way faster (for most cases) on the uptake of new RCE exploits and they do fairly harmless (CPU time abuse) actions.

Friend found their react server components server down, and upon investigating found the docker container that normally had their JS server process in, was now ./3s83jmfv.out (I guess it had killed the main process to secure a monopoly for that instance)

Annoying? Sure, but that is way better than "hello I have just nicked your .env file and ransomware/blackmailed you"

I for one am glad that the crypto mining worm people are here to out-compete the more nasty people!

A tube ad saying the quiet part out loud about the current economic situation

A very good morning to the world's most stable CDN

It's almost tragic that they didn't do this on Black Friday/ Cyber Monday

I had an hour to kill last night while waiting to collect my wife from Glasgow Central Station. It was raining heavily and the Christmas neon was lighting the streets. Be rude not to, eh?
#photography #neon #reflections #AbstractPhotography

I've finally re-found a talk I think about at least once a week

"But don’t let that distract you; it was designed to kill people."

" Don't Get Distracted " by Caleb Hearth

A deeply important watch for anyone in software/hardware engineering, especially in a AI era

(available in both text or (I highly recommenced) video)

https://calebhearth.com/dont-get-distracted

or

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBdBoWAtLNI

Richard Hughes got fired by WordPress before Matt did

Something I miss about the days where Intel were building server cases and motherboards is that they generally didn't skimp out on the things that made the operators lives a lot easier.

A great example is the drive caddies, take a look at the thickness of this thing! makes it so much easier to insert the drive when you're not trying to screw it into what is basically razor blades

Drive caddies seem to be very aggressively "designed for manufacturing" even though when doing so often makes the lives of the people's who have to do the replacements a lot worse

It really does say something about the civil areospace industry that it will happily slime millions of people over a ultra rare software bug that is triggered by a celestial event.

Meanwhile, occasionally cars just have a woopsie in their ECU and people end up accelerating straight into a concrete wall and this is seemingly just accepted (by the manufacturers of course) as a okay-ish thing to do as long as it doesn't happen too much

I am forever impressed at how often telegram just doesn't actually work (app opens, but it stays in "connecting..." status for 10+ mins)

It hides it's downtime very well, but for a [instant messaging/propaganda] platform it sure doesn't move messages very often

This MacOS (APFS?) quirk was mentioned at the pub last night, and I still cannot believe this actually works when I tried it myself

Github actions yeah but what about Github consequences

lol what.

Something(?) triggered my 25G/100G switch to load AppArmor profiles for 1Password, Brave, and Discord???

weird and wild, sure I guess, why not, just in case I ever launch discord on this thing.

I guess they can then slup up extra metadata from the switch too

Shai-Hulud Returns: Over 300 NPM Packages infected via Fake Bun Runtime Within Hours

(link)

"No Way To Prevent This" Says Only Package Ecosystem Where This Regularly Happens

Got my first Boiler room call of the year, for BTC of course. Must be great times for that market

The slightly sad/annoying thing about boiler room calls is that its a lot more effort to waste their time because you kinda do need to listen to them to figure out where to direct the rabbit hole

Interesting, it seems that Discord no longer includes the entire history of their gender guessing model output, here is my most recent "discord gender assignment" (75% male)

{
  "user_id": "282657081457115136",
  "day_pt": "2025-07-08T00:00:00",
  "gender": "male",
  "predicted_gender": "male",
  "probability": 0.75259220600128174,
  "prob_male": 0.75259220600128174,
  "prob_female": 0.15768958628177643,
  "prob_non_binary_gender_expansive": 0.089718155562877655,
  "prediction_type": "fixed",
  "model_version": "2025-06-29T00:00:00.000000Z"
}

Given that last time they put this number at 80%+ Male, I don't quite know what to think of this (other than that this is a remarkably stupid endeavor)

On the flip side, the age vibe/guess has become more modest:

{
  "user_id": "282657081457115136",
  "day_pt": "2025-07-08T00:00:00",
  "age": "18-24",
  "predicted_age": "18-24",
  "probability": 0.48142609000205994,
  "prob_13_17": 0.0231526680290699,
  "prob_18_24": 0.48142609000205994,
  "prob_25_34": 0.33853498101234436,
  "prob_35_over": 0.15688623487949371,
  "prediction_type": "fixed",
  "model_version": "2025-06-29T00:00:00.000000Z"
}

18-24? Aww thank you soul-less model, you flatter me

You can find your own numbers if you do a GPDR/Privacy/Data export (that will take ~12 hours hours in my experiance) and it should be in the (surprisingly massive) file Activity/analytics/events-2025-00000-of-00001.json, You will likely need to just grep for "predicted_gender"

I appreciate the Google Takeout stuff including the ol' "Google Confidential and Proprietary" warning inside some of the files exported out (in the "Android Device Configuration Service")

Today I learned that actually writing letters to various organizations actually does work, even if it means that you're sending a letter to Uruguay

Dear Ben Cartwright-Cox,

Hope you are doing well. We are contacting you from LACNIC regarding
your Bulk Whois letter request sent by post.

(for some reason LACNIC forces certain processes to be initiated by post only)

multiple questions here,

A) why does it contain a what 3 words thing? come on...

B) why does the what 3 words thing begin with suffer on a AED? (there was almost certainly was a different one to choose)

Reading a "hot off the press" UK high court judgment that references IRC chat rooms was not on my bingo card for 202x

Given I was at BT Tower (and packed the zoooooom lens in my bag), I took the opportunity for some city infrastructure spotting

Really love the "industrial" piping that is hidden from the street level

The UK IPv6 Council meeting was held at BT (London) Tower the other day, and seemingly as part of the deal of hosting something at BT Tower is that your stuff gets put on the mini scrolling jumbotron.

I wonder how many people looked up and thought "wtf is IPv6 and this URL?"

The age-old British language game of, " is it of insult or is it food? "

hmmm, CF outage seemingly taken 50%~ of their traffic volumes out by the looks of things

@benjojo Disco Stu can't serve this webpage to you, ooh!

Why don't they just host cloudflare where they host the status page

Thank you to the global cloudflare outage for reminding me of my custom error page I made in 2014

Supermicro motherboard box art going for that Animorphs look

Unscheduled reboot safety test (failed) at nikhef this morning it seems

The Sony PlayStation Consoles are the most successful distribution of FreeBSD, this is likely obvious when you think about it, but when I look at bgp.tools traffic I see about 7x more traffic from the PS5 than (real) browsers running from FreeBSD.

I don't know who decides to use bgp.tools on their PS5/PS4, but more power to you I guess

Google Maps release the 2025 London Street-view images you cowards, I am still waiting for the other side of https://benjojo.co.uk/u/benjojo/h/956H4hjKbV4S2jWTVl