Burn After Reading - Issue #6

Locks, drugs, cakes, fakes, fonts, and more. Try saying that three times fast!

It’s great to see more and more home automation kit on the market. It’s sad to see how much of it is terrible, overly intrusive, or unnecessarily internet-connected. As a homeowner, fortunately, it’s almost entirely my choice. Unfortunately for Lesley Carhart, the building she rents from is forcibly converting everyone to “smart locks”, and she’s written an excellent analysis with insightful questions and considerations and concerns.

Doing illegal things is generally bad and not recommended. But reading about modern techniques can be fascinating! “Dropgangs, or the future of dark markets” describes a modern drug sale and distribution system with low trust requirements, decentralisation, verification procedures, and more - and it feels like it could have been lifted straight from a sci-fi spy novel…

On the subject of “things that are not recommended”, Patisserie Valerie - the business behind my wife’s favourite cakes - have recently had issues with “very significant manipulation of the balance sheet and profit and loss accounts”. YoungFIGuy has a great summary of the Pat Val situation, insights into the work of auditors, and what might be coming next.

AI-generated synthetic images and videos of humans are technologically fascinating and conceptually rather disturbing - see “deepfakes” for some particularly problematic examples. Kyle MacDonald’s “How to recognize fake AI-generated images” shows examples of some of the latest (published) achievements, and some tell-tale giveaways that still remain - for now…

Typesetting nerdery can be utterly fascinating, and this excerpt from Dave Addey’s Typeset in the Future book looks at WALL·E (that’s an interpunct, not a hyphen or a bullet!) from an angle that I definitely didn’t appreciate when I saw it on Netflix!

“First Primitive Year at the Hut” is a captivating - and oddly soothing - video by Chad Zuber showing highlights of his first year building his adobe hut and other furnishings.

Security is hard, but as Katie Fenn points out, we’re still seeing mistakes made that were known to be problematic back in 1999 - if you’re going to get it wrong, at least try to get it wrong interestingly…

Many tech concepts are taught and explained from a very abstract perspective. It’s great to know about the maths underlying HTTPS, but it’s also important to look at the real world aspects and considerations, which Robert Heaton’s “HTTPS in the real world” covers nicely.

I love the micro:bit and I love genetic simulations (I spent hours playing Creatures when I was younger) so Sean Tibor’s fusion of the two - “uorganisms” - was great to discover, and it’s neat he’s putting together an accompanying worksheet and lesson plan for teachers to use it too.

A while back I saw “the GitHub repository with all the e’s” go past (e98e, if you prefer) but it was only quite recently that I read the story behind it, by iliana weller. Unfortunately the response from GitHub, and a bunch of GitHub users, was rather disappointing.

My personal position is that most organisations wanting “High Availability PostgreSQL” should just pay for AWS Aurora because Amazon will probably do it better and/or cheaper than them. Sometimes though, DIY is the best way (even if I think that’s less often than a lot of others do…), and for that, ScaleGrid have a nice explanation and comparison of three popular tools.

Finally, from the archive, a “special” collection of freeware tools from Brendan Gregg, including such gems as cdrewind, and /usr/bin/maybe.

Thanks for reading! Please give me any and all feedback you may have, whether email, tweets, or the thumbs up (or down!) button at the bottom. As ever, if you think someone else might enjoy this too, then please just forward this on!

Cheers, Kristian