If Cory Doctorow can fall victim to a phishing scam, what hope do the rest of us have?
Coincidentally, someone on the Irish Tech Community slack reported that they were the victim of an attempt where their “bank” read out the first 8 digits of their virtual card and was asking them to read out the last 8. Turns out that you can basically construct the first 8 digits of any card if you know the card type, the issuer and the issuing country.
Let’s be careful out there.
Anecdata!
We were in Harvey Norman yesterday buying a new fridge. Have you ever been fridge-shopping with two small children? Hoooly shit is it hard work. After myself and my wife finally managed to snag 10 seconds of peace and quiet to discuss the options to ourselves, I took the kids off to distract them with the demo-mode TVs while my wife talked to a salesperson.
While the kids were hypnotised by the crisp images of crystal glasses melting like ice, I used the opportunity to ask a salesperson if they happened to have any 4K Blu-Ray players because I’m doubling down on physical media. “I’ll have to check the system” he says. So we walk across the shop to their DOS-based(!) inventory system. Along the way we pass an entire row of record players. About 20 of them. Everything from cheapo all-in-ones to top-of-the-range Pro-ject ones. They were even selling a few vinyl records. “No, we don’t have any 4K Blu-Ray players,” says the salesman, “we could order one in if you’d like?”
Apparently in 2024, a 150-year-old technology is better catered for in a shop like Harvey Norman than a 20-year old one.
(Incidentally, DID Electrical, Curry’s and Power City also did not have any Blu-Ray players for sale, but they did have DVD players for sale.)
See also:
This is probably old news, but TIL you can install your own fonts on your Kindle.
I’m a reluctant Visual Studio Code user. It’s got a lot of great design ideas but it’s so slowwwwww and I miss the speed of something like Sublime Text. Zed (from the makers of Atom) is an editor that prioritises speed but copies a lot from vscode. It’s just missing vscode’s massive extensibility, but now it’s been open sourced maybe that will change? One worth keeping an eye on.
This is pretty huge - Casey Newton’s is taking his newsletter off of Substack because of its ridiculous policies on hate speech.
In 2023, we added more than 70,000 free subscribers. While I would love to credit that growth exclusively to our journalism and analysis, I believe we have seen firsthand how quickly and aggressively tools like <substack’s newsletter promotion features> can grow a publication.
And if Substack can grow a publication like ours that quickly, it can grow other kinds of publications, too.
I think I’ve read most of these books. My favourites are:
Basically Mein Kampf
Bomb Cock 2: Mutually Assured Destruction
and
- The Turing Test, but sexy
Old Made Good is a vintage shop in Nashville that takes boring old prints and makes them a thousand times better they’re extremely My Shit. Their Instagram was an instant-follow for me.
Wes Anderson has started a movie club/streaming site, where each month’s films are curated by different people like Mike Mills and Ari Wegner. So kind of like Mubi used to be? But it’s $10/month and the films are only streaming in the US. Cute idea but kind of a shit deal for non-US people.
In the middle of 2022, my tech restlessness took over and I felt like I needed a change. It had been years since I looked at Wordpress in any serious way and I was curious to see what had changed under the hood there (answer: probably a lot if you’re using it as a CMS for a complicated site but as a lowly single blogger using it for personal writing, not a lot!). Plus, there has been a bit of movement in terms of using sqlite as a WP backend which feels like a pretty great step forward to me? So over the course of an evening, I moved my blog from Hugo back to Wordpress. I stayed on there for about 14 months, switching back last week. Let’s talk about the experience.
The WP ecosystem is great. Apps like MarsEdit make it so easy to interact with your blog - uploading images and dropping them into a blog post is very straightforward. Having a client on my phone meant that I could write and publish blog posts from anywhere. And the organisation of posts inside of Wordpress is incredibly simple. And the search! Oh my goodness, so great. Loved all that.
But the spam is unreal. Wordpress is basically unusable without an Askimet account to scan every comment. And even using sqlite as the backend and not running an entire MySQL server for my extremely low-traffic blog felt a good bit safer, every interaction is still run through PHP which is still way more of an attack vector than I’m comfortable with (if you want to spike your anxiety, try Vladimir Smitka’s WordPress installer attack race where he documents a Wordpress blog being compromised during installation 😬).
Writing and publishing on Hugo, on the other hand, is much slower and more convoluted. Let’s be generous and say it’s “deliberate”. There’s no phone client that lets me publish blog posts from wherever (not that I ever actually did that, but it was a nice option to have). Publishing can only really be done on a computer1. Want to embed an image in your blog post? You need to handle the resizing yourself, upload it to a static folder, then figure out the magical markdown incantation for referencing the image, but remember to remove the static part from the URL you put in because that gets stripped when the files get published. The whole thing is actively user-unfriendly.
But what you get in return is content that is truly yours. It’s not stored off in a service on another computer somewhere, where you pray you have a decent backup system. The files that make up this website are on my computer, and my computer is automatically backed up on my NAS. And I keep everything in a private GitHub repo as well for triple redundancy. And because everything is just markdown files, it’s dead simple to just display this image differently if you want. For example, my reading/ section is just markdown files, same as the main part of my blog. It’s just rendered differently there because Hugo makes that so simple.
And let’s be honest, the stuff I’m publishing on this website isn’t exactly breaking news, so maybe I can afford for the process of getting things written and published to be more deliberate. In fact, it’s something I’d like to aim for. Something that struck me while copying across the blog posts I’d made in Wordpress back into Hugo was how not-deliberate my writing was. I’d bang something out without a second thought and maybe, maybe go back and fix any typos I spotted (but mostly I did not).
Anyway, my point here is that Hugo isn’t perfect but it’s pretty great for my needs. Are you reading this, future-John who is currently thinking about moving off to something else? Say it with me: Hugo is pretty great for my needs.
Obviously this is a giant generalisation - for example, prior to moving to Wordpress, I was running a build pipeline in a locally-hosted Jenkins that would detect any changes to my blog’s GitHub repo and automatically build and deploy the Hugo site. So it can be done, but this is a whole step beyond what most people expect from software in 2024. ↩︎
Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before.