“I’m only asking for basic respect.” – Dr. Beth Upton, in the face of a hostile courtroom, media, and world.
Her fucking bravery is amazing. 💖
Tag: news
Note #25736
After “fixing” BBC News’ RSS feeds I noticed that I was seeing less news (and, somehow, stressing less over everything happening in the USA). Turns out that in switching myself to my new system I’d subscribed to the UK edition, whereas previously I’d been on the Full edition. I’ve corrected it now in my RSS reader, but it was an interesting couple of days.
tl;dr: I accidentally stopped reading international news and I was less stressed
Anyway: if you’re not already using my improved BBC News RSS feeds, they’re at: https://bbc-feeds.danq.dev
UK’s secret Apple iCloud backdoor order is a global emergency, say critics
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
In its latest attempt to erode the protections of strong encryption, the U.K. government has reportedly secretly ordered Apple to build a backdoor that would allow British security officials to access the encrypted cloud storage data of Apple customers anywhere in the world.
The secret order — issued under the U.K.’s Investigatory Powers Act 2016 (known as the Snoopers’ Charter) — aims to undermine an opt-in Apple feature that provides end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for iCloud backups, called Advanced Data Protection. The encrypted backup feature only allows Apple customers to access their device’s information stored on iCloud — not even Apple can access it.
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Sigh. A continuation of a long-running saga of folks here in the UK attempting to make it easier for police to catch a handful of (stupid) criminals1… at the expense of making millions of people more-vulnerable to malicious hackers2.
If we continue on this path, it’ll only be a short number of years before you see a headline about a national secret, stored by a government minister (in the kind of ill-advised manner we know happens) on iCloud or similar and then stolen by a hostile foreign power who merely needed to bribe, infiltrate, or in the worst-case hack their way into Apple’s datacentres. And it’ll be entirely our own fault.
Meanwhile the serious terrorist groups will continue to use encryption that isn’t affected by whatever “ban” the UK can put into place (Al Qaeda were known to have developed their own wrapper around PGP, for example, decades ago), the child pornography rings will continue to tunnel traffic around whatever dark web platform they’ve made for themselves (I’m curious whether they’re actually being smart or not, but that’s not something I even remotely want to research), and either will still only be caught when they get sloppy and/or as the result of good old-fashioned police investigations.
Weakened and backdoored encryption in mainstream products doesn’t help you catch smart criminals. But it does help smart criminals to catch regular folks.
Footnotes
1 The smart criminals will start – or more-likely will already be using – forms of encryption that aren’t, and can’t, be prevented by legislation. Because fundamentally, cryptography is just maths. Incidentally, I assume you know that you can send me encrypted email that nobody else can read?
2 Or, y’know, abuse of power by police.
BBC News RSS… your way!
It turns out my series of efforts to improve the BBC News RSS feeds are more-popular than I thought. People keep asking for variants of them, and it’s probably time I stopped hosting the resulting feeds on my NAS (which does a good job, but it’s in a highly-kickable place right under my desk).
So I’ve launched BBC-Feeds.DanQ.dev. On a 20-minute schedule, it generates both UK and World editions of the BBC News feeds, filtered to remove iPlayer, Sounds, app “nudges”, duplicates, and other junk, and optionally with the sports news filtered out too.
The entire thing is open source under an ultra-permissive license, so you can run your own copy if you don’t want to use mine.
Enjoy!
Bishop McBishopface
Don’t Bishops normally get to retain their regular name? This BBC News headline makes it sound like we’re gonna end up with Bishop McBishopface!
Reading more rolled papyri
In kind-of local news, I see that the folks at Diamond Light Source (which I got to visit last year) have been helping the Bodleian (who I used to work for) to X-ray one of their Herculaneum scrolls (which I’ve written about before). That’s really cool.
BBC News RSS… with the sport?
Earlier today, somebody called Allan commented on the latest in my series of several blog posts about how I
mutilate manipulate the RSS feeds of BBC News to work around their (many, and increasingly so) various shortcomings, specifically:
- Their inclusion of non-news content such as plugs for iPlayer and their apps,
- Their repeating of identical news stories with marginally-different GUIDs, and
- All of the sports news, which I don’t care about one jot.
Well, it turns out that some people want #3: the sport. But still don’t want the other two.
I shan’t be subscribing to this RSS feed, and I can’t promise I’ll fix it if it gets broken. But if “without the crap, but with the sports” is the way you like your BBC News RSS feed, I’ve got you covered:
- [RSS] BBC News… without the crap… and without the sports (the one I use) | source code to generate this feed
- [RSS] BBC News… without the crap… but with the sports (the new feed) | source code to generate this feed
So there you go, Allan, and anybody in a similar position. I hope that fulfils your need for sports news… without the crap.
