For the last six years I’ve kept a spreadsheet listing every parking spot I’ve used at the local supermarket in a bid to park in them all. This week I completed my Magnum Opus! A
thread.
I live in Bromley and almost always shop at the same Sainsbury’s in the centre of town, here’s a satellite view of their car park. It’s a great car park because you can always get a
space and it is laid out really well. Comfortably in my top 5 Bromley car parks.
After quite a few years of going each week I started thinking about how many of the different spots I’d parked in and how long it would take to park in them all. My life is one long
roller coaster.
…
A glorious story from a man with the kind of dedication that would have gotten him far in CNPS back in the day (I wonder if Claire ever got past 13 points…).
This is the kind of thing that I occasionally consider adding to the list of mundane shit I track about my life. But then I start thinking about the tracking infrastructure and I end up
adding far more future-proofing than I intend: I start thinking about tracking how often my hayfever causes me problems so I can correlate it to the time and the location data I already
record to work out which tree species’ pollen affects me the most. Or tracking a variety of mood metrics so I can see if, as I’ve long suspected, the number of unread emails in my
inboxen negatively correlates to my general happiness.
Cellebrite makes software to automate physically extracting and indexing data from mobile devices. They exist within the grey – where enterprise branding joins together with the
larcenous to be called “digital intelligence.” Their customer list has included authoritarian regimes in Belarus, Russia, Venezuela, and China; death squads in Bangladesh; military
juntas in Myanmar; and those seeking to abuse and oppress in Turkey, UAE, and elsewhere. A few months ago, they announced
that they added Signal support to their software.
Their products have often been linked to the persecution of imprisoned journalists and activists around the world, but less has been written about what their software actually
does or how it works. Let’s take a closer look. In particular, their software is often associated with bypassing security, so let’s take some time to examine the security of
their own software.
Recently Moxie, co-author of the Signal Protocol, came into possession of a Cellebrite Extraction Device (phone cracking kit used by law enforcement as well as by oppressive regimes who
need to clamp down on dissidents) which “fell off a truck” near him. What an amazing coincidence! He went on to report, this week, that he’d partially reverse-engineered the system,
discovering copyrighted code from Apple – that’ll go down well! – and, more-interestingly, unpatchedvulnerabilities. In a demonstration video, he goes on to show that
a carefully crafted file placed on a phone could, if attacked using a Cellebrite device, exploit these vulnerabilities to take over the forensics equipment.
Obviously this is a Bad Thing if you’re depending on that forensics kit! Not only are you now unable to demonstrate that the evidence you’re collecting is complete and accurate, because
it potentially isn’t, but you’ve also got to treat your equipment as untrustworthy. This basically makes any evidence you’ve collected inadmissible in many courts.
Moxie goes on to announce a completely unrelated upcoming feature for Signal: a minority of functionally-random installations will create carefully-crafted files on their
devices’ filesystem. You know, just to sit there and look pretty. No other reason:
In completely unrelated news, upcoming versions of Signal will be periodically fetching files to place in app storage. These files are never used for anything inside Signal and never
interact with Signal software or data, but they look nice, and aesthetics are important in software. Files will only be returned for accounts that have been active installs for some
time already, and only probabilistically in low percentages based on phone number sharding. We have a few different versions of files that we think are aesthetically pleasing, and
will iterate through those slowly over time. There is no other significance to these files.
Since joining the hiring team at Automattic in the fall of 2019, I’ve noticed different patterns and preferences on text-based interviews. Some
of these are also general interviewing tips.
Send shorter messages
Avoid Threads if possible
Show your thought process
Don’t bother name dropping
Tell the story
It’s not that different
…
Fellow Automattician Jerry Jones, whose work on accessibility was very useful in spearheading some research by my team,
earlier this year, has written a great post about interviewing at Automattic or, indeed, any company that’s opted for text-based interviews. My favourite hosting company uses these too,
and I’ve written about my experience of interviewing at Automattic, but Jerry’s post – which goes into much more detail than just the six
highlight points above, is well worth a look if you ever expect to be on either side of a text-based interview.
