I have a few issues with substack, but truth be told, I dislike requiring handing over information to multiple services without seeing value upfront - and getting rid of obtrusive pop-ups does not qualify as value. Their willingness to platform Nazis just sealed my unwillingness into a conscious refusal.

In a similar vein, the corporate relationship adjustments you mentioned are also steps I’ve taken, but I’m inclined to agree with Naomi Klein’s perspective on consumer boycott being insufficient to address systemic problems. The general advice is to change what is within your power, but when you have close to zero power, does that advice then imply that you should try to do nothing or that you simply can affect nothing?

My substack qualms and the corporate relationship adjustments topics tie in quite nicely with a phrase from your substack that has been bothering me all weekend. It critiques my usual instincts for what to do as first steps, but it also articulates a problem I’ve struggled with for a while: “Documentation without transformation”.

Now I’m not of the opinion that we’ve ever truly been able to trust the information we consume as being objective truth, but AI has certainly suddenly increased the scarcity of reliable information.

The larger issue for me is that transformation is clearly necessary, but the scale of transformation required is so immense that it’s not something I’ve seen happen historically without also incurring immense suffering. This is not to say that the majority of humanity isn’t hugely suffering now, just that this kind of systemic change is one of those “this is going to get a lot worse before it gets better” type situations - in an acute way.

The usual trigger for change at this scale seems to be when realised losses of resource scarcity for too many exceeds the risk of setting what’s left on fire.

So we’re left with a situation where there’s potentially neither reliable documentation nor positive transformation. This does not spark joy.

I suppose my questions for you are then:

• what actions do you think would be sufficient to effect the systemic change necessary?
• how do you remain optimistic about this whole thing?

“I don’t know” is a totally valid answer to either too, in the spirit of acknowledging honest uncertainty.

Mashed potatoes seems like it would be pretty hard to stir one handed, so credit to you for that. Thinner soups or things you can boil and drain would probably be an easier choice, so you don’t have to keep hold of a pot while stirring.

Things which keep their shape and that you can fry in a large flat pan and use tongs to move about, like the spam, are probably going to be much easier and safer overall though.

If you can afford one, a mandoline that is heavy or you can fix to a surface is something that will be useful even if your arm improves, they make chopping vegetables fast - but can be risky if you’re not paying full attention. I have one similar to this, but the more industrial ones are even sturdier.

If that isn’t an option, pre-cut frozen veg are usually not hugely more expensive than fresh, and are often more nutritious than stuff on the supermarket shelves. Tinned tomatoes or sauces are easy to throw on pasta too, which doesn’t need any real stirring - just be sure to only cook smaller pots so they’re lighter to deal with. Tinned beans are also great, my go to meal is that plus tinned tomatoes, a bunch of dried herbs/spices, and whatever veg I’ve got around at the time. You can fry some meat, throw in the rest, let it heat through and you’re good to go.

If you have an oven, a whole cob of corn in-husk is 30 mins. You can throw it in there, walk away, then after 30 take it out of the oven. Just gently tug the silk out from the top, which will now come out easily with no real mess, and you can then pull down the husk to use as a handle while eating.

Don’t write off microwaves either. Washing a few potatoes and nuking them for a few minutes per potato will get you a perfectly good meal base that you can load up with whatever. Microwaves are my go to for the frozen veg to help bulk out anything else I cook too.

My speciality is not arm-based problems but I’ve had to change a lot about how I cook for medical reasons, so hopefully some of this is helpful to you too. Good luck and I hope you don’t need to adapt for long!

For anyone who doesn’t want to click through to rawstory and then Twitter (why does Lieu still use this?), the document in question is EFTA00020517 (redacted version). Trigger warning for both rape and murder although it does not go into significantly more detail than the rawstory link. I think this document was from the batch at least a month ago though.

It also claims that the coroner ruled the death a suicide even though officers on the scene said there was no way it could have been.

I haven’t got a substack account, or I would have subscribed, but I hope you keep writing. You’ve given me a lot to think about. While I don’t quite know what to do with these questions yet, or if there is even something I can do about them, they’re salient and framed extremely well.