Fixing BBC News… Yet Again
The Beeb continue to keep adding more and more non-news content to the BBC News RSS feed (like this ad for the iPlayer app!), so I’ve once again had to update my script to “fix” the feed so that it only contains, y’know, news.
Canine commuters chase dog travel season tickets
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
Dogs are being offered boat and rail season tickets to ease their path to walkies in the Lake District.
Ullswater Steamers and the Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway have introduced £20 annual “Rover” season tickets, which include a 10% donation to animal charities.
The cost for a standard doggie day ticket is £2.50 for the railway and £1 for a boat trip.
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In a world where the news is dominated by war, cyber attacks, or imminent elections, it’s nice to be distracted by a nonsense bit of news. And this one’s just delightful.
For a fee of £1 – £2.50, dogs can travel on the boats and railways of Ravenglass and Eskdale Railway and Ullswater Steamers. So far, so good.
And now they’ve introduced a season pass for people who take their canines on the ferries or railways more often. Also good.
And they’ve called the season pass for dogs… a “Rover” ticket.
Excellent.
Don’t Ask, Don’t Teach
Politics and pundits
The UK’s Conservative government, having realised that their mandate is worthless, seems to be in a panicked rush to try to get the voters to ignore any of the real issues. Instead, they say, we should be focussed on things like ludicrously-expensive and ineffective ways to handle asylum seekers and making life as hard as possible for their second-favourite scapegoat: trans and queer people.
The latest move in that second category seems likely to be a plan to, among other things, discourage teachers from talking about gender identity in schools, with children of any age. From the article I linked:
The BBC has not seen the new guidelines but a government source said they included plans to ban any children being taught about gender identity.
If asked, teachers will have to be clear gender ideology is contested.
Needless to say, such guidance is not likely to be well-received by teachers:
Pepe Di’Iasio, headteacher at a school in Rotherham, told Today that he believes pupils are being used “as a political football”.
Teachers “want well informed and evidence-based decisions”, he said, and not “politicised” guidance.
People and pupils
This shit isn’t harmless. Regardless of how strongly these kinds of regulations are enforced, they can have a devastating chilling effect in schools.
I speak from experience.
Most of my school years were under the shadow of Section 28. Like I predict for the new Conservative proposals, Section 28 superficially didn’t appear to have a major impact: nobody was ever successfully prosecuted under it, for example. But examining its effects in that way completely overlooks the effect it had on how teachers felt they had to work.
For example…
In around 1994, I witnessed a teacher turn a blind eye to homophobic bullying of a pupil by their peer, during a sex education class. Simultaneously, the teacher coolly dismissed the slurs of the bully, saying that we weren’t “talking about that in this class” and that the boy should “save his chatter for the playground”. I didn’t know about the regulations at the time: only in hindsight could I see that this might have been a result of Section 28. All I got to see at the time was a child who felt that his homophobic harassment of his classmate had the tacit endorsement of the teachers, so long as it didn’t take place in the classroom.
A gay friend, who will have been present but not involved in the above event, struggled with self-identity and relationships throughout his teenage years, only “coming out” as an adult. I’m confident that he could have found a happier, healthier life had he felt supported – or at the very least not-unwelcome – at school. I firmly believe that the long-running third-degree side-effects of Section 28 effectively robbed him of a decade of self-actualisation about his identity.
The long tail of those 1980s rules were felt long-after they were repealed. And for a while, it felt like things were getting better. But increasingly it feels like we’re moving backwards.
With general elections coming up later this year, it’ll soon be time to start quizzing your candidates on the issues that matter to you. Even (perhaps especially) if your favourite isn’t the one who wins, it can be easiest to get a politicians’ ear when they and their teams are canvassing for your vote; so be sure to ask pointed questions about the things you care about.
I hope that you’ll agree that not telling teachers to conceal from teenagers the diversity of human identity and experience is something worth caring about.
Update: Only a couple of hours after I posted this, the awesome folks (whom I’ve mentioned before) at the Vagina Museum tooted a thread about the long tail of Section 28. It’s well-worth a read.
Roman object that baffled experts to go on show at Lincoln Museum
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
A mysterious Roman artefact found during an amateur archaeological dig is going on public display in Lincolnshire for the first time.
The object is one of only 33 dodecahedrons found in Britain, and the first to have been discovered in the Midlands.
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I learned about these… things… from this BBC News story and I’m just gobsmacked. Seriously: what is this thing?
This isn’t a unique example. 33 have been found in Britain, but these strange Roman artefacts turn up all over Europe: we’ve found hundreds of them.