Max has produced a list of “naughty strings”: things you might try injecting into your systems along with any fuzz testing you’re doing to check for common errors in escaping,
processing, casting, interpreting, parsing, etc. The copy above is heavily truncated: the list is long!
It’s got a lot of the things in it that you’d expect to find: reserved keywords and filenames, unusual or invalid unicode codepoints, tests for the Scunthorpe Problem, and so on. But perhaps my favourite entry is this one, a test for “human injection”:
# Human injection
#
# Strings which may cause human to reinterpret worldview
If you're reading this, you've been in a coma for almost 20 years now. We're trying a new technique. We don't know where this message will end up in your dream, but we hope it works.
Please wake up, we miss you.
This is a basic Python shell (really, it’s a fancy wrapper over the system shell) that takes a task and asks OpenAI for what Linux bash command to run based on your description. For
safety reasons, you can look at the command and cancel before actually running it.
…
Of all the stupid uses of OpenAI’s GPT-3, this might be the most-amusing. It’s really interesting to see how close – sometimes spot-on – the algorithm comes to writing the right command
when you “say what you mean”. Also, how terribly, terribly ill-advised it would be to actually use this for real.
Had to search for an embarrassingly long time before finding this one. The coordinates and the hint agreed with the (obvious) location I was looking, but I just couldn’t see it. I
expanded my search to nearby candidates too before giving up and moving on with my walk.
On the way back, I decided to have another quick search before calling it a DNF… and found it straight away. I was kicking myself to not
have seen it before, especially given that I’d looked at past log photos and knew exactly what I was looking for! I’ll tell you what; if either of my kids had been here today they’d
have spotted it instantly! (But then… they’re about the perfect height for it…)
Thanks for the distraction while I waited to collect from the river my partner’s brother, who’s been rowing down from Bablock Hythe since yesterday.
Plus many, many things that were new to me and that I’ve loved learning about these last few days.
It’s definitely not a competition; it’s a learning opportunity wrapped up in the weirdest bits of the field. Have an explore and feed your inner computer science geek.
When I was a kid of about 10, one of my favourite books was Usborne’s Spy’s Guidebook. (I also liked its sister the Detective’s Handbook, but the Spy’s
Guidebook always seemed a smidge cooler to me).
I imagine that a younger version of me would approve of our 7-year-old’s bookshelf, too.
So I was pleased when our eldest, now 7, took an interest in the book too. This morning, for example, she came to breakfast with an encrypted message for me (along with the relevant
page in the book that contained the cipher I’d need to decode it).
Decryption efforts were hampered by sender’s inability to get her letter “Z”s the right damn way around.
Later, as we used the experience to talk about some of the easier practical attacks against this simple substitution cipher (letter frequency analysis, and known-plaintext attacks… I
haven’t gotten on to the issue of its miniscule keyspace yet!), she asked me to make a pocket version of the code card as described in the book.
A three-bit key doesn’t make a simple substitution cipher significantly safer, but it does serve as a vehicle to teach elementary cryptanalysis!
While I was eating leftover curry for lunch with one hand and producing a nice printable, foldable pocket card for her (which you can download here if you like) with the other, I realised something. There are likely to be a lot more messages in my
future that are protected by this substitution cipher, so I might as well preempt them by implementing a computerised encoder/decoder right away.
If you’ve got kids of the right kind of age, I highly recommend picking up a copy of the Spy’s Guidebook (and possibly the Detective’s Handbook). Either use it as a
vehicle to talk about codes and maths, like I have… or let them believe it’s secure while you know you can break it, like we did with Enigma machines after WWII. Either way, they eventually learn a valuable lesson about cryptography.
Wix, the website builder company you may remember from stealing WordPress code and lying about it, has now decided the best way
to gain relevance is attacking the open source WordPress community in a bizarre
set of ads. They can’t even come up with original concepts for attack ads, and have tried to rip-off of Apple’s Mac vs PC ads, but tastelessly personify the WordPress community
as an absent, drunken father in a therapy session.
