There was a delightful end-of-term feel to this show. It was few days before the last performance and the cast were clearly having a lot of fun heckling back at the unruly audience. If you've seen any of the "Goes Wrong" shows on TV, you'll know exactly what to expect. A group of over-enthusiastic but under-equipped performers attempt the impossible and fail in a variety of stunning ways. It was a heady mix of pantomime, farce, silliness, and genuinely lovely magic. Having seen Penn and…
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I found this book while following a citation trail for my MSc. Published before the 21st Century (fuck, I'm old) it's a run-down of this new-fangled thing called Information Warfare. It covers electronic attacks, espionage, computer security and more. In the last 20 years, depressingly little has changed. If you removed the mentions of ActiveX and floppy disks, it'd still be 90% relevant. It sets out in clear detail why information warfare is the new frontier - and some practical takes on how…
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I used to be a member of social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Flickr, etc. But I felt guilty because I didn't run my own servers. OK, I could host content with them. But I had a severely limited way of curating what I saw and how much I could customise what people saw of me. So I signed up to a cloud provider and installed Mastodon and Pixelfed. Neat! But I didn't really run that server. Sure, I could install software - but I didn't have root. It was all managed by someone else. …
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Pure pulp sci-fi - and I loved every page of it. The best sci-fi, in my opinion, doesn't dwell too long on how the magic box works - but spends time exploring the consequences of opening it. The premise is great - cloning is real and you can back up your brain. When you die, your brain is downloaded to a clone. It's a brilliant exploration of human rights. Are clones humans? Are they property? Can they inherit? Are they the same person as their original? What will protesters spit at them? …
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Ira Aldridge -- a black New Yorker -- was one of nineteenth-century Europe's greatest actors. By the time he began touring in Europe he was principally a Shakespearean actor, playing such classic characters as Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III, and King Lear. Although his frequent public appearances made him the most visible black man in the world by mid-nineteenth century, today Aldridge tends to be a forgotten figure, seldom mentioned in histories of British and European theater. This…
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The FIDO specification defines a form of Universal 2nd Factor (U2F) when users log in to a system. Rather than relying on one-time codes sent via SMS, or displayed on a phone screen, these are physical hardware tokens which are used to supplement passwords. When used with websites, this technology is also known as WebAuthn. I use a USB thumb-drive sized hardware token and they're nifty - but a little impractical. Since the great working from home experiment, I don't have my keys on me at…
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Notes for anyone who wants a more detailed guide than the one on the official Wiki. Download OpenWRT Download the initramfs firmware file Rename the file to WN531A6.bin Download the sysupgrade file Download the original firmware Check the model number on your router. You can download the firmware from Wavlink directly. They have a specific firmware for WL-WN531A6-A and WL-WN531A6-C. Make sure you download the correct one. You can also back up the original firmware from your router if you …
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I found this rather humorous Tweet in which a computer issued a cheque for £2,324,252,080,110: Gareth Hughes@gh230277Thank you for our compensation payment @Northpowergrid for the several days we were without power following #stormarwen Before I bank the cheque however, are you 100% certain you can afford this? #trillionpounds pic.x.com/z5mnc2nxl1❤️ 51,914💬 2,191♻️ 011:52 - Sat 12 February 2022 I wondered whether 2324252080110 was a common sort of mistake - like a 32 bit overflow - so I Google…
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Several years ago, I applied for my dream job. Not quite ice-cream tester on the International Space Station, but pretty close. I was astounded to get a first interview, and crushed to flame out at the second round. That's the way it goes sometimes. Better to have tried and failed than never to have tried at all. In the past, that would have been the end of it. I'd have moved on with my life and gradually forgotten about it. But fucking LinkedIn… A few months after the interview, one of my f…
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Oh! But this is ridiculously fantastic fun. An unemployed sci-fi geek escapes the pandemic by going all David Attenborough with Godzilla. Yes, it is an exercise in nerdy wish fulfilment. But who among us wouldn't have rather spent the last two years being chased by giant scary monsters rather than cowering away from a microscopic virus? It a joyful piece of bubble-gum sci-fi. It plays well with tropes and, much like Redshirts, gives the reader exactly what they need. It isn't very subtle. …
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I'm doing an apprenticeship MSc in Digital Technology. In the spirit of openness, I'm blogging my research and my assignments. This is my paper from the OPP module - where I can choose any subject. I picked Cybersecurity. You can read my Digital Leadership paper, my Data Analytics Paper, and my Business and Technology essay. I've previously written about the Art of Hacking course. The middle two parts of this paper are about that - why I chose it and how I put it into practice. The first and …
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Dolphins in spaaaaaaaace! This is the sequel to David Brin's "Sundiver" - and the 2nd part of the Uplift series. And - BAM! - it goes straight into the action. Very little needless exposition - just spaceships running away from an Extra-Terrestrial menace, crash-landing, and having to escape. All good sci-fi fun. Especially with a crew of cyborg dolphins, a few telepathic humans, and one super-intelligent ape. It's a thoroughly enjoyable adventure - and almost certainly impossible to film.…
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