Toots for david_chisnall@infosec.exchange account

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-02-01 at 09:50

I had a random thought at 5am this morning:

What would happen if you moved the ability to sponsor visas from companies to unions and removed caps? If a company wants someone to move to a country for work, they have to convince the union that it won’t depress wages but will increase the number of people working in the field (which strengthens the union). If your company has a reputation for treating workers badly, the union won’t let you have any work visas. If you hire an immigrant and treat them badly, the visa isn’t tied to you and the union can help them move to another employer.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-31 at 18:56

Internet, please help!

What is the plural of nucleon?

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-31 at 10:15

After doubling a few times in the preceding years, the fact that the Microsoft stock price now is basically the same as a year ago should be a clear signal to Nadella that not even Wall Street is gullible enough to believe that focusing on AI at the expense of things that customers actually need or want is a good idea.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-30 at 18:26

Sealing remains one of my favourite features of #CHERI, and is a core part of any compartmentalisation model that's usable by programmers. In the #CHERIoT compiler, we've improved it by surfacing sealing in the C/C++ type system.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-30 at 17:55

Nice of #GitHub to acknowledge that PRs and issues were broken, then declare that they working again, while they are still demonstrably broken.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-30 at 08:11

I just saw some porn spam in my feed. By the time I read it, the user that posted it had been suspended but:

There are a few things I’ve seen recently and have not been sure why they were in my feed, but this is one where I can be fairly confident no one I follow would have boosted it and I very much doubt it would be one of thee most popular on the instance.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-29 at 15:51

My ongoing quest to build the worlds most secure lightbulb continues. Hugh the lightbulb version two!

https://github.com/CHERIoT-Platform/cheriot-demos/pull/13

Now with end-to-end encryption! The key is not accessible from the compartment that has access to the network, so we're now up to 12 compartments, between the core RTOS bits, the network stack, and the three for the lightbulb control.

It now uses a small amount over 256 KiB of total code + data memory, so needs to run on Sonata 1.0 or later.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-29 at 10:31

It's been 30 years and I still can't get over the fact that the designers of Java said 'Smalltalk syntax is too hard for people to learn, but C's syntax for type casts is definitely something we want in a new language'.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-26 at 14:28

Until I made the mistake of reading LinkedIn, it had never occurred to me how hard the daily struggle of autistic people not to accidentally give keynote speeches at AfD rallies must be.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-26 at 08:37

So much of the news recently is reminding me of an evolutionary psychology (academic Just So Stories) paper I read a decade or so ago that came up with a very convincing explanation of why boys prefer blue and girls prefer pink, citing Stone Age behaviour. Completely ignoring the fact that, for most of the last two thousand years, in Europe pink was a masculine colour (dyes were not colour-fast and red was the colour of blood and therefore of war) and blue was the colour of the Virgin Mary and so peak feminine colouration. And the fact that, even today, the colour preference varies hugely across cultures.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-25 at 14:33

After all of the hype around the recent WINE release, I thought I'd have another go at Red Alert 2. I had it installed with WineSkin, but the old version of WINE in that didn't work with new macOS. So I tried updating it, but WineSkin is not maintained anymore. There's a replacement / fork called Kegworks. So I tried that, but it didn't seem able to take over the old wrapper.

I told it to rebuild the wrapper and it said 'Warning, this will delete your drive_c'. I didn't want that, so I hit cancel. Except they put the okay and cancel buttons the opposite way around to every other macOS application ever and so I actually proceeded.

Oh well, I'll dig out the CDs. Which, it turns out, I can actually find! There are instructions on the WINE appsdb for installing it and they require copying the CDs to a hard disk first and then mounting it in WINE so that the drive labels are correct.

Only it turns out that's only the Yuri's Revenge installer, which needs the RA2 installer to run first. Unfortunately, the RA2 installer (unlike the game itself) does not run in WINE. Last time I installed it, I installed on Windows and then copied the RA2 folder, but I no longer have a Windows machine.

Oh well.

Note: There is a third-party installer, but it works only with the 2008 DVD version, not the original.

Edit: It turns out the third-party installer will work if you follow the instructions from here to get a kind-of working initial version of the game directory (ignore all of the regedit bits). Then, as long as Wine Mono is installed (for some reason, it wasn't in my wrapper) you can then run C:/Westwood/RA2/Resources/clientogl.exe

So far, the campaign crashes and Skirmish mode draws part of the UI off the screen, but progress!