I have a lot of empathy for whoever was forced to work on these ads, including the actors, it must have felt bad working on something that’s like Encyclopedia Britannica
attacking Wikipedia. WordPress is a global movement of hundreds of thousands of volunteers and community members, coming together to make the web a better place. The code,
and everything you put into it, belongs to you, and its open source license ensures that you’re in complete control, now and forever. WordPress is free, and also gives you freedom.
…
For those that haven’t been following the relevant bits of tech social media this last week, here’s the insanity you’ve missed:
Wix’s Twitter and YouTube responses suddenly swing from their usual “why is your customer service so slow to respond to me?” level of negative to outright hostile. LOL.
Sure, I’m not the target audience. I’ve been a WordPress user for 15 years, and every time I visit a Wix site it annoys me when I have to permit a stack of third-party JavaScript just
to load images like they’ve never heard of the <img>tag or something. Hell, I like WordPress enough that I used it as a
vehicle to get a job with Automattic, a company most-famous for its WordPress hosting provision. But even putting all of that aside: this
advertising campaign stinks.
Twine 2 is a popular tool for making hypertext interactive fiction, but there’s something about physical printed “choose your own adventure”-style
gamebooks that isn’t quite replicated when you’re playing on the Web. Maybe it’s the experience of keeping your finger in a page break to facilitate a “save point” for when you
inevitably have to backtrack and try again?
These are the first branching novels I’ve introduced her to for which she’s felt the need to take notes.
As a medium for interactive adventures, paper isn’t dead! Our 7-year-old is currently tackling the
second part of a series of books by John Diary, the latest part of which was only published
in December! But I worry that authors of printed interactive fiction might have a harder time than those producing hypertext versions. Keeping track of all of your cross-references and
routes is harder than writing linear fiction, and in the hypertext
John Diary tweeted about his process back in 2017 and it looks… more manual than I’d want.
Twinebook
So I’ve thrown together Twinebook, an experimental/prototype tool which aims to bring the feature-rich toolset of Twine to authors of
paper-based interactive fiction. Simply: you upload your compiled Twine HTML to Twinebook and it gives you a printable PDF file, replacing the hyperlinks with references in the style of
“turn to 27” to instruct the player where to go next. By default, the passages are all scrambled to keep it interesting, but with the starting passage in position 1… but it’s possible
to override this for specific passages to facilitate puzzles that require flipping to specific numbered passages.
In some adventure games, keeping your thumb in the page feels like it’s essential.
Obviously, it doesn’t work with any kind of “advanced” Twine game – anything that makes use of variables, Javascript, etc., for example! – unless you can think of a way to translate
these into the written word… which is certainly possible – see Fighting Fantasy‘s skill, stamina, luck and
dice-rolling mechanics, for example! – but whether it’s desirable is up to individual authors.
If this tool is valuable to anybody, that’s great! Naturally I’ve open-sourced the whole thing so others can expand on it if they like.
If you find it useful, let me know.
Mapping a complex piece of interactive fiction is a job for a computer, not a human.
If you’re interested in the possibility of using Twine to streamline the production of printable interactive fiction, give my Twinebook
prototype a try and let me know what you think.
I don’t normally watch videos of other people playing video games. I’m even less inclined to watch “walkthroughs”.
This, though, isn’t a walkthrough. It’s basically the opposite of a walkthrough: this is somebody (slowly, painstakingly) playing through Skyrim: Special Edition
without using any of the movement controls (WASD/left stick) whatsoever. Wait, what? How is such a thing possible?
That’s what makes the video so compelling. The creator used so many bizarre quirks and exploits to even make this crazy stupid idea work at all. Like (among many, many more):
Dragging a bucket towards yourself to “push” yourself backwards (although not upstairs unless you do some very careful pushing “under” your feet).
Doing an unarmed heavy attack to “stumble” forward a little at a time, avoiding the stamina loss by eating vegetable soup or by cancelling the attack (e.g. by switching
quickselected arrows), which apparently works better if you’re overencumbered.
