Second attempt at sputter coating an organic sample (human hair, mildly damaged) for SEM imaging.

This was 100W DC (~400V), Cr, 3 minutes.

Blobs are Cr crystals from too aggressive deposition rate or poor sample prep... we think?

Why hello there small business owner! Are you one of those business certified gays?

Does anybody want a free official Google pixel 7A case? I accidentally bought one (I have a 7, not 7a, ooops)

Edit: Claimed! Thank you for playing

I do love Wikipedia for it's sometimes "at a glance" or "simplified" sections and then proceeds to show some maths or diagram that looks like it requires at least one degree to fully understand

Throwback to when I printed out business cards for the IDA Pro 6.8 'community edition' license owner. Still not sure if that was a real person.

Wonder if there's still a few around floating around in CTF/hacker circles? I remember distributing a bunch of them.. but this was almost a decade ago.

The megaport dashboard on my side giving me a "intercontinental ballistic ethernet layer 2" vibe

The bgp.tools megaport/megaix setup is a wonderful horror, to the point where a ARP packet in New Zealand is (eventually) heard all the way in the Netherlands where it lands on my "party" port

Seemingly the most American network RFO I just saw:

Sorry the IX was partitioned last night because of a tornado

Got lost in a rabbit hole, and ended up adding MBR (aka "BIOS") booting support to the headless IPMI resetter, So I could wipe a HPE Gen 8 machine without faffing with a screen and OS

Man there are about 1000 different ways to make a ISO and about 3 of them actually result in a bootable image on all BIOS + UEFI + HP

https://github.com/benjojo/headless-ipmi-reset

FWIW, It seems like one of the old Twitter ASNs AS63179 seems to be now doing heavy web scraping (presumably for grok), you can probs get away with dropping the whole thing

No thank you, I would rather do some incredibly unpleasant things than that

Soliciting advice for email newsletter sending services (for opt-in bgp.tools changelog updates etc)

Looking for:

A) Ones you have used first hand
B) Ones that are hosted in Europe (EU/UK/CH)

I do my own transactional email but I am not brave enough to do newsletters

Put a block of ice on my passively (via a large block of metal) cooled router since it's hot today, and yup, impressive how the cool-ness stuck around after removing it

I am really looking forward to tomorrow when I'm not boiling alive, a simple debugging session for a big fix took way too long just now

*inhales* HONK!!

A classic situation

Cor, RIPE just had a Brexit referendum moment

51.12% to a 48.88% vote

On a incredibly contentious topic that has been squabbled for years

Or 68 votes

This will surely not have any long running consequences to the mailing list arguments...

CSI_6919-Kopie
Flyby of a Wagtail (Motacilla alba)
Surpsiringly hard as they fly really fast and the wings are often then not closed while its in a bomb-bird mode as they are not really gliding. 

1/4000s, F5.6, ISO2500

#bird #photography #nature #birdphotography #wagtail

The puzzling habit of networking social events having counterproductively super loud live music

It seems relatively clear at this point that we (the wider industry) now have an extremely good C/C++ linters, with the only downside that they are expensive (relative to previous tools) to run.

Much like the "if your company depends on running other people's x86 code, then Spectre/Meltdown/etc are devastating", I think if your company is/was depending on the user separation boundaries in the OS to work, then you are in a lot of trouble.

[Unauth'd file read/Local Priv Esc]'s have always kind of been low(er) hanging fruit, but they are nowhere near as cool/good at RCEs.

Now that we have machines to find these at reasonable competence and speed, it is probably a good time to look at anything that you run that [processes user supplied data, or speaks over the network] that is written in C/C++ and find memory safe alternatives. It's not those memory safe alternatives are going to be bug free, but they are far less likely to cause you to need to upgrade your kernel every few days to urgently catch up with local LPE's

Even if you are not going to use the new auditing systems for whatever reason, the "enemy" (whether that is your intelligence agencies, ransom gangs, etc) will have no problem trading a few 100$ for what used to cost $10,000's to do.

The Debian Bookworm -> Trixie upgrade path is by far the [worst/most explosive] I have in recent memory, on the same level of tricky as the sysvinit -> systemd migration

The sysctls location change being the #1 killer, but there are so many paper cuts in that particular upgrade to keep an eye out for

Despite the common consensus, self hosting your outbound email it's not impossible to do (*)

bgp.tools has been sending it's own outbound email since day one of having the ability to send email, while i have been doing a migration i have discovered that rspamd (for DKIM signing) was keeping it's own logs outside of journalctl, meaning they never got rotated (grrr)

The upside of this log rotation failure is that I can give you this graph: The total email volume sent per month via bgp.tools

I don't think it has been particularly hard (other than hotmail) to run this, and it means that I don't have to give customer emails to another 3rd party.

I think the only struggle for a lot of people is that it's quite difficult to find "clean" or at least "boring" IPs to send out from. i suspect you probably couldn't replicate these results with Hetzner/Digital Ocean/etc without some serious fighting or luck

(*) unless your service depends on sending to hotmail/live/msn emails, because that shit is impossible

Cracking open a new tube of toothpaste and uh, they shurnkflated the toothpaste 😢

The Kagi LinkedIn translate is honestly a incredible marketing tool for them.

Throwing the Cloudflare layoff blog post into it and putting it through a few round trips as the "English" translation gets shorter and more frank

Warnings of major disruption as trains across southern England disrupted by radio fault

Did someone/something break the UK's GSM-R stack?