It doesn’t look like they were something that you’d find in any Roman-era household, but they seem to be common enough that if you wandered around third century Northern Europe with one for a week or so you’d surely be able to find somebody who could explain them to you. And yet we don’t know why.
We have absolutely no idea why the Romans made these things. They’re finely and carefully created from bronze, and we find them buried in coin stashes, which suggests that they were valuable and important. But for what? Frustrated archaeologists have come up with all kinds of terrible ideas:
- Maybe they were a weapon, like the ball of a mace or something to be flung from a sling? Nope; they’re not really heavy enough.
- At least one was discovered near a bone staff, so it might have been a decorative scepter? But that doesn’t really go any distance to explaining the unusual shape, even if true (nor does it rule out the possibility of it being some kind of handled tool).
- Perhaps they were a rangefinding tool, where a pair of opposing holes line up only when you’re a particular distance from the tool? If a target of a known size fills the opposite hole in your vision, its distance must be a specific multiple of your distance to the tool. But that seems unlikely because we’ve never found any markings on these that would show which side you were using; also the devices aren’t consistently-sized.
- Roleplayers might notice the similarity to polyhedral dice: maybe they were a game? But the differing-sized holes make them pretty crap dice (researchers have tried), and Romans seemed to favour cubic dice anyway. They’re somewhat too intricate and complex to be good candidates for children’s toys.
- They could be some kind of magical or divination tool, which would apparently fit with the kinds of fortune-telling mysticism believed to be common to the cultures at the sites where they’re found. Do the sides and holes correspond to the zodiac or have some other astrological significance?
- Perhaps it was entirely decorative? Gold beads of a surprisingly-similar design have been found as far away as Cambodia, well outside the reach of the Roman Empire, which might suggest a continuing tradition of an earlier precursor dodecahedron!
- This author thinks they might have acted as a kind of calendar, used for measuring the height of the midday sun by observing way its beam is cast through a pair of holes when the tool is placed on a surface and used to determine when winter grains should be planted.
- Using replicas, some folks online have demonstrated how they could have been used as a knitting tool for making the fingers of gloves using a technique called “spool knitting”. But this knitting technique isn’t believed to have been invented until a millennium later than the youngest of these devices.
- Others have proposed that they were a proof of qualification: something a master metalsmith would construct in order to show that they were capable of casting a complex and intricate object.
I love a good archaeological mystery. We might never know why the Romans made these things, but reading clever people’s speculations about them is great.
you are a printer we are all printers
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
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Anyway, here’s the best printer for 2024: a Brother laser printer. You can just pick any one you like; I have one with a sheet feeder and one without a sheet feeder. Both of them have reliably printed return labels and random forms and pictures for my kid to color for years now, and I have never purchased replacement toner for either one. Neither has fallen off the WiFi or insisted I sign up for an ink-related hostage situation or required me to consider the ongoing schemes of HP executives who seem determined to make people hate a legendary brand with straightforward cash grabs and weird DRM ideas.
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It’s sort-of alarming that Brother are the only big player in the printer space who subscribe to a philosophy of “don’t treat the customers like livestock”. Presumably all it’d take is a board-level decision to flip the switch from “not evil” to “evil” and we’d lose something valuable. Thankfully, for now at least, they still clearly see the value of the positive marketing the world gives them. Positive marketing like like this article.
The article is excellent, by the way. I know that I’m “supposed” to stir up hatred about the fact that its conclusion is written by an AI but… well, just read it for yourself and you’ll see why I don’t mind even one bit. Top notch reporting. Consider following the links within it to stories about how other printer manufacturers continue to show exactly how shitty they can be.
I recommended a Brother printer to the Vagina Museum the other month. I assume it ‘s still working out fine for them (and not ripping them off, spying on them, and/or contributing to the destruction of the the planet).
Bumblebees surprise scientists with ‘sophisticated’ social learning
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
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First, bees had to push a blue lever that was blocking a red lever… too complex for a bee to solve on its own. So scientists trained some bees by offering separate rewards for the first and second steps.
These trained bees were then paired with bees who had never seen the puzzle, and the reward for the first step was removed.
Some of the untrained bees were able to learn both steps of the puzzle by watching the trained bees, without ever receiving a reward for the first step.
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This news story is great for two reasons.
Firstly, it’s a really interesting experimental result. Just when you think humankind’s learned everything they ever will about the humble bumblebee (humblebee?), there’s something more to discover.
That a bee can be trained to solve a complex puzzle by teaching it to solve each step independently and then later combining the steps isn’t surprising. But that these trained bees can pass on their knowledge to their peers (bee-ers?); who can then, one assumes, pass it on to yet other bees. Social learning.