Mid-stumble, consuming a reagent that paralyses yourself to glitch through thin doors. Exploit a bug in dropping gear for your companion near an area-change doorway to get all of
the reagent you’ll ever need.
Rush-grinding your way to the Whirlwind Sprint shout and Vampire Lord “Bats” ability so you’ve got a way to move forward quickly, then pairing them with paralysis to catapult
yourself across the map.
When things get desperate, exploiting the fact that you can glitch-teleport yourself places by commanding your companion to go somewhere, quicksaving before they get there, then
quickloading to appear there yourself.
This video’s just beautiful: the cumulation of what must be hundreds or thousands of person-hours of probing the “edges” of Skyrim‘s engine to discover all of the potentially
exploitable bugs that make it possible.
Following the success of our last game of Dialect the previous month and once again in a one-week hiatus of our usual Friday
Dungeons & Dragons game, I hosted a second remote game of this strange “soft” RPG with linguistics and improv drama elements.
Thieves’ Cant
Our backdrop to this story was Portsmouth in 1834, where we were part of a group – the Gunwharf Ants – who worked as stevedores and made our living (on top of the abysmal wages for
manual handling) through the criminal pursuit of “skimming a little off the top” of the bulk-break cargo we moved between ships and onto and off the canal. These stolen goods would be
hidden in the basement of nearby pub The Duke of Wellington until they could be safely fenced, and this often-lucrative enterprise made us the envy of many of the docklands’ other
criminal gangs.
I played Katie – “Kegs” to her friends – the proprietor of the Duke (since her husband’s death) and matriarch of the group. I was joined by Nuek (Alec), a Scandinavian friend with a wealth of criminal experience, John “Tuck” Crawford (Matt), adoptee of the gang and our aspiring quartermaster, and
“Yellow” Mathias Hammond (Simon), a navy deserter who consistently delivers better than he expects to.
Our second tableau was somehow more-chaotic than the first, even after I accidentally removed several cards before taking this picture!
While each of us had our stories and some beautiful and hilarious moments, I felt that we all quickly converged on the idea that the principal storyline in our isolation was that of
young Tuck. The first act was dominated by his efforts to proof himself to the gang, and – with a little snuff – shake off his reputation as the “kid” of the group and
gain acceptance amongst his peers. His chance to prove himself with a caper aboard the Queen Anne went proper merry though after she turned up tin-ful and he found
himself kept in a second-place position for years longer. Tuck – and Yellow – got proofed eventually, but the extra time spent living hand-to-mouth might have been what first
planted the seed of charity in the young man’s head, and kept most of his numbers out of his pocket and into those of the families he supported in the St. Stevens area.
The second act turned political, as Spiky Dave, leader of the competing gang The Barbados Boys, based over Gosport way, offered a truce between the two rivals in exchange for sharing
the manpower – and profits – of a big job against a ship from South Africa… with a case of diamonds aboard. Disagreements over the deal undermined Kegs’ authority over the Ants, but
despite their March it went ahead anyway and the job was a success. Except… Spiky Dave kept more than his share of the loot, and agreed to share what was promised only in
exchange for the surrender of the Ants and their territory to his gang’s rulership.
We returned to interpersonal drama in the third act as Katie – tired of the gang wars and feeling her age – took perhaps more than her fair share of the barrel (the gang’s
shared social care fund) and bought herself clearance to leave aboard a ship to a beachside retirement in Jamaica. She gave up her stake in the future of the gang and
shrugged off their challenges in exchange for a quiet life, leaving Nuek as the senior remaining leader of the group… but Tuck the owner of the Duke of Wellington. The gang split into
those that integrated with their rivals and those that went their separate ways… and their curious pidgin dissolved with them. Well, except for a few terms which hung on in dockside
gang chatter, screeched amongst the gulls of Portsmouth without knowing their significance, for years to come.
Playing Out
Despite being fundamentally the same game and a similar setting to when we played The Outpost the previous month, this game felt very different. Dialect is
versatile enough that it can be used to write… adventures, coming-of-age tales, rags-to-riches stories, a comedies, horror, romance… and unless the tone is explicitly set out at the
start then it’ll (hopefully) settle somewhere mutually-acceptable to all of the players. But with a new game, new setting, and new players, it’s inevitable that a different kind of
story will be told.