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-25 at 09:03

Has anyone managed to get a terminal and web browser working on the colour #remarkable tablets? I played with one recently and if I had a terminal and could ssh to another machine and a web browser (don’t care if it’s slow), it would be a great machine for me to stop staring at bright backlit LCDs. Their target market is mostly people who want paper that can be backed up, which isn’t me (if I never have to hold a pen again, I will be happy), but the display technology is impressive. Alternatively, does anyone make a laptop with the same display?

The first #eInk device I owned was an iRex Iliad. This was quite a fun machine because it ran Linux and X11 (which was awful for battery life) and so could easily be set up as a remote display for other things. The screen could do white to black transitions (possible grey to darker grey?) fairly quickly, but the other direction required a complete redraw which took 0.7 seconds. Fine for rendering a page of text, not really usable for much else.

The jump from there to the new colour displays is amazing. Colour reproduction isn’t great (‘I’m thinking: Pastels!’) but with some dithering images are not too bad, and the updates are fast enough that you can draw on the screen with no lag. It would be ample for vim with syntax highlighting (which, let’s face it, is 90% of what I need from a work laptop).

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-25 at 08:45

Lots of people have posted about how their mothers can use #signal. More importantly: my father, who thinks MS Outlook has the best UI of any mail client and therefore can’t be trusted to have opinions about anything involving computers, can also manage to use Signal.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-25 at 08:28

I hope US Government employees are not having to waste too much time reporting all of the folks who were hired for reasons other than merit. Such as being connected to the current administration (or previous ones). Or having the right accent and being ‘one of us’.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-24 at 16:42

Huge thanks to all of the folks here who helped get the #CHERI article merged into #wikipedia!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Hardware_Enhanced_RISC_Instructions

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-23 at 18:22

Everyone here is so judgemental. Just because someone buys a propaganda platform and immediately reinstates a load of Nazis who were previously banned, uses it to amplify Nazi talking points, does a Nazi salute on stage (twice, to make sure everyone saw it) and then immediately quotes one of the more famous bits of Nazi propaganda, you all accuse him of being a Nazi.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-23 at 08:16

Thank you to whoever on the @Mastodon team unbroke opening posts in a new tab! Minor code change (I hope), massive usability improvement.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-23 at 07:25

In light of the new administration’s efforts to sabotage the civil service, something I wrote a year or so ago seems to have become relevant again:

Corporate diversity and inclusion isn't about being nice

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-22 at 10:14

Whenever inheritance tax comes up, there's always an argument that it's double taxation: you paid tax when you earned the income and you then pay it again when you die. I'd always nodded along with this because, even if I disagree that it's a bad thing, it seemed to be at least a real thing. But is it?

Most people pay tax on their money when they make it, so this seems like a sensible thing to claim. But how many people who have enough money to trigger the inheritance tax level made that money through work rather than investments? Investments are not taxed as they go up in value, only when you sell them. What would happen if we treated death as a realisation event for the purpose of capital gains tax and made any increase in value taxable at that point?

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

Written by David Chisnall (Now with 50% more sarcasm!) on 2025-01-21 at 10:46

EDIT: After lots of helpful feedback in this thread, the article is now accepted. Thanks everyone who helped!

Any #Wikipedia editors around who can help? We are trying to get the article on #CHERI added. It's so far been rejected three times:

First, it did not have enough independent citations. We added a lot to news articles about CHERI.

Second, it was insufficiently detailed and lacking context. We added a timeline of development, a load of cross references, and a simple introduction.

It was then rejected again because it lacks an explanation that a 15-year-old could understand. This is true of 90% of science-related articles on Wikipedia, so I'm not sure how we fix it. An explanation at that level is something I can write (I have done for the #CHERIoT book!) but it would then make the page 3-4 times as long and not suitable for an encyclopaedia (I've previously seen pages rejected because Wikipedia is not the right place for tutorials).

I don't understand the standards for Wikipedia and I really need some guidance for how to resolve and progress this.

=> More informations about this toot | View the thread

=> This profile with reblog | Go to david_chisnall@infosec.exchange account