Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
mhoyeDaughter just came home to tell me the teachers at school tried to confiscate her vape but they couldn't because it's actually a kazoo.
"I made a kazoo noise at them and I could see them dying on the inside so I made a sad kazoo noise instead. I don't think it helped."
The grin on her face.
Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
GÉANT#eduroam has been named one of the 13 Dutch brilliant breakthroughs by the Dutch Research Council (NWO)
Created in 2002 by Klaas Wierenga, eduroam started as a simple idea: make Wi-Fi secure, easy & free for students and researchers, wherever they go.
Today, eduroam connects people at almost 40,000 locations in 106 countries. In 2024 alone, it recorded over 8.4 billion authentications.
👏
Congrats to all its contributors from the R&E community for building a service with such global impact.
Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
tomie(Me): so, we create this "virtual memory" to trick processes into thinking they have a contiguous address layout
(Medieval peasant): Would not thy abstraction swell the tally of mem'ry lookups?
(Me): well, yes. to deal with that we created the "translation lookaside buffer"
Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
dangerzoneReminder: even with a sanitized document that can't phone home, there are still ways you can be tracked. There are watermarking methods such as printer tracking dots, intentional misspellings and extra spaces, that have been used in the past to detect whistleblowers. Be extra cautious when handling documents that have been sent to you personally.
Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
NGI Commons🔊
The @EUCommission@ec.social-network.europa.eu 🇪🇺
is seeking input on #Open #Digital #Ecosystems!
The European Commission’s Call for Evidence aims to shape a strategy for open source & open digital assets, boosting tech sovereignty, security & competitiveness.
🫵
If you’re a dev, researcher, or public admin: your voice matters! 🗣
️
🔗
Share your feedback: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/16213-European-Open-Digital-Ecosystems_en
#OpenSource #DigitalEurope #TechPolicy #Innovation
@martelinnovate@eupolicy.social @linuxfoundation@social.lfx.dev @cnrs@social.numerique.gouv.fr @OpenForumEurope@mastodon.cloud @openfuture@eupolicy.social @ngi@social.ngi.eu
Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
Stefano MarinelliA few days ago, a client’s data center "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.
I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.
The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.
To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.
The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.
That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.
The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.
The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.
Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.
Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.
#IT #SysAdmin #HorrorStories #ITHorrorStories #Monitoring
Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
Ars TechnicaBose open-sources its SoundTouch home theater smart speakers ahead of EoL
If companies insist on bricking gadgets, this is a better way to do it.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/01/bose-open-sources-its-soundtouch-home-theater-smart-speakers-ahead-of-eol/?utm_brand=arstechnica&utm_social-type=owned&utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social
Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
maxlathContinuing the tradition of moving to a new mastodon instance every 9 years, somehow always on the 7th January 🤔
😅
Goodbye mastodon.social, salut piaille.fr!
Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
agatha :verifiedlesbian: :verifiedtrans:stolen to add alt text
Niko (Martin) :heart_ace:
:neobot: 7222e800 "memdmp" :bot: (free use pet)@jessew@mk.cpluspatch.com fae is meant to have xir's pronouns be changed every time it's referred to, after all. you (sodi) aren't being respected if "any, go wild" doesn't include the pronouns i (sodi) am having used on themselves changing every 3 seconds, and doesnt include use of 1pp and 2pp. going wild implies one needs to do out of the ordinary things to her pronouns.