Which, logically, means that a bee that learns to solve the two-lever puzzle second-hand would have a chance of solving an even more-complex three-lever puzzle; assuming such a thing is within the limits of the species’ problem-solving competence (I don’t know for sure whether they can do this, but I’m a firm bee-lever).
But the second reason I love this story is that it’s a great metaphor in itself for scientific progress. The two-lever problem is, to an untrained bee, unsolvable. But if it gets a low-effort boost (a free-bee, as it were) by learning from those that came before it, it can make a new discovery.
(I suppose the secret third reason the news story had me buzzing was that I appreciated the opportunities for puns that it presented. But you already knew that I larva pun, right?)
BBC News… without the crap
Did I mention recently that I love RSS? That it brings me great joy? That I start and finish almost every day in my feed reader? Probably.
I used to have a single minor niggle with the BBC News RSS feed: that it included sports news, which I didn’t care about. So I wrote a script that downloaded it, stripped sports news, and re-exported the feed for me to subscribe to. Magic.
But lately – presumably as a result of technical changes at the Beeb’s side – this feed has found two fresh ways to annoy me:
-
The feed now re-publishes a story if it gets re-promoted to the front page… but with a different
<guid>(it appears to get a #0 after it when first published, a #1 the second time, and so on). In a typical day the feed reader might scoop up new stories about once an hour, any by the time I get to reading them the same exact story might appear in my reader multiple times. Ugh. - They’ve started adding iPlayer and BBC Sounds content to the BBC News feed. I don’t follow BBC News in my feed reader because I want to watch or listen to things. If you do, that’s fine, but I don’t, and I’d rather filter this content out.
Luckily, I already have a recipe for improving this feed, thanks to my prior work. Let’s look at my newly-revised script (also available on GitHub):
#!/usr/bin/env ruby require 'bundler/inline' # # Sample crontab: # # At 41 minutes past each hour, run the script and log the results # */20 * * * * ~/bbc-news-rss-filter-sport-out.rb > ~/bbc-news-rss-filter-sport-out.log 2>>&1 # Dependencies: # * open-uri - load remote URL content easily # * nokogiri - parse/filter XML gemfile do source 'https://rubygems.org' gem 'nokogiri' end require 'open-uri' # Regular expression describing the GUIDs to reject from the resulting RSS feed # We want to drop everything from the "sport" section of the website, also any iPlayer/Sounds links REJECT_GUIDS_MATCHING = /^https:\/\/www\.bbc\.co\.uk\/(sport|iplayer|sounds)\// # Load and filter the original RSS rss = Nokogiri::XML(open('https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml?edition=uk')) rss.css('item').select{|item| item.css('guid').text =~ REJECT_GUIDS_MATCHING }.each(&:unlink) # Strip the anchors off the <guid>s: BBC News "republishes" stories by using guids with #0, #1, #2 etc, which results in duplicates in feed readers rss.css('guid').each{|g|g.content=g.content.gsub(/#.*$/,'')} File.open( '/www/bbc-news-no-sport.xml', 'w' ){ |f| f.puts(rss.to_s) }
That revised script removes from the feed anything whose <guid> suggests it’s sports news or from BBC Sounds or iPlayer, and also strips any “anchor” part of the
<guid> before re-exporting the feed. Much better. (Strictly speaking, this can result in a technically-invalid feed by introducing duplicates, but your feed reader
oughta be smart enough to compensate for and ignore that: mine certainly is!)
You’re free to take and adapt the script to your own needs, or – if you don’t mind being tied to my opinions about what should be in BBC News’ RSS feed – just subscribe to my copy at: https://fox.q-t-a.uk/bbc-news-no-sport.xml
GB number plate sticker no longer valid abroad
This is a repost promoting content originally published elsewhere. See more things Dan's reposted.
British motorists driving outside the UK must now remove old-style GB stickers or cover them up.
Instead they should display a UK sticker or have the UK identifier on their number plate.
The UK government guidance has been in place since Tuesday 28 September.
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With the replacement of “GB” stickers with “UK” ones, I’ll soon be able to add another joke to my list of jokes that aged badly. I first read this in a joke book when I was a kid:
A young man gets his first car and his younger sister comes to look at it. “What’s this ‘L’ sticker for?” she asks.
“It stands for ‘Learning’,” replies man, “Because I’m still having driving lessons.”
Some time later, after he’s passed his test, the man is preparing to take a trip to France with his friends. His sister points to a sticker on his car. “Does this ‘GB’ mean you’re ‘Getting Better’?”