Some Bits: Nelson's Linkblog

October 11 was a big moment in DNS configuration, the key signing key for the DNS root was changed.

Popular media server has a nasty remote root.

Free-ranging article by an excellent author about the history of porcelain, a material science story.

A review of the weird cultural moment where a bunch of tech nerds all have their own private radio programs

A visualization of a week of tides in Texas

Open source code for bonding several network connections for improved speed.

Claude figures out the secret seed values NSA chose for a popular cryptography system could be benign, the output of a basic PRNG.

Typically sharply worded but clear Linus post to the kernel mailing list saying AI tools are fine, just like other tools.

Old school Internet culture guy has an active blog

Some very old Usenet culture, an etiquette guide for online behavior (oddly, written as the opposite of etiquette)

He's taken tax breaks on $14.7B in donations to his foundation.

Weird one from the archives, a different Robert F.

A couple of years ago the Texas Attorney General spent New Year's with his mistress and a couple of fugitives from the US.

New dataset merges two authoritative community data sources

British slang word meaning "girl" or "woman".

Alexey Gerasimov, the creator of the popular video series, was forced out by the new corporate owners.

A helpful backgrounder on the bizarre but productive philosophical trend

Open source code for generating map tiles, with good default styles.

Python framework for download and parsing web pages, extracting text for machine learning etc.

A couple of years ago Google released as new JPEG encoding that's better quality, more efficient, and supports more than 8 bit images (sort of)

Apple fanboy decides he likes X afterall.

"A Trekkie's Tale", the 1973 origin of the "Mary Sue" trope.

A contemporary real-time strategy game, sort of Total Annihilation designed for 100+ players.

DDOS exploit using Sierra Leone DNS as an amplifier.

An early bicycle racing superstar, racing 1896 -- 1910.

Project cryptographically timestamps 339B archived web pages (the history of the Common Crawl) and puts the hashes on the Bitcoin blockchain so we have a verifiable copy of the web that should last forever.

This webapp doesn't just validate, it provides previews

A lovely summary of some of the essential open source technologies the whole Internet is built on and who maintains them

A 1989 Houston music performance by my friends' high school band.

Web site to download files for saved games in Steam

Early influential videogame series was sold to EA in 1992.

A 1971 article about a remarkable evening with EM Forster and general appreciation for the man and his homosexuality

AI company half-publishes solutions to many major open math questions.

A good collection of otherwise hard-to-find images

A very precise map routing system for finding the flattest walk from A to B in San Francisco

Remarkably scholarly reviews of early gay porn.

Artist builds a working mechanical clock from trash collected in the famous watchmaking town

A blog about 1920s literati and their social lives.

Introduction to Wendy Moffat's excellent biography of E.M.

Employee quits because he's concerned about safety practices at the AI company, writes an exposé

A newish slippy map of the famous French Cassini map, in a nice color copy

A collection of hard to find photographs of the author's homosexual lovers

Lovely global map with animated lights sweeping the waters

A classic video, a fan edit with captions of the Deep Space 9 romance

Linux distro just landed a new system update that involves deferring installing critical packages until the next reboot

A new-to-me systemd capability: you can defer userspace package updates to the next reboot

A local jeweler describes his process creating a unique opal ring

A collection of primary sources, late 19th century writing on queer themes

A chilling early 20th century poem of unrequited gay love

A fan imagines if Grand Theft Auto had a London map