But more than that, the backdrop itself impacted on the tale we wove. On Mars, we were physically isolated from the rest of humankind and living in an environment in which the
necessities of a new lifestyle and society necessitates new language. But the isolation of criminal gangs in Portsmouth docklands in the late Georgian era is a very different
kind: it’s a partial isolation, imposed (where it is) by its members and to a lesser extent by the society around them. Which meant that while their language was still a defining aspect
of their isolation, it also felt more-artificial; deliberately so, because those who developed it did so specifically in order to communicate surreptitiously… and, we
discovered, to encode their group’s identity into their pidgin.
While our first game of Dialect felt like the language lead the story, this second game felt more like the language and the story co-evolved but were mostly unrelated. That’s
not necessarily a problem, and I think we all had fun, but it wasn’t what we expected. I’m glad this wasn’t our first experience of Dialect, because if it were I think
it might have tainted our understanding of what the game can be.
As with The Outpost, we found that some of the concepts we came up with didn’t see much use: on Mars, the concept of fibs was rooted in a history of of how our medical
records were linked to one another (for e.g. transplant compatibility), but aside from our shared understanding of the background of the word this storyline didn’t really come up.
Similarly, in Thieves Cant’ we developed a background about the (vegan!) roots of our gang’s ethics, but it barely got used as more than conversational flavour. In both cases
I’ve wondered, after the fact, whether a “flashback” scene framed from one of our prompts might have helped solidify the concept. But I’m also not sure whether or not such a thing would
be necessary. We seemed to collectively latch onto a story hook – this time around, centred around Matt’s character John Crawford’s life and our influences on it – and it played out
fine.
And hey; nobody died before the epilogue, this time!
I’m looking forward to another game next time we’re on a D&D break, or perhaps some other time.
Dr. Doe’s latest Sexplanations vlog is on polyamorous language, and despite being – or, perhaps, because I’m – a bit of a long-toothed polyamorist these days, fully a quarter
or more of the terms she introduced were new to me! Fascinating!
I’ve been doing a course provided through work to try to improve my ability to connect with an
audience over video.
This is my fourth week in the course, and I opted to revisit a video I made during my second week and try to do it again with more engagement, more focus, more punch, and more
emotion. I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. Interestingly, it somewhat mirrors my Howdymattic video from when I first started at
Automattic, but I pivoted my “origin story” a little bit and twisted it to fit one of my favourite parts of
the Automattic Creed.
I’ve been doing a course provided through work to try to improve my ability to connect with an audience over
video. For one of my assignments in this, my fourth week, I picked a topic out from the “welcome” survey I filled out when I first started the course. The topic: the Devil’s Quoits. This stone circle – not far from my new house – has such a bizarre
history of construction, demolition, and reconstruction… as well as a fun folk myth about its creation… that I’d thought it’d make a great follow-up to my previous “local history”
piece, Oxford’s Long-Lost Zoo. I’d already hidden a “virtual” geocache at the henge, as I previously did for the zoo: a video seemed like the next logical step.
My brief required that the video be only about a minute long, which presented its own challenge in cutting down the story I’d like to tell to a bare minimum. Then on top of that, it
took me at least eight takes until I was confident that I’d have one I was happy with, and there’s still things I’d do differently if I did it again (including a better windbreak on my
lapel mic, and timing my takes for when geese weren’t honking their way past overhead!).
In any case: part of the ritual of this particular course encourages you to “make videos… as if people will see them”, and I’ve been taking that seriously! Firstly, I’ve been
sharing many of my videos with others either at work or on my blog, like the one about how GPS works or the one about the secret of magic. Secondly, I’ve been doing “extra credit” by
recording many of my daily-standup messages as videos, in addition to providing them through our usual Slack bot.
Anyway, the short of it is: you’re among the folks who get to see this one. Also available on YouTube.
