RE: the brutal secrets of UK deportation flight Esparto 11 (the guardian)
At 5.15am, a detainee in a T-shirt and boxers was presented for handover with a bloody nose. Described as “calm and polite throughout”, the Kuwaiti’s nose had been injured during extraction while he repeatedly insisted his removal was cancelled, the escorts wrote. When they finally checked, it transpired he had been telling the truth.

these people are coming to our shores on little rubber dinghies, asking for help. and we’re breaking their noses and sending them away

RE: may community update

interesting watching this freenode event playing out. some projects moving to a new irc server, some moving to matrix. I wonder if any are moving to jabber?</>

is it possible to federate a Matrix room that started on matrix.org? otherwise this seems like moving the problem (centralized services) to a new location

it’s been good seeing how smooth it can be, though. the indieweb folks did an incredible job of seamlessly moving the Slack and Matrix integrations from freenode to libera

RE: Conduit - Your own chat server

Conduit is a less resource-hungry alternative to synapse for a Matrix homeserver.

it isn’t ready yet, but i’m looking forward to getting some ram back when it is. i only need a server capable of handling things for 10+ people, not thousands or millions.

RE: https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega-dropdown (Ben Kamens)

this is cool, a triangle bounding box for menus so if the user is moving down and to the right then it keeps their previous selection.

https://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html

Was created by Tog for the old Macintosh operating system. it was abandoned by NeXT, and so it’s missing from macOS 10+.

Most of us, however, have our forearms mounted on a pivot we like to call our elbow. That means that moving our hand describes an arc, rather than a straight line.

The Windows folks tried to overcome the pivot problem with a hack: If they see the user move down into range of the next item on the primary menu, they don’t instantly close the second-level menu. Instead, they leave it open for around a half second, so, if users are really quick, they can be inaccurate but still get into the second-level menu before it slams shut.

When I specified the Mac hierarchical menu algorithm in the mid-’80s, I called for a buffer zone shaped like a <, so that users could make an increasingly-greater error as they neared the hierarchical without fear of jumping to an unwanted menu. As long as the user’s pointer was moving a few pixels over for every one down, on average, the menu stayed open, no matter how slow they moved. (Cancelling was still really easy; just deliberately move up or down.) Apple hierarchicals were still less efficient than single level menus, because of the added target, but at least they were less challenging than the average video game.

oh, a triangle is a static way of counting the ratio of X pixels to Y pixels

that’s interesting

 

 

RE: Cheese beats crackers (bbc news)
A helpful virus is making its way around the web, checking computers for vulnerabilities and closing them.

20 years ago a virus called “cheese” went around closing holes opened by a virus called “Lion”

It scans networks with certain net addresses until it finds one with a back door, or port, that has been opened by the Lion worm.

this article

The program is known as a “worm” because it travels across a network copying itself as it goes. By contrast a “trojan” is a program that looks benign but contains a malicious payload.

remember when the news used to tell us the difference between all the different viruses all the time

 

a photo of a stuffed animal tux (the linux penguin), captioned "the Linux mascot penguin: An increasingly popular target"

lol who is attacking tux

also what is going on with that weirdly proud, tough tux

looks like a kid who’s sure they just owned everyone