Fazal Majid

https://social.vivaldi.net/@fazalmajid

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homepage: https://majid.info/

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npub1kpecwswlevyykagjuggxwgpr6ph8jd4wr8y2xpsxfft44lmpuswq4hcsgn

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fazalmajid_at_social.vivaldi.net@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqstquu8g80ukzztw5fwyyr8yq3aqmnex6hpnj9rqcry5466las7g8qprpmhxue69uhhyetvv9ujumt0d4hhxarj9ecxjmntqy28wumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnyv9kh2uewd9hsz8thwden5te0dehhxarj94c82c3wwajkcmr0wfjx2u3wdejhgzjh8sx

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relay.momostr.pink

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npub1kpecwswlevyykagjuggxwgpr6ph8jd4wr8y2xpsxfft44lmpuswq4hcsgn

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Last Notes

2026-10-31 09:38:42 UTC

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And they still haven't acknowledged the breach, which violates all sorts of notification laws.

2026-09-07 19:13:08 UTC

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an inferior substitute to stroopwaffels.

2026-09-07 12:21:58 UTC

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Telco standards (ITU and ETSI) are paywalled, therefore cannot be considered to be free as in anything free.

2026-09-02 08:47:44 UTC

I subscribe to The Londoner, which has some of the most incisive reporting on London, unlike the propaganda corporate media. This article on the causes of the collapse of Thames Water is enraging and stunning in equal measure. Yesterday PM Andy Burnham lay much of the blame for the UK's current condition on Thatcher. Her successors are also to blame, but leaving critical networks like water or electricity to be looted is government incompetence of the highest order:
https://www.the-londoner.co.uk/why-thames-water-sewage-leaks/

2026-08-31 17:44:55 UTC

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It's because 8% are seniors with dementia who got confused and pressed the wrong button.

2026-08-04 21:43:31 UTC

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surely as a proud Dutchman you meant this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel_(M._C._Escher)

2026-08-04 07:36:48 UTC

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So basically it is ROT-13 in a font? Trivially defeated by scrapers, maximum aggravation for humans using assistive technology.

2026-08-02 10:09:49 UTC

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the US started diverging from the rest of the developed world around 1980. Who could have imagined Reagan's "Greed is good" ethos would lead to wide-scale looting in the health care sector? /s
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy-vs-health-expenditure?time=earliest..latest

2026-07-22 21:18:59 UTC

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the fawning plug for eIDAS undermines the credibility of the article. I have no doubt Meta lobbied hard to pass the buck, although $2B is extremely high even for an astroturfing campaign.

2026-06-27 10:06:08 UTC

@npub1kwa…e0nj Android 17 introduces a new permission ACCESS_LOCAL_NETWORK and when my phone upgraded to it, FairEmail lost the ability to connect to my email server at home. Google in their infinite wisdom won't allow apps in the Play Store to request that permission yet, nor F-Droid, so I have to sideload from their Git repo. I think this is going to be a sufficient problem it's worth mentioning widely in the release notes and your other channels like Mastodon.
https://m66b.github.io/FairEmail/#:~:text=Nearby%20devices%20(ACCESS_LOCAL_NETWORK)%3A%20to%20access%20email%20servers%20via%20local%20network%20addresses%20(Android%2017%20and%20later%20only%3B%20not%20available%20in%20the%20Play%20Store%20release)

2026-06-03 08:35:46 UTC

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if you go to Pizza Hacker, you don't have to worry about shrinkflation

2026-05-27 14:10:31 UTC

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yes, I noticed that after posting. The network my GrapheneOS phone runs on (Three UK) never deployed 2G, so it's largely a non-issue for me.

2026-05-21 09:28:23 UTC

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This diagram is misleading because it does not show the ages in proportion to their share of the population, or of their propensity to vote.

2026-05-20 20:15:58 UTC

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I'd be more interested in disabling EDGE/3G the way Apple does in Lockdown mode due to the many security bugs. Is that "preferred Network Type: 5G or 4G only" does?

2026-05-12 18:52:59 UTC

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That's anachronistic: the French Revolution (started July 1789) happened after the US Constitution was promulgated in March 1789, the Bill of Rights in September. The Reign of Terror was in 1792–94.
The real reason why the feared democracy was they were all rich men who feared taxation. Madison is crystal-clear:
> In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place. If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country against innovation. Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability.

2026-03-21 09:35:27 UTC

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it's not just energy. Fertilizer shortages are going to kill millions as global warming has weakened food security worldwide, and then replacing the helium from Qatar is going to be a major challenge.

2026-03-09 16:05:41 UTC

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I wrote and have been been using my own feed reader, Temboz, for over 24 years now. The two essential features of any good reader in my book are:
1) filtering. Don't want to hear about the inane Kardashians or the insane Trump any more? Double-click on their occurrence, click "thumbs-down", adjust the filtering setting and boom, mental health restored.
2) giving you control over the order articles are shown, as opposed to the Meta or Google algorithm that does not have your best interests at heart.

2026-03-05 09:10:36 UTC

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compare that with France, where former heads of state like Jacques Chirac or Nicolas Sarkozy were successfully prosecuted, or Germany where so was Helmut Kohl, who reunified the country. Italy had a revolt led by its judges to nail corrupt politicians.
Just as Americans are unaware of how bad their health "care" system is, Brits are blissfully unaware of the corruption and unaccountability of its elites, starting of course with the royal family setting the tone.

2026-03-05 09:01:57 UTC

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never, the Establishment looks out for its own. Can you recall a single instance of accountability in the last 70 years or more? Aberfan, the Cambridge 5, Bloody Sunday, Hillsborough, Jean-Charles de Menezes, war crimes in Afghanistan or Iraq, Grenfell, tainted blood, Post Office Horizon, the list just goes on, with the guilty as often as not promoted like Lord Robens (Aberfan) or Cressida Dick (Menezes).
That's why the Andrew formerly known as Prince or Mandelson being arrested is so newsworthy, but they have not been prosecuted and condemnded for their crimes.

2026-03-01 12:30:55 UTC

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well, for Netanyahu, an end to war means losing power and going to prison.

2026-02-14 21:11:37 UTC

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Axolotl vats or handmaiden, depending on which dystopia they mistook for a how-to manual. Though on second thought, the most likely source given their affinities is probably "The Boys from Brazil".

2026-02-11 15:28:22 UTC

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"There is nothing so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher."
-- Cicero

2026-01-22 08:17:11 UTC

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they're not the Gestapo. More like the Sturmabteilung or the Einsatzgruppen. Or for a more recent simile the Honduran or El Salvadoran death squads.

2026-01-19 17:04:55 UTC

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that is naive. The Europeans also have their own copyright lobbies, which are if anything even more rabid than US ones.
Just one example: France has a levy on all storage devices, funneled directly into the pockets of copyright collection agency SACEM. Thus the SD card in your digicam or the database drives in your hospital are taxed to fund Nicolas Sarkozy's wife Carla Bruni or Taylor Swift (with a hefty commission taken by the self-dealing scum at SACEM, of course).

2025-10-27 13:25:15 UTC

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it’s even worse than that. 20 years ago most of the network pipes were owned and managed by telcos, nowadays it is the hyperscalers who commission international fiber cables and the bulk of Internet traffic goes over their backbones:
https://hknog.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/01_GeoffHuston_TheDeath_of_Transit_and_Beyond.pdf

2025-07-29 00:09:28 UTC

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another similar device:
https://www.elecrow.com/crowview-note-all-in-one-portable-monitor-phone-to-laptop-device-with-full-featured-type-c-sbcs-mini-pc-pc-game-console-compatibility.html

2025-07-03 05:56:42 UTC

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I’m guessing he actually farms out the work to freelancers. And that’s how North Korea infiltrates your company and steaks crypto or intellectual property:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21043693
https://therecord.media/doj-raids-laptop-farms-crackdown

2025-05-02 10:20:44 UTC

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or more aggressively, the Zip bomb reverse-DDOS technique:
https://idiallo.com/blog/zipbomb-protection

2025-04-27 07:44:36 UTC

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even the commodity parts are managed through proprietary APIs and it’s exceedingly difficult to find ops staff who can work with more than one clod:
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/the-lock-in-you-dont-see/

2025-04-24 08:41:39 UTC

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read Travis Ormandy’s scathing take-downs of sloppy antivirus software coding practices, like replacing strncpy with stripy “for speed” in code that inspects every single I/O your system does, enabling zero-click exploits. There’s a reason why Big Tech companies like Apple or Meta do not use AV and rely on other measures.

2025-04-12 21:30:48 UTC

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usually the dichotomy is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS for VMs, S3, EBS) vs Platform as a Service (PaaS, all the services with APIs other than commodity storage or compute).

2025-03-24 18:48:52 UTC

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sadly not surprising at all to any student of history. After all, IBM eagerly collaborated with the OG Nazis' efforts to round up Jews and Roma:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust

2025-03-24 11:35:01 UTC

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it’s probably true is some carefully parsed way. Companies with a clue moved a long time ago. Stragglers waited until the election, are scrambling but it will take time to migrate because those things take time even for competent organizations, and it will take months to kick in.

2025-03-05 14:56:57 UTC

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is there any SOC vendor that meets those requirements (specially memory tagging) other than Google's Tensor series as implemented in the Pixels since the Pixel 8?

2025-03-02 12:17:36 UTC

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anecdotally it seems location lock is much faster since this release landed. Kudos!

2025-01-23 16:53:52 UTC

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hey, I had that compiler as well!

2025-01-23 14:11:08 UTC

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reminds me a bit of this XKCD:
https://xkcd.com/1807/
and also of the Avast virus-scanner that Tavis Ormandy discovered could be trivially exploited because the scanner replaced strncpy with strcpy in an open-source library "for speed" (not linking to the original because it is on Xitter).

2025-01-18 20:48:13 UTC

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Instagram is largely written in Python and WhatsApp in Erlang, both relatively slow languages compared to C/C++/Rust/Zig/Go, and yet they manage to scale. At a previous company, we had a Python based server handling 4000 sustained requests/second with 9ms latency at the 99th percentile, so it's not just the language at fault.

2025-01-14 13:33:06 UTC

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Thatcher was originally a scientist (chemistry, studied under Nobelist Dorothy Hodgkin).
To this day she is the only British PM with a science or engineering background, which may explain why the country, run as it is by Oxford PPE or liberal arts wankers, is circling the drain.

2024-10-20 21:01:27 UTC

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it’s a bit like the exclusions in the fine print of most software licenses that tell you not to use the software to run nuclear reactors or medical equipment.

2024-09-13 13:09:23 UTC

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don’t forget refusing to invest in the education of medical professionals and choosing instead to freeload on the education budgets of desperately poor countries like India, Nigeria or The Philippines in an inversion of noblesse oblige.

2024-08-02 12:17:09 UTC

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it's worth mentioning SQLite has probably the most impressive unit test suite of any database. The attention to detail and quality of Richard Hipp is incredible.
That said Parquet with DuckDB is clearly the way to go. Blazing fast single node analytics with an upgrade path to Apache Iceberg and pretty much any big data system supports it.