Mildly interesting, it seems that one of the name servers for the .de DNS zone has all of their Cogent customers going via CNNIC (China Internet Network Information Center) all the way to China

A traceroute from Cogent in Frankfurt:

traceroute to 194.246.96.1 (194.246.96.1), 30 hops max, 60 byte packets
 1  * *
 2  be5200.ccr41.fra05.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.76.169)  0.603 ms
 3  be7946.ccr42.par01.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.72.117)  9.937 ms 
 4  be2780.ccr32.mrs02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.72.226)  20.813 ms 
 5  be2899.ccr21.hkg02.atlas.cogentco.com (154.54.0.42)  181.371 ms 
 6  154.18.9.165 (154.18.9.165)  185.283 ms 
 7  159.226.254.229 (159.226.254.229)  220.828 ms 
 8  * *
 9  218.241.107.69 (218.241.107.69)  221.520 ms !X *

Probably a mistake rather than anything malicious, but that's still some extra long haul miles for some DNS queries

Polymarket market for "next TLD or major domain to break DNSSEC" because it is not "if" but "when"

Another win for DNSSEC

Unmatched at turning small ops mistakes into country wide ops consequences

Forgot to post this last month, but there is a abandoned huge 32m satellite dish sitting in the Azores, with nature slowly reclaiming it with weeds and moss (as is everything in the Azores)

You can see a very similar (likely the same model) still being used in Pakistan for PTCL here on google maps

The Spezi people bring you: Bi-Sexual Cola

DZ: ukpol, elections

Observations from my letter box:

A) The green party sure do send a lot of paper to me

B) Labor seemingly have picked up the tricks of the Americans by sending me increasingly insidious smear letters about the Greens

Like, look at this stuff:

https://electionleaflets.org/leaflets/23707/

https://electionleaflets.org/leaflets/23685/

https://electionleaflets.org/leaflets/23701/

Perhaps my "favourite" (not my scan) is the this bullet point list: https://electionleaflets.org/leaflets/23702/

I uploaded all of my election letters to https://electionleaflets.org ( You should upload yours too! )

Picked up a AMS-IX mug from a recent conference swag table and I didn't realise it's like 70% of the size of a normal mug. Why! Surely you want your customers to use the mugs you give them, if bgp.tools was to have branded promo mugs it would be like the giant Sports Direct mugs where if you spill it you flood your fucking house

A yes, a massive "VPN" button wedged between back and forward, thanks firefox

Firefox might be a chrome advertising psyop

Otters!

Please enjoy this absolutely furious goose

HONK!

Fluffy!

When the crunchy bit of grass is just so good

"Bring back triple cheeseburger in McDonalds" https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/768167

Iran claims US exploited networking equipment backdoors during strikes

Cisco, Juniper, Fortinet, and MikroTik devices allegedly rebooted or disconnected during the conflict.

Oh don't worry about the MikroTik's, they just do that (reboot unexpectedly in production at inopportune times)

There is something very funny that someone in Sun all of those years ago decided that 2021 was the start of "preposterous time"

#define PREPOSTEROUS_YEARS (2021 - POSIX_BASE_YEAR)

Sun Microsystems clearly accidentality hired a Cassandra because that was worryingly spot on

via https://mastodon.social/@zarbet/110823319981235740 / https://mastodon.social/@tubetime/110811949233318077

While travelling last week I came across this in my hotel room, this seems like a fantastic way to have your USB C powered device's chassis float to 120V live if you use it wrong enough in the dark

Birds, the angle you take a photo of them can change the vibe a lot

From a

>:|

to a

:o

On a ocean facing fence full of love locks full of people's relationship commitments, somebody was just like "well this one's probably more of a combination lock job to be honest"

scdaemon -> scDemons

The asynchronous_metric_log clickhouse table that has no auto expiry and just grows forever is a ploy by big SSD to get you to blindly buy more storage without checking if the cluster is just infinitely growing for no reason

I was in the Azores a few weeks ago, and it really does feel like a place where if humans suddenly decided to leave all at once, it would not take long for nature to reclaim everything

Great place to go for those who like [Moss, Ferns, Abandoned stuff]

How many TCP segments is a reasonable number for a TLS Client Hello?

Depending on your network set up, for connecting to bgp.tools until maybe a couple of hours ago the (non reasonable, but real) answer may have been up to 22!

It turns out on IPv4 bgp.tools has been advertising the wrong TCP window scale for quite some time and it's a true testament to TCP's flexibility that any of this was working in the first place.

Regardless, connection setups on bgp.tools should now work a little better on IPv4 now that your machine wont have to send 21 extra packets

inet_aton wins again

Here I was waiting for output on a tcpdump -ni any host 3306... that should have been port 3306, but of course in the world of inet_aton "3306" is a valid IP address of 0.0.12.234!

Thanks inet_aton!

Some other fun things I spotted in the Cogent Q4 2025 investor presentation:

A) Cogent is now averaging at 800 tbit/s of traffic

B) While their office broadband biz is 4%~ of their total traffic, it's 43% of their $ revenue! Not bad!

C) For their off-net IP offering (aka, they use another provider to do the last mile) over half of the cost to the customer is to the last mile loop provider!

Full thing here: https://www.cogentco.com/files/docs/about_cogent/investor_relations/presentation/Cogent_IR_Presentation_4Q25.pdf

Hah, Cogent CEO seems to recognize that having the ability for customers to make RPKI ROA's on their space (aka, signing a ARIN agreement) made its IPv4 rentable there's a lot more appealing to customers!