The Epstein files obviously contain a lot of information about rape and trafficking, which is very understandably and rightly in the spotlight. But what the files also contain is very detailed information about exactly how our laws and financial systems are being actively exploited to maintain the power of a select few. That is something that is much harder to write a quick article about, by design, but we haven’t even seen some of these names mentioned in the media:

• de Rothschild (with a very illustrative diagram in EFTA01114424)
• Thiel
• Rockefeller
• Murdoch
• von Habsburg

And those are just individuals, not companies. We haven’t heard anything about JP Morgan Chase, Sotheby’s, Goldman Sachs… Or even the universities like Harvard.

You can’t usually pull a single short damning quote from an email for them because it’s not as simple as the horror of one person raping children, but it lays the foundation of how this horror was allowed to continue at such a large scale by so many people.

Oh yes, I understand how they go about smoothing everything over.

But, given the details we know, don’t you think:
• one corporate resignation,
• one months-prior bureaucrat firing, and,
• one investigation into a former PM,
is pretty far removed from could be considered a proportional fallout?

This is the theme of almost all of the “toppling”. Mostly they’ve just… resigned. They probably keep all the perks, and then take up a corporate advisor position once there’s less heat.

Headlines like this make it sound like there’s been real impact beyond generating articles about a few of the more public figures. But reading article, it’s really just a few politicians and bureaucrats resigning. Mandelson’s firing was already months ago. The investigation into a former Norwegian PM sounds like that’s as harsh as it’s got so far for politicians this time. And nothing except one law firm board member resigning for private companies?

They’re all getting away with it, and all the victims get is a hundred headlines about Musk being named in the files, and having their lives endangered from the terrible Don-centric redaction.

The difference was that he fired his PR agents in 2020 who stopped him from ruining their carefully created advertising. He never was that person.

It’s a wonder people haven’t started throwing water balloons filled with mud and flour at the cameras. Perhaps he should be grateful that’s not a trend?

Same for Japan. No chance they’re wearing full hiking boots or sneakers inside the house in Japan - the shoe cabinet is built in right next to the front door of houses, tiny apartments, temples, many restaurants, etc. I assume the schools still do too.

I took a brief look at one and it seems they may have learnt their lesson from the first time around, unfortunately.

Pick Up That Can

Out of curiosity, what sort of customizations are you doing with it? I’m just a bit surprised that docker rebuild or a non-trivial fork would be needed, so I’m assuming they’re pretty big changes.

I’m not a spice merchant, and most exploits rarely involve a single step. This screenshot is just a system design red flag.

You’re free to examine the repo yourself and find your own spice, my 5 min look tells me that piefed needs to expend a significant amount of effort on infosec to maintain user trust in the longer term.

As others have pointed out, it does still require (with some caveats about the infra setup) the user to be an admin. But if someone manages to get in to the interface, or another person is granted admin access who shouldn’t have been, it makes it more risky than it needs to be. It also for me is a design choice that indicates other parts of the system should be carefully examined for how they’re handling and sanitizing input.

Any webserver you browse is possibly capable of ACE depending on the implementation. When it starts to hold user data is when that starts to be a big concern. The more points of entry, the more that needs to be secured.

I don’t have any experience with piefed admin, or any opinion on piefed itself, just too many years of web admin experience. And as soon as I see intentionally made doors that allow code input, I start to worry about how much experience the devs who made it have with web admin.

Well, just copy and pasted rather than written. I would have hoped that infra read-level permission, infra write-level permission and admin interface permissions were all separate to begin with, even if the person who spun up the instance obviously has all three.

You do need a level of trust in an admin, of course, but wide open text boxes for putting in code are a questionable system design choice, in my opinion. It adds an extra point of possible entry that then relies on the security of the overall admin interface instead of limiting it to what should require highest level infra admin permissions to access. And if it is something that would be limited to someone who has those, then what is the actual utility of having a textarea for it in the first place?

I get that many people are concerned about is scoring systems, but it seems a lot more worrying to me that it allows arbitrary code execution.

But… Where are 102 and 103 then? Are they on a separate street?

Oh wait I get it now. It’s a weird choice but ok. Where I live we just subdivide by adding letters. E.g 20 subdivide and becomes 20 and 20A.

Careful of your eyes! I’m pretty sure you need a special filter or telescope